We used to wait. (Chapter 22/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 22/?)
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 5,188
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
Kara and Lee shared a cot in one of the cells in Galactica’s formal brig. They were shoulder to shoulder, backs to the wall, simply enjoying one anothers company even though they would have much preferred to be anywhere else. Lee had lobbied strongly for her to be set free, especially after Baltar’s test came back negative and Cottle’s own exams proved to feature the same healed wounds they had recorded on her medical file. Had the situation with her Viper gone differently, she more than likely would have been let go, but even Lee had to wonder just how she’d come by the pristine Mark II with its modifications. There was no talking Roslin and his father out of keeping her locked up, but Bill had conceded to at least allow Lee to visit her.
Though he’d had meetings and schedules to follow according to the job he currently worked for the government, or what kind of government they still had, there’d been no question to him about where he needed to be. The people out there were of course in great need for his help, but he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself had he left her behind like this. For months he’d prayed and wished he could have her again, if even for a minute, and he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth when it came to what he’d been given.
Her hand rested against his thigh and Lee’s own fingers dragged lightly over the back of her hand and wrist in a soothing pattern. Though Baltar was in the cell beside them, they’d quickly come to pay him no mind, especially since he had been all manner of insane as of late, even more so than usual. He’d hardly stopped pacing his cell, talking to both himself and someone that wasn’t even there. Though he’d barely been sane before, the death sentence seemed to have made him snap.
“I believe you when you say you saw Earth. There’s no question about it to me, Kara,” Lee started. “But that ship…” He trailed off, eyes on the bars across from him as he played back in his mind every inch of her Viper he’d personally had his hands on earlier. “None of it makes sense.”
She chewed her lip and listened to him, focusing on the feel of his warm skin to her much cooler flesh. “It doesn’t make sense to me either. An FTL drive? Different fuel? Not a scratch on her?” The news about her Viper that Lee had returned to her with had even unsettled her.
“Maybe you just don’t remember what happened. Head trauma.” It was a suggestion that could very well be plausible. What had happened to her during the time she didn’t remember, though, he wasn’t sure. “When you took your helmet off, I remember seeing your hair and it was loose. I didn’t even think about it at the time, but if you were just in that ship for six hours like you said you were… when you left Galactica two months ago I know your hair was braided.” It was the little details that were starting to compile into bigger ideas now.
Her hand ran up to brush through her long hair, trying to recall the last day they’d shared together. Lee was right, she remembered it bound up and tied off. “How do you not think I’m a cylon? Even I’m starting to believe it now.” Kara turned her head and pulled away from him only a few inches, though her hand slid from his lap and contact between them was severed.
He sighed and swallowed over the lump in his throat, watching her though she didn’t look at him. “You remember on Kobol, when Helo was taking care of Athena and I just couldn’t understand how he could do that? Why he would do that?”
Kara’s head lifted in brief ascent.
“I get it now. If you’re a cylon, a human, an alien, an I don’t even know what, it just doesn’t matter to me. You’re the same person I’ve always known.” Lee reached across the space she had given him, tugging her wrist gently until her attention was on him. “All of this, it changes nothing for me. You aren’t any less to me because of it.”
Her shoulders relaxed, thinking back to similar sentiments he had expressed to her months ago when Lee told her his love was unconditional. She thought she understood the words back then, but now she knew she’d barely comprehended the true meaning of it all.
“You know, when you were gone, I actually prayed that you were a cylon because it meant I would see you again.” He laughed softly, his head shaking as he did so. “What I know is, if Zak had stepped off that Viper, if my brother had climbed out of there, it wouldn’t have mattered to me for even an instant if he was a cylon or not. He’s my brother, nothing else matters. You’re my…” Blue eyes met her gold and green ones. His lips quirked into a nervous smile. “I don’t know what you are to me.” He watched her face fall a little at his words so he raised his palms face up to her in offering of a white flag. “There isn’t a word for what you are to me. Nothing means enough.”
It brought a smile to her face as she looked away down to her lap, as if she was actually shy for a moment in her life. “You’ve changed so much.” Just listening to him and watching him, she could read all the ways in which the last few months had affected him. No longer were things simply black and white for either of them, good and evil, human and cylon. There were all kinds of shades of grey, and she would be happy to live in the in between with him. She stood from where they sat and stepped over towards the bars and the door of the cell. Her hands curled around a bar each, her forehead pressing against them as well. “I know you can live with me no matter what I am, but I’m not sure if I can.”
“When you were gone, I used to see you everywhere.” His confession was quiet, though just loud enough so she could hear him from where he sat. “In my sleep, but also when I was awake. I felt like I was losing my mind. You’d be around every corner, you’d be with me in the mess telling me how bad the food was. One day I saw you, Kara, and it helped me pick myself up from where I’d fallen to. You told me to be the man I wanted to be.” Lee pushed up off the cot and approached, but didn’t touch her. He simply leaned his back into the bars, using them as support. “Be the woman you want to be. You always have the choice.”
She lifted her head to regard him, carefully chewing over his words. Kara wanted to believe in them, but it felt impossible, even to her. She kept quiet instead.
“Let me help you find Earth.”
Kara’s forehead creased in comprehension of what he was saying. “You’ve got new commitments now.”
“I do. They’re to you.”
She expected him to have turned away from her and jumped at the chance to leave. If not that, Kara believed he would have returned to the work he’d been doing since her supposed death. It would be the right thing to do and that was very much a Lee Adama-like thing. “Your father and the President are sooner going to throw me out the airlock than they let me do anything else.”
“We’ll give them time.” He walked away from the bars to pace across the middle of the small cell. “No matter what my father thinks he believes, he’ll come around to you. You didn’t see how broken up he was when we thought you died.”
