We used to wait. (Chapter 25/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 25/?)
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: 6,693
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?
I've posted chapters 24 + 25 at the same time, make sure you don't miss either of them or you'll be seriously confused.
Caprica: Eighteen Years Before the Fall
The alarm on the night stand blared bright and early, signaling Socrata’s usual wake up at quarter past six in the morning. She rolled over towards the side of the bed, hand groping around the surface of the small table until it found the plastic of the alarm. A few of the buttons on top were pressed, one actually switching the sound of the alarm to the more offensive stream of talk radio, before she finally found the off button. Silence settled in and her still half asleep ears were thankful for it. She laid back down on her warm sheets, her arm stretching out to Dreilide’s side of the bed. “Sorry,” she said aloud in apology. Most mornings, she wasn’t so remorseful for the sound of the alarm. After all, she was the one having to get ready for a day of work while her husband usually stayed at home with their daughter or frittering away his time doing relatively nothing. They’d had a particularly good night though, and her still undressed body attested to that fact strongly. Her hand felt nothing beside her so she stretched further, but only felt the cold sheets. Socrata lifted her head and looked to the space beside her, her vision confirming what she already knew. He wasn’t there and the temperature of his space indicated he hadn’t been for awhile.
It was unusual to her, but not so alarming, as there had been a number of times she’d woken up alone to find him in the living room working on a piece of music or even stepped out early to surprise her with fresh breakfast from a nearby store. There could be a number of reasons for his absence, though that didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed to find herself alone. With a glance back to the time that read across the digital clock, she sighed and pushed herself out of bed. She gathered up her robe in her hands from where Dreilide had tugged it off of her and abandoned it the night before, her face smiling at the memory. The fabric pulled close around her and she used the belt to cinch it at her waist. The rest of the clothing was gathered up and set into the nearby laundry hamper until the room was the very definition of neat and order.
Abandoning her room, she crossed the hall and went to the bathroom to start her morning off with a shower. That was one of the few daily routines she enjoyed, after years of communal and timed showers. Afterward, with her robe back on and her damp hair freshly combed, Socrata headed to the kitchen to turn on the morning coffee pot. When she passed through the living room on return to Kara’s room, she paused and looked around. She almost forgot that she expected Dreilide to be there or to have fallen asleep on the couch at some point in the night. Her pulse jumped a little, unsettled by the situation. She didn’t let it stop her though, as she was working with time constraints, and finally powered through to wake Kara. Maybe Dreilide would be there, he had a habit of falling asleep with their daughter after trying to get her to fall back sleep.
The door creaked open, the wall switch flipped on and welcoming the room to morning. Only the small body of her daughter was curled up under the blankets, rather than a much larger one alongside it. Socrata’s hand anxiously tugged on her daughter’s shoulder, the gentleness with which she usually did it fading fast. Kara rolled onto her other side, attempting to evade her mother’s wake up call, but Socrata didn’t relent. “Kara, get up.”
A high pitch whine left the seven year old’s throat as she fought with determination for extra minutes of sleep. “No,” she mumbled at her mother’s incessant tugging. “No, Mama.”
Socrata’s patience wearing thin, she tugged the blankets from her daughter, a trick that usually worked once the cold air hit the young girl. “You’ve got school. Don’t fight me. I’ve got work and your Dad’s got to get you there.”
Kara pulled a nearby stuffed animal into her arms, hugging it close. Try as she might, her body was slowly waking, though she held her eyes shut. “Daddy said you were taking me today,” her sleepy words slipped out.
“What?” Socrata stopped on the other side of the room, from where she was sifting through Kara’s drawers to pull out what she would wear that day. “When did he say that?”
“Middle of the night.”
“Kara, you saw your Dad in the middle of the night?” Her mother asked, trying not to let her emotions bleed through.
“Uh-huh,” the little girl said, finally sitting up, her hair tousled and a mess. “He said he was going somewhere and you would take me to school.”
Though it wasn’t unlike Dreilide to have some place to go, he had never disappeared without a word to her beforehand. In that regard, he had always been reliable. Her pulse quickened further and temperature rose, as her body put together the implications of all the details about the morning before the rest of her did. Leaving behind Kara’s clothes half hanging out of the dresser, Socrata tore out of the room and back to the bedroom she shared with her husband. The closet door was ajar and attracted her attention. When she pulled it open, her eyes went skyward immediately, towards the upper shelf and noted the empty space there.
The pounding of her heart echoed in her ears, her brain still in denial over it all. “No,” she whispered to herself and turned to go for the set of drawers that her husband’s belongings filled. Before she could even see in them, she knew something was off by how little effort was actually required to tug them open. They were deserted, a few items left behind, but all the essentials taken. One by one, she opened each drawer and closed it again, finding the same kind of devastation left behind. This wasn’t a trip he’d taken. He’d left almost nothing behind, hardly a record of his existence.
She stood there for the longest of times, looking at the last drawer she’d opened that revealed the ultimate betrayal. When she came back to herself, Socrata reached for her phone left charging on her nightstand and scrolled through the numbers stored inside. Tears clouded her vision as she finally found his name, submitting the call to go through. She drew it to her ear and waited for the ring. It rang once, twice, before it picked up. An exhale of breath released and though she was brimming with anger towards him, she was relieved to know he hadn’t fully given up. The voice that came through wasn’t his, however, instead it was the automatically generated recording, indicating that the number had been recently disconnected.
Her breath hitched and she closed the phone to return it to where she’d found it. All she could think about was the night before, lying with him in their bed and the words he’d said to her.
“Socrata?” Dreilide asked in the veil of darkness of the room. “Are you happy? I mean, have you been happy with me?”
She shook her head and cupped her hand over her mouth, eyes clenched shut.
“If something ever happened to me, you and Kara would be okay, wouldn’t you?”
Though she’d thought his line of questioning to be odd the night before since he’d never, not once, let such thoughts be verbalized to her, now she understood what he had meant. He was planning to go. He’d made love to her the night before to say goodbye, knowing he was going to leave both his wife and his daughter behind.
Grief shook her and she sat down on the bed to give her weakening legs a break. Her morning had been so uncomplicated, hiding away the truth of the situation. Tears poured from her and she buried her face into her hands, unsure of how one was even properly supposed to deal with such a thing. How could anyone continue on from here? Her husband of over eleven years had left without so much of a word to her, without a note, without leaving them with even anything to pick themselves up with. Despite all the things she’d seen during her days as a marine, and even those years she fought in the war, she knew she’d never felt as absolutely lost as she suddenly did.
Socrata’s body shuddered as her cries grew harder, though she stifled the sounds they made as best as she could, unprepared to show that level of emotion even in the privacy of her room. The person that had persuaded her to slow down and open up had left her in the end. It suddenly all felt like a waste. A waste of time, of her life, or everything she’d put into it. The muscles of her stomach clenched and she took off running towards the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before she lost what little she held in stomach. Every muscle in her body tensed as she emptied herself out into the porcelain, her tears still coming in between each gag.
Her stomach settled eventually, the burn of acid and bile stinging the inside of her mouth and back of her throat as she sat against the cool tie in nothing but the robe she’d put on. She pulled herself up to the sink and rinsed her mouth clean as best she could, looking into the mirror at the image reflected there. The fabric she wore sickened her further, recalling just how the pads of his fingers had slid between it and her skin to help it off. The entire night replayed before her eyes, her head swimming with the images. Only the sound of piano keys tapping distantly in the apartment woke her from it.
