We used to wait. (Chapter 28/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 28/?)
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: 9,765
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?
After Kara’s eager departure, Lee had made an attempt to follow. She’d gotten a head start of only mere seconds, but with how little he knew she wanted to be found, she’d used it to put a mile between them. He was afraid for her, though he knew deep inside of himself that she wouldn’t try anything, at least not right now. In the future, when all the details were out in the open, maybe then Kara would make an attempt at removing herself permanently, but she wouldn’t dare now. Though they’d shut down the computer they found on Earth, by what had been revealed in that room it was unclear if there were other facilities operating on the planet, or perhaps elsewhere in space. Death might once again not be the end for her, and if she had to be somewhere, Lee knew she would choose to stay here, at least for the time being.
He took the moments alone to finally give himself a second to breathe and once he’d closed himself away in their billet, Lee let out everything he’d felt. Today, he had to be strong for her, despite how much it killed him to keep it together. She had needed him and he would have given her anything, Kara didn’t even need to ask. Alone though, finally, he could just exist as he needed. Lee sat down on the small couch in their quarters, back hunched forward with his elbows on his knees. He held his head in his hands as his exhausted body gave in to finally feeling every ache. The pain in his shoulders and arms, he knew that was from carrying Kara’s body, or one of them. When he closed his eyes, all he saw was the way her body looked, limp and without life. It was hard for him to differentiate between them and the woman he knew, even hours later. It had looked so real, in fact it had been real. Had the resurrection gone through the first or second time instead, it would have been one of those bodies he made love to every night.
Tears came but he didn’t audibly cry, feeling much too worn for even that display. Some part of him knew he should be repulsed by all of it, or at least he thought he should be. Most others would have been sickened by the idea that the person they loved was a machine, at least everyone other than Karl Agathon. He’d seen the way the marriage between Galen and Cally had fallen apart ever since everything had been revealed. Cally couldn’t find it in herself to come to terms with who and what he was, at least not yet. Despite knowing he should be averse to Kara, he couldn’t. What did that make him? Was he just pushed too far and clinging to something he shouldn’t? Was he just afraid to let go and be alone all over again?
His head shook in his hands, a muffled cry let out into the recycled air of the room. No, even when he thought like that, he felt a stab of pain inside of him. She wasn’t just a cylon. She even had a human mother, or at least that was what he’d gleaned from the conversation earlier. She was both of them, a person to bridge the gap between man and machine, the first example to everyone that there needn’t be hatred between both sides. He loved her more than anything, that much he knew, and the feeling that washed over him when he thought of her was like nothing he’d ever felt before in his life. Kara Thrace had crawled inside of him years ago and made her home there. She would always be a part of him.
Lee wiped away the tears from his face, rubbing his hands along the thighs of his pants to remove the moisture entirely. Everywhere he looked around the room, there she was. Her bag she’d been packing before the alert had gone off was still on the floor, despite the fact that they’d come back earlier to put their uniforms on before the meeting. The clothing items she’d removed were sprawled across the bed, messy and tangled, and it reminded him of their usual mornings together. Kara would be there causing chaos and he’d be picking up after her as she teased him, though he never minded the job he’d earned for himself. No, he’d loved it in fact, even if she called him crazy for it. If he stepped into the bathroom, Lee knew he’d see her there as well. Her hairbrush, with strands of long hair wound up in the bristles, would be on the sink counter where she usually left it. Her toothbrush was nestled up against his, much like they slept beside one another in bed.
He couldn’t imagine life without her, he was certain. He couldn’t and didn’t want to. How many times had he promised her and reassured her that he would stand at her side no matter what happened? Lee had whispered words of his unconditional affection to her on more than a few occasions and while Kara had doubted him at the beginning, he knew that now when she looked into his eyes as he said it, she did believe him. Until the end, it would be Starbuck and Apollo, whenever that end came for either or both of them. He was in love with her and it didn’t matter what they’d seen or heard today, because it didn’t change who she was or the woman he’d met with flowers in his hand at her apartment door all those years ago. He thought of Zak, and though his brother hadn’t lived through the horrors of the last few years, he imagined what his little brother’s more carefree nature would have done upon learning the truth. Lee liked to think Zak wouldn’t care either, he would be by her side to the end, holding strong and true to the commitment he made to her when he gave Kara his ring.
Lee rose from where he sat, nose sniffling though most of his tears had stopped. He went for the bag she’d abandoned in the room and began to take each item out, folding them and replacing them in the drawers and closet space that were Kara’s own. The duffel was tucked away and then he began on the clothes on the bed and floor. What was clean was replaced where it belonged and what wasn’t was set aside to be washed along with his things as well. That was a sight he did love, returning to their billet to find their laundry dropped off by the crew members in charge of that ship function, her items of clothing mixed in with his. He drew her sweatshirt off the back of one of the small chairs and pulled it to his nose, breathing in the clean scent of her skin from it before he hung it back up with reluctance. He held the door of the closet open, looking in at their things hanging together, side by side. His flight suit and her slightly smaller one. His dress greys and hers as well, though hers cut a little different to accommodate for her shape. At the floor of the closet was a spare set of boots she owned and Lee admired the shine to them. She kept polishing them and he wondered if he was still what she thought of every single time.
With the one-roomed quarters neat and tidy, Lee found himself not wanting to sleep. He’d given Kara space, time for her to think on her own, something he knew she needed, even he had to admit he was crowding her as of late. He hadn’t slept on his own since the night before she’d returned from the dead and he couldn’t start now, afraid what it would once again mean to not have her at his side. He straightened his uniform, the impeccable state of it bringing him stability and comfort, before he left the room finally, going in search of the woman who’d run out on all of them nearly two hours before. Lee would start at all the usual places first, the ready room and CAG’s office, though it was no longer hers.
There was no sign of her anywhere, and Helo and Athena had been hesitant to let Lee go without an explanation from him. The gym had been dark and empty, showing no sign of anyone inhabiting the place anytime in the recent hours. It was on his way to check Joe’s Bar that he passed a pair of marines leading Dreilide Thrace from the head and back to the quarters he knew his father had put them in. The other man, who looked only a few years older than he, traded a glance with Lee, and it was in that instant that he knew he’d been caught.
“I didn’t get your name back at the…” Dreilide’s voice trailed off, unsure of what exactly to call the night’s earlier event. A meeting? Talk?
Lee didn’t want to stay to speak to him, despite how curious he was. His loyalties were to Kara and not this man, even if he did claim to be her father. Looking across to him, however, Lee couldn’t help but notice some of the striking similarities between father and daughter. He never thought he would have a chance to meet anyone from Kara’s past, as she was most certainly on her own like most people suddenly found themselves after the Fall. but here the man was and he was talking directly to him. “Captain Lee,” he paused, realizing he would have to give away his last name. That had been something he hated to admit to in the past, but he’d grown used to everyone here knowing his face, name, and parentage. “Adama.”
“The Admiral, he’s your father?”
He nodded. “Kara hasn’t been to see you, has she?” It was a shot in the dark, but perhaps after she had calmed down, she would have gone to the man for answers.
Dreilide’s face fell in sudden concern. He didn’t know anything about his daughter or who she was, but from the expression she’d worn in that room and the tone of voice she’d used, he knew she was walking on shaky ground. “No, is she all right?”
“She just needed some time to think,” Lee quickly answered, not wanting to betray Kara to her own father. That would be something she wouldn’t easily forgive him for.
“I don’t know you, and I don’t know her,” Dreilide confessed to Lee. “But I’d be blind not to see there’s something going on between you two.”
Lee’s body warmed at the thought, feeling like a teenager again after meeting his high school girlfriend’s parents for the first time. It was hard for him to look at the man and realize his age, the fact that he could be someone’s father, especially father to a woman approaching thirty years old. The parental concern was something else difficult to accept and cope with, but he did his best to try to understand where the man was coming from. He didn’t respond, though, unsure of what it was he could say or what Dreilide wanted to hear.
“Just…” he sighed and looked back to Lee. “Make sure she’s okay. If she doesn’t ever want to speak to me, I’ll understand it.”
Apollo watched the older man talk, seeing him in a new light than he had in that conference room. Gone was the man who appeared to be wise and full of knowledge and perhaps threatening towards the end when accused of abandoning the Colonials. Now before him, he was like anyone else, weighed down with concern for his child, albeit one he hardly ever knew. “You’re right, you don’t know her, because she’d kill me if she found out I was even talking to you like this without her. Kara likes to think she can take care of herself, but she shouldn’t have to.”
Dreilide nodded, a small smile over his lips. Any bit of information about the person his daughter turned out to be was welcomed. “You say that, and it sounds like she turned out exactly like Socrata.”
Lee shook his head as he stepped back, looking to leave and continue his search. “If I were you, I wouldn’t say anything like that to her. You don’t know what happened between her and her mother.”
“What?” He asked, shock and fear written across his face.
“It’s not my place,” Apollo continued from a few feet away. “If Kara ever wants to talk to you, she’ll come to you herself. Otherwise, leave her alone.” With that, Lee abandoned the man and his guards. He’d only ever met the fathers of a few girls he dated, but he’d never practically threatened one before now. For him, Kara was all about firsts.
-
It took another hour for Lee to finally track Kara down. He was beginning to think maybe he had been wrong about her being safe on her own when he’d heard chatter from passing crewmen awake for the night shift that they’d seen a woman asleep in the observation room. It could have been anyone else, but Lee innately knew that when he got there, he would find Kara Thrace.
The hatch closed behind him and Lee saw her straight away, body stretched out on her left side in front of the floor to ceiling windows. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake, but he kept his approach quiet, eventually coming to kneel behind her. For a second, panic spread through him, imagining her just as lifeless as the copies of her had been, but he caught the slight expansion and contraction of her chest. He didn’t know if she’d come here straight away or if she’d merely ended up here at the end of the night. Either way, she’d succumbed to sleep there and he’d be damned if he disturbed her from it. Lee thought of picking her up and carrying her back to their billet, but he knew she’d wake long before he laid her down in their bed. Instead, Lee began to unbutton the top of his uniform, pulling his arms from the sleeves. When it was off, he bunched it up, gently lifting her head to push the fabric beneath it as a makeshift pillow. Kara stirred just barely, but didn’t rise, so Lee laid down behind her, spooned against her with his arm slung over her midsection to keep her close to him.