“Unfortunately, Lee, he doesn’t think I’m me. He thinks I’m a machine wearing Kara Thrace’s face and ruining her memory.” She paused, her face crinkled before she corrected herself. “My memory.”
Rather than feed into the mood Kara had fallen into, Lee opted to change the topic of conversation. “When you were gone, I actually ended up in hack for a few days. Me and Sam were in this very cell.”
Her lips spread wide and apart, face reading of both shock and amusement. “My ex-husband and my boyfriend ended up in the brig together? Were you boys fighting?”
“Not each other.” He quickly interjected. “He kept watch while I beat the hell out of Leoben.”
Kara doubled over in laughter, arms folded across the width of her stomach. Though she had felt some attachment to Leoben in the temple for what he’d shown to her, anger still lingered in her gut from their last confrontation on the day she had supposedly gone to her death. “You look pretty proud of your-” Her words silenced themselves as the door to the room that held the jail cells opened, the sound of feet stomping in.
It wasn’t just the changing of the shift for the marines who kept watch over her and Baltar, instead it was a gaggle of marines clad in black, clustered around their prisoner. She saw the top of Sam’s head peak out among the rest of them and from the glimpses she took between the moving bodies around him, he was handcuffed. The Admiral and President brought up the rear.
“Put him in with Baltar,” Adama ordered.
“What the frak is going on? Sam?” She pressed her body up to the bars, arms sticking out between them as if she could reach, though they were feet away. “Sammy?” Her ex-husband kept quiet, instead allowing himself to be pushed into the cell he was to begin sharing with the former President of the Colonies. Kara moved to the bars that separated the two cells apart then, repeating her earlier actions as she tried to come in physical contact with him.
“Dad?” Lee questioned from where he was locked inside with Kara, though unlike the other three cell members, he was the only one not being permanently kept there.
Adama’s face held the same look of betrayal it had shown when Kara climbed out of her Viper after her two month absence and declared death. His words were curt and eyes never looked away from where Sam sat in the cell, hands still bound. “Anders says he’s a cylon.”
Kara’s head snapped from her Sam back towards Adama, eyes wide. “Admiral, there has to be a mistake,” she made an excuse for the man she used to call her husband. “Sam!” Kara’s voice rose, urgent and panicked. “Tell him you’re frakking joking!”
Anders finally looked up and over to her, any hint of the jovial expression he usually wore completely wiped away. “I don’t have proof,” he finally said to the entire room. “Nothing concrete, but I know I am and I know who the others are.”
“He’s losing his mind, he needs Cottle, not time in hack,” Kara continued to make a plea for Sam from her side of the bars, her temper and desperation increasing tenfold with each passing second.
“I’m not losing my frakking mind!” Sam yelled from his cell. “Do you remember when you lost the Pegasus and all the Raiders pulled away at the last minute? Kara,” Though the room was full of the biggest names in the entire fleet, his focus remained on her. “That was me. I don’t know what happened, but a Raider looked right at me, didn’t shoot me, didn’t do anything. It just looked at me and they all pulled back-”
“It’s just a Gods damned coincidence!”
“No, no-” His head shook vigorously. “It happened the day you came back again. They all turned around after one look at me. And on the algae planet - I’ve been there before! I knew the temple was there! How could I just know that?”
“You’re confused, Sam.”
“How do you know who the others are?” Roslin interrupted the conversation between former husband and wife.
“I’m not talking about the others until we reach an agreement.”
“You’re not in any position to be making demands, Anders,” Adama warned him.
“You don’t understand. They don’t know they’re cylons, I barely know myself. I’m not going to tell you their names just so you can throw them out the airlock. You can kill me, torture me, whatever the frak you do to get information. I’ll take it to my grave.”
“Madame President, Admiral,” Lee started, trying to restore some order to the chaos buzzing about them. “If he’s telling the truth, this isn’t the place.”
“Is it me?” Kara blurted out to Sam, undistracted by Lee. “Am I one of them?”
“No,” he said. “But you’re tied to it and I have no frakking idea how or why.”
-
In Bill’s quarters later that night, Laura, Saul and Lee convened to begin making sense of the situation that had presented itself with Sam’s admission. Though Anders’ loose tongue had confessed an awful lot in mere minutes when confronted with Kara, he had turned rather tight lipped immediately following. As a measure of security and intel, the brig was being monitored and recorded, in hopes, or perhaps fear, that he would reveal even more when their presence was removed.
“I don’t know how things went to hell so fast,” Tigh said from where he sat in an armchair, his uniform unbuttoned and opened, an indication of how far from regulation he felt at the moment.
Adama nodded and sipped his glass of Galactica-made whiskey. “You’re telling me.”
Laura, looking a little worse for wear, sat beside Bill on the couch. “We can’t even be sure if he’s telling the truth. He really could just be suffering a mental breakdown after Kara’s death and return. You know if we run Baltar’s test and it comes back negative, he’ll just say the test is wrong. We’re going on a very unstable man’s word.”
Lee kept quiet from where he stood towards the back of the room, his eyes on the framed photos on his father’s walls instead of the group. How he felt regarding both Kara and Sam was drastically different than the other three, so much so that even he began to question whether or not his judgement could be trusted in regards to the two of them. Kara always had a way of clouding his head and impairing his decisions. Had it been anyone left behind on that moon during their first few months fleeing the cylons, they would have been left behind to bring the fleet to safety, but he and the Old Man had just about doomed the last 50,000 humans in existence to die in order to try to bring her back.
“Some of the things add up, though,” Adama began slowly. “His story corroborates what you said D’Anna told you regarding their theory. That’s not even factoring in the temple, the Chief said Anders was already there by time he found it.”
