BSG fic: For the Eying of My Scars (Kara Thrace, PG-13)
Title: For the Eying of My Scars (For the Hearing of My Heart)
Character: Kara Thrace (with references to Kara/Anders and Leoben, as well as hints of Kara/Lee)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: I'm mainly a slasher. I don't often poke around female brains, let alone Kara's. But she insisted that I write something about her and her art. I told her I don't understand painting, but she told me to write it anyway. She's more stubborn than I am, so here it is. Spoilers for "Crossroads, part two." 2100 words.
Note: The title is taken from Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," although that poem has little bearing on this story. ETA: Apparently, I forgot about some painting Kara did on NC; it's a frak-up, but it's written in the story, so consider this AU, as far as that goes. Or, you know, if that kind of fudging is abhorrent to you, don't read.
For the Eying of My Scars (For the Hearing of My Heart)
She hated him for so many things, like the way she'd wake up and think, for a moment, that the attacks had never happened, that the second occupation, then, was a fantastical nightmare she was awaking from. Having finally surrendered to sleep, she would wake up in a real bed, sunlight streaming in through the window. It reminded her most of Delphi, for some reason, maybe the dry air and musty smell.
But if it was Delphi, it was no longer a haven, a place she went to unfurl her brain, let the canvas tell her things she didn't want to know, things she couldn't learn any other way. Thoughts come to her best in that comforting pattern of primary colors: red and yellow and blue. Every color she could ever need. If she kept little else in that apartment in Delphi, she kept those paints. So, too, Leoben kept them in that apartment that really wasn't one. He occasionally left them out, tubes open enough to smell them.
After the rescue, when she was back on Galactica, she told herself she would never, ever paint again.
*
As she lies in a bed in the infirmary after she comes back from the dead, she thinks, of all things, about the first time she painted after the attacks. A long frakking time after, she says to herself. But not really. Years of fear and worry contracted into a time people still counted in days.
It wasn't a canvas. Her mandalas aren't brown and gunmetal and moon sand. Still, there outside that fallen raider, she slipped her fingers over something sticky and organic, and as she thought, calculated, she rubbed it into a circle, the clear pink goop mixed with sand, some of it with something black that trickled out of the raider, too. Something akin to motor grease, if it was thinner, more like blood.
She'd thought she was going to die, even if she wasn't about to go down without a fight. No harm, then, in letting everything come open, whirling brain full-throttle against the press of sandy wind. Might've even helped her make sense of what to do. And it made her absurdly happy. She didn't think about it being an excavation, like always. It wasn't until she got back and began to miss her paints that she knew what she'd done.
Like a scab. Pick it over and over-she knew from fights on the deck in academy, from moments sitting in the window there in Delphi, watching the people spill out below her, picking at an old wound on her knee-and it heals better and better each time. That is to say, more imperviously. But the scar is ugly. Thick. But at least it doesn't bleed anymore.
*
She knows she's come through something when she can put brush to canvas again. Bare hands, even.
After Zak, it took her being angry. Drunk. Weeks later, she picked a fight with Apollo over nothing at all because she wanted him to take a swing at her. Early the next morning, she still hadn’t slept; her face burned and her eye tried to swell shut on her. Not that she needed to see to make her circles. The red and blue merged into a sickening magenta-maroon, edging out the yellow, which had gone up first for some reason. She never threw it away. It was still there when she and Helo took refuge during the occupation. She didn't need to drag it out, turn it over, to know.
Then New Caprica, what might've been a good change. After everyone got settled, people began to barter in ways they couldn't before. The world was a pathetic flea market, but there were a few treasures. A sneering kid from Aerelon had a set of paints he seemed determined to throw away, if only someone had enough to trade.
Sam would've let her have whatever she wanted, if he knew she needed it; she would've given the little she had, too. In the end, she gave nothing. She wasn't altogether sure about the kind of happiness that might come from peeling back the layers, or putting all your hope in your hands.