His head rested on his other arm as he looked out at the beautiful planet before them. It had been only twenty four hours ago that they were in their bunk asleep, sated and exhausted, dreaming of their future together. Kara wasn’t child to a human mother and a cylon father, and Earth was still the dream they’d hoped for. Now they knew the truth of it all and just how deceptive the blue planet looked. There was still hope, a small lingering amount, in the ship that had appeared earlier in the evening. There were twenty other people on board the Meridian that they had yet to meet, that presumably had come from somewhere. There would be much work to do in convincing the civilian fleet that settling down with the Thirteenth Tribe was the right decision, but Lee knew it was the only choice. They couldn’t even hope to deceive the civilians and not reveal the true heritage of the others, as it would undoubtedly come out eventually. Honesty was about to become their only policy.
Beneath his arm, Kara yawned loudly as she slipped from sleep. Her eyes opened, blinking slowly as she got her bearings on where she was. The observation room, that was right. The details of the day came back to her slowly, just as she realized she was no longer alone and felt the comfort of someone’s warm body at her back. There could be only one person, but Kara didn’t want to turn around to confirm or deny it. So long as she didn’t look at his face, she wouldn’t have to face the judgment she feared would be there. Instead, her arm raised and ran along his own, fingers curling over into his own until they formed a fist together. She pulled their arms tighter around her, drawing their hands to her mouth until she kissed at each folded finger of his, much as he’d done forever ago in her office.
Lee leaned in to touch his lips to her neck in unison with her own kisses, letting her know that he was awake with her. He hadn’t yet fallen asleep.
“Why are you here?”
“Where else would I be?” Lee answered.
His dedication to her nearly made her break. She felt guilty, like she’d brainwashed him into being beside her, or at least making him feel bad enough that he thought he owed it to her to remain. “Apollo…”
“That’s not my name.” She had a tendency to use his call sign when trying to distance herself from him. Kara used it when she was angry with him or trying to push him away, and while he’d allowed her the idiosyncrasy beforehand, now he knew it was important to correct her on it.
“What?”
“I’m Lee. If you’re going to try to get rid of me, at least use my name, Kara.”
She quieted down, her hand releasing his as she pulled her arm back into herself in a way to further cut herself off. Kara didn’t like being called out for her flaws and tricks. “You should be with your father and Roslin, trying to figure out what you’re all going to do come tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t you be there too?”
“Why would I be?” Kara replied. “I’m not one of you, I don’t have a say in what happens to the human race anymore.”
“Look at me,” he said, though didn’t use the tone in which he reserved for ordering those of lower rank around with. He moved just enough to force her to roll onto her back while he remained on his side and looking down to her. He expected her eyes to avoid his, but she met them immediately, and he could tell she was doing so out of defiance. “Don’t cheapen and insult what I feel for you by telling me you aren’t a person.”
From below, she blinked and watched him.
“If it turned out my mother was one of those women, would you turn away from me?”
She didn’t answer.
“What if we looked back far enough into Kobol and found out that everyone there had started as a tribe of cylons leaving another planet and looking for a home. Could you go on to one of the civilian ships and tell the families there that they weren’t real? Could you go to Cally Tyrol and tell her that her son isn’t worth loving?” A light sheen of tears covered his eyes as he spoke, though he kept himself in perfect control. “Knowing Sam’s a cylon, does that mean your marriage meant nothing? Do you believe that Karl looks at Hera and thinks she shouldn’t be alive?”
Kara didn’t have an answer for him, though her resolve was weakening as she listened to him speak with so much conviction. No, she couldn’t tell Cally that her son wasn’t a person because his father was a cylon. She couldn’t say that Hera wasn’t the most wonderful little girl she’d ever met simply because of who her mother was. Even Athena, Kara no longer saw as deficient. She was just right the way she was. And Sam, though their marriage had fallen apart and even started for the wrong reasons, the truth about him didn’t change how she saw him in her eyes.
“Then how can you think that I see you any differently? How can you think that my father would stop thinking of you as his daughter? Kara, we love you.” He reached his hand out to cup her cheek, then ran his fingers through her hair as he looked to her. “Do you think Karl wouldn’t die to protect his wife? I’d sacrifice myself before I let something happen to you again.”
She bit at the inside of her cheek, trying to rein herself in. She wanted to remain in that moment forever, with Lee’s hand so close to her, able to breathe him in. There was no logic to her thoughts though, because as much as she believed there was nothing wrong with all those people he’d listed, she felt as though it didn’t apply to her. She was the exception to the rule. Kara pushed herself from the floor roughly, suddenly needing to get away from him. He stopped her though, taking a hold of her wrist as he sat up and looked upwards to her, just as she had to him a second before.
“Well I’m not your wife, so you don’t have to.”
“Do you want to be?” He asked, almost not believing the words that he said. His mouth had acted a mile ahead of his head and before he had time to think better of it.
Her heart jumped at the thought. Though they’d talked about their future together, especially in relation to Earth, neither had explicitly mentioned marriage. There was talk of children, talk of houses and lives together, but never the vows. Until that moment, Kara never realized just how much she wanted it with him, not that she would admit it aloud. “Just don’t, Lee.”
Lee had thought about it on occasion, but asking Starbuck to get married was like jumping into a pen with a hungry lion. She’d probably have torn him apart for the suggestion, even when they were at their best. The marriage to Sam, he considered an anomaly because she’d been the one to suggest it, and she hadn’t exactly gone into it with pure intentions. It had been another wall between them. A layer of protection she needed to function at the time. This wasn’t how he planned to ask either, if he ever did. They were upset and both bordering on mental break downs, definitely not the clearest of heads for such thinking, but he didn’t regret his words just the same. It wasn’t a proposal, but it was the planting of an idea. “Because I’d want to be your husband.”
“I said don’t.”
“What I’m trying to say is, we may not be, but it doesn’t matter. I think of you that way already.”
Kara tugged her wrist away from him and made to leave again, but this time Lee got up and followed, stepping in front of her in an attempt to slow her down.
“Just leave me alone.” Her hands pushed into his chest, aggression flowing out of her and into him.
“If you need to hit me and push me, then frakking do it.” He could think back to a hundred times before that this had happened and unfortunately, a few times when he’d lost his temper and struck her back. That wouldn’t be happening tonight or ever again, that much he knew.
“I don’t need you, Apollo, and I don’t need your shit.” She said through gritted teeth.
“Say my name, say ‘I don’t need you, Lee.’”
“I don’t.”
His blue eyes locked on her own golden green. He dared to defy her. “I don’t believe you.”
Kara shoved both her hands at his chest again and he stumbled back, but regained his footing. When he stood up straight, she closed the gap of space between them, her fists gripping into his tanks to pull him close while she forced her mouth against his in a crude apology. It was aggressive and invasive, rushed and rough, but Lee’s hands came back around her, drawing her in for as long as she would let him. She was trying to lose herself in him, to derive purpose and meaning out of who he was and what the two of them had been. Just as quickly as she’d joined them together, she pulled apart with something of a cry, the back of her hand drawn to her mouth as she looked up to him.
“I don’t want to be me anymore, I don’t even know who I am.” She was cracking as both halves of her met, Starbuck the impenetrable fortress who had always been sure of herself, and Kara, the little girl that had existed before her father left and all the moments in between her mother’s less pleasant days.
“Yes you do.” He felt vacant with her sudden absence again, so he moved in as he nodded, pressing a kiss between her brows when he reached her. This one was unlike the ones before, careful and reassuring. “Everything you thought about yourself this morning, you still are.” His hands sought out both of hers and Kara didn’t fight with him on it this time, instead letting her palms meet his and their fingers fold up tight into one another’s. Lee rested his forehead against her own and he shut his eyes, allowing himself to just be. “We made plans when we got up today, I want to get up tomorrow and know we’re still going to follow them through.”
“This is all too frakked up, Lee, even for me.” She sighed. When it came to him these days, she lost most of the fight she used to have.
He quietly laughed, eyes still closed shut as they stood impossibly close, bodies touching at a few key points. “Never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“Shut up.”
Though he couldn’t see it, he knew she was smiling, even if it was subdued and muted. It was there, to whatever degree. Lee felt one of her hands release his, but a moment later her warm palm traced along his jaw. It made him breathe easy. “I meant what I asked earlier,” he braved it.
“I know,” and she knew exactly to what he referred, despite how much she couldn’t understand it. She lifted her forehead from his, only to then rest her ear to his upper chest. “Lee,” she whispered barely loud enough for him to hear as she watched her palm come to rest over his heart. “Can I come home?”
“You already are.”
-
Hours later, Kara climbed out of the bed she and Lee shared. In silence, she dressed, cursing Lee in the confines of her head for being so anal retentive that he had found time to put away her things in the middle of the day and night they’d previously had. She pulled on a pair of fatigue pants and her boots, but when she went to find her sweatshirt where she’d left it, it was no longer there. Kara stared across at the closet door, the one that had a habit of creaking at the most inopportune moments, but finally decided the risk was worth it. She pulled it open slowly, and though the quietest of sounds emerged from the hinge, Lee didn’t stir. She zipped her sweatshirt up most of the way and made to move to the hatch, spinning the handle open as quietly as she could.
“Kara?” Lee called out.
Caught. She froze and sighed. “What, Lee?”
“Where are you going? It’s early, yet.” He said with a glance to the clock they kept nearby their bed. It in fact wasn’t that early, when either of them were CAG and the other just a pilot, they were often up earlier than this to prepare for the morning brief or perhaps even on shift. They’d gotten soft, something of which they both teased the other about. Soft and very old.
“I need to go see my father.”
He expected it sooner or later, though he was surprised with just how soon it was. It was a toss up really, either Kara avoided things until she couldn’t anymore or she tended to tackle them head on from the start. “Do you want me to come with you?” He knew it wasn’t really his place, but he didn’t want her to have to be alone if she didn’t want to. Kara still couldn’t ask him for things like that, so he usually offered.
“No,” she said. “I need to talk to him on my own first.” It was true. She would tell Lee all the details of it later, but right now, she needed to just be alone with her father. Kara needed answers, to some of the more straightforward questions and to some of the ones that had been inside of her for the last twenty plus years. As much as she shared with Lee, she didn’t know if she could ask those types of things with him sitting beside her.
