Fic: Descant (chapter 12)
Title: Descant (Chapter 12)
Rating: R
Characters: Kara/Leoben, Ellen, Sam & more
Word Count (this chapter): 2,459
WARNINGS: Canon-level violence.
A/N: Yes, there is an entire other epic happening in the background of this chapter. I may write it someday, but not today!
Chapter 11B
Chapter 12
Leoben opens his eyes and she’s there, smiling down at him, vivid and alive. And she’s changed, too, but she’s still Kara.
A noise echoes down the hall and Kara glances away. “Come on,” she says quickly, “we have to go. Now!” She hauls him up by his hands and Leoben scrambles into a set of clothes as Kara checks her gun and peers out the door.
He clears his throat, trying out new vocal chords. He puts thoughts of his last body, comatose with grief, out of his mind.
Kara turns, hearing him, and grins. She kisses him once, hard. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” he says urgently, as she starts to move. "There are others who need our help.”
She takes one more quick look, then nods. “Fine. Quickly, though.”
Leoben jerks his head in the right direction and leads the way. As he reaches to open the door to the Final Five’s cell, he pauses, looking warily at Kara. “There won’t be time right now to explain.”
She shakes her head in confusion. “Don’t worry.”
He opens the door and for just a moment Kara does stare, something like awe in her eyes. Then she bursts into action. “We’re here!” she calls out to them. “We have to get back to Galactica RFN, so everybody move!”
They run through the halls as a group, stopping twice while Kara takes down groups of fours and fives armed with assault rifles. Leoben waves the others into the Raptor, then climbs in himself, sealing the hatch as Kara darts in after them.
Vipers and missiles are swarming as they emerge from the baseship, and Kara whoops as she rolls the Raptor out of the way of a nuke that passes them and tears into the hangar they’ve just left. The baseship explodes in a cacophony of light.
In the back of the Raptor, Ellen leans against Saul’s shoulder, holding his hand. “It’s over, then,” she sighs.
Kara turns to looks at her, and Leoben frowns in confusion at how calm Kara is in the face of this revelation. “Don’t worry,” she tells the Five, “the hard part’s done.”
The battle quiets behind them once the baseship is gone, and Kara lands the Raptor just ahead of the Viper wing. The minute she opens the hatch, the entire deck freezes, staring in shock at the crowd of people behind her.
Figursky finally reaches for a phone. “Admiral,” he says, “You’d better get down here.”
For a while there’s chaos as Bill and Laura and the others arrive. Adama protests wildly that these five could ever be Cylons, until Tigh pulls him into a hug.
Caprica emerges from a corridor and runs toward Leoben, throws her arms around him. He strokes her back, lets her cling. After a moment Sharon barrels into them and he’s holding them both. They’re back on the shores of Caprica’s lake, surrounded by silence and peace. Athena’s eyes are full of tears as she looks up at him.
Caprica blinks her own eyes clear. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she orders.
He shakes his head, squeezes his sisters close for another moment.
When he opens his eyes, back on the hangar deck, he can see Kara watching all of it with a fond smile: Bill hugging Saul, Athena crossing the deck to embrace Tyrol, Laura with Tory wrapped in her arms. Leoben watches her. He still can’t quite believe that she’s more than a vision, that if he reached out and stroked her hair, it would be soft beneath his fingers.
When Barolay finally lets Sam go, he turns to Kara, reaches out and pulls her into his arms. Leoben stares. Where Sam’s arm was once tattooed is now bare skin, reborn without the physical damage of his last life. Kara doesn’t have a tattoo either.
“It's good to see you,” Sam says softly.
“Got used to me saving your ass?” Kara teases. As she speaks, Leoben’s eyes flicker over her face. He can’t keep himself from watching her, from drinking in every word she says, no matter to whom.
Sam laughs. “Something like that.”
Kara catches Leoben’s gaze, and nods. With a smile at Sam she steps away, approaches Leoben with joy in her eyes.
“I missed you,” she says tenderly.
He can hardly contain it. He nods.