Still, at night, she looked up through the hole in their tent, those first days after they'd set up and they were too exhausted to patch the canvas, and watched the stars. She ached for something green in a way she never did when she was on Galactica, and it just kept getting worse. During the day, when she had time to stop moving, she made rings of those weeds that sprang up from dry, hard ground. They weren't green enough. Her dreams and fantasies of earth involved abandoned cans of paint so green it would make her dizzy.
She had never much painted with green. She thought the wanting to, then, as she could hear his breath beside her, was enough. Her hands traced out against the blanket, against his back, whole hills of color to replace the color they'd all lost.
*
When she came back to Galactica from what she'd thought was the end, when she finally painted again, it was in shades of grey.
It took a lot of doing. You don't forgive the man who kept you prisoner four months, who frakked with your soul, who smiled and spoke softly and so confidently you almost believed him sometimes, who seemed to love you as cruelly as your own mother had. But she had forgiven him-a version, anyway. That was almost unbearable to her. So what if he had been what her brain chose, the voice that forced her to see what she was supposed to be, do? All that meant was she was frakked up in the head. She knew that all too well.
Still: she forgot, for the first time since New Caprica, to be nauseated at the thought of painting. Not forgiving, then. Forgetting, somehow. One copy of Leoben smiles, and it doesn't seem to matter that he is probably just figment of her imagination. One face replaces the other. Sometimes.
Other times she wakes up from nightmares of confinement struggling to breathe. She's often genuinely afraid she'll gut Sam if she wakes up with his leg slung over hers, even if Leoben never held her, apart from that day she left him. A small part of her whispers along her nerves, wonders if she meant what she said. No, she tells herself. It was hell. But this one little thing has been released back to her, and she's not sorry. It feels like a piece of herself coming back.
Lee gives her the idea weeks before she does anything about it. He's always known about the painting. He suggests some of the scrap that's been piling up in the hold for a crude canvas, old crates and such. Useless putty is a thick paint, even mixed with used oil, but it works. Like sculpture as much as painting. Touch it too much, though, and it crumbles, once it's dry. Not that it matters, then; not really. It's a means, not an end.
On her pillow one night in her rack, she finds a vial filled with a blue powder. She'd seen them all over the infirmary before; it turns out to be some old supplement that has lost its efficacy. It turns almost purple in the putty, but it will do. When she mixes in a bit of oil, it's perfect for a New Caprica night.
Frak if she knows which night she's painting, who she's lying beside as she remembers those stars-as long is it was a night she didn't spend locked in that place. Lee asks her about it one day, but it's after they've shared a bottle between them and she's already talked through the visions and the choice to fly into oblivion, so she tells him, as much as she can bear. It comes out in hazy descriptions and repeated dialogues, in fits and starts as they talk about the same four months for him, on the Pegasus. She doesn't know why she does it, only that it seems necessary. If she can do it, then she thinks that maybe she should. There is still the one face to block out the other. She'll never stop seething under her skin and having nightmares, and the wounds will probably never heal, but she's painting again, even if she's not entirely sure why.
She never shows them to Sam, those crude putty-rendered monstrosities. She's never shared that part of her life with him. She doesn't have to wonder why, but she finally makes herself ignore the reasons. Karl still has the pictures of her apartment, so one day she lays them in Sam's hands and tells him her doodlings were always more than doodles. She also tells him she needs color, especially green. He promises he'll find it, and he doesn't ask her any questions. Her dying has made him even more afraid of her. She hates that.
She tells him, later, that she never thought about having green until she met him. He shakes his head and tells her she's just marking her own change by his presence in her life. She's always done it, she concedes. It must've been why every man she ever cared for comes out in a swirl of red and yellow and blue. Every thing she ever felt comes out in a swirl of blue and red and yellow, eventually. That's what Sam brings her, too. It's all he can find. She very nearly puts it all out an airlock.