Lee shut his eyes and rolled over into the mattress. There had been a time when the beds on Galactica felt like absolute torture, but now this particular bed was the sweetest surface he’d ever laid upon. “I’ll see you later then. Lunch?”
“Lunch.” Kara left their quarters to head towards where their guests were being kept. Room was still tight on Galactica, so even finding a space to put them would have been difficult, but she knew the Admiral would have found space just the same. The marine guards outside the door were a dead giveaway when she found the hallway and she nodded her head to the one that was most familiar, the man moving to let her through. She knocked, hoping not to catch anyone in a state of undress, and soon she heard someone on the other side begin to open and release the hatch. When it opened, Dreilide was there, looking mussed from sleep, but awake just the same. Any fatigue that had been in him before fluttered away at the sight of who it was, and without a word, he stepped aside to let her in.
“Where are the others?” She asked, keeping her distance and trying not to look at him as she paced the room.
He raised his hand in a motion to the other doorway. “Bedroom. I took the couch,” he explained plainly. This was a moment he’d been waiting years for, and though he’d crossed the universe slowly for two thousand years, time had never moved at more of a standstill pace than the last two decades did. They both walked the length of the room idly, like two tigers circling one another, waiting for the other to make the first move. Dreilide had the vague suspicion that like her mother, Kara would never be the one to jump first. “You must have… a lot of questions.” The understatement of the century.
“I died,” Kara started, not looking to him. “A couple months ago, I went down into this gas planet we were orbiting around. It looked just like that thing I used to draw for you when I was a kid. I died, but I’m still here. Why?”
Dreilide listened carefully to what information she offered and what she was specifically asking from him, wanting to be sure of his words before he answered. “When you were little, you drew that for me one day. I thought maybe it was just a coincidence, but there was something about it to you. For my people-”
“Cylons, just say it.”
“If that’s what you want to call us, then fine, for cylons, at least the ones I’m part of, everything’s sort of connected. It’s not anything you’re ever really aware of and it can be the smallest, simplest little thing. Knowing something maybe you shouldn’t, but never being quite sure what it is. For children and parents, its a little tighter, but not by much. When your mother and I had you, I never thought that would be something that continued on, but it did, in whatever small degree. You got that image from me, because it was something I’d seen and knew to be important.”
Kara’s movements stopped as she tried to absorb the details that made her just who she really was. “Is that why I’m good at somethings? I’ve been a Viper pilot for the last ten years, is that why I’m so good at it? Because I’m not part human?” She was afraid of the answer.
“No. What?” He almost laughed at her words, but wisely held back. “If you’re good at something, Kara, then you just are. I don’t know what you’ve seen of the first generation of cylons made at the Colony, I don’t know what the other five implemented into them towards the end or what they did to themselves. I imagine though, that they’ve started to program skill sets into them to cheat time and energy. You, Kara, you were never,” he shook his head, sullen at the thought that she could think this about herself, “programmed. I wasn’t programmed. Believe me, if I had been, I would have been a lot better at piano than I was.” With that, he did laugh at himself.
She smiled slightly, unconsciously, as he joked about what used to make his living back on Caprica. The idea that she didn’t have an advantage over others in that regard calmed her some. Her life’s pride had been that she’d been such a natural in the cockpit, and if she were to learn that it had all been planted into her, it would have come close to killing her.
“There are a lot of questions that I can’t answer for you, only because I just don’t know. I heard before that your Eight has a half human child now too, and Galen has a half human son. There’s only three of you and you’re the first, everything about you is unique.”
“You never answered how I’m alive.”
He sat down at one of the chairs at the small table in the room, trying to focus his thoughts. “When we got back to Earth, we had to find where our people went. We had a hunch, but it took us awhile. Two thousand years is a long time. We weren’t sure if they would have died out or perhaps there would have been another war. It was the best of possibilities, though. They were alive, they were well.” He thought back to all those years ago and their arrival back to their own people. “They didn’t really know who we were at first and they thought the worst. I found out that they kept resurrection going for a few hundred years while they tried to repopulate, but had gone back to foregoing it again once they were sure their numbers were stable. All the people we knew when we left, they were dead. Everyone who knew our faces and knew what we left to do, they were gone. I’m not sure what would have happened to us, but it turned out that Jacob’s brother who had survived the attacks as well, hadn’t given up the idea that someday we would come back. He knew we had resurrection with us, so he held out hope, and it became this story that his family continued to pass on. They were the reasons we were even given time to share what we’d seen, where we’d come from.”
Kara listened and sat down on the small couch across the room, pushing aside the pillow and blankets her father had clearly used to sleep.
“They wanted us to give up resurrection and we agreed to do it, because it wasn’t something we ever intended to rely upon. Before we did though, Eugenia, Cleo and I did I guess what you’d call a hard reset. I don’t know what you know about the ways your cylons resurrect, but when they download it’s like a data dump into a new body they have waiting for them. You die, you download, you get a new body. It’s convenient when you only have a few ways for people to look and if you want to avoid healing from your injuries, but it wasn’t what my team used and it wasn’t what my people used when we mass resurrected. The other way is quick, you can go from death to life in a matter of minutes.” He kept his pace slow, watching her face to make sure she understood as he proceeded.
“Our way is slower. It will take the information it gets in a download and rebuild a person from that. Like a last save point when you’re working on a file. I don’t suppose you’ve done a lot of computer work since you left the Twelve Colonies, but, did you ever accidentally shut a word program off too early without saving? You think it’s gone, but when you open it next time, it tells you that it saved it and restores it for you. It isn’t a perfect analogy… but it’s as close as I can get. Our resurrection is like that. It takes your last created memories of the person that you were and works from there. You’re not a machine, you don’t have mechanical parts inside of you, it’s biological in ways I can’t even begin to explain. What it means is that you come back like you were before. For your cylons, I imagine that if they lost a hand, they’d kill themselves to download into a body without the injury. For us, you’re coming back without that hand unless you do a hard reset, which is like going back to an older file, an older memory, and building off of that. The three of us chose to do it to give us extra time, because I didn’t know when you’d be coming back, if you ever did.”
“Is that why you look so young?”
“I think I’m somewhere around my late thirties now, but I’m never really sure. Not old enough to be your father, but I am.” As he watched, he took in every detail about her. From the shape of her nose to how she liked to sit, the way she drummed her nails nervously. All the times he dreamed up how she’d be as an adult paled in comparison to the woman she’d actually turned into.
“I went back to Earth not long after that and started one of the old facilities up again, in fear that you’d need it some day. You could have died on Caprica for all I knew or you could have been living happily there with your family, I didn’t know. But I wasn’t taking a risk I didn’t have to. Eugenia and Cleo and I returned and we rewrote some of the program, so that it wouldn’t accept downloads from anyone else but you. What we did, it wasn’t exactly legal considering we’d just agreed to abandon resurrection completely, but we did it anyway. You said you died around that gas planet?”
Kara nodded solemnly. “The mandala just drew me in, there was something about it when I was near it. Lee said I kept talking about how I knew something was there and I had to go find out what it was.”
Dreilide sighed. “It’s my fault. Like I said, you’re half cylon. I didn’t know if resurrection would work on you but I was going to try anyway. When we left Earth all those years ago, we passed by that planet too, and that was the point at which I stopped feeling the pull from the resurrection sites on Earth before they’d shut them down. Kind of the point of no return if you didn’t have other means. For you, you felt that pull for the first time and it was too much for you to understand.”
The details of it all were slowly starting to make sense to her, though in some majorly frakked up kind of way. “When we were on Earth, I knew I’d been there before,” she started. “We found one of them. We went inside and…” Kara stopped, suddenly unsure of herself as her voice quaked. “There were two other bodies in there. Just like they were sitting and waiting for me to use them.”
He watched the horror spread across her face and stood, instinctively going to her. Dreilide sat beside her and stretched his hand across to touch her shoulder, though he pulled back at the last second, not quite sure if she was ready for a physical connection just yet. “I don’t know what happened without seeing the information for myself, but I know the computers will usually keep trying again until they get it correct. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes it does, and because you were something new, it probably had a hard time getting you right. God, Kara, I’m-” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t believe in the Gods?”
“We used to, but honestly, I don’t really believe in anything. The one thing we took away from the Colony was your cylons’ notion of one God.”
She didn’t know why, but that fact seemed to bother her the most. Maybe it was just another reason that pointed to a difference between her and her father. Another thing to keep them apart.
“I’ll have to go down to the surface and shut that computer off,” he thought aloud.
“I already did it,” she answered. “Lee and Leoben burned the other bodies for me.”
His head looked back to her immediately. “Leoben? Leoben’s here?”
“In the brig,” she said absentmindedly. Though she felt ingratiated to the cylon for what he’d done for her today, it didn’t wash away the other hurts she knew he was guilty of. “Thanks by the way, for creating a cylon so incredibly frakked up he makes me seem normal.”
The only information he’d received about his cylon model was that very photo of him they’d all seen in the conference room the night before. He knew that the Twos were out there, but to think that the first model still existed, and was on this very ship, was unreal. “What do you mean?”
Kara sighed and shook her head. “You don’t want the full story. Maybe you should talk to him yourself, ask him about all the things he’s done to me and to Lee.” Kara unzipped and pulled her sweatshirt off to bring her temperature down a few degrees, piling the fabric in her lap.
Dreilide took in her ominous words, though he was sure he didn’t want to know what other kind of pain he’d caused his daughter inadvertently through the creation of the Twos. He would find out though, one way or another, he owed it to her to at least understand what he’d done. “Tattoos?” He asked as he saw her bare arms, and never before had he sounded so much like a disapproving father.
She must have felt it too, because she actually laughed. Full bodied, shaking laughter. “I came all the way across the universe while being chased by psychotic cylons my abandoning father helped create and you’re going to lecture me about getting a few tattoos?”
He couldn’t help but laugh at the situation as well. “Sorry. Do they mean anything?”
Kara shrugged her shoulders in a manner that reminded her father very much of something she’d often done as a child. “This one’s a marriage tattoo,” she said, pointing out the largest one that was scrawled over her left upper arm.