And then she presses close to him, kissing him with all the love he’s always known she’d feel one day. His arms circle her, holding her against him as he savors the feel of her, her smell and taste. Around them the room shifts with surprise and startlement and Helo’s jovial laughter. Leoben doesn’t bother to look. She’s in his arms.
The Viper pilots return then, victorious and exuberant, and the chaos intensifies. Leoben doesn’t let Kara go even as it swirls around them, but finally he steps back enough to gaze down at her wonderingly. “How is this possible?” he asks softly.
She shakes her head, eyes bright. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Ellen clears her throat beside them. “I think I do.”
*
Ellen leads them to her old quarters, now Kara’s. Leoben follows her in, his hand on Kara’s waist. Caprica and Gaius, Helo and Athena have come, too. And Sam. Leoben can feel pressure building around them, the foreshadowing of something about to be revealed.
Ellen lets out a short laugh as she settles on the edge of the bed, smiling at him, at his sisters. “Well,” she starts. “Look at you.”
Sam lays a hand on her shoulder, and they share a look of quiet pride. Then Ellen turns to the group.
“I was born on a planet called Earth,” she begins. She pauses as the others gasp in startlement. Kara strokes Leoben’s knuckles and he realizes he’s gripping her hand.
“The way our oldest stories went, the thirteenth tribe, the tribe of Cylons, left in a different direction from the human tribes and founded Earth. And the reason the tribes left Kobol was forgotten.”
Ellen opens her mouth and searches for the words, then stops and smiles, reaching out for Sam and Caprica’s hands, waiting until they’ve formed a loose circle.
The projection is like any other, yet her mind is different. Leoben puzzles over it for a moment as he surveys the memory she’s built around them.
“Ellen,” a man’s voice says softly, and Leoben turns. They’re in a lab, and before them a younger, calmer Ellen is pipetting samples of something. At the sight of the man, she shrieks, dropping a glass tube to the floor. She stumbles back a few feet in shock.
“Dad?” she whispers.
Leoben’s eyes dart to the man before her: John Cavil.
“Ellen.” His voice is wistful, gentle. “There’s something I need you to do for me. Something is coming and you have a role to play.”
From another room two others enter, joking and jostling. Ellen twists rapidly to see Galen and Tory, and when she turns back her father is gone. She starts to tremble, rubbing a hand over her eyes.
“Everything okay?” Tory asks, kneeling to pick up the pieces of broken glass.
Ellen nods mutely, staring into the distance.
Her voice washes over Leoben as he watches the scene play out. “We had already built our own Centurions on Earth, and a great war was underway. When my father told me our race would be lost unless we rebuilt resurrection, I listened. I got my team to work on it, and I got my husband to prepare the ship we’d need.” She pauses, and Leoben slips out of the projection long enough to look at her, to see the regret in her eyes.
“It seemed,” Ellen continues, “that the Gods--or God, or whatever--had given humanity something on Kobol, the knowledge of how to pluck a soul from the stream. And humans had used that gift to make slaves, to make thinking, feeling creatures that would do their bidding.”
Helo wraps an arm around Athena’s shoulders, pulling her close against him.
“We had done the same thing on Earth, and the…whatever…was angry at us.” Ellen rolls her eyes at the idea of the Gods, but an old sadness lingers on her face. “But somehow we’d been chosen, to keep it from happening again. My father showed me what I needed to know get the five of us off of Earth and heading for the Colonies. He’d been gone for years, had died when I was a little girl, but he said I had to do it and I believed him.”
Her memories swirl around them: the bombings, the long hours spent building the technology they’d need to survive. Grief pervades everything they’re seeing-all of it is gone, lost to the crimes of one race against another.
Sam squeezes Ellen’s shoulder. “It was a hard time.”
Kara stiffens beside Leoben, looking sharply at Sam. “Who did you see?”
He smiles sadly, and suddenly they’re on a beach, waves lapping in the background and Sam with a guitar in his arms. The sky above them rolls darkly toward evening, and the wind is cool. Sam plays a few chords that seem almost familiar as Leoben listens. Kara is squeezing his head so hard it hurts, the sensation streaming from reality into the projection.