“All the pilots who fought in both of those battles knew the Raiders turned back though, it could just be a good story, Bill,” Saul added in a layer of skepticism.
“Why would he turn himself in?” asked Laura, though it was more thinking aloud than anything else. “If he had an agenda, some plan, why would he come to us?” She sighed and crossed her legs at the knee after reaching for her glass of water on the coffee table. She sipped it, eyes shutting to enjoy the crisp taste and the relief the coolness brought. Her cancer had returned weeks ago and luckily, she still managed to keep it a relative secret, though it was getting harder by the day. “Unless he’s distracting us…”
Bill watched her with concern in his eyes. He had been one of the few she confided in about the return of her illness, even staying in his quarters when enduring her Deloxin treatment.
“I think you’re all missing something important,” said Lee, his hands in his pockets as he turned back around to address them. “What you’ve gotten out of D’Anna and Leoben is that the Five aren’t like the other seven models. They’re something different. Even if they weren’t, we know they’re all capable of ignoring their programming. Athena’s one of us now and she made her choice. Why couldn’t Sam and whoever the others are get to choose? He led the resistance on Caprica for nearly a year. He’s flown with our pilots. He was down on the algae planet for weeks with the rest of us, making sure we wouldn’t starve to death. If he’s a cylon, how does it change anything?” His defense of Anders even surprised himself.
“You’re forgetting Boomer, kid,” Tigh said with a raise of the brow over his one remaining eye. “It’s fine to say Anders is on our side, but what if he just gets his flip switched one day and loses it, kills half the people around him?”
“You’re at his mercy either way. You don’t play ball with him and he won’t share what he knows. If you’re so afraid of Sam, how afraid are you of whoever those other four are? It could be any of us. It could be me. It could be Zarek. Madame President, it could even be you.”
Tigh laughed, his chest shaking with the humor he found at the suggestion Lee made. “Yeah, and it could be me or even the Old Man.”
“We have to make a decision.” Lee approached where the other three sat and took his own seat on the empty chair while he looked to his father. “Either we go on not knowing who the others are and hope to the Gods they don’t betray us, or we find out who they are and give them amnesty if they continue to stick by us.”
The only sound of the room was the quite hum of Galactica’s engines that gently spun through the entire ship at any given moment. Like most of the decisions they’d made since the end of the worlds, it was choosing between a rock and a hard place. One bad decision versus another slightly worse one.
“Give Sam the assurances he wants,” Roslin ordered to no one in particular.
Without missing a beat, Adama added in, “And have him take his oath to the fleet again.” It was more a symbol than anything else, just as it had been during Athena’s ceremony when she joined and committed herself to the fleet instead of her own people. The amount of trust they were going to put into Samuel Anders was immeasurable, but Bill knew it was the necessary move.
“What about Starbuck?” Tigh posed and Lee was thankful he didn’t have to be the one to bring her up.
Adama drank the rest of the whiskey down in a large gulp, contemplating how Kara fit into what they’d already decided. “She deserves the amount of loyalty she’s always shown us.”
-
Kara sat beside Sam on their cell floors, bars separating one another from any kind of real contact. They’d migrated there after their superiors had left them alone, Lee reluctantly leaving with them. He’d wanted to stay, she had seen the look on his face that said so, but they both had known he needed to be there for the conversation that was going to take place surrounding hers and Sam’s seemingly mutual fate. It was no question that Lee was on her side, but the fact that he hadn’t completely turned on Sam was what shocked her the most. Something had changed between the two men since her supposed death, as before they’d barely been able to exchange a few words to one another. Kara knew she had always been between them, funny enough that her death had been what brought them together in the end.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Kara asked Sam. “You’ve been thinking this for a long time, why didn’t you tell me?”
“What was I going to say? You had a lot on your plate, we were barely speaking, and you’ve probably killed more cylons than anyone in the fleet.”
“So did you back on Caprica,” she pointed out. They’d both done their fair share of introducing the enemy to death, or at least a fresh resurrection. “All right, I admit, I probably wouldn’t have been the best person to tell.” With the exception of Athena, and even Kara had hated that woman at first, she still considered all of the skinjobs and their chrome counterparts to be on the opposing side. “How do you know who the others are if you can’t remember being a cylon?”
“That night you and Lee played piano in Joe’s Bar, that song you played, it felt the same way to me as I did when I knew the temple was in the mountains. Like I’ve known it for a very long time, but couldn’t place it. I followed the sound and found you, and when I looked up…”
Kara took deep, steadying breaths as Sam’s words came out. So this was how she was involved. It shook her completely, knowing she had a part in all of it.
“There were four other people looking just as taken by it as I was. It wasn’t just that, but at that moment, I felt at home with them, you know? It made sense in some way I can’t describe.” Sam’s voice rang of an almost kind of defeat. He wished he could better explain it to anyone else, even to himself. For weeks he’d contemplated putting a bullet to his head just to see if he woke up somewhere, but the fear of what it would mean if he’d been wrong, along with what would happen to him if he did end up in some resurrection ship or basestar, had kept him from going through with it.
“But why that song? Even if you and the others are the last cylons, then what do I have to do with it?” She tugged her legs up to her chest, arms wrapping around them as her chin came to rest upon her knees. “And how am I here? Apollo saw my ship explode. Even if I didn’t die, say I ejected or who knows what, where did I spend the last two months? Someone built me a new ship and sent me home. If the cylons had me, why would they send me back?”
The more she talked, the more frantic she became, tears being produced at an increased rate in response to her heightened emotions. “Did they brainwash me before sending me back? What if they grew me in some petri dish? They got my ovary on Caprica, Sam, in that farm-” Her head shook and she pressed her forehead to her knees to hide herself away temporarily. “What if they just made a copy of me, what if I’m dead and this isn’t even me?”