For a second, she imagined it all to be a horrible nightmare. He hadn’t gone, it had been a horrible joke and misunderstanding. She’d fight with him later for it, after getting him in her arms and confirming just how real his presence was. Socrata left the bathroom, heading down the hall to the living room as she listened, though a thousand warning bells in her head went off. The notes weren’t played with the same finesse her husband had, even when he was merely messing around at the keyboard. No, they were shorter and without proper rhythm. In a clearer head, she would have known right away they belonged to her daughter’s fingers, but given the circumstances, the dream of it all was on her mind.
Rounding the corner, she saw Kara at the piano bench in her pajamas, bare feet dangling towards the ground but not quite reaching. The wave of pain and grief hit her again, just as fresh as it had in her bedroom when the call hadn’t gone through. This time, she didn’t let it consume her, instead sorrow turned to anger. Anger at what her husband had done to her, anger at what he’d done to their daughter. She rushed towards the piano, her hand grasping Kara’s arm and jerking her violently off the bench. Kara stumbled, her face horrified at the treatment shown to her by her mother.
“Mama-” Kara began to interject, not quite understanding.
Socrata’s hands made quick work to cover the keys up, hiding them behind the slip of wood that pulled out. Her daughter protested beside her, struggling to push through. She was in a blind frenzy, though, gathering up every sheet of paper visible on the piano that belonged to her husband.
“Stop!” Her daughter shrieked, tugging at her mother’s arm. “You’re ruining them!” She repeated the gentle warning her father had given her years ago regarding the handling of the papers covered in both the printed and handwritten notes.
Her mother’s hands stopped, dropping the papers to the floor suddenly to grab at her daughter’s upper arms. She shook her roughly for a second, stopping as she bent down to level with her daughter. “Don’t you get it?” Socrata’s words were harsh and biting, a tone that she had never before used with her. “Your father left. He doesn’t care about the papers anymore, he doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t care about you, Kara.”
Kara’s head shook to deny it, though her own tears began to form. “You’re lying!” She screeched from her mother’s grasp. “He loves me! He’ll come back! He always comes back!” The words she used showed her lack of understanding on how her father’s latest disappearance was different from all the other trips he’d previously taken and returned from. Her tiny fist smacked into her mother’s arm, though there was little real force behind it.
“Not this time,” Socrata said and released her daughter, moving to gather the crinkled papers, wadding them up in her fists as she worked. When she had them all, she started to head towards the kitchen and the garbage can there. She opened the lid and went to release them into the trash when Kara’s hands tugged at the robe her mother wore, trying to stop her.
“Stop it! Those aren’t yours!” She yelled to her mother.
Socrata spun in place, releasing the papers, some of which fell into the garbage and some which did not. One hand grabbed at Kara’s arm and her other swung, open palm slapping across her daughter’s face. The sound echoed in the apartment, both mother and daughter ceasing in their cries and anger for one identical moment. Kara’s cheek already began to warm with blood from the hit she’d received and the little girl looked up to her mother, still not comprehending what just happened despite the sharp sting she felt. Her face was blank, and nearly ten seconds later did reality hit Kara, tears flowing even worse than before as she tried to recoil away from her mother and the first of many betrayals she would feel at the woman’s hand.
Her mother stared back at her with equal cluelessness, despite the fact that she’d been the one to deliver the blow. As harsh of a personality as she had at times, and Dreilide knew that to be fact, she’d never done such a thing to her own child. No, Kara had remained the part of her life uncontaminated by the person Socrata feared she really was deep down underneath everything. The life she and her husband had created over the last eleven years had done well enough to heal her, though now she realized those wounds couldn’t ever have been healed, only hidden. With the safety of the world they’d made crumbling around her, the woman she’d once been began to rear her ugly head.
She was horrified at what she’d done, unable to move or even verbalize her regret. Her hand still grasped at her child’s arm despite how much Kara tried to retreat away in fear of her mother. The cries of her daughter now replaced the sound of the slap, the truth of her actions having the effect of giving herself her own smack to the face.
“Kara.” Socrata said her name, voice thick with emotion. Her offending hand, the one that had so brutally hit her daughter only a moment ago, pulled at her and soon Kara was in her enveloping arms. She cried against Kara’s shoulder and hair, her child resisting her still. “Gods,” she sobbed into her daughter. “I don’t know what-I’m sorry.”
The girl gave up the fight, although she still didn’t know what she felt. This was her mother, the woman who, though stern and had very specific ways of doing things, had never harmed her a day in her life. Her father had always acted as the buffer between her and her mother’s moods, but not once had she been on the receiving end of any of it, at least not more than a raising of her voice. She’d not even so much been swatted on her bottom when she misbehaved, and now she could still feel the pain of her mother’s hand across her cheek. Kara loved her mother, more than anything else, but now when she thought of her, a fear lingered inside of her. Her fists gripped into Socrata’s robe, desperately wanting to forget what had just happened and return to the old imagery she had of her mother.
“I’m so sorry,” Socrata repeated against her daughter, her body rocking both of them together.
Cheeks stained with her own tears, Kara’s small voice spoke. “Where’s Daddy?”
Socrata’s arms tightened around her a little bit more, trying to steady herself. “I don’t know, baby. But he isn’t coming back this time.” She was gentler this go around as she tried to explain to her daughter, though still not in the best of manners.
“No,” Kara insisted.
Though she didn’t believe it, especially considering her sudden outburst, Socrata tried an attempt at comfort. “We’ll be okay.”
As Kara’s own hand rubbed her hot cheek while she was in her mother’s arms, she knew it wouldn’t.
-
Galactica: Present
Lee stroked his hand against Kara’s cheek from where he lay behind her, spooned in close. At just louder than a whisper, he spoke, “Kara, wake up.” He’d woken only a moment before to find her stirring slightly, even in slumber. It wasn’t how she normally slept, at least not when at peace, and the tension he felt in her very muscles had him worried. If she was dreaming of anything even remotely unpleasant, the last thing he wanted to do was to let her continue to suffer through it. He pushed her hair from her face and leaned in to kiss her shoulder. “You’re dreaming.”
The call of his voice pulled her out of the state she’d been in, restoring reality to her in gradual steps. “Lee?” Kara asked, eyes opening only to find darkness around her.
“I’m here.” Their daytime hours had left them arguing, as was usual for them, but by time it came to curl up into their bed, they’d already understood the silent apologies both gave. Their making up was irrelevant, however, because even if they went to sleep hating one another, he would have found it in himself to wake her with that same quiet tone of voice. Of the two of them, he was the one who more often suffered from dreams bordering on nightmares, usually stemming back to his time on New Caprica. Even before her death, when they would both share an hour or so of sleep beside one another in the billet before returning to their quarters, Kara had woken him from a few of those mental prisons with her own similar manner. She’d taken care of him then, now he returned it. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly.
“What were you dreaming about?” If she didn’t want to talk about it, he wouldn’t press her on it. She’d often asked him in the past about his own dreams, but when Lee truly, really hadn’t wanted to share, Kara had given him that courtesy of privacy.
“My mother.”
Though Socrata Thrace came up on occasion, most notably the night she’d revealed the details about that particularly brutal injury to her hand and how her mother had been responsible, Kara remained rather tight lipped about either of her parents. “What about her?”