*
The first one is hard. Her hands shake as she lays down the blue, but not enough to be a problem. There have been times when she was much less steady than she is now as she painted her life into a ring that never stops burning or moving. She's an old hand at holding herself together by letting go. She's not necessarily very good at it, but it's her way, and it actually feels helpful this time. She makes herself think about precisely why she'd doing it, why she didn't immediately adulterate the yellow with a pinprick of the cerulean tattoo ink Sam traded three ships away to get.
She shows him the mandala, then she shows it to Karl and Lee and anyone else who cares to look. She kind of enjoys the way it freaks them all out. Makes her feel like her own near panic at having seen it completed is normal. If Leoben, the one in her head, gave it back to her, what he gave was transformed into this omen, transcendent and frightening all at once: a destiny, a key to earth. It's not until she's sitting across from the old man at his own table, and he asks her what it is, that she thinks: it doesn't have to mean anything about me anymore.
*
She never paints another eye of Jupiter. She wants to, but she doesn't.
Tylium has a by-product that smells like rotten eggs but makes a beautiful copper-green. It actually shimmers. The Chief found her something equally as foul in a big drum in the hold that thins out the putty. It will last infinitely long now.
People bring her things that they think might make a good pigment. Some of them work and some of them don't. Some of them only seem to, the painting drying into something macabre or faded brown. Sometimes she tells them to frakking take the things back to their own lives and use them.
They have never seen earth. She begins to think everything that happened to her out there was a dream, and that feels irrevocably dangerous.
*
She won't let them take down the picture of her on the wall of memory. She finds that corridor the most calming place she knows, full of such art, simple images of real people, many of them against a green now gone.
Three years after the attacks, one time when she's kickboxing alone in the training room, she breaks down and cries so hard it makes her shake all over. She's a little afraid she'll never stop, so she lets her hands form that old circle again. Only now it looks rather more like Sam's eyes shining or the well in the middle of tent city or the burnished copper intake under a viper.
Lee's, she tells herself. Lee's rolling away from a burst of fire. Mine.
Early one morning before the CAP, in her viper where she knows she's meant to be, she thinks: red and yellow make orange. She wonders if she still has some tucked away somewhere.
Of course she does.
~
Character: Kara Thrace (with references to Kara/Anders and Leoben, as well as hints of Kara/Lee)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: I'm mainly a slasher. I don't often poke around female brains, let alone Kara's. But she insisted that I write something about her and her art. I told her I don't understand painting, but she told me to write it anyway. She's more stubborn than I am, so here it is. Spoilers for "Crossroads, part two." 2100 words.
Note: The title is taken from Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," although that poem has little bearing on this story. ETA: Apparently, I forgot about some painting Kara did on NC; it's a frak-up, but it's written in the story, so consider this AU, as far as that goes. Or, you know, if that kind of fudging is abhorrent to you, don't read.
For the Eying of My Scars (For the Hearing of My Heart)
She hated him for so many things, like the way she'd wake up and think, for a moment, that the attacks had never happened, that the second occupation, then, was a fantastical nightmare she was awaking from. Having finally surrendered to sleep, she would wake up in a real bed, sunlight streaming in through the window. It reminded her most of Delphi, for some reason, maybe the dry air and musty smell.
But if it was Delphi, it was no longer a haven, a place she went to unfurl her brain, let the canvas tell her things she didn't want to know, things she couldn't learn any other way. Thoughts come to her best in that comforting pattern of primary colors: red and yellow and blue. Every color she could ever need. If she kept little else in that apartment in Delphi, she kept those paints. So, too, Leoben kept them in that apartment that really wasn't one. He occasionally left them out, tubes open enough to smell them.
After the rescue, when she was back on Galactica, she told herself she would never, ever paint again.
*
As she lies in a bed in the infirmary after she comes back from the dead, she thinks, of all things, about the first time she painted after the attacks. A long frakking time after, she says to herself. But not really. Years of fear and worry contracted into a time people still counted in days.