Sam wished he could have reached through the bars to pull her into his arms and offer some kind of comfort to her as her psyche tore itself apart. He didn’t know what she was, but like Lee, he didn’t care. This was his wife, and though they were now legally divorced, he would always care for her., even if he was a cylon and even if she really believed she was some genetic cylon experiment. He settled for pushing his hand between the gap of the bars, his palm rubbing her arm. “Stop, Kara.”
Just as she lifted her head, prepared to begin again, the door to her cell opened, four marines standing in wait. She turned to look back to Sam and he would’ve sworn there was a kind of peace in her eyes which absolutely terrified him.
“Where are you taking her?” Sam questioned the marines. As expected, they didn’t answer.
“Major Thrace,” it amused Kara to hear the formality. “Stand up and turn around so we can handcuff you.”
She obeyed slowly and though at any other time, she would have fought them and struggled to push her way free from her jailers, Kara didn’t even make an attempt. Her eyes held on Sam as he stood up, watching in horror. “This is how it ends then.” She smiled, a glint to her eye. “Again, I guess.”
“I want to see Captain Adama!” Sam yelled, rushing towards the front of his cell, hitting the chain of his cuffs on the bars to attract any kind of attention. They continued to ignore him. “Kara, nothing’s going to happen to you,” he tried for reassurance, but the quiver in his voice wouldn’t have calmed her anyway.
They led her away, two marines in front of her and two behind her. “I love you, Sammy,” Kara confessed just before they had her out of the door. It wasn’t what she felt for Lee, but she knew she’d always feel affection towards the man she’d married, cylon or not. She barely heard him continue to yell for Apollo as the door behind her shut, effectively cutting the volume of his voice down to a tenth of what it had been.
She followed them as they led the way, though with each hallway and landmark she passed, Kara became more confident in her assumption of where she was going. They were taking her to one of the decks, where, of course, the launch tube airlocks were. She tried to tell herself to be brave in facing her death, to be Starbuck and not just Kara Thrace as she had been since she’d climbed out of her Viper days ago. When they stepped onto the hangar floor, Adama was waiting with his own set of marines. Kara hoped it would have been anyone else but him to do this to her. Well, anyone besides him and Lee. Tigh, she could have taken, even though her feelings towards the older man had softened over the years. The Old Man though, she couldn’t handle that.
Her contingent of marines stepped away to leave her standing by herself before the man that had been her father for all intents and purposes. That sense of peace she’d had when she left her jail cell began to quickly fade away, fear of self preservation kicking in. As much as she may have wanted to, though, neither Starbuck nor Kara would beg for her life. “So, you quietly cut me loose in deep space.” With a deep breath for a small amount of courage, Kara lied, “I’m not afraid to die.”
“A little easier after you’ve been through it once,” Adama said.
“You’re making a mistake.”
Before he responded, he paused, needing to be sure of the decision they’d come to one last time. “Maybe I am, but I can’t take the chance that you’re right and not do something about it.”
Kara’s breath caught in her throat, sure she’d heard him wrong. As one of the marines stepped up behind her and released her wrists from the tight cuffs, she knew it wasn’t just her mind playing a trick on her.
“I’m tired of turning away from the things I want to believe in, Kara, and I believe you when you say that you’ll die before you stop trying. And I won’t lose you again. Now go. Find a way to Earth.”
She’d thought that one of her proudest moments regarding the Admiral had been the day he had summoned her to his quarters and asked her to take command of Pegasus. Kara had been absolutely stunned that day, almost refusing it on the grounds that the Old Man had finally lost his mind. He had trusted her in charge of half of the fleet and to ultimately take his place should anything have happened to him and Galactica. Sometimes at night in her lonely battlestar when Sam was down on New Caprica and Lee was still not speaking to her, she would cling to that memory inside of her, using it for the kind of warmth she needed to keep herself going. Especially in those last few months on Pegasus, during the planning of their return trip to save their people, she’d found faith in herself through the Admiral’s own words.
Now, though, she would have a new moment to keep to herself and preserve quietly. Then and there, Kara vowed she would use it as the necessary fuel she needed to bring them to Earth. He had faith in her again and it meant even more to her now given the questionability about where she’d spent the last two months. She wouldn’t let him regret it. Kara threw her arms around the Admiral and in the same instant, his own closed around her. Those tears she’d fought off came forward and for the time being, she didn’t even care. Days before, she had returned to Galactica after the months she’d been gone, but not until this moment did she actually return home.
Bill squeezed her tightly, aware of just how much he needed this moment. Perhaps, he needed it more than even Kara did. He’d lost his daughter and only now did he know he had her back. Whatever had happened to her, however she’d come back to them, what mattered to him was that she actually had returned in the end. He wasn’t just a father to one as he had been for the last two months, but once again a parent with two children. As they pulled apart just barely, he kissed the top of her head, just as he’d done to his two boys when they were much younger. He saw the tears on her cheeks and his thumbs helped her to brush them away, leaving his own to stain his skin.
“My son’s waiting for you at the end of the deck. You two are going to take apart your bird and try to make sense of it, see if there are any clues there. Helo and Gaeta will be helping you with star charts.”
She nodded, the most obedient she’d ever been in all her life. “Thank you.” Though he wasn’t her father, at least not biologically, she began to feel a sort of healing to the anger her own father’s abandonment had left in its wake. Kara moved to head down the empty deck, towards where she knew Lee had already started the work they were supposed to share together.
“And Kara?”
Her head turned back, stopping.
“You should have told me you were together months ago," Adama said in light chastisement.
Cheeks warming, Kara ducked her head down in the nod of a child caught in a lie.
Adama stepped away with a smile. “There’s nothing that makes me happier.”