“Just the day my father left.” Her hand drew up to her own cheek, palming the skin there like she could still feel the faint sting her mother’s hand laid upon her.
“What happened?”
There was something about the dark that always made it easier for secrets to be told. Perhaps it was the anonymity of it, or just the fact that she didn’t have to look into his eyes and see his reaction to her words. Nighttime also always had the effect of making things seem less real, at least for her. “She used to get me ready for school every morning, but she was distracted with trying to find where my Dad had gone. I should have gotten dressed but she didn’t leave anything out.” Kara reached behind her to tug at Lee’s hand, pulling it around her.
“I went to the living room and started practicing piano. I was just getting good at putting my two hands together and I used to spend every free minute I had sitting there, trying to get it right. My mom came back in and she was just so… upset, but I didn’t care and didn’t understand because all she did was pull me away from the piano and start to throw out all of his papers. I remember I was so angry at her for touching his things. She told me he wasn’t coming back and I tried to stop her from tossing them out. She turned around and slapped me across the face.” There was a detachment to the way she described it versus how she’d detailed the incident with her hand.
“Were you okay?” Not that it mattered if she hadn’t been back then, there was nothing he could have done for it now.
“Yeah, and she was sorry afterward. I get it now though. I never thought to try to understand what happened that morning, but now I get it. My father came to me in the middle of the night before and told me how much he loved me and to tell her he loved her too.” Bitterness returned in the short laugh she gave. “Told me to remember that frakking song because he thought I’d need it someday. Then he left us and she couldn’t take it.”
His hand that she clutched to her body stroked over the skin of her stomach, sleep addled brain trying not to lose her as she shared her memories. “It must have been hard for her. For you, too.”
“Would have been nice if some of his final words to me weren’t so self-absorbed to be about some stupid song he wrote.”
“It was important to you two though, maybe that’s why he wanted you to remember it,” said Lee.
Her fingers moved just barely over the back of his hand, echoing the pattern of the single notes she’d played earlier on in the day for Anders as she tapped them lightly into Lee’s skin. One, One, two, three. Six, five, three. Six, five, three, two, one.
Regrettably, Lee felt himself giving into his fatigue and even Kara’s touch at his hand seemed to coax him closer to it. He was surrounded by her, feeling the expansion of her lungs, the scent of her skin and hair in his nose, the fading taste of her still on his tongue from the lovemaking they’d completed hours ago. All things Kara Thrace had the ability of lulling him into a serene sense of contentment. Just as he was about to slip back under, he suddenly felt her fingers go still against his skin, the absence of the rhythm jarring him just enough.
“Frak me,” Kara said, the expression escaping her lips, suddenly feeling wide awake. “Lee, you asleep?” She asked, rubbing the back of his hand with her palm.
He groaned his wordless reply into her hair.
“It’s not a song, Lee.” She rolled over in his arms, her hands immediately going to either of his cheeks, staring across at him in the dim light. She could just barely make out the angles of his face. “I mean, it is a song, but it’s not.”
“Kara, what are you talking about?” He groused, wanting desperately to fall back asleep.
Unclothed, she scrambled from their bed, flipping on the nearest light switch. She fished her underwear off the floor and pulled them on, before heading to the small desk setup they currently had. She rummaged her hands quickly through the papers there, looking for a scrap of anything that wasn’t vaguely important and a writing tool of some kind. She feared that if she didn’t get her thoughts down fast enough they’d simply evaporate, dissipate into the air like they never existed at all. By time she’d covered the page in a line of numbers and turned back to him, Lee was sitting up, blankets bunched around his waist. She crossed the room, nearly tripping over their clothing strewn over the floor, hands displaying the torn piece of paper to him.
“The notes - they’re numbers, Lee. Twelve numbers. What else is twelve numbers?” Kara posed to him from her frantic state. He offered a blank, but tired, expression to her, and she held the paper down against the mattress, trying to carefully bracket off the list of twelve numbers into three groupings without puncturing through the paper with her pen. “One, one, two, three. Six, five, three, six. Five, three, two, one. They’re frakking jump coordinates.”
Lee watched her skeptically, unsure of whether to believe her or to think she’d finally been pushed too far. His hand settled over her own. “That’s more than a stretch. Lots of things have twelve numbers. Planet to planet calls used to be twelve numbers. Barcodes on cereal boxes used to be twelve numbers.” He wanted to believe her and had done so rather blindly since she had returned, but maybe even Lee Adama had limits when it came to Kara Thrace.
“He could have taught me any song. He could have taught me nursery rhymes or television jingles or anything else, but he didn’t. This was always it. This was always important. The last time I saw him he told me to remember it. And that frakking mandala, Lee! He used to tell me to paint it everywhere for him. He didn’t want me to forget.”
“But how did he know about either of those things? It doesn’t make sense. Your father was just a man living on Caprica, there was no way for him to know about any of this.”
She shook her head, trying to force logic and reason out and hold on to the feeling inside of her. It was in her gut, in her bones, in the goosebumps forming on her skin and the hair that stood on the back of her neck. She felt it coursing through her bloodstream as her heart pumped it around. There was something there and she couldn’t let herself or even Lee talk her out of it. “Maybe the Gods sent it to him. How am I even here Lee? You saw me die and I can’t remember where I was for two months. What if the Gods sent me back?” said Kara.
As much as Lee had started to believe in anything since her return, what she was saying to him now was too crazy for even this new version of himself. “Kara-”
“No.” Her finger tapped against the paper that rested beside him on their bed. “This is it and I’m going to find out whether you’re with me or not, Lee. Trust me one last time.”
He sighed, eyes staring down at her messy handwriting. He was absolutely torn in two over what to do. Lee thought back to the conversation they’d had over raised voices before she’d gone to her death. Kara had wanted him to believe in the Gods and he told her her that if he had to believe in something, it would be her. It was always her. He looked back to Kara, knowing his decision. “I never really could say no to anything.”
“Except me.”
Lee shook his head. “Especially you.”
-
Kara agreed to at least wait until the morning cycle before escalating her theory beyond just the two of them. They both knew there was no way they could simply ask the Admiral to plug the coordinates into Galactica’s jump drive and hope that they didn’t jump them into the middle of a planet, a star, perhaps even a black hole. That kind of blind jumping was extremely dangerous to even a small vessel like a Raptor, and would undoubtedly be deadlier to the battlestar. No, they’d have to do this on their own.
After her revelation, both dressed despite the bags under their eyes and fled their quarters to head to the small room they had been meeting periodically in with Gaeta and on occasion, Helo, trying to scour scans of nearby star systems in order to find the one that called Earth home. Though neither of them were as well versed in the process of plotting jumps as the Lieutenant was, together they had confidence their calculations could be trusted safely. The specific jump itself, from their current point to the coordinates Kara was convinced was the answer to all their problems, was well beyond the red line, and it would take a series of carefully plotted jumps to get there safely and without risk. If they were to simply jump directly there, they knew the likelihood of a ships’ onboard FTL system bringing them accurately there was not in their favor.
It was well towards dinner by time they realized how long they’d been working, Lee’s grumbling stomach calling Kara’s attention. She watched him, noting the exhaustion over his face and the discoloration of the skin beneath his eyes. Lee’s eyes drooped nearly closed but he soldiered on and it reminded her so much of those first few days when the cylons attacked every thirty-three minutes. Lee, especially, had been burning the candle at both ends for her lately. Just as much as she didn’t want to see herself fail, he didn’t want to see it either. They were a team now, at least now their relationship confirmed it as much outwardly as he’d always felt inwardly, and her disappointments were now also his.