“Did you make Captain Adama get one too?” He asked, taking in the shape of it. For some reason, he didn’t feel comfortable referring to the other man by his first name.
Her laughter returned, this time more restrained. “No. Lee’s not my husband. I’m divorced. Are you going to lecture me about living in sin now?”
He shared a smile with her, but shook his head. “Those who live in glass houses…” He started, though he didn’t finish. “Did he die on the Colonies? Your husband?”
The mood grew darker than it had a second before. Kara reached into her tanks and pulled out her singular dog tag and the ring that hung there. “I was engaged a long time ago, to a man named Zak. He died in an accident long before the end of the worlds.” Her thumb rubbed into the metal there to feel close to him, despite now knowing that this hadn’t actually been the ring that Zak wore around his finger. This had been crafted down in that bunker for her too. “He was Lee’s brother, actually. Then I married Sam over two years ago.”
“Sam…Anders?” He asked, trying to put the pieces together. His face wrinkled the more he thought it over. “There’s something kind of off about the idea that my friend married my daughter.”
Kara laughed to herself as she tucked the dog tag and ring back into her shirt, patting over the fabric to confirm it was there afterwards. “Now there’s Lee.” She wasn’t sure if she’d ever been so open and straightforward with someone in her life, not even with Apollo. There was something about Dreilide though, that made her so unconcerned about all the rest. “How did I get back to Galactica, if I was on Earth? I died, but when they found me, I was there and in my Viper even though Lee saw it explode. How could my ship be there and why can’t I remember any of it?”
“We knew that resurrection would be traumatic for anyone who went through it, so it’s built in that it will take awhile for actual, real consciousness to return. You’re sort of on autopilot at first. As for you getting there, I knew if you ever needed to resurrect, making you stuck on Earth wouldn’t exactly help. The computer uses your memories to try to find a way to return you to where you last were, or where you need to be. It doesn’t take liberties with people, but it does with other things if it must. I don’t know how far you went into the bunker, but it goes well beyond the resurrection room. It built your ship in one of the others, made the necessary changes according to what you remembered, what you needed, and the information I gave it last time I was there.”
“I didn’t just go back to the mandala though, and I was light years from Earth when they found me. I just… I don’t understand it.”
“Kara, listen, I know. It’s a lot to take in.” There was frustration in her, the same kind he’d seen in her at four years old when she couldn’t get things exactly right. “When I left Caprica, I took every byte of information I could with me to bring back. I knew we’d need proof when we returned and I knew that if I was going to turn that computer online again for you, I’d need new technology to help you, not the stuff we had back then. Sublight isn’t particularly useful when everyone has FTL now. I can take a look at your ship, I can go back down to Earth and turn the computer back on and tell you all the exact details about what happened when you were here, if that’s what you want. But, what I think happened is that the computer drew from your memory, calculated how far you needed to go and in what amount of time, and made the choices to solve it as efficiently as possible. Let me ask you this, where they found you, did you know they were headed there before you died?”
She pondered the question for a short time. She’d died at that gas planet, down in the mandala, but they had only stopped there for repairs and refueling while on their way to the next road sign towards what they hoped was Earth. The Ionian Nebula. That’s where they had been headed. “Yes.”
“So the computer took that, took all the possible locations of where you might be able to find the fleet, put them into the FTL for you and began cycling through them until it got you where you needed to go. There’s probably a huge chance it wouldn’t have worked or you would have missed them, but your onboard computer would have kept you going until either you ran out of fuel or you found them, either way.”
Kara wasn’t exactly sure if she was retaining any of the information she’d been patiently listening to as it came out of her father. It was overwhelming in every sense of the word, and yet she never wanted it to stop. She wanted to know everything about what had happened to her and everything about him. She wanted to let him know everything about her that he’d missed as well, to pick up where they left off all those years ago. Kara switched gears and this time she looked at him directly. “Did you ever even love me?”
His expression crumbled and this time, he didn’t care what she was or wasn’t ready for. He cupped her cheek with his large hand, happy she didn’t pull away. “Kara,” his head shook as he kept back his tears. “I loved you more than anything. You were the light of my life, of your mother’s.”
She pulled away once he mentioned Socrata. That, she didn’t think she’d ever believe. Kara stood up abruptly, letting her sweatshirt remain on the couch. Anger coursed through her as she paced, turning her head back to him sharply and accusingly. “You don’t know what happened after you left, so don’t tell me Mama ever actually loved me.”
He’d been expecting a lot of things, but never such hatred between his daughter and his wife. The warning Captain Adama had given him hours before rang in his ears. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Kara’s hands went to her hips as she turned away from him, trying to center herself against every ounce of rage that pooled inside of her. “All I ever heard from her was that I was a mistake, that I ruined her life. I was a disappointment no matter what I did. She spent her life making sure I’d never trust anyone ever again because she dared to trust you and you left her.”
The reality of what he’d done to his family hit him hard. He never thought that it would be easy on either of them, but he expected them to make it through it in the end, unscathed and having one another. His leaving had torn mother and daughter apart, for that he would always be guilty. “I’m sorry,” he offered lamely. No apology would ever fix it. He watched her back as her shoulders shook and he could sense that she was crying, or at least trying to fight it off.
“You left me with her,” she scathingly said. Kara spun around then, eyes red as she looked to him. “Do you want to hear about the things she did to me? Or do you just want me to shut up so you don’t have to acknowledge what you did? Do you want me to show you every scar she ever gave me, every place she left a bruise for more than a week?” Her voice raised and before she knew it, she was yelling at him.
Dreilide rose to approach her, hearing the door to the small bedroom open, Cleo appearing behind it. “Cleo, it’s okay, we’re just talking,” he tried to reassure her and with a glance look between father and daughter, the other woman shut them back to themselves. The thought of what his wife could have done to their child absolutely sickened them. He wanted to deny it, to claim that Kara was lying, that the woman he loved couldn’t be that horrible, but looking at his daughter’s face, he would never be able to pretend it wasn’t true. “I didn’t know. It’s not an excuse, but I didn’t. Your mother, Kara, she loved you. You were everything to her. I never would have thought she would-”
“Well she did!”
“I can’t excuse what your mother did, I’ll never understand why she did it. But she did love you, even if she hurt you. I’m not saying that makes it right or lessens the pain, or makes it okay. It doesn’t, nothing will ever make right the things she did.” He continued to approach her slowly, knowing both of them needed the closeness of another person. “But she did love you. Never think that your mother didn’t. She was frakked up, but she loved you, Kara.” If he succeeded in anything, he needed to at least make his daughter understand that her mother had felt deep affection towards her at some point in her life. “You can’t fake the way she loved you when you were small. She was never that happy as she was when you were born.”
Kara continued to shake her head, tears welling up even further the more she thought about what little she could remember about her mother from those earlier years. Even the later ones, the bad times almost always clouded over any of the other memories. Now that she thought about it, really thought about it, she could recall a few occasions when Socrata had laid down with her daughter at nine and ten years old, holding her through the night like she had before everything went so wrong. Even on one of her last visits to her mother before her death, Kara could remember seeing a few of her childhood paintings and toys in her mother’s apartment, clearly unable to put away what few mementos she had of her daughter. Maybe her mother hadn’t been a monster, just a confused and lost human being. One that didn’t know how to cope, one that had been hurt herself and only knew how to keep passing that hurt along.
Dreilide pulled her into his arms and held her, tears falling down his cheeks slowly at the first time he held his daughter since she was only seven years old. He kissed her hair, just like he’d done hundreds of times before, one palm rubbing over her back to soothe away the pain she was feeling inside of her. God, he couldn’t stand the thought that his absence had broken his wife, but even worse was the idea that it had broken his daughter too. He had wanted her to be happy, but now he knew most of her life hadn’t been spent that way. As a father, he’d been an absolute failure. “She loved you,” Dreilide reminded Kara. “And I love you.”
She didn’t bother to hold him back, instead let him do all the work as she soaked it in. Kara felt five years old again, recovering from some childish hurt in her father’s arms. If she focused enough, she could imagine it was her mother instead, Socrata’s voice soothing and calming as she took care of her daughter. Those were the years before the mistrust and the pain, when her mother could still do no wrong in her eyes. Her parents had been infallible back then and it had been heaven. “I love you,” Kara whispered back, to both her father and the memory of her mother that was in that room with them.
When they pulled back, they simply looked at each other, both Dreilide and Kara enjoying that they had the chance to be beside one another again just once more. He leaned in and kissed her forehead, echoing the way Lee had done to her in the middle of the night in the observation room. If she closed her eyes for longer than just a blink, she could see Lee and smell him on her clothes. For now, she felt completely safe.
“Your mother, she died when the cylons attacked, didn’t she?” Dreilide ventured to ask her. Part of him had been holding out hope that when Kara found Earth, Socrata would have been with her. Nothing would have been more perfect than that, but perfect rarely existed. Even to this moment, he silently prayed that his wife was somewhere else on the battlestar or one of the civilian ships. When he’d resurrected again all those years ago, this time forcing into a younger state, Dreilide almost didn’t go through with it in the hope that his wife would be with his daughter as well. He didn’t want to be decades younger than the woman he loved, knowing it would put a wedge between them. All he wanted to do was to enjoy the lines of her face while she enjoyed his.
Kara’s expression was regretful as she looked to her father, seeing the longing there that she was about to destroy for him. “She’s dead, but she died a few years before then. Lung cancer.”
He nodded though it killed him and he took a few necessary steps away from her to finally deal with the reality that he really would never see his wife again. For all the good he’d done for his own people, for all the tens, if not hundreds, of times he’d resurrected over the years to cheat his body’s natural aging, his wife was still dead. If only he hadn’t left, he thought, maybe he could have done something, anything, to keep her alive. Maybe he’d made the wrong decision all those years ago. He should have stayed with his wife and his daughter. What kind of woman would Kara be right now without the burdens of his abandonment and her mother’s treatment? Though he didn’t really think it was possible, right then, in that moment, he was sure he could have modified resurrection for a human being. For Socrata.
She watched her father be the broken one now and Kara approached, settling her own hand to his shoulder. “I was too mad at her to be with her when she died,” she admitted, ashamed of herself. “Do you think she’ll forgive me?”
Dreilide nodded as he looked back to her. “She already does. I’m sure of it.”
For the rest of the morning, Kara stayed at her father’s side.