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 5,188
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
Kara and Lee shared a cot in one of the cells in Galactica’s formal brig. They were shoulder to shoulder, backs to the wall, simply enjoying one anothers company even though they would have much preferred to be anywhere else. Lee had lobbied strongly for her to be set free, especially after Baltar’s test came back negative and Cottle’s own exams proved to feature the same healed wounds they had recorded on her medical file. Had the situation with her Viper gone differently, she more than likely would have been let go, but even Lee had to wonder just how she’d come by the pristine Mark II with its modifications. There was no talking Roslin and his father out of keeping her locked up, but Bill had conceded to at least allow Lee to visit her.
Though he’d had meetings and schedules to follow according to the job he currently worked for the government, or what kind of government they still had, there’d been no question to him about where he needed to be. The people out there were of course in great need for his help, but he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself had he left her behind like this. For months he’d prayed and wished he could have her again, if even for a minute, and he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth when it came to what he’d been given.
Her hand rested against his thigh and Lee’s own fingers dragged lightly over the back of her hand and wrist in a soothing pattern. Though Baltar was in the cell beside them, they’d quickly come to pay him no mind, especially since he had been all manner of insane as of late, even more so than usual. He’d hardly stopped pacing his cell, talking to both himself and someone that wasn’t even there. Though he’d barely been sane before, the death sentence seemed to have made him snap.
“I believe you when you say you saw Earth. There’s no question about it to me, Kara,” Lee started. “But that ship…” He trailed off, eyes on the bars across from him as he played back in his mind every inch of her Viper he’d personally had his hands on earlier. “None of it makes sense.”
She chewed her lip and listened to him, focusing on the feel of his warm skin to her much cooler flesh. “It doesn’t make sense to me either. An FTL drive? Different fuel? Not a scratch on her?” The news about her Viper that Lee had returned to her with had even unsettled her.
“Maybe you just don’t remember what happened. Head trauma.” It was a suggestion that could very well be plausible. What had happened to her during the time she didn’t remember, though, he wasn’t sure. “When you took your helmet off, I remember seeing your hair and it was loose. I didn’t even think about it at the time, but if you were just in that ship for six hours like you said you were… when you left Galactica two months ago I know your hair was braided.” It was the little details that were starting to compile into bigger ideas now.
Her hand ran up to brush through her long hair, trying to recall the last day they’d shared together. Lee was right, she remembered it bound up and tied off. “How do you not think I’m a cylon? Even I’m starting to believe it now.” Kara turned her head and pulled away from him only a few inches, though her hand slid from his lap and contact between them was severed.
He sighed and swallowed over the lump in his throat, watching her though she didn’t look at him. “You remember on Kobol, when Helo was taking care of Athena and I just couldn’t understand how he could do that? Why he would do that?”
Kara’s head lifted in brief ascent.
“I get it now. If you’re a cylon, a human, an alien, an I don’t even know what, it just doesn’t matter to me. You’re the same person I’ve always known.” Lee reached across the space she had given him, tugging her wrist gently until her attention was on him. “All of this, it changes nothing for me. You aren’t any less to me because of it.”
Her shoulders relaxed, thinking back to similar sentiments he had expressed to her months ago when Lee told her his love was unconditional. She thought she understood the words back then, but now she knew she’d barely comprehended the true meaning of it all.
“You know, when you were gone, I actually prayed that you were a cylon because it meant I would see you again.” He laughed softly, his head shaking as he did so. “What I know is, if Zak had stepped off that Viper, if my brother had climbed out of there, it wouldn’t have mattered to me for even an instant if he was a cylon or not. He’s my brother, nothing else matters. You’re my…” Blue eyes met her gold and green ones. His lips quirked into a nervous smile. “I don’t know what you are to me.” He watched her face fall a little at his words so he raised his palms face up to her in offering of a white flag. “There isn’t a word for what you are to me. Nothing means enough.”
It brought a smile to her face as she looked away down to her lap, as if she was actually shy for a moment in her life. “You’ve changed so much.” Just listening to him and watching him, she could read all the ways in which the last few months had affected him. No longer were things simply black and white for either of them, good and evil, human and cylon. There were all kinds of shades of grey, and she would be happy to live in the in between with him. She stood from where they sat and stepped over towards the bars and the door of the cell. Her hands curled around a bar each, her forehead pressing against them as well. “I know you can live with me no matter what I am, but I’m not sure if I can.”
“When you were gone, I used to see you everywhere.” His confession was quiet, though just loud enough so she could hear him from where he sat. “In my sleep, but also when I was awake. I felt like I was losing my mind. You’d be around every corner, you’d be with me in the mess telling me how bad the food was. One day I saw you, Kara, and it helped me pick myself up from where I’d fallen to. You told me to be the man I wanted to be.” Lee pushed up off the cot and approached, but didn’t touch her. He simply leaned his back into the bars, using them as support. “Be the woman you want to be. You always have the choice.”
She lifted her head to regard him, carefully chewing over his words. Kara wanted to believe in them, but it felt impossible, even to her. She kept quiet instead.
“Let me help you find Earth.”
Kara’s forehead creased in comprehension of what he was saying. “You’ve got new commitments now.”
“I do. They’re to you.”
She expected him to have turned away from her and jumped at the chance to leave. If not that, Kara believed he would have returned to the work he’d been doing since her supposed death. It would be the right thing to do and that was very much a Lee Adama-like thing. “Your father and the President are sooner going to throw me out the airlock than they let me do anything else.”
“We’ll give them time.” He walked away from the bars to pace across the middle of the small cell. “No matter what my father thinks he believes, he’ll come around to you. You didn’t see how broken up he was when we thought you died.”