“This would be so much easier if we just had Gaeta do this for us,” he said.
Kara’s head shook. “I can’t explain how I got these and expect anyone besides you to trust me on this.”
“Have you thought about how we’re going to convince the Admiral to let us make these jumps in the first place?”
Her shoulders slumped as she worked through her final set of calculations, writing the last set of digits in the list of fifteen or so. Lee took the paper from her, beginning to double check the work she’d already done. This had been their process since the middle of the night, one person starting the work and the other going over it again, hoping to catch any errors made along the way. “Fifteen jumps. I think that’s cutting it close with a team of Raptors. Could run out of fuel if we had a single mistake.”
Lee sighed loudly as he nodded and slid the paper towards the center of the table. “It checks out.”
Neither of them dared to pick up the sheet of paper between them, instead letting their eyes lock on it from where they stood. If this worked, if this really took them where Kara believed it would, then it would change everything for the fleet. They would have Earth.
“We ask the Admiral for another ship. Something that can go longer range, but still small. We jump there, see what we find-” She stopped. “No, we jump there and when,” she emphasized the word, “we find Earth, we come back and bring the fleet with us.”
Lee watched her and all of a sudden it was like seeing Commander Thrace come back to life before him. He’d only seen her in such a position very briefly before their encounter on Founders’ Day, when nothing of her leadership was yet to be tested. Lee strongly wished he could have seen her during the exodus, or perhaps even been at her side through it. She must have been something else.
“Then we better figure out which one we want and we’re most likely to get, and who we’re bringing on with us to run the ship.”
-
A week later, the Demetrius, former sewage processing ship, hung alone suspended in the black of space. They’d left Galactica and the fleet the day before, under the guise of searching for food available on nearby planets and their moons. With everything going on, Kara had been sure Adama wasn’t going to let them go, especially not risking the loss of both of his children, but he had acquiesced in the end and agreed to commandeer the ship chosen for the mission. The people they wanted to go with them, though, the Admiral would not order them to join up on the mission, and the crew had then been switched to volunteer only. As luck would have it, most of the people had anyway decided of their own volition to come along for the ride. A day into the short journey along with the heat and stench of the ship, however, and most of them probably regretted it.
Though it wasn’t necessary to take so much time between jumps, the FTL drive on the Demetrius was older and rumored to be quite precarious, so the caution of allowing the system to cool and spool up again was taken. The inward pull and release of jump fourteen released them back into space, and though Kara knew Earth wouldn’t at all be visible from this location, the lack of anything else around them had her scared. She wasn’t sure what she expected, though a bright blinking sign pointing the way towards Earth would have been ideal. Lee joined her up front in the large cabin of the cockpit of the ship, sitting down beside her in the co-pilot’s seat.
“What if it’s not there?” She asked.
That was something he hadn’t considered since he made the decision to follow her on out and away from the fleet. Since he’d climbed out of bed and began their preparations in the middle of that very night, Lee had chosen to believe that this would be the answer they prayed for. He didn’t have an answer for her.
“I can’t go back to Galactica with nothing. No one will ever believe a word I say again.”
“We don’t really have a choice. We don’t have the fuel to keep jumping blindly out here and we have to meet back up with the fleet in two days at the latest. Besides, I think Helo and Athena will start a mutiny if you keep us in this ship any longer than possible,” his attempt at trying to lighten the mood was blatant.
She didn’t bite at it, instead allowing the fear sitting in her stomach to consume her. “Maybe we should take the Raptor out to the last jump. You and me.” Kara wasn’t sure what good it would do for them, the ship they were in wouldn’t change what awaited them on the other side. It just felt fitting to her, that if anyone was going to see that planet first, it should be reserved for their eyes alone.
Lee stood from his seat and Kara was sure he was going to reject the offer she’d given. Just as he was about to leave, he stopped, pausing with his hand on the hatch door. “Go get your flight suit on.”
An hour later, Starbuck and Apollo, the two as they’d always been, sat within the confines of the Raptor that had been brought along with Demetrius. The ship released from where it docked with the larger vessel, and Kara, with her hands at the ship’s controls, glanced over to Lee as he spoke to Helo back on Demetrius. “We’ll jump to the coordinates you have and be back within twenty minutes. If you don’t hear from us or see us by then, you’re ordered to return to Galactica without us. No rescue missions, do you understand?”
There was silence on the other line and he could imagine Helo’s torn expression as he took his orders. “Roger that, Apollo. You better frakking come back.” There was some kind of interference over the line and Athena’s teasing voice then rang out. “You can’t keep Earth for yourself, Starbuck!”
“Like hell I’m sharing it with you guys,” Kara said with a smile that was heard in her words. When the line cleared and the Raptor was at a safe distance from the sewage ship, she spoke again. “Commencing jump in 5, 4, 3, 2…”
Next to her, Lee finished her words. “Jump.” The ship disappeared off of DRADIS on the Demetrius and blinked back into existence light years away.
The black emptiness of space stared back at both of them, the immediate sight of nothing causing her breathing to grow instantly erratic. Her body crumpled in her seat, only her restraints holding her up as she preemptively succumbed to what she felt to be her ultimate failure. “Nothing! There’s nothing here!”
Lee remained stalwart, switching over the ship’s controls to his side, spinning the Raptor around slowly to get a full 360-degree look of where they were. As the ship rotated, the field of vision provided by the cockpit glass was filled by a trio of spheres floating in space. “Kara,” said Lee, barely able to understand the implications of what he saw. Along with his call of her name, DRADIS sounded as it came back online and showed the large planetary body near them.
She lifted her head, prepared to take her frustration and failure out on Lee, but instead her face was bathed in the light reflected off the rock she knew to be the moon she’d seen and taken photographs of. They both existed in mutual silence for Gods knew how long, until Kara erupted into a fit of laughter, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes in supreme happiness over what was there after all. “That’s the moon!” Her hand waved over towards it like a child would, pointing out the obvious to her parent. “The sun!” That one was far more distant, glowing hot. It was strange that her attention should fall onto the biggest orb last, but perhaps she was saving the very best for the end.
There, before both of them, was the blue planet, the expanse of the rich color only broken up by the swirling white clouds and green and brown land masses down below. It was Earth, and not even Caprica from orbit had ever looked that beautiful to either of them. Kara had done it.
She released her seatbelt and moved to the back of the Raptor quickly.
“Kara- what the frak? Where are you going?”
“Taking pictures!” She shouted jubilantly as she sat down at the ECO station, setting the ship’s onboard camera to the proper range and allowing it to snap up a few photographs of the planet before them. “It’s beautiful, Lee. Better than I remembered.”
From the front of the ship, Lee stared out to the planet below them. All he wanted to do was to take the Raptor down and land on what looked like it had to be green grass down below. He wanted to find the warmest spot of the planet and run into the water, feel the burn of sun on his skin and know what it would be like to not only feel the gripping despair of hopelessness. It was Earth and it was their future. He looked to the clock counting down how many minutes they had left before rendezvousing up with the Demetrius again and it killed him to know there wasn’t time for even a quick trip to the surface.
The FTL drive spooled up again once Kara had taken the necessary readings about the planet below, all of which indicated drinkable water and breathable air. Consumed in the bliss of the moment, neither of them bothered to notice that there was a distinct lack of any and all transmissions from the surface of Earth.