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: 9,765
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?
After Kara’s eager departure, Lee had made an attempt to follow. She’d gotten a head start of only mere seconds, but with how little he knew she wanted to be found, she’d used it to put a mile between them. He was afraid for her, though he knew deep inside of himself that she wouldn’t try anything, at least not right now. In the future, when all the details were out in the open, maybe then Kara would make an attempt at removing herself permanently, but she wouldn’t dare now. Though they’d shut down the computer they found on Earth, by what had been revealed in that room it was unclear if there were other facilities operating on the planet, or perhaps elsewhere in space. Death might once again not be the end for her, and if she had to be somewhere, Lee knew she would choose to stay here, at least for the time being.
He took the moments alone to finally give himself a second to breathe and once he’d closed himself away in their billet, Lee let out everything he’d felt. Today, he had to be strong for her, despite how much it killed him to keep it together. She had needed him and he would have given her anything, Kara didn’t even need to ask. Alone though, finally, he could just exist as he needed. Lee sat down on the small couch in their quarters, back hunched forward with his elbows on his knees. He held his head in his hands as his exhausted body gave in to finally feeling every ache. The pain in his shoulders and arms, he knew that was from carrying Kara’s body, or one of them. When he closed his eyes, all he saw was the way her body looked, limp and without life. It was hard for him to differentiate between them and the woman he knew, even hours later. It had looked so real, in fact it had been real. Had the resurrection gone through the first or second time instead, it would have been one of those bodies he made love to every night.
Tears came but he didn’t audibly cry, feeling much too worn for even that display. Some part of him knew he should be repulsed by all of it, or at least he thought he should be. Most others would have been sickened by the idea that the person they loved was a machine, at least everyone other than Karl Agathon. He’d seen the way the marriage between Galen and Cally had fallen apart ever since everything had been revealed. Cally couldn’t find it in herself to come to terms with who and what he was, at least not yet. Despite knowing he should be averse to Kara, he couldn’t. What did that make him? Was he just pushed too far and clinging to something he shouldn’t? Was he just afraid to let go and be alone all over again?
His head shook in his hands, a muffled cry let out into the recycled air of the room. No, even when he thought like that, he felt a stab of pain inside of him. She wasn’t just a cylon. She even had a human mother, or at least that was what he’d gleaned from the conversation earlier. She was both of them, a person to bridge the gap between man and machine, the first example to everyone that there needn’t be hatred between both sides. He loved her more than anything, that much he knew, and the feeling that washed over him when he thought of her was like nothing he’d ever felt before in his life. Kara Thrace had crawled inside of him years ago and made her home there. She would always be a part of him.
Lee wiped away the tears from his face, rubbing his hands along the thighs of his pants to remove the moisture entirely. Everywhere he looked around the room, there she was. Her bag she’d been packing before the alert had gone off was still on the floor, despite the fact that they’d come back earlier to put their uniforms on before the meeting. The clothing items she’d removed were sprawled across the bed, messy and tangled, and it reminded him of their usual mornings together. Kara would be there causing chaos and he’d be picking up after her as she teased him, though he never minded the job he’d earned for himself. No, he’d loved it in fact, even if she called him crazy for it. If he stepped into the bathroom, Lee knew he’d see her there as well. Her hairbrush, with strands of long hair wound up in the bristles, would be on the sink counter where she usually left it. Her toothbrush was nestled up against his, much like they slept beside one another in bed.
He couldn’t imagine life without her, he was certain. He couldn’t and didn’t want to. How many times had he promised her and reassured her that he would stand at her side no matter what happened? Lee had whispered words of his unconditional affection to her on more than a few occasions and while Kara had doubted him at the beginning, he knew that now when she looked into his eyes as he said it, she did believe him. Until the end, it would be Starbuck and Apollo, whenever that end came for either or both of them. He was in love with her and it didn’t matter what they’d seen or heard today, because it didn’t change who she was or the woman he’d met with flowers in his hand at her apartment door all those years ago. He thought of Zak, and though his brother hadn’t lived through the horrors of the last few years, he imagined what his little brother’s more carefree nature would have done upon learning the truth. Lee liked to think Zak wouldn’t care either, he would be by her side to the end, holding strong and true to the commitment he made to her when he gave Kara his ring.
Lee rose from where he sat, nose sniffling though most of his tears had stopped. He went for the bag she’d abandoned in the room and began to take each item out, folding them and replacing them in the drawers and closet space that were Kara’s own. The duffel was tucked away and then he began on the clothes on the bed and floor. What was clean was replaced where it belonged and what wasn’t was set aside to be washed along with his things as well. That was a sight he did love, returning to their billet to find their laundry dropped off by the crew members in charge of that ship function, her items of clothing mixed in with his. He drew her sweatshirt off the back of one of the small chairs and pulled it to his nose, breathing in the clean scent of her skin from it before he hung it back up with reluctance. He held the door of the closet open, looking in at their things hanging together, side by side. His flight suit and her slightly smaller one. His dress greys and hers as well, though hers cut a little different to accommodate for her shape. At the floor of the closet was a spare set of boots she owned and Lee admired the shine to them. She kept polishing them and he wondered if he was still what she thought of every single time.
With the one-roomed quarters neat and tidy, Lee found himself not wanting to sleep. He’d given Kara space, time for her to think on her own, something he knew she needed, even he had to admit he was crowding her as of late. He hadn’t slept on his own since the night before she’d returned from the dead and he couldn’t start now, afraid what it would once again mean to not have her at his side. He straightened his uniform, the impeccable state of it bringing him stability and comfort, before he left the room finally, going in search of the woman who’d run out on all of them nearly two hours before. Lee would start at all the usual places first, the ready room and CAG’s office, though it was no longer hers.
There was no sign of her anywhere, and Helo and Athena had been hesitant to let Lee go without an explanation from him. The gym had been dark and empty, showing no sign of anyone inhabiting the place anytime in the recent hours. It was on his way to check Joe’s Bar that he passed a pair of marines leading Dreilide Thrace from the head and back to the quarters he knew his father had put them in. The other man, who looked only a few years older than he, traded a glance with Lee, and it was in that instant that he knew he’d been caught.
“I didn’t get your name back at the…” Dreilide’s voice trailed off, unsure of what exactly to call the night’s earlier event. A meeting? Talk?
Lee didn’t want to stay to speak to him, despite how curious he was. His loyalties were to Kara and not this man, even if he did claim to be her father. Looking across to him, however, Lee couldn’t help but notice some of the striking similarities between father and daughter. He never thought he would have a chance to meet anyone from Kara’s past, as she was most certainly on her own like most people suddenly found themselves after the Fall. but here the man was and he was talking directly to him. “Captain Lee,” he paused, realizing he would have to give away his last name. That had been something he hated to admit to in the past, but he’d grown used to everyone here knowing his face, name, and parentage. “Adama.”
“The Admiral, he’s your father?”
He nodded. “Kara hasn’t been to see you, has she?” It was a shot in the dark, but perhaps after she had calmed down, she would have gone to the man for answers.
Dreilide’s face fell in sudden concern. He didn’t know anything about his daughter or who she was, but from the expression she’d worn in that room and the tone of voice she’d used, he knew she was walking on shaky ground. “No, is she all right?”
“She just needed some time to think,” Lee quickly answered, not wanting to betray Kara to her own father. That would be something she wouldn’t easily forgive him for.
“I don’t know you, and I don’t know her,” Dreilide confessed to Lee. “But I’d be blind not to see there’s something going on between you two.”
Lee’s body warmed at the thought, feeling like a teenager again after meeting his high school girlfriend’s parents for the first time. It was hard for him to look at the man and realize his age, the fact that he could be someone’s father, especially father to a woman approaching thirty years old. The parental concern was something else difficult to accept and cope with, but he did his best to try to understand where the man was coming from. He didn’t respond, though, unsure of what it was he could say or what Dreilide wanted to hear.
“Just…” he sighed and looked back to Lee. “Make sure she’s okay. If she doesn’t ever want to speak to me, I’ll understand it.”
Apollo watched the older man talk, seeing him in a new light than he had in that conference room. Gone was the man who appeared to be wise and full of knowledge and perhaps threatening towards the end when accused of abandoning the Colonials. Now before him, he was like anyone else, weighed down with concern for his child, albeit one he hardly ever knew. “You’re right, you don’t know her, because she’d kill me if she found out I was even talking to you like this without her. Kara likes to think she can take care of herself, but she shouldn’t have to.”
Dreilide nodded, a small smile over his lips. Any bit of information about the person his daughter turned out to be was welcomed. “You say that, and it sounds like she turned out exactly like Socrata.”
Lee shook his head as he stepped back, looking to leave and continue his search. “If I were you, I wouldn’t say anything like that to her. You don’t know what happened between her and her mother.”
“What?” He asked, shock and fear written across his face.
“It’s not my place,” Apollo continued from a few feet away. “If Kara ever wants to talk to you, she’ll come to you herself. Otherwise, leave her alone.” With that, Lee abandoned the man and his guards. He’d only ever met the fathers of a few girls he dated, but he’d never practically threatened one before now. For him, Kara was all about firsts.
-
It took another hour for Lee to finally track Kara down. He was beginning to think maybe he had been wrong about her being safe on her own when he’d heard chatter from passing crewmen awake for the night shift that they’d seen a woman asleep in the observation room. It could have been anyone else, but Lee innately knew that when he got there, he would find Kara Thrace.
The hatch closed behind him and Lee saw her straight away, body stretched out on her left side in front of the floor to ceiling windows. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake, but he kept his approach quiet, eventually coming to kneel behind her. For a second, panic spread through him, imagining her just as lifeless as the copies of her had been, but he caught the slight expansion and contraction of her chest. He didn’t know if she’d come here straight away or if she’d merely ended up here at the end of the night. Either way, she’d succumbed to sleep there and he’d be damned if he disturbed her from it. Lee thought of picking her up and carrying her back to their billet, but he knew she’d wake long before he laid her down in their bed. Instead, Lee began to unbutton the top of his uniform, pulling his arms from the sleeves. When it was off, he bunched it up, gently lifting her head to push the fabric beneath it as a makeshift pillow. Kara stirred just barely, but didn’t rise, so Lee laid down behind her, spooned against her with his arm slung over her midsection to keep her close to him.