“Unfortunately, Lee, he doesn’t think I’m me. He thinks I’m a machine wearing Kara Thrace’s face and ruining her memory.” She paused, her face crinkled before she corrected herself. “My memory.”
Rather than feed into the mood Kara had fallen into, Lee opted to change the topic of conversation. “When you were gone, I actually ended up in hack for a few days. Me and Sam were in this very cell.”
Her lips spread wide and apart, face reading of both shock and amusement. “My ex-husband and my boyfriend ended up in the brig together? Were you boys fighting?”
“Not each other.” He quickly interjected. “He kept watch while I beat the hell out of Leoben.”
Kara doubled over in laughter, arms folded across the width of her stomach. Though she had felt some attachment to Leoben in the temple for what he’d shown to her, anger still lingered in her gut from their last confrontation on the day she had supposedly gone to her death. “You look pretty proud of your-” Her words silenced themselves as the door to the room that held the jail cells opened, the sound of feet stomping in.
It wasn’t just the changing of the shift for the marines who kept watch over her and Baltar, instead it was a gaggle of marines clad in black, clustered around their prisoner. She saw the top of Sam’s head peak out among the rest of them and from the glimpses she took between the moving bodies around him, he was handcuffed. The Admiral and President brought up the rear.
“Put him in with Baltar,” Adama ordered.
“What the frak is going on? Sam?” She pressed her body up to the bars, arms sticking out between them as if she could reach, though they were feet away. “Sammy?” Her ex-husband kept quiet, instead allowing himself to be pushed into the cell he was to begin sharing with the former President of the Colonies. Kara moved to the bars that separated the two cells apart then, repeating her earlier actions as she tried to come in physical contact with him.
“Dad?” Lee questioned from where he was locked inside with Kara, though unlike the other three cell members, he was the only one not being permanently kept there.
Adama’s face held the same look of betrayal it had shown when Kara climbed out of her Viper after her two month absence and declared death. His words were curt and eyes never looked away from where Sam sat in the cell, hands still bound. “Anders says he’s a cylon.”
Kara’s head snapped from her Sam back towards Adama, eyes wide. “Admiral, there has to be a mistake,” she made an excuse for the man she used to call her husband. “Sam!” Kara’s voice rose, urgent and panicked. “Tell him you’re frakking joking!”
Anders finally looked up and over to her, any hint of the jovial expression he usually wore completely wiped away. “I don’t have proof,” he finally said to the entire room. “Nothing concrete, but I know I am and I know who the others are.”
“He’s losing his mind, he needs Cottle, not time in hack,” Kara continued to make a plea for Sam from her side of the bars, her temper and desperation increasing tenfold with each passing second.
“I’m not losing my frakking mind!” Sam yelled from his cell. “Do you remember when you lost the Pegasus and all the Raiders pulled away at the last minute? Kara,” Though the room was full of the biggest names in the entire fleet, his focus remained on her. “That was me. I don’t know what happened, but a Raider looked right at me, didn’t shoot me, didn’t do anything. It just looked at me and they all pulled back-”
“It’s just a Gods damned coincidence!”
“No, no-” His head shook vigorously. “It happened the day you came back again. They all turned around after one look at me. And on the algae planet - I’ve been there before! I knew the temple was there! How could I just know that?”
“You’re confused, Sam.”
“How do you know who the others are?” Roslin interrupted the conversation between former husband and wife.
“I’m not talking about the others until we reach an agreement.”
“You’re not in any position to be making demands, Anders,” Adama warned him.
“You don’t understand. They don’t know they’re cylons, I barely know myself. I’m not going to tell you their names just so you can throw them out the airlock. You can kill me, torture me, whatever the frak you do to get information. I’ll take it to my grave.”
“Madame President, Admiral,” Lee started, trying to restore some order to the chaos buzzing about them. “If he’s telling the truth, this isn’t the place.”
“Is it me?” Kara blurted out to Sam, undistracted by Lee. “Am I one of them?”
“No,” he said. “But you’re tied to it and I have no frakking idea how or why.”
-
In Bill’s quarters later that night, Laura, Saul and Lee convened to begin making sense of the situation that had presented itself with Sam’s admission. Though Anders’ loose tongue had confessed an awful lot in mere minutes when confronted with Kara, he had turned rather tight lipped immediately following. As a measure of security and intel, the brig was being monitored and recorded, in hopes, or perhaps fear, that he would reveal even more when their presence was removed.
“I don’t know how things went to hell so fast,” Tigh said from where he sat in an armchair, his uniform unbuttoned and opened, an indication of how far from regulation he felt at the moment.
Adama nodded and sipped his glass of Galactica-made whiskey. “You’re telling me.”
Laura, looking a little worse for wear, sat beside Bill on the couch. “We can’t even be sure if he’s telling the truth. He really could just be suffering a mental breakdown after Kara’s death and return. You know if we run Baltar’s test and it comes back negative, he’ll just say the test is wrong. We’re going on a very unstable man’s word.”
Lee kept quiet from where he stood towards the back of the room, his eyes on the framed photos on his father’s walls instead of the group. How he felt regarding both Kara and Sam was drastically different than the other three, so much so that even he began to question whether or not his judgement could be trusted in regards to the two of them. Kara always had a way of clouding his head and impairing his decisions. Had it been anyone left behind on that moon during their first few months fleeing the cylons, they would have been left behind to bring the fleet to safety, but he and the Old Man had just about doomed the last 50,000 humans in existence to die in order to try to bring her back.
“Some of the things add up, though,” Adama began slowly. “His story corroborates what you said D’Anna told you regarding their theory. That’s not even factoring in the temple, the Chief said Anders was already there by time he found it.”