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: 6,693
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?
I've posted chapters 24 + 25 at the same time, make sure you don't miss either of them or you'll be seriously confused.
Caprica: Eighteen Years Before the Fall
The alarm on the night stand blared bright and early, signaling Socrata’s usual wake up at quarter past six in the morning. She rolled over towards the side of the bed, hand groping around the surface of the small table until it found the plastic of the alarm. A few of the buttons on top were pressed, one actually switching the sound of the alarm to the more offensive stream of talk radio, before she finally found the off button. Silence settled in and her still half asleep ears were thankful for it. She laid back down on her warm sheets, her arm stretching out to Dreilide’s side of the bed. “Sorry,” she said aloud in apology. Most mornings, she wasn’t so remorseful for the sound of the alarm. After all, she was the one having to get ready for a day of work while her husband usually stayed at home with their daughter or frittering away his time doing relatively nothing. They’d had a particularly good night though, and her still undressed body attested to that fact strongly. Her hand felt nothing beside her so she stretched further, but only felt the cold sheets. Socrata lifted her head and looked to the space beside her, her vision confirming what she already knew. He wasn’t there and the temperature of his space indicated he hadn’t been for awhile.
It was unusual to her, but not so alarming, as there had been a number of times she’d woken up alone to find him in the living room working on a piece of music or even stepped out early to surprise her with fresh breakfast from a nearby store. There could be a number of reasons for his absence, though that didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed to find herself alone. With a glance back to the time that read across the digital clock, she sighed and pushed herself out of bed. She gathered up her robe in her hands from where Dreilide had tugged it off of her and abandoned it the night before, her face smiling at the memory. The fabric pulled close around her and she used the belt to cinch it at her waist. The rest of the clothing was gathered up and set into the nearby laundry hamper until the room was the very definition of neat and order.
Abandoning her room, she crossed the hall and went to the bathroom to start her morning off with a shower. That was one of the few daily routines she enjoyed, after years of communal and timed showers. Afterward, with her robe back on and her damp hair freshly combed, Socrata headed to the kitchen to turn on the morning coffee pot. When she passed through the living room on return to Kara’s room, she paused and looked around. She almost forgot that she expected Dreilide to be there or to have fallen asleep on the couch at some point in the night. Her pulse jumped a little, unsettled by the situation. She didn’t let it stop her though, as she was working with time constraints, and finally powered through to wake Kara. Maybe Dreilide would be there, he had a habit of falling asleep with their daughter after trying to get her to fall back sleep.
The door creaked open, the wall switch flipped on and welcoming the room to morning. Only the small body of her daughter was curled up under the blankets, rather than a much larger one alongside it. Socrata’s hand anxiously tugged on her daughter’s shoulder, the gentleness with which she usually did it fading fast. Kara rolled onto her other side, attempting to evade her mother’s wake up call, but Socrata didn’t relent. “Kara, get up.”
A high pitch whine left the seven year old’s throat as she fought with determination for extra minutes of sleep. “No,” she mumbled at her mother’s incessant tugging. “No, Mama.”
Socrata’s patience wearing thin, she tugged the blankets from her daughter, a trick that usually worked once the cold air hit the young girl. “You’ve got school. Don’t fight me. I’ve got work and your Dad’s got to get you there.”
Kara pulled a nearby stuffed animal into her arms, hugging it close. Try as she might, her body was slowly waking, though she held her eyes shut. “Daddy said you were taking me today,” her sleepy words slipped out.
“What?” Socrata stopped on the other side of the room, from where she was sifting through Kara’s drawers to pull out what she would wear that day. “When did he say that?”
“Middle of the night.”
“Kara, you saw your Dad in the middle of the night?” Her mother asked, trying not to let her emotions bleed through.
“Uh-huh,” the little girl said, finally sitting up, her hair tousled and a mess. “He said he was going somewhere and you would take me to school.”
Though it wasn’t unlike Dreilide to have some place to go, he had never disappeared without a word to her beforehand. In that regard, he had always been reliable. Her pulse quickened further and temperature rose, as her body put together the implications of all the details about the morning before the rest of her did. Leaving behind Kara’s clothes half hanging out of the dresser, Socrata tore out of the room and back to the bedroom she shared with her husband. The closet door was ajar and attracted her attention. When she pulled it open, her eyes went skyward immediately, towards the upper shelf and noted the empty space there.
The pounding of her heart echoed in her ears, her brain still in denial over it all. “No,” she whispered to herself and turned to go for the set of drawers that her husband’s belongings filled. Before she could even see in them, she knew something was off by how little effort was actually required to tug them open. They were deserted, a few items left behind, but all the essentials taken. One by one, she opened each drawer and closed it again, finding the same kind of devastation left behind. This wasn’t a trip he’d taken. He’d left almost nothing behind, hardly a record of his existence.
She stood there for the longest of times, looking at the last drawer she’d opened that revealed the ultimate betrayal. When she came back to herself, Socrata reached for her phone left charging on her nightstand and scrolled through the numbers stored inside. Tears clouded her vision as she finally found his name, submitting the call to go through. She drew it to her ear and waited for the ring. It rang once, twice, before it picked up. An exhale of breath released and though she was brimming with anger towards him, she was relieved to know he hadn’t fully given up. The voice that came through wasn’t his, however, instead it was the automatically generated recording, indicating that the number had been recently disconnected.
Her breath hitched and she closed the phone to return it to where she’d found it. All she could think about was the night before, lying with him in their bed and the words he’d said to her.
“Socrata?” Dreilide asked in the veil of darkness of the room. “Are you happy? I mean, have you been happy with me?”
She shook her head and cupped her hand over her mouth, eyes clenched shut.
“If something ever happened to me, you and Kara would be okay, wouldn’t you?”
Though she’d thought his line of questioning to be odd the night before since he’d never, not once, let such thoughts be verbalized to her, now she understood what he had meant. He was planning to go. He’d made love to her the night before to say goodbye, knowing he was going to leave both his wife and his daughter behind.
Grief shook her and she sat down on the bed to give her weakening legs a break. Her morning had been so uncomplicated, hiding away the truth of the situation. Tears poured from her and she buried her face into her hands, unsure of how one was even properly supposed to deal with such a thing. How could anyone continue on from here? Her husband of over eleven years had left without so much of a word to her, without a note, without leaving them with even anything to pick themselves up with. Despite all the things she’d seen during her days as a marine, and even those years she fought in the war, she knew she’d never felt as absolutely lost as she suddenly did.
Socrata’s body shuddered as her cries grew harder, though she stifled the sounds they made as best as she could, unprepared to show that level of emotion even in the privacy of her room. The person that had persuaded her to slow down and open up had left her in the end. It suddenly all felt like a waste. A waste of time, of her life, or everything she’d put into it. The muscles of her stomach clenched and she took off running towards the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before she lost what little she held in stomach. Every muscle in her body tensed as she emptied herself out into the porcelain, her tears still coming in between each gag.
Her stomach settled eventually, the burn of acid and bile stinging the inside of her mouth and back of her throat as she sat against the cool tie in nothing but the robe she’d put on. She pulled herself up to the sink and rinsed her mouth clean as best she could, looking into the mirror at the image reflected there. The fabric she wore sickened her further, recalling just how the pads of his fingers had slid between it and her skin to help it off. The entire night replayed before her eyes, her head swimming with the images. Only the sound of piano keys tapping distantly in the apartment woke her from it.