It wasn't a canvas. Her mandalas aren't brown and gunmetal and moon sand. Still, there outside that fallen raider, she slipped her fingers over something sticky and organic, and as she thought, calculated, she rubbed it into a circle, the clear pink goop mixed with sand, some of it with something black that trickled out of the raider, too. Something akin to motor grease, if it was thinner, more like blood.
She'd thought she was going to die, even if she wasn't about to go down without a fight. No harm, then, in letting everything come open, whirling brain full-throttle against the press of sandy wind. Might've even helped her make sense of what to do. And it made her absurdly happy. She didn't think about it being an excavation, like always. It wasn't until she got back and began to miss her paints that she knew what she'd done.
Like a scab. Pick it over and over-she knew from fights on the deck in academy, from moments sitting in the window there in Delphi, watching the people spill out below her, picking at an old wound on her knee-and it heals better and better each time. That is to say, more imperviously. But the scar is ugly. Thick. But at least it doesn't bleed anymore.
*
She knows she's come through something when she can put brush to canvas again. Bare hands, even.
After Zak, it took her being angry. Drunk. Weeks later, she picked a fight with Apollo over nothing at all because she wanted him to take a swing at her. Early the next morning, she still hadn’t slept; her face burned and her eye tried to swell shut on her. Not that she needed to see to make her circles. The red and blue merged into a sickening magenta-maroon, edging out the yellow, which had gone up first for some reason. She never threw it away. It was still there when she and Helo took refuge during the occupation. She didn't need to drag it out, turn it over, to know.
Then New Caprica, what might've been a good change. After everyone got settled, people began to barter in ways they couldn't before. The world was a pathetic flea market, but there were a few treasures. A sneering kid from Aerelon had a set of paints he seemed determined to throw away, if only someone had enough to trade.
Sam would've let her have whatever she wanted, if he knew she needed it; she would've given the little she had, too. In the end, she gave nothing. She wasn't altogether sure about the kind of happiness that might come from peeling back the layers, or putting all your hope in your hands.
Still, at night, she looked up through the hole in their tent, those first days after they'd set up and they were too exhausted to patch the canvas, and watched the stars. She ached for something green in a way she never did when she was on Galactica, and it just kept getting worse. During the day, when she had time to stop moving, she made rings of those weeds that sprang up from dry, hard ground. They weren't green enough. Her dreams and fantasies of earth involved abandoned cans of paint so green it would make her dizzy.
She had never much painted with green. She thought the wanting to, then, as she could hear his breath beside her, was enough. Her hands traced out against the blanket, against his back, whole hills of color to replace the color they'd all lost.
*
When she came back to Galactica from what she'd thought was the end, when she finally painted again, it was in shades of grey.
It took a lot of doing. You don't forgive the man who kept you prisoner four months, who frakked with your soul, who smiled and spoke softly and so confidently you almost believed him sometimes, who seemed to love you as cruelly as your own mother had. But she had forgiven him-a version, anyway. That was almost unbearable to her. So what if he had been what her brain chose, the voice that forced her to see what she was supposed to be, do? All that meant was she was frakked up in the head. She knew that all too well.
Still: she forgot, for the first time since New Caprica, to be nauseated at the thought of painting. Not forgiving, then. Forgetting, somehow. One copy of Leoben smiles, and it doesn't seem to matter that he is probably just figment of her imagination. One face replaces the other. Sometimes.
Other times she wakes up from nightmares of confinement struggling to breathe. She's often genuinely afraid she'll gut Sam if she wakes up with his leg slung over hers, even if Leoben never held her, apart from that day she left him. A small part of her whispers along her nerves, wonders if she meant what she said. No, she tells herself. It was hell. But this one little thing has been released back to her, and she's not sorry. It feels like a piece of herself coming back.
Lee gives her the idea weeks before she does anything about it. He's always known about the painting. He suggests some of the scrap that's been piling up in the hold for a crude canvas, old crates and such. Useless putty is a thick paint, even mixed with used oil, but it works. Like sculpture as much as painting. Touch it too much, though, and it crumbles, once it's dry. Not that it matters, then; not really. It's a means, not an end.