“All the pilots who fought in both of those battles knew the Raiders turned back though, it could just be a good story, Bill,” Saul added in a layer of skepticism.
“Why would he turn himself in?” asked Laura, though it was more thinking aloud than anything else. “If he had an agenda, some plan, why would he come to us?” She sighed and crossed her legs at the knee after reaching for her glass of water on the coffee table. She sipped it, eyes shutting to enjoy the crisp taste and the relief the coolness brought. Her cancer had returned weeks ago and luckily, she still managed to keep it a relative secret, though it was getting harder by the day. “Unless he’s distracting us…”
Bill watched her with concern in his eyes. He had been one of the few she confided in about the return of her illness, even staying in his quarters when enduring her Deloxin treatment.
“I think you’re all missing something important,” said Lee, his hands in his pockets as he turned back around to address them. “What you’ve gotten out of D’Anna and Leoben is that the Five aren’t like the other seven models. They’re something different. Even if they weren’t, we know they’re all capable of ignoring their programming. Athena’s one of us now and she made her choice. Why couldn’t Sam and whoever the others are get to choose? He led the resistance on Caprica for nearly a year. He’s flown with our pilots. He was down on the algae planet for weeks with the rest of us, making sure we wouldn’t starve to death. If he’s a cylon, how does it change anything?” His defense of Anders even surprised himself.
“You’re forgetting Boomer, kid,” Tigh said with a raise of the brow over his one remaining eye. “It’s fine to say Anders is on our side, but what if he just gets his flip switched one day and loses it, kills half the people around him?”
“You’re at his mercy either way. You don’t play ball with him and he won’t share what he knows. If you’re so afraid of Sam, how afraid are you of whoever those other four are? It could be any of us. It could be me. It could be Zarek. Madame President, it could even be you.”
Tigh laughed, his chest shaking with the humor he found at the suggestion Lee made. “Yeah, and it could be me or even the Old Man.”
“We have to make a decision.” Lee approached where the other three sat and took his own seat on the empty chair while he looked to his father. “Either we go on not knowing who the others are and hope to the Gods they don’t betray us, or we find out who they are and give them amnesty if they continue to stick by us.”
The only sound of the room was the quite hum of Galactica’s engines that gently spun through the entire ship at any given moment. Like most of the decisions they’d made since the end of the worlds, it was choosing between a rock and a hard place. One bad decision versus another slightly worse one.
“Give Sam the assurances he wants,” Roslin ordered to no one in particular.
Without missing a beat, Adama added in, “And have him take his oath to the fleet again.” It was more a symbol than anything else, just as it had been during Athena’s ceremony when she joined and committed herself to the fleet instead of her own people. The amount of trust they were going to put into Samuel Anders was immeasurable, but Bill knew it was the necessary move.
“What about Starbuck?” Tigh posed and Lee was thankful he didn’t have to be the one to bring her up.
Adama drank the rest of the whiskey down in a large gulp, contemplating how Kara fit into what they’d already decided. “She deserves the amount of loyalty she’s always shown us.”
-
Kara sat beside Sam on their cell floors, bars separating one another from any kind of real contact. They’d migrated there after their superiors had left them alone, Lee reluctantly leaving with them. He’d wanted to stay, she had seen the look on his face that said so, but they both had known he needed to be there for the conversation that was going to take place surrounding hers and Sam’s seemingly mutual fate. It was no question that Lee was on her side, but the fact that he hadn’t completely turned on Sam was what shocked her the most. Something had changed between the two men since her supposed death, as before they’d barely been able to exchange a few words to one another. Kara knew she had always been between them, funny enough that her death had been what brought them together in the end.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Kara asked Sam. “You’ve been thinking this for a long time, why didn’t you tell me?”
“What was I going to say? You had a lot on your plate, we were barely speaking, and you’ve probably killed more cylons than anyone in the fleet.”
“So did you back on Caprica,” she pointed out. They’d both done their fair share of introducing the enemy to death, or at least a fresh resurrection. “All right, I admit, I probably wouldn’t have been the best person to tell.” With the exception of Athena, and even Kara had hated that woman at first, she still considered all of the skinjobs and their chrome counterparts to be on the opposing side. “How do you know who the others are if you can’t remember being a cylon?”
“That night you and Lee played piano in Joe’s Bar, that song you played, it felt the same way to me as I did when I knew the temple was in the mountains. Like I’ve known it for a very long time, but couldn’t place it. I followed the sound and found you, and when I looked up…”
Kara took deep, steadying breaths as Sam’s words came out. So this was how she was involved. It shook her completely, knowing she had a part in all of it.
“There were four other people looking just as taken by it as I was. It wasn’t just that, but at that moment, I felt at home with them, you know? It made sense in some way I can’t describe.” Sam’s voice rang of an almost kind of defeat. He wished he could better explain it to anyone else, even to himself. For weeks he’d contemplated putting a bullet to his head just to see if he woke up somewhere, but the fear of what it would mean if he’d been wrong, along with what would happen to him if he did end up in some resurrection ship or basestar, had kept him from going through with it.
“But why that song? Even if you and the others are the last cylons, then what do I have to do with it?” She tugged her legs up to her chest, arms wrapping around them as her chin came to rest upon her knees. “And how am I here? Apollo saw my ship explode. Even if I didn’t die, say I ejected or who knows what, where did I spend the last two months? Someone built me a new ship and sent me home. If the cylons had me, why would they send me back?”
The more she talked, the more frantic she became, tears being produced at an increased rate in response to her heightened emotions. “Did they brainwash me before sending me back? What if they grew me in some petri dish? They got my ovary on Caprica, Sam, in that farm-” Her head shook and she pressed her forehead to her knees to hide herself away temporarily. “What if they just made a copy of me, what if I’m dead and this isn’t even me?”