For a second, she imagined it all to be a horrible nightmare. He hadn’t gone, it had been a horrible joke and misunderstanding. She’d fight with him later for it, after getting him in her arms and confirming just how real his presence was. Socrata left the bathroom, heading down the hall to the living room as she listened, though a thousand warning bells in her head went off. The notes weren’t played with the same finesse her husband had, even when he was merely messing around at the keyboard. No, they were shorter and without proper rhythm. In a clearer head, she would have known right away they belonged to her daughter’s fingers, but given the circumstances, the dream of it all was on her mind.
Rounding the corner, she saw Kara at the piano bench in her pajamas, bare feet dangling towards the ground but not quite reaching. The wave of pain and grief hit her again, just as fresh as it had in her bedroom when the call hadn’t gone through. This time, she didn’t let it consume her, instead sorrow turned to anger. Anger at what her husband had done to her, anger at what he’d done to their daughter. She rushed towards the piano, her hand grasping Kara’s arm and jerking her violently off the bench. Kara stumbled, her face horrified at the treatment shown to her by her mother.
“Mama-” Kara began to interject, not quite understanding.
Socrata’s hands made quick work to cover the keys up, hiding them behind the slip of wood that pulled out. Her daughter protested beside her, struggling to push through. She was in a blind frenzy, though, gathering up every sheet of paper visible on the piano that belonged to her husband.
“Stop!” Her daughter shrieked, tugging at her mother’s arm. “You’re ruining them!” She repeated the gentle warning her father had given her years ago regarding the handling of the papers covered in both the printed and handwritten notes.
Her mother’s hands stopped, dropping the papers to the floor suddenly to grab at her daughter’s upper arms. She shook her roughly for a second, stopping as she bent down to level with her daughter. “Don’t you get it?” Socrata’s words were harsh and biting, a tone that she had never before used with her. “Your father left. He doesn’t care about the papers anymore, he doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t care about you, Kara.”
Kara’s head shook to deny it, though her own tears began to form. “You’re lying!” She screeched from her mother’s grasp. “He loves me! He’ll come back! He always comes back!” The words she used showed her lack of understanding on how her father’s latest disappearance was different from all the other trips he’d previously taken and returned from. Her tiny fist smacked into her mother’s arm, though there was little real force behind it.
“Not this time,” Socrata said and released her daughter, moving to gather the crinkled papers, wadding them up in her fists as she worked. When she had them all, she started to head towards the kitchen and the garbage can there. She opened the lid and went to release them into the trash when Kara’s hands tugged at the robe her mother wore, trying to stop her.
“Stop it! Those aren’t yours!” She yelled to her mother.
Socrata spun in place, releasing the papers, some of which fell into the garbage and some which did not. One hand grabbed at Kara’s arm and her other swung, open palm slapping across her daughter’s face. The sound echoed in the apartment, both mother and daughter ceasing in their cries and anger for one identical moment. Kara’s cheek already began to warm with blood from the hit she’d received and the little girl looked up to her mother, still not comprehending what just happened despite the sharp sting she felt. Her face was blank, and nearly ten seconds later did reality hit Kara, tears flowing even worse than before as she tried to recoil away from her mother and the first of many betrayals she would feel at the woman’s hand.
Her mother stared back at her with equal cluelessness, despite the fact that she’d been the one to deliver the blow. As harsh of a personality as she had at times, and Dreilide knew that to be fact, she’d never done such a thing to her own child. No, Kara had remained the part of her life uncontaminated by the person Socrata feared she really was deep down underneath everything. The life she and her husband had created over the last eleven years had done well enough to heal her, though now she realized those wounds couldn’t ever have been healed, only hidden. With the safety of the world they’d made crumbling around her, the woman she’d once been began to rear her ugly head.
She was horrified at what she’d done, unable to move or even verbalize her regret. Her hand still grasped at her child’s arm despite how much Kara tried to retreat away in fear of her mother. The cries of her daughter now replaced the sound of the slap, the truth of her actions having the effect of giving herself her own smack to the face.
“Kara.” Socrata said her name, voice thick with emotion. Her offending hand, the one that had so brutally hit her daughter only a moment ago, pulled at her and soon Kara was in her enveloping arms. She cried against Kara’s shoulder and hair, her child resisting her still. “Gods,” she sobbed into her daughter. “I don’t know what-I’m sorry.”
The girl gave up the fight, although she still didn’t know what she felt. This was her mother, the woman who, though stern and had very specific ways of doing things, had never harmed her a day in her life. Her father had always acted as the buffer between her and her mother’s moods, but not once had she been on the receiving end of any of it, at least not more than a raising of her voice. She’d not even so much been swatted on her bottom when she misbehaved, and now she could still feel the pain of her mother’s hand across her cheek. Kara loved her mother, more than anything else, but now when she thought of her, a fear lingered inside of her. Her fists gripped into Socrata’s robe, desperately wanting to forget what had just happened and return to the old imagery she had of her mother.
“I’m so sorry,” Socrata repeated against her daughter, her body rocking both of them together.
Cheeks stained with her own tears, Kara’s small voice spoke. “Where’s Daddy?”
Socrata’s arms tightened around her a little bit more, trying to steady herself. “I don’t know, baby. But he isn’t coming back this time.” She was gentler this go around as she tried to explain to her daughter, though still not in the best of manners.
“No,” Kara insisted.
Though she didn’t believe it, especially considering her sudden outburst, Socrata tried an attempt at comfort. “We’ll be okay.”
As Kara’s own hand rubbed her hot cheek while she was in her mother’s arms, she knew it wouldn’t.
-
Galactica: Present
Lee stroked his hand against Kara’s cheek from where he lay behind her, spooned in close. At just louder than a whisper, he spoke, “Kara, wake up.” He’d woken only a moment before to find her stirring slightly, even in slumber. It wasn’t how she normally slept, at least not when at peace, and the tension he felt in her very muscles had him worried. If she was dreaming of anything even remotely unpleasant, the last thing he wanted to do was to let her continue to suffer through it. He pushed her hair from her face and leaned in to kiss her shoulder. “You’re dreaming.”
The call of his voice pulled her out of the state she’d been in, restoring reality to her in gradual steps. “Lee?” Kara asked, eyes opening only to find darkness around her.
“I’m here.” Their daytime hours had left them arguing, as was usual for them, but by time it came to curl up into their bed, they’d already understood the silent apologies both gave. Their making up was irrelevant, however, because even if they went to sleep hating one another, he would have found it in himself to wake her with that same quiet tone of voice. Of the two of them, he was the one who more often suffered from dreams bordering on nightmares, usually stemming back to his time on New Caprica. Even before her death, when they would both share an hour or so of sleep beside one another in the billet before returning to their quarters, Kara had woken him from a few of those mental prisons with her own similar manner. She’d taken care of him then, now he returned it. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly.
“What were you dreaming about?” If she didn’t want to talk about it, he wouldn’t press her on it. She’d often asked him in the past about his own dreams, but when Lee truly, really hadn’t wanted to share, Kara had given him that courtesy of privacy.
“My mother.”
Though Socrata Thrace came up on occasion, most notably the night she’d revealed the details about that particularly brutal injury to her hand and how her mother had been responsible, Kara remained rather tight lipped about either of her parents. “What about her?”
“Just the day my father left.” Her hand drew up to her own cheek, palming the skin there like she could still feel the faint sting her mother’s hand laid upon her.