His head rested on his other arm as he looked out at the beautiful planet before them. It had been only twenty four hours ago that they were in their bunk asleep, sated and exhausted, dreaming of their future together. Kara wasn’t child to a human mother and a cylon father, and Earth was still the dream they’d hoped for. Now they knew the truth of it all and just how deceptive the blue planet looked. There was still hope, a small lingering amount, in the ship that had appeared earlier in the evening. There were twenty other people on board the Meridian that they had yet to meet, that presumably had come from somewhere. There would be much work to do in convincing the civilian fleet that settling down with the Thirteenth Tribe was the right decision, but Lee knew it was the only choice. They couldn’t even hope to deceive the civilians and not reveal the true heritage of the others, as it would undoubtedly come out eventually. Honesty was about to become their only policy.
Beneath his arm, Kara yawned loudly as she slipped from sleep. Her eyes opened, blinking slowly as she got her bearings on where she was. The observation room, that was right. The details of the day came back to her slowly, just as she realized she was no longer alone and felt the comfort of someone’s warm body at her back. There could be only one person, but Kara didn’t want to turn around to confirm or deny it. So long as she didn’t look at his face, she wouldn’t have to face the judgment she feared would be there. Instead, her arm raised and ran along his own, fingers curling over into his own until they formed a fist together. She pulled their arms tighter around her, drawing their hands to her mouth until she kissed at each folded finger of his, much as he’d done forever ago in her office.
Lee leaned in to touch his lips to her neck in unison with her own kisses, letting her know that he was awake with her. He hadn’t yet fallen asleep.
“Why are you here?”
“Where else would I be?” Lee answered.
His dedication to her nearly made her break. She felt guilty, like she’d brainwashed him into being beside her, or at least making him feel bad enough that he thought he owed it to her to remain. “Apollo…”
“That’s not my name.” She had a tendency to use his call sign when trying to distance herself from him. Kara used it when she was angry with him or trying to push him away, and while he’d allowed her the idiosyncrasy beforehand, now he knew it was important to correct her on it.
“What?”
“I’m Lee. If you’re going to try to get rid of me, at least use my name, Kara.”
She quieted down, her hand releasing his as she pulled her arm back into herself in a way to further cut herself off. Kara didn’t like being called out for her flaws and tricks. “You should be with your father and Roslin, trying to figure out what you’re all going to do come tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t you be there too?”
“Why would I be?” Kara replied. “I’m not one of you, I don’t have a say in what happens to the human race anymore.”
“Look at me,” he said, though didn’t use the tone in which he reserved for ordering those of lower rank around with. He moved just enough to force her to roll onto her back while he remained on his side and looking down to her. He expected her eyes to avoid his, but she met them immediately, and he could tell she was doing so out of defiance. “Don’t cheapen and insult what I feel for you by telling me you aren’t a person.”
From below, she blinked and watched him.
“If it turned out my mother was one of those women, would you turn away from me?”
She didn’t answer.
“What if we looked back far enough into Kobol and found out that everyone there had started as a tribe of cylons leaving another planet and looking for a home. Could you go on to one of the civilian ships and tell the families there that they weren’t real? Could you go to Cally Tyrol and tell her that her son isn’t worth loving?” A light sheen of tears covered his eyes as he spoke, though he kept himself in perfect control. “Knowing Sam’s a cylon, does that mean your marriage meant nothing? Do you believe that Karl looks at Hera and thinks she shouldn’t be alive?”
Kara didn’t have an answer for him, though her resolve was weakening as she listened to him speak with so much conviction. No, she couldn’t tell Cally that her son wasn’t a person because his father was a cylon. She couldn’t say that Hera wasn’t the most wonderful little girl she’d ever met simply because of who her mother was. Even Athena, Kara no longer saw as deficient. She was just right the way she was. And Sam, though their marriage had fallen apart and even started for the wrong reasons, the truth about him didn’t change how she saw him in her eyes.
“Then how can you think that I see you any differently? How can you think that my father would stop thinking of you as his daughter? Kara, we love you.” He reached his hand out to cup her cheek, then ran his fingers through her hair as he looked to her. “Do you think Karl wouldn’t die to protect his wife? I’d sacrifice myself before I let something happen to you again.”
She bit at the inside of her cheek, trying to rein herself in. She wanted to remain in that moment forever, with Lee’s hand so close to her, able to breathe him in. There was no logic to her thoughts though, because as much as she believed there was nothing wrong with all those people he’d listed, she felt as though it didn’t apply to her. She was the exception to the rule. Kara pushed herself from the floor roughly, suddenly needing to get away from him. He stopped her though, taking a hold of her wrist as he sat up and looked upwards to her, just as she had to him a second before.
“Well I’m not your wife, so you don’t have to.”
“Do you want to be?” He asked, almost not believing the words that he said. His mouth had acted a mile ahead of his head and before he had time to think better of it.
Her heart jumped at the thought. Though they’d talked about their future together, especially in relation to Earth, neither had explicitly mentioned marriage. There was talk of children, talk of houses and lives together, but never the vows. Until that moment, Kara never realized just how much she wanted it with him, not that she would admit it aloud. “Just don’t, Lee.”
Lee had thought about it on occasion, but asking Starbuck to get married was like jumping into a pen with a hungry lion. She’d probably have torn him apart for the suggestion, even when they were at their best. The marriage to Sam, he considered an anomaly because she’d been the one to suggest it, and she hadn’t exactly gone into it with pure intentions. It had been another wall between them. A layer of protection she needed to function at the time. This wasn’t how he planned to ask either, if he ever did. They were upset and both bordering on mental break downs, definitely not the clearest of heads for such thinking, but he didn’t regret his words just the same. It wasn’t a proposal, but it was the planting of an idea. “Because I’d want to be your husband.”
“I said don’t.”
“What I’m trying to say is, we may not be, but it doesn’t matter. I think of you that way already.”
Kara tugged her wrist away from him and made to leave again, but this time Lee got up and followed, stepping in front of her in an attempt to slow her down.
“Just leave me alone.” Her hands pushed into his chest, aggression flowing out of her and into him.
“If you need to hit me and push me, then frakking do it.” He could think back to a hundred times before that this had happened and unfortunately, a few times when he’d lost his temper and struck her back. That wouldn’t be happening tonight or ever again, that much he knew.
“I don’t need you, Apollo, and I don’t need your shit.” She said through gritted teeth.
“Say my name, say ‘I don’t need you, Lee.’”
“I don’t.”
His blue eyes locked on her own golden green. He dared to defy her. “I don’t believe you.”
Kara shoved both her hands at his chest again and he stumbled back, but regained his footing. When he stood up straight, she closed the gap of space between them, her fists gripping into his tanks to pull him close while she forced her mouth against his in a crude apology. It was aggressive and invasive, rushed and rough, but Lee’s hands came back around her, drawing her in for as long as she would let him. She was trying to lose herself in him, to derive purpose and meaning out of who he was and what the two of them had been. Just as quickly as she’d joined them together, she pulled apart with something of a cry, the back of her hand drawn to her mouth as she looked up to him.
“I don’t want to be me anymore, I don’t even know who I am.” She was cracking as both halves of her met, Starbuck the impenetrable fortress who had always been sure of herself, and Kara, the little girl that had existed before her father left and all the moments in between her mother’s less pleasant days.
“Yes you do.” He felt vacant with her sudden absence again, so he moved in as he nodded, pressing a kiss between her brows when he reached her. This one was unlike the ones before, careful and reassuring. “Everything you thought about yourself this morning, you still are.” His hands sought out both of hers and Kara didn’t fight with him on it this time, instead letting her palms meet his and their fingers fold up tight into one another’s. Lee rested his forehead against her own and he shut his eyes, allowing himself to just be. “We made plans when we got up today, I want to get up tomorrow and know we’re still going to follow them through.”
“This is all too frakked up, Lee, even for me.” She sighed. When it came to him these days, she lost most of the fight she used to have.
He quietly laughed, eyes still closed shut as they stood impossibly close, bodies touching at a few key points. “Never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“Shut up.”
Though he couldn’t see it, he knew she was smiling, even if it was subdued and muted. It was there, to whatever degree. Lee felt one of her hands release his, but a moment later her warm palm traced along his jaw. It made him breathe easy. “I meant what I asked earlier,” he braved it.
“I know,” and she knew exactly to what he referred, despite how much she couldn’t understand it. She lifted her forehead from his, only to then rest her ear to his upper chest. “Lee,” she whispered barely loud enough for him to hear as she watched her palm come to rest over his heart. “Can I come home?”
“You already are.”
-
Hours later, Kara climbed out of the bed she and Lee shared. In silence, she dressed, cursing Lee in the confines of her head for being so anal retentive that he had found time to put away her things in the middle of the day and night they’d previously had. She pulled on a pair of fatigue pants and her boots, but when she went to find her sweatshirt where she’d left it, it was no longer there. Kara stared across at the closet door, the one that had a habit of creaking at the most inopportune moments, but finally decided the risk was worth it. She pulled it open slowly, and though the quietest of sounds emerged from the hinge, Lee didn’t stir. She zipped her sweatshirt up most of the way and made to move to the hatch, spinning the handle open as quietly as she could.
“Kara?” Lee called out.
Caught. She froze and sighed. “What, Lee?”
“Where are you going? It’s early, yet.” He said with a glance to the clock they kept nearby their bed. It in fact wasn’t that early, when either of them were CAG and the other just a pilot, they were often up earlier than this to prepare for the morning brief or perhaps even on shift. They’d gotten soft, something of which they both teased the other about. Soft and very old.
“I need to go see my father.”
He expected it sooner or later, though he was surprised with just how soon it was. It was a toss up really, either Kara avoided things until she couldn’t anymore or she tended to tackle them head on from the start. “Do you want me to come with you?” He knew it wasn’t really his place, but he didn’t want her to have to be alone if she didn’t want to. Kara still couldn’t ask him for things like that, so he usually offered.
“No,” she said. “I need to talk to him on my own first.” It was true. She would tell Lee all the details of it later, but right now, she needed to just be alone with her father. Kara needed answers, to some of the more straightforward questions and to some of the ones that had been inside of her for the last twenty plus years. As much as she shared with Lee, she didn’t know if she could ask those types of things with him sitting beside her.