Sam wished he could have reached through the bars to pull her into his arms and offer some kind of comfort to her as her psyche tore itself apart. He didn’t know what she was, but like Lee, he didn’t care. This was his wife, and though they were now legally divorced, he would always care for her., even if he was a cylon and even if she really believed she was some genetic cylon experiment. He settled for pushing his hand between the gap of the bars, his palm rubbing her arm. “Stop, Kara.”
Just as she lifted her head, prepared to begin again, the door to her cell opened, four marines standing in wait. She turned to look back to Sam and he would’ve sworn there was a kind of peace in her eyes which absolutely terrified him.
“Where are you taking her?” Sam questioned the marines. As expected, they didn’t answer.
“Major Thrace,” it amused Kara to hear the formality. “Stand up and turn around so we can handcuff you.”
She obeyed slowly and though at any other time, she would have fought them and struggled to push her way free from her jailers, Kara didn’t even make an attempt. Her eyes held on Sam as he stood up, watching in horror. “This is how it ends then.” She smiled, a glint to her eye. “Again, I guess.”
“I want to see Captain Adama!” Sam yelled, rushing towards the front of his cell, hitting the chain of his cuffs on the bars to attract any kind of attention. They continued to ignore him. “Kara, nothing’s going to happen to you,” he tried for reassurance, but the quiver in his voice wouldn’t have calmed her anyway.
They led her away, two marines in front of her and two behind her. “I love you, Sammy,” Kara confessed just before they had her out of the door. It wasn’t what she felt for Lee, but she knew she’d always feel affection towards the man she’d married, cylon or not. She barely heard him continue to yell for Apollo as the door behind her shut, effectively cutting the volume of his voice down to a tenth of what it had been.
She followed them as they led the way, though with each hallway and landmark she passed, Kara became more confident in her assumption of where she was going. They were taking her to one of the decks, where, of course, the launch tube airlocks were. She tried to tell herself to be brave in facing her death, to be Starbuck and not just Kara Thrace as she had been since she’d climbed out of her Viper days ago. When they stepped onto the hangar floor, Adama was waiting with his own set of marines. Kara hoped it would have been anyone else but him to do this to her. Well, anyone besides him and Lee. Tigh, she could have taken, even though her feelings towards the older man had softened over the years. The Old Man though, she couldn’t handle that.
Her contingent of marines stepped away to leave her standing by herself before the man that had been her father for all intents and purposes. That sense of peace she’d had when she left her jail cell began to quickly fade away, fear of self preservation kicking in. As much as she may have wanted to, though, neither Starbuck nor Kara would beg for her life. “So, you quietly cut me loose in deep space.” With a deep breath for a small amount of courage, Kara lied, “I’m not afraid to die.”
“A little easier after you’ve been through it once,” Adama said.
“You’re making a mistake.”
Before he responded, he paused, needing to be sure of the decision they’d come to one last time. “Maybe I am, but I can’t take the chance that you’re right and not do something about it.”
Kara’s breath caught in her throat, sure she’d heard him wrong. As one of the marines stepped up behind her and released her wrists from the tight cuffs, she knew it wasn’t just her mind playing a trick on her.
“I’m tired of turning away from the things I want to believe in, Kara, and I believe you when you say that you’ll die before you stop trying. And I won’t lose you again. Now go. Find a way to Earth.”
She’d thought that one of her proudest moments regarding the Admiral had been the day he had summoned her to his quarters and asked her to take command of Pegasus. Kara had been absolutely stunned that day, almost refusing it on the grounds that the Old Man had finally lost his mind. He had trusted her in charge of half of the fleet and to ultimately take his place should anything have happened to him and Galactica. Sometimes at night in her lonely battlestar when Sam was down on New Caprica and Lee was still not speaking to her, she would cling to that memory inside of her, using it for the kind of warmth she needed to keep herself going. Especially in those last few months on Pegasus, during the planning of their return trip to save their people, she’d found faith in herself through the Admiral’s own words.
Now, though, she would have a new moment to keep to herself and preserve quietly. Then and there, Kara vowed she would use it as the necessary fuel she needed to bring them to Earth. He had faith in her again and it meant even more to her now given the questionability about where she’d spent the last two months. She wouldn’t let him regret it. Kara threw her arms around the Admiral and in the same instant, his own closed around her. Those tears she’d fought off came forward and for the time being, she didn’t even care. Days before, she had returned to Galactica after the months she’d been gone, but not until this moment did she actually return home.
Bill squeezed her tightly, aware of just how much he needed this moment. Perhaps, he needed it more than even Kara did. He’d lost his daughter and only now did he know he had her back. Whatever had happened to her, however she’d come back to them, what mattered to him was that she actually had returned in the end. He wasn’t just a father to one as he had been for the last two months, but once again a parent with two children. As they pulled apart just barely, he kissed the top of her head, just as he’d done to his two boys when they were much younger. He saw the tears on her cheeks and his thumbs helped her to brush them away, leaving his own to stain his skin.
“My son’s waiting for you at the end of the deck. You two are going to take apart your bird and try to make sense of it, see if there are any clues there. Helo and Gaeta will be helping you with star charts.”
She nodded, the most obedient she’d ever been in all her life. “Thank you.” Though he wasn’t her father, at least not biologically, she began to feel a sort of healing to the anger her own father’s abandonment had left in its wake. Kara moved to head down the empty deck, towards where she knew Lee had already started the work they were supposed to share together.
“And Kara?”
Her head turned back, stopping.
“You should have told me you were together months ago," Adama said in light chastisement.
Cheeks warming, Kara ducked her head down in the nod of a child caught in a lie.
Adama stepped away with a smile. “There’s nothing that makes me happier.”