“What happened?”
There was something about the dark that always made it easier for secrets to be told. Perhaps it was the anonymity of it, or just the fact that she didn’t have to look into his eyes and see his reaction to her words. Nighttime also always had the effect of making things seem less real, at least for her. “She used to get me ready for school every morning, but she was distracted with trying to find where my Dad had gone. I should have gotten dressed but she didn’t leave anything out.” Kara reached behind her to tug at Lee’s hand, pulling it around her.
“I went to the living room and started practicing piano. I was just getting good at putting my two hands together and I used to spend every free minute I had sitting there, trying to get it right. My mom came back in and she was just so… upset, but I didn’t care and didn’t understand because all she did was pull me away from the piano and start to throw out all of his papers. I remember I was so angry at her for touching his things. She told me he wasn’t coming back and I tried to stop her from tossing them out. She turned around and slapped me across the face.” There was a detachment to the way she described it versus how she’d detailed the incident with her hand.
“Were you okay?” Not that it mattered if she hadn’t been back then, there was nothing he could have done for it now.
“Yeah, and she was sorry afterward. I get it now though. I never thought to try to understand what happened that morning, but now I get it. My father came to me in the middle of the night before and told me how much he loved me and to tell her he loved her too.” Bitterness returned in the short laugh she gave. “Told me to remember that frakking song because he thought I’d need it someday. Then he left us and she couldn’t take it.”
His hand that she clutched to her body stroked over the skin of her stomach, sleep addled brain trying not to lose her as she shared her memories. “It must have been hard for her. For you, too.”
“Would have been nice if some of his final words to me weren’t so self-absorbed to be about some stupid song he wrote.”
“It was important to you two though, maybe that’s why he wanted you to remember it,” said Lee.
Her fingers moved just barely over the back of his hand, echoing the pattern of the single notes she’d played earlier on in the day for Anders as she tapped them lightly into Lee’s skin. One, One, two, three. Six, five, three. Six, five, three, two, one.
Regrettably, Lee felt himself giving into his fatigue and even Kara’s touch at his hand seemed to coax him closer to it. He was surrounded by her, feeling the expansion of her lungs, the scent of her skin and hair in his nose, the fading taste of her still on his tongue from the lovemaking they’d completed hours ago. All things Kara Thrace had the ability of lulling him into a serene sense of contentment. Just as he was about to slip back under, he suddenly felt her fingers go still against his skin, the absence of the rhythm jarring him just enough.
“Frak me,” Kara said, the expression escaping her lips, suddenly feeling wide awake. “Lee, you asleep?” She asked, rubbing the back of his hand with her palm.
He groaned his wordless reply into her hair.
“It’s not a song, Lee.” She rolled over in his arms, her hands immediately going to either of his cheeks, staring across at him in the dim light. She could just barely make out the angles of his face. “I mean, it is a song, but it’s not.”
“Kara, what are you talking about?” He groused, wanting desperately to fall back asleep.
Unclothed, she scrambled from their bed, flipping on the nearest light switch. She fished her underwear off the floor and pulled them on, before heading to the small desk setup they currently had. She rummaged her hands quickly through the papers there, looking for a scrap of anything that wasn’t vaguely important and a writing tool of some kind. She feared that if she didn’t get her thoughts down fast enough they’d simply evaporate, dissipate into the air like they never existed at all. By time she’d covered the page in a line of numbers and turned back to him, Lee was sitting up, blankets bunched around his waist. She crossed the room, nearly tripping over their clothing strewn over the floor, hands displaying the torn piece of paper to him.
“The notes - they’re numbers, Lee. Twelve numbers. What else is twelve numbers?” Kara posed to him from her frantic state. He offered a blank, but tired, expression to her, and she held the paper down against the mattress, trying to carefully bracket off the list of twelve numbers into three groupings without puncturing through the paper with her pen. “One, one, two, three. Six, five, three, six. Five, three, two, one. They’re frakking jump coordinates.”
Lee watched her skeptically, unsure of whether to believe her or to think she’d finally been pushed too far. His hand settled over her own. “That’s more than a stretch. Lots of things have twelve numbers. Planet to planet calls used to be twelve numbers. Barcodes on cereal boxes used to be twelve numbers.” He wanted to believe her and had done so rather blindly since she had returned, but maybe even Lee Adama had limits when it came to Kara Thrace.
“He could have taught me any song. He could have taught me nursery rhymes or television jingles or anything else, but he didn’t. This was always it. This was always important. The last time I saw him he told me to remember it. And that frakking mandala, Lee! He used to tell me to paint it everywhere for him. He didn’t want me to forget.”
“But how did he know about either of those things? It doesn’t make sense. Your father was just a man living on Caprica, there was no way for him to know about any of this.”
She shook her head, trying to force logic and reason out and hold on to the feeling inside of her. It was in her gut, in her bones, in the goosebumps forming on her skin and the hair that stood on the back of her neck. She felt it coursing through her bloodstream as her heart pumped it around. There was something there and she couldn’t let herself or even Lee talk her out of it. “Maybe the Gods sent it to him. How am I even here Lee? You saw me die and I can’t remember where I was for two months. What if the Gods sent me back?” said Kara.
As much as Lee had started to believe in anything since her return, what she was saying to him now was too crazy for even this new version of himself. “Kara-”
“No.” Her finger tapped against the paper that rested beside him on their bed. “This is it and I’m going to find out whether you’re with me or not, Lee. Trust me one last time.”
He sighed, eyes staring down at her messy handwriting. He was absolutely torn in two over what to do. Lee thought back to the conversation they’d had over raised voices before she’d gone to her death. Kara had wanted him to believe in the Gods and he told her her that if he had to believe in something, it would be her. It was always her. He looked back to Kara, knowing his decision. “I never really could say no to anything.”
“Except me.”
Lee shook his head. “Especially you.”
-
Kara agreed to at least wait until the morning cycle before escalating her theory beyond just the two of them. They both knew there was no way they could simply ask the Admiral to plug the coordinates into Galactica’s jump drive and hope that they didn’t jump them into the middle of a planet, a star, perhaps even a black hole. That kind of blind jumping was extremely dangerous to even a small vessel like a Raptor, and would undoubtedly be deadlier to the battlestar. No, they’d have to do this on their own.
After her revelation, both dressed despite the bags under their eyes and fled their quarters to head to the small room they had been meeting periodically in with Gaeta and on occasion, Helo, trying to scour scans of nearby star systems in order to find the one that called Earth home. Though neither of them were as well versed in the process of plotting jumps as the Lieutenant was, together they had confidence their calculations could be trusted safely. The specific jump itself, from their current point to the coordinates Kara was convinced was the answer to all their problems, was well beyond the red line, and it would take a series of carefully plotted jumps to get there safely and without risk. If they were to simply jump directly there, they knew the likelihood of a ships’ onboard FTL system bringing them accurately there was not in their favor.
It was well towards dinner by time they realized how long they’d been working, Lee’s grumbling stomach calling Kara’s attention. She watched him, noting the exhaustion over his face and the discoloration of the skin beneath his eyes. Lee’s eyes drooped nearly closed but he soldiered on and it reminded her so much of those first few days when the cylons attacked every thirty-three minutes. Lee, especially, had been burning the candle at both ends for her lately. Just as much as she didn’t want to see herself fail, he didn’t want to see it either. They were a team now, at least now their relationship confirmed it as much outwardly as he’d always felt inwardly, and her disappointments were now also his.