Lee shut his eyes and rolled over into the mattress. There had been a time when the beds on Galactica felt like absolute torture, but now this particular bed was the sweetest surface he’d ever laid upon. “I’ll see you later then. Lunch?”
“Lunch.” Kara left their quarters to head towards where their guests were being kept. Room was still tight on Galactica, so even finding a space to put them would have been difficult, but she knew the Admiral would have found space just the same. The marine guards outside the door were a dead giveaway when she found the hallway and she nodded her head to the one that was most familiar, the man moving to let her through. She knocked, hoping not to catch anyone in a state of undress, and soon she heard someone on the other side begin to open and release the hatch. When it opened, Dreilide was there, looking mussed from sleep, but awake just the same. Any fatigue that had been in him before fluttered away at the sight of who it was, and without a word, he stepped aside to let her in.
“Where are the others?” She asked, keeping her distance and trying not to look at him as she paced the room.
He raised his hand in a motion to the other doorway. “Bedroom. I took the couch,” he explained plainly. This was a moment he’d been waiting years for, and though he’d crossed the universe slowly for two thousand years, time had never moved at more of a standstill pace than the last two decades did. They both walked the length of the room idly, like two tigers circling one another, waiting for the other to make the first move. Dreilide had the vague suspicion that like her mother, Kara would never be the one to jump first. “You must have… a lot of questions.” The understatement of the century.
“I died,” Kara started, not looking to him. “A couple months ago, I went down into this gas planet we were orbiting around. It looked just like that thing I used to draw for you when I was a kid. I died, but I’m still here. Why?”
Dreilide listened carefully to what information she offered and what she was specifically asking from him, wanting to be sure of his words before he answered. “When you were little, you drew that for me one day. I thought maybe it was just a coincidence, but there was something about it to you. For my people-”
“Cylons, just say it.”
“If that’s what you want to call us, then fine, for cylons, at least the ones I’m part of, everything’s sort of connected. It’s not anything you’re ever really aware of and it can be the smallest, simplest little thing. Knowing something maybe you shouldn’t, but never being quite sure what it is. For children and parents, its a little tighter, but not by much. When your mother and I had you, I never thought that would be something that continued on, but it did, in whatever small degree. You got that image from me, because it was something I’d seen and knew to be important.”
Kara’s movements stopped as she tried to absorb the details that made her just who she really was. “Is that why I’m good at somethings? I’ve been a Viper pilot for the last ten years, is that why I’m so good at it? Because I’m not part human?” She was afraid of the answer.
“No. What?” He almost laughed at her words, but wisely held back. “If you’re good at something, Kara, then you just are. I don’t know what you’ve seen of the first generation of cylons made at the Colony, I don’t know what the other five implemented into them towards the end or what they did to themselves. I imagine though, that they’ve started to program skill sets into them to cheat time and energy. You, Kara, you were never,” he shook his head, sullen at the thought that she could think this about herself, “programmed. I wasn’t programmed. Believe me, if I had been, I would have been a lot better at piano than I was.” With that, he did laugh at himself.
She smiled slightly, unconsciously, as he joked about what used to make his living back on Caprica. The idea that she didn’t have an advantage over others in that regard calmed her some. Her life’s pride had been that she’d been such a natural in the cockpit, and if she were to learn that it had all been planted into her, it would have come close to killing her.
“There are a lot of questions that I can’t answer for you, only because I just don’t know. I heard before that your Eight has a half human child now too, and Galen has a half human son. There’s only three of you and you’re the first, everything about you is unique.”
“You never answered how I’m alive.”
He sat down at one of the chairs at the small table in the room, trying to focus his thoughts. “When we got back to Earth, we had to find where our people went. We had a hunch, but it took us awhile. Two thousand years is a long time. We weren’t sure if they would have died out or perhaps there would have been another war. It was the best of possibilities, though. They were alive, they were well.” He thought back to all those years ago and their arrival back to their own people. “They didn’t really know who we were at first and they thought the worst. I found out that they kept resurrection going for a few hundred years while they tried to repopulate, but had gone back to foregoing it again once they were sure their numbers were stable. All the people we knew when we left, they were dead. Everyone who knew our faces and knew what we left to do, they were gone. I’m not sure what would have happened to us, but it turned out that Jacob’s brother who had survived the attacks as well, hadn’t given up the idea that someday we would come back. He knew we had resurrection with us, so he held out hope, and it became this story that his family continued to pass on. They were the reasons we were even given time to share what we’d seen, where we’d come from.”
Kara listened and sat down on the small couch across the room, pushing aside the pillow and blankets her father had clearly used to sleep.
“They wanted us to give up resurrection and we agreed to do it, because it wasn’t something we ever intended to rely upon. Before we did though, Eugenia, Cleo and I did I guess what you’d call a hard reset. I don’t know what you know about the ways your cylons resurrect, but when they download it’s like a data dump into a new body they have waiting for them. You die, you download, you get a new body. It’s convenient when you only have a few ways for people to look and if you want to avoid healing from your injuries, but it wasn’t what my team used and it wasn’t what my people used when we mass resurrected. The other way is quick, you can go from death to life in a matter of minutes.” He kept his pace slow, watching her face to make sure she understood as he proceeded.
“Our way is slower. It will take the information it gets in a download and rebuild a person from that. Like a last save point when you’re working on a file. I don’t suppose you’ve done a lot of computer work since you left the Twelve Colonies, but, did you ever accidentally shut a word program off too early without saving? You think it’s gone, but when you open it next time, it tells you that it saved it and restores it for you. It isn’t a perfect analogy… but it’s as close as I can get. Our resurrection is like that. It takes your last created memories of the person that you were and works from there. You’re not a machine, you don’t have mechanical parts inside of you, it’s biological in ways I can’t even begin to explain. What it means is that you come back like you were before. For your cylons, I imagine that if they lost a hand, they’d kill themselves to download into a body without the injury. For us, you’re coming back without that hand unless you do a hard reset, which is like going back to an older file, an older memory, and building off of that. The three of us chose to do it to give us extra time, because I didn’t know when you’d be coming back, if you ever did.”
“Is that why you look so young?”
“I think I’m somewhere around my late thirties now, but I’m never really sure. Not old enough to be your father, but I am.” As he watched, he took in every detail about her. From the shape of her nose to how she liked to sit, the way she drummed her nails nervously. All the times he dreamed up how she’d be as an adult paled in comparison to the woman she’d actually turned into.
“I went back to Earth not long after that and started one of the old facilities up again, in fear that you’d need it some day. You could have died on Caprica for all I knew or you could have been living happily there with your family, I didn’t know. But I wasn’t taking a risk I didn’t have to. Eugenia and Cleo and I returned and we rewrote some of the program, so that it wouldn’t accept downloads from anyone else but you. What we did, it wasn’t exactly legal considering we’d just agreed to abandon resurrection completely, but we did it anyway. You said you died around that gas planet?”
Kara nodded solemnly. “The mandala just drew me in, there was something about it when I was near it. Lee said I kept talking about how I knew something was there and I had to go find out what it was.”
Dreilide sighed. “It’s my fault. Like I said, you’re half cylon. I didn’t know if resurrection would work on you but I was going to try anyway. When we left Earth all those years ago, we passed by that planet too, and that was the point at which I stopped feeling the pull from the resurrection sites on Earth before they’d shut them down. Kind of the point of no return if you didn’t have other means. For you, you felt that pull for the first time and it was too much for you to understand.”
The details of it all were slowly starting to make sense to her, though in some majorly frakked up kind of way. “When we were on Earth, I knew I’d been there before,” she started. “We found one of them. We went inside and…” Kara stopped, suddenly unsure of herself as her voice quaked. “There were two other bodies in there. Just like they were sitting and waiting for me to use them.”
He watched the horror spread across her face and stood, instinctively going to her. Dreilide sat beside her and stretched his hand across to touch her shoulder, though he pulled back at the last second, not quite sure if she was ready for a physical connection just yet. “I don’t know what happened without seeing the information for myself, but I know the computers will usually keep trying again until they get it correct. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes it does, and because you were something new, it probably had a hard time getting you right. God, Kara, I’m-” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t believe in the Gods?”
“We used to, but honestly, I don’t really believe in anything. The one thing we took away from the Colony was your cylons’ notion of one God.”
She didn’t know why, but that fact seemed to bother her the most. Maybe it was just another reason that pointed to a difference between her and her father. Another thing to keep them apart.
“I’ll have to go down to the surface and shut that computer off,” he thought aloud.
“I already did it,” she answered. “Lee and Leoben burned the other bodies for me.”
His head looked back to her immediately. “Leoben? Leoben’s here?”
“In the brig,” she said absentmindedly. Though she felt ingratiated to the cylon for what he’d done for her today, it didn’t wash away the other hurts she knew he was guilty of. “Thanks by the way, for creating a cylon so incredibly frakked up he makes me seem normal.”
The only information he’d received about his cylon model was that very photo of him they’d all seen in the conference room the night before. He knew that the Twos were out there, but to think that the first model still existed, and was on this very ship, was unreal. “What do you mean?”
Kara sighed and shook her head. “You don’t want the full story. Maybe you should talk to him yourself, ask him about all the things he’s done to me and to Lee.” Kara unzipped and pulled her sweatshirt off to bring her temperature down a few degrees, piling the fabric in her lap.
Dreilide took in her ominous words, though he was sure he didn’t want to know what other kind of pain he’d caused his daughter inadvertently through the creation of the Twos. He would find out though, one way or another, he owed it to her to at least understand what he’d done. “Tattoos?” He asked as he saw her bare arms, and never before had he sounded so much like a disapproving father.
She must have felt it too, because she actually laughed. Full bodied, shaking laughter. “I came all the way across the universe while being chased by psychotic cylons my abandoning father helped create and you’re going to lecture me about getting a few tattoos?”
He couldn’t help but laugh at the situation as well. “Sorry. Do they mean anything?”
Kara shrugged her shoulders in a manner that reminded her father very much of something she’d often done as a child. “This one’s a marriage tattoo,” she said, pointing out the largest one that was scrawled over her left upper arm.
“Did you make Captain Adama get one too?” He asked, taking in the shape of it. For some reason, he didn’t feel comfortable referring to the other man by his first name.