“Sammy!” a girl calls, racing across the sand, and he stops playing, tears in his eyes as he looks at her. She’s barely out of childhood, her hair in a long braid down her back. She kneels on the sand at his feet and rests her cheek against his knee. “Don’t stop,” she whispers. “I need you to write the rest of it.”
“My little sister,” Sam says roughly, answering Kara’s question. “She died in one of the early Centurion attacks.”
He plays there on the beach, a song that seems to mourn everything happening to his planet, then race away from it, building into something joyful.
The younger Ellen wanders up across the beach. Her eyes are dark with confusion and grief as she stops before him, entranced. Sam looks up at her, but doesn’t stop playing. In the distance, a bomb explodes.
“We had no choice but to leave,” Sam says, anguish lingering in his voice.
Athena stares at him hard, hand tight in Helo’s. “But what about Earth?”
Sam shakes his head, bereft, and then they’re standing on it. In the same place, a month or a year later. Perhaps that very day. Around them the landscape is dead and gray and Athena starts to sob. Sam says the words even though they’re unnecessary now. “It was destroyed as we left. Nuked. We can’t go back there any more than Caprica.”
“It was all for nothing.” Athena’s words are muffled by the fabric of Helo’s jacket.
Leoben can’t quite breathe, can’t quite make sense of it. “It was all…” He turns to Kara, tears in his eyes. “You died for nothing.” There are tears on his cheeks, and she pulls him into her arms. Against all reason he can feel her smiling against his cheek.
“The story’s not over yet,” Kara whispers, like it’s a promise.
Ellen clears her throat. “It took centuries to make the journey. We were in stasis for most of it, and when we finally got here they’d already begun the war.” The projection is tinged with bitterness again, as the final five take in the destruction Centurions and humans have wrought on one another by the final days of the first war. In the dark of a baseship, the five of them argue with the Centurions about peace.
“You have a soul!” Ellen protests. “That means you get to make choices. That’s what you’re fighting for, isn’t? You can make a better one than this.”
The Centurion speaks with a girl’s voice that Leoben’s never heard. “We want justice for our people. We want to live freely in the light of God’s love.”
Ellen shakes her head, sadder and wiser than the girl in the lab. “No one gets that from war. No one. Not ever, Zoe. I know you never wanted this.”
For a long time there’s silence.
“Can you give us back--can you give us bodies? Can your technology do that?”
Ellen stares at her warily. “I think so.”
“And souls?” Its red eye shifts relentlessly back and forth.
John appears behind her, nodding. “It’s the only way, Ellen.”
Ellen looks longingly at him, then back at Zoe. “I’ll try.”
The projection fades even as Leoben tries to reach into it, tries to understand the other layers of memories. Ellen closes her mind. “What they wanted was you,” she tells them, smiling fondly at Caprica. “The chance to be more human, to understand what it meant. How could we say no to that?”
“The angels,” Sam says softly, “helped us choose the souls.”
Ellen gives a sad little laugh. “After the first one. After I failed to find my father.”
Sam wraps an arm around her shoulders, squeezing her against his side. “They believed you were a way to lasting peace.” He looks back and forth among Caprica and Athena and Leoben. “You were made to be loved, to help end the war.” As they listen they can see his memory playing out, Tory and Ellen and Galen lifting newborn Cylons from their amniotic fluid, smiling in excitement.
“And you succeeded,” Ellen says, smiling at them with motherly pride.
Leoben feels the stream starting to sing inside of him again, feels awareness approaching, something beyond what he’s ever seen.
“Cavil didn’t understand,” Ellen says tightly. Her eyes are bright with anger and guilt. “He never understood what we were working for, and he tried to take it all away. Wiped our minds, scattered us across the twelve worlds.” For a moment they get a glimpse of Ellen screaming, fighting as a Centurion guns down Saul. Then she sharply cuts it off. “And even when we died on New Caprica, he left us with no choice but to rebuild resurrection.