On her pillow one night in her rack, she finds a vial filled with a blue powder. She'd seen them all over the infirmary before; it turns out to be some old supplement that has lost its efficacy. It turns almost purple in the putty, but it will do. When she mixes in a bit of oil, it's perfect for a New Caprica night.
Frak if she knows which night she's painting, who she's lying beside as she remembers those stars-as long is it was a night she didn't spend locked in that place. Lee asks her about it one day, but it's after they've shared a bottle between them and she's already talked through the visions and the choice to fly into oblivion, so she tells him, as much as she can bear. It comes out in hazy descriptions and repeated dialogues, in fits and starts as they talk about the same four months for him, on the Pegasus. She doesn't know why she does it, only that it seems necessary. If she can do it, then she thinks that maybe she should. There is still the one face to block out the other. She'll never stop seething under her skin and having nightmares, and the wounds will probably never heal, but she's painting again, even if she's not entirely sure why.
She never shows them to Sam, those crude putty-rendered monstrosities. She's never shared that part of her life with him. She doesn't have to wonder why, but she finally makes herself ignore the reasons. Karl still has the pictures of her apartment, so one day she lays them in Sam's hands and tells him her doodlings were always more than doodles. She also tells him she needs color, especially green. He promises he'll find it, and he doesn't ask her any questions. Her dying has made him even more afraid of her. She hates that.
She tells him, later, that she never thought about having green until she met him. He shakes his head and tells her she's just marking her own change by his presence in her life. She's always done it, she concedes. It must've been why every man she ever cared for comes out in a swirl of red and yellow and blue. Every thing she ever felt comes out in a swirl of blue and red and yellow, eventually. That's what Sam brings her, too. It's all he can find. She very nearly puts it all out an airlock.
*
The first one is hard. Her hands shake as she lays down the blue, but not enough to be a problem. There have been times when she was much less steady than she is now as she painted her life into a ring that never stops burning or moving. She's an old hand at holding herself together by letting go. She's not necessarily very good at it, but it's her way, and it actually feels helpful this time. She makes herself think about precisely why she'd doing it, why she didn't immediately adulterate the yellow with a pinprick of the cerulean tattoo ink Sam traded three ships away to get.
She shows him the mandala, then she shows it to Karl and Lee and anyone else who cares to look. She kind of enjoys the way it freaks them all out. Makes her feel like her own near panic at having seen it completed is normal. If Leoben, the one in her head, gave it back to her, what he gave was transformed into this omen, transcendent and frightening all at once: a destiny, a key to earth. It's not until she's sitting across from the old man at his own table, and he asks her what it is, that she thinks: it doesn't have to mean anything about me anymore.
*
She never paints another eye of Jupiter. She wants to, but she doesn't.
Tylium has a by-product that smells like rotten eggs but makes a beautiful copper-green. It actually shimmers. The Chief found her something equally as foul in a big drum in the hold that thins out the putty. It will last infinitely long now.
People bring her things that they think might make a good pigment. Some of them work and some of them don't. Some of them only seem to, the painting drying into something macabre or faded brown. Sometimes she tells them to frakking take the things back to their own lives and use them.
They have never seen earth. She begins to think everything that happened to her out there was a dream, and that feels irrevocably dangerous.
*
She won't let them take down the picture of her on the wall of memory. She finds that corridor the most calming place she knows, full of such art, simple images of real people, many of them against a green now gone.
Three years after the attacks, one time when she's kickboxing alone in the training room, she breaks down and cries so hard it makes her shake all over. She's a little afraid she'll never stop, so she lets her hands form that old circle again. Only now it looks rather more like Sam's eyes shining or the well in the middle of tent city or the burnished copper intake under a viper.
Lee's, she tells herself. Lee's rolling away from a burst of fire. Mine.
Early one morning before the CAP, in her viper where she knows she's meant to be, she thinks: red and yellow make orange. She wonders if she still has some tucked away somewhere.
Of course she does.
~