“This would be so much easier if we just had Gaeta do this for us,” he said.
Kara’s head shook. “I can’t explain how I got these and expect anyone besides you to trust me on this.”
“Have you thought about how we’re going to convince the Admiral to let us make these jumps in the first place?”
Her shoulders slumped as she worked through her final set of calculations, writing the last set of digits in the list of fifteen or so. Lee took the paper from her, beginning to double check the work she’d already done. This had been their process since the middle of the night, one person starting the work and the other going over it again, hoping to catch any errors made along the way. “Fifteen jumps. I think that’s cutting it close with a team of Raptors. Could run out of fuel if we had a single mistake.”
Lee sighed loudly as he nodded and slid the paper towards the center of the table. “It checks out.”
Neither of them dared to pick up the sheet of paper between them, instead letting their eyes lock on it from where they stood. If this worked, if this really took them where Kara believed it would, then it would change everything for the fleet. They would have Earth.
“We ask the Admiral for another ship. Something that can go longer range, but still small. We jump there, see what we find-” She stopped. “No, we jump there and when,” she emphasized the word, “we find Earth, we come back and bring the fleet with us.”
Lee watched her and all of a sudden it was like seeing Commander Thrace come back to life before him. He’d only seen her in such a position very briefly before their encounter on Founders’ Day, when nothing of her leadership was yet to be tested. Lee strongly wished he could have seen her during the exodus, or perhaps even been at her side through it. She must have been something else.
“Then we better figure out which one we want and we’re most likely to get, and who we’re bringing on with us to run the ship.”
-
A week later, the Demetrius, former sewage processing ship, hung alone suspended in the black of space. They’d left Galactica and the fleet the day before, under the guise of searching for food available on nearby planets and their moons. With everything going on, Kara had been sure Adama wasn’t going to let them go, especially not risking the loss of both of his children, but he had acquiesced in the end and agreed to commandeer the ship chosen for the mission. The people they wanted to go with them, though, the Admiral would not order them to join up on the mission, and the crew had then been switched to volunteer only. As luck would have it, most of the people had anyway decided of their own volition to come along for the ride. A day into the short journey along with the heat and stench of the ship, however, and most of them probably regretted it.
Though it wasn’t necessary to take so much time between jumps, the FTL drive on the Demetrius was older and rumored to be quite precarious, so the caution of allowing the system to cool and spool up again was taken. The inward pull and release of jump fourteen released them back into space, and though Kara knew Earth wouldn’t at all be visible from this location, the lack of anything else around them had her scared. She wasn’t sure what she expected, though a bright blinking sign pointing the way towards Earth would have been ideal. Lee joined her up front in the large cabin of the cockpit of the ship, sitting down beside her in the co-pilot’s seat.
“What if it’s not there?” She asked.
That was something he hadn’t considered since he made the decision to follow her on out and away from the fleet. Since he’d climbed out of bed and began their preparations in the middle of that very night, Lee had chosen to believe that this would be the answer they prayed for. He didn’t have an answer for her.
“I can’t go back to Galactica with nothing. No one will ever believe a word I say again.”
“We don’t really have a choice. We don’t have the fuel to keep jumping blindly out here and we have to meet back up with the fleet in two days at the latest. Besides, I think Helo and Athena will start a mutiny if you keep us in this ship any longer than possible,” his attempt at trying to lighten the mood was blatant.
She didn’t bite at it, instead allowing the fear sitting in her stomach to consume her. “Maybe we should take the Raptor out to the last jump. You and me.” Kara wasn’t sure what good it would do for them, the ship they were in wouldn’t change what awaited them on the other side. It just felt fitting to her, that if anyone was going to see that planet first, it should be reserved for their eyes alone.
Lee stood from his seat and Kara was sure he was going to reject the offer she’d given. Just as he was about to leave, he stopped, pausing with his hand on the hatch door. “Go get your flight suit on.”
An hour later, Starbuck and Apollo, the two as they’d always been, sat within the confines of the Raptor that had been brought along with Demetrius. The ship released from where it docked with the larger vessel, and Kara, with her hands at the ship’s controls, glanced over to Lee as he spoke to Helo back on Demetrius. “We’ll jump to the coordinates you have and be back within twenty minutes. If you don’t hear from us or see us by then, you’re ordered to return to Galactica without us. No rescue missions, do you understand?”
There was silence on the other line and he could imagine Helo’s torn expression as he took his orders. “Roger that, Apollo. You better frakking come back.” There was some kind of interference over the line and Athena’s teasing voice then rang out. “You can’t keep Earth for yourself, Starbuck!”
“Like hell I’m sharing it with you guys,” Kara said with a smile that was heard in her words. When the line cleared and the Raptor was at a safe distance from the sewage ship, she spoke again. “Commencing jump in 5, 4, 3, 2…”
Next to her, Lee finished her words. “Jump.” The ship disappeared off of DRADIS on the Demetrius and blinked back into existence light years away.
The black emptiness of space stared back at both of them, the immediate sight of nothing causing her breathing to grow instantly erratic. Her body crumpled in her seat, only her restraints holding her up as she preemptively succumbed to what she felt to be her ultimate failure. “Nothing! There’s nothing here!”
Lee remained stalwart, switching over the ship’s controls to his side, spinning the Raptor around slowly to get a full 360-degree look of where they were. As the ship rotated, the field of vision provided by the cockpit glass was filled by a trio of spheres floating in space. “Kara,” said Lee, barely able to understand the implications of what he saw. Along with his call of her name, DRADIS sounded as it came back online and showed the large planetary body near them.
She lifted her head, prepared to take her frustration and failure out on Lee, but instead her face was bathed in the light reflected off the rock she knew to be the moon she’d seen and taken photographs of. They both existed in mutual silence for Gods knew how long, until Kara erupted into a fit of laughter, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes in supreme happiness over what was there after all. “That’s the moon!” Her hand waved over towards it like a child would, pointing out the obvious to her parent. “The sun!” That one was far more distant, glowing hot. It was strange that her attention should fall onto the biggest orb last, but perhaps she was saving the very best for the end.
There, before both of them, was the blue planet, the expanse of the rich color only broken up by the swirling white clouds and green and brown land masses down below. It was Earth, and not even Caprica from orbit had ever looked that beautiful to either of them. Kara had done it.
She released her seatbelt and moved to the back of the Raptor quickly.
“Kara- what the frak? Where are you going?”
“Taking pictures!” She shouted jubilantly as she sat down at the ECO station, setting the ship’s onboard camera to the proper range and allowing it to snap up a few photographs of the planet before them. “It’s beautiful, Lee. Better than I remembered.”
From the front of the ship, Lee stared out to the planet below them. All he wanted to do was to take the Raptor down and land on what looked like it had to be green grass down below. He wanted to find the warmest spot of the planet and run into the water, feel the burn of sun on his skin and know what it would be like to not only feel the gripping despair of hopelessness. It was Earth and it was their future. He looked to the clock counting down how many minutes they had left before rendezvousing up with the Demetrius again and it killed him to know there wasn’t time for even a quick trip to the surface.
The FTL drive spooled up again once Kara had taken the necessary readings about the planet below, all of which indicated drinkable water and breathable air. Consumed in the bliss of the moment, neither of them bothered to notice that there was a distinct lack of any and all transmissions from the surface of Earth.