Her laughter returned, this time more restrained. “No. Lee’s not my husband. I’m divorced. Are you going to lecture me about living in sin now?”
He shared a smile with her, but shook his head. “Those who live in glass houses…” He started, though he didn’t finish. “Did he die on the Colonies? Your husband?”
The mood grew darker than it had a second before. Kara reached into her tanks and pulled out her singular dog tag and the ring that hung there. “I was engaged a long time ago, to a man named Zak. He died in an accident long before the end of the worlds.” Her thumb rubbed into the metal there to feel close to him, despite now knowing that this hadn’t actually been the ring that Zak wore around his finger. This had been crafted down in that bunker for her too. “He was Lee’s brother, actually. Then I married Sam over two years ago.”
“Sam…Anders?” He asked, trying to put the pieces together. His face wrinkled the more he thought it over. “There’s something kind of off about the idea that my friend married my daughter.”
Kara laughed to herself as she tucked the dog tag and ring back into her shirt, patting over the fabric to confirm it was there afterwards. “Now there’s Lee.” She wasn’t sure if she’d ever been so open and straightforward with someone in her life, not even with Apollo. There was something about Dreilide though, that made her so unconcerned about all the rest. “How did I get back to Galactica, if I was on Earth? I died, but when they found me, I was there and in my Viper even though Lee saw it explode. How could my ship be there and why can’t I remember any of it?”
“We knew that resurrection would be traumatic for anyone who went through it, so it’s built in that it will take awhile for actual, real consciousness to return. You’re sort of on autopilot at first. As for you getting there, I knew if you ever needed to resurrect, making you stuck on Earth wouldn’t exactly help. The computer uses your memories to try to find a way to return you to where you last were, or where you need to be. It doesn’t take liberties with people, but it does with other things if it must. I don’t know how far you went into the bunker, but it goes well beyond the resurrection room. It built your ship in one of the others, made the necessary changes according to what you remembered, what you needed, and the information I gave it last time I was there.”
“I didn’t just go back to the mandala though, and I was light years from Earth when they found me. I just… I don’t understand it.”
“Kara, listen, I know. It’s a lot to take in.” There was frustration in her, the same kind he’d seen in her at four years old when she couldn’t get things exactly right. “When I left Caprica, I took every byte of information I could with me to bring back. I knew we’d need proof when we returned and I knew that if I was going to turn that computer online again for you, I’d need new technology to help you, not the stuff we had back then. Sublight isn’t particularly useful when everyone has FTL now. I can take a look at your ship, I can go back down to Earth and turn the computer back on and tell you all the exact details about what happened when you were here, if that’s what you want. But, what I think happened is that the computer drew from your memory, calculated how far you needed to go and in what amount of time, and made the choices to solve it as efficiently as possible. Let me ask you this, where they found you, did you know they were headed there before you died?”
She pondered the question for a short time. She’d died at that gas planet, down in the mandala, but they had only stopped there for repairs and refueling while on their way to the next road sign towards what they hoped was Earth. The Ionian Nebula. That’s where they had been headed. “Yes.”
“So the computer took that, took all the possible locations of where you might be able to find the fleet, put them into the FTL for you and began cycling through them until it got you where you needed to go. There’s probably a huge chance it wouldn’t have worked or you would have missed them, but your onboard computer would have kept you going until either you ran out of fuel or you found them, either way.”
Kara wasn’t exactly sure if she was retaining any of the information she’d been patiently listening to as it came out of her father. It was overwhelming in every sense of the word, and yet she never wanted it to stop. She wanted to know everything about what had happened to her and everything about him. She wanted to let him know everything about her that he’d missed as well, to pick up where they left off all those years ago. Kara switched gears and this time she looked at him directly. “Did you ever even love me?”
His expression crumbled and this time, he didn’t care what she was or wasn’t ready for. He cupped her cheek with his large hand, happy she didn’t pull away. “Kara,” his head shook as he kept back his tears. “I loved you more than anything. You were the light of my life, of your mother’s.”
She pulled away once he mentioned Socrata. That, she didn’t think she’d ever believe. Kara stood up abruptly, letting her sweatshirt remain on the couch. Anger coursed through her as she paced, turning her head back to him sharply and accusingly. “You don’t know what happened after you left, so don’t tell me Mama ever actually loved me.”
He’d been expecting a lot of things, but never such hatred between his daughter and his wife. The warning Captain Adama had given him hours before rang in his ears. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Kara’s hands went to her hips as she turned away from him, trying to center herself against every ounce of rage that pooled inside of her. “All I ever heard from her was that I was a mistake, that I ruined her life. I was a disappointment no matter what I did. She spent her life making sure I’d never trust anyone ever again because she dared to trust you and you left her.”
The reality of what he’d done to his family hit him hard. He never thought that it would be easy on either of them, but he expected them to make it through it in the end, unscathed and having one another. His leaving had torn mother and daughter apart, for that he would always be guilty. “I’m sorry,” he offered lamely. No apology would ever fix it. He watched her back as her shoulders shook and he could sense that she was crying, or at least trying to fight it off.
“You left me with her,” she scathingly said. Kara spun around then, eyes red as she looked to him. “Do you want to hear about the things she did to me? Or do you just want me to shut up so you don’t have to acknowledge what you did? Do you want me to show you every scar she ever gave me, every place she left a bruise for more than a week?” Her voice raised and before she knew it, she was yelling at him.
Dreilide rose to approach her, hearing the door to the small bedroom open, Cleo appearing behind it. “Cleo, it’s okay, we’re just talking,” he tried to reassure her and with a glance look between father and daughter, the other woman shut them back to themselves. The thought of what his wife could have done to their child absolutely sickened them. He wanted to deny it, to claim that Kara was lying, that the woman he loved couldn’t be that horrible, but looking at his daughter’s face, he would never be able to pretend it wasn’t true. “I didn’t know. It’s not an excuse, but I didn’t. Your mother, Kara, she loved you. You were everything to her. I never would have thought she would-”
“Well she did!”
“I can’t excuse what your mother did, I’ll never understand why she did it. But she did love you, even if she hurt you. I’m not saying that makes it right or lessens the pain, or makes it okay. It doesn’t, nothing will ever make right the things she did.” He continued to approach her slowly, knowing both of them needed the closeness of another person. “But she did love you. Never think that your mother didn’t. She was frakked up, but she loved you, Kara.” If he succeeded in anything, he needed to at least make his daughter understand that her mother had felt deep affection towards her at some point in her life. “You can’t fake the way she loved you when you were small. She was never that happy as she was when you were born.”
Kara continued to shake her head, tears welling up even further the more she thought about what little she could remember about her mother from those earlier years. Even the later ones, the bad times almost always clouded over any of the other memories. Now that she thought about it, really thought about it, she could recall a few occasions when Socrata had laid down with her daughter at nine and ten years old, holding her through the night like she had before everything went so wrong. Even on one of her last visits to her mother before her death, Kara could remember seeing a few of her childhood paintings and toys in her mother’s apartment, clearly unable to put away what few mementos she had of her daughter. Maybe her mother hadn’t been a monster, just a confused and lost human being. One that didn’t know how to cope, one that had been hurt herself and only knew how to keep passing that hurt along.
Dreilide pulled her into his arms and held her, tears falling down his cheeks slowly at the first time he held his daughter since she was only seven years old. He kissed her hair, just like he’d done hundreds of times before, one palm rubbing over her back to soothe away the pain she was feeling inside of her. God, he couldn’t stand the thought that his absence had broken his wife, but even worse was the idea that it had broken his daughter too. He had wanted her to be happy, but now he knew most of her life hadn’t been spent that way. As a father, he’d been an absolute failure. “She loved you,” Dreilide reminded Kara. “And I love you.”
She didn’t bother to hold him back, instead let him do all the work as she soaked it in. Kara felt five years old again, recovering from some childish hurt in her father’s arms. If she focused enough, she could imagine it was her mother instead, Socrata’s voice soothing and calming as she took care of her daughter. Those were the years before the mistrust and the pain, when her mother could still do no wrong in her eyes. Her parents had been infallible back then and it had been heaven. “I love you,” Kara whispered back, to both her father and the memory of her mother that was in that room with them.
When they pulled back, they simply looked at each other, both Dreilide and Kara enjoying that they had the chance to be beside one another again just once more. He leaned in and kissed her forehead, echoing the way Lee had done to her in the middle of the night in the observation room. If she closed her eyes for longer than just a blink, she could see Lee and smell him on her clothes. For now, she felt completely safe.
“Your mother, she died when the cylons attacked, didn’t she?” Dreilide ventured to ask her. Part of him had been holding out hope that when Kara found Earth, Socrata would have been with her. Nothing would have been more perfect than that, but perfect rarely existed. Even to this moment, he silently prayed that his wife was somewhere else on the battlestar or one of the civilian ships. When he’d resurrected again all those years ago, this time forcing into a younger state, Dreilide almost didn’t go through with it in the hope that his wife would be with his daughter as well. He didn’t want to be decades younger than the woman he loved, knowing it would put a wedge between them. All he wanted to do was to enjoy the lines of her face while she enjoyed his.
Kara’s expression was regretful as she looked to her father, seeing the longing there that she was about to destroy for him. “She’s dead, but she died a few years before then. Lung cancer.”
He nodded though it killed him and he took a few necessary steps away from her to finally deal with the reality that he really would never see his wife again. For all the good he’d done for his own people, for all the tens, if not hundreds, of times he’d resurrected over the years to cheat his body’s natural aging, his wife was still dead. If only he hadn’t left, he thought, maybe he could have done something, anything, to keep her alive. Maybe he’d made the wrong decision all those years ago. He should have stayed with his wife and his daughter. What kind of woman would Kara be right now without the burdens of his abandonment and her mother’s treatment? Though he didn’t really think it was possible, right then, in that moment, he was sure he could have modified resurrection for a human being. For Socrata.
She watched her father be the broken one now and Kara approached, settling her own hand to his shoulder. “I was too mad at her to be with her when she died,” she admitted, ashamed of herself. “Do you think she’ll forgive me?”
Dreilide nodded as he looked back to her. “She already does. I’m sure of it.”
For the rest of the morning, Kara stayed at her father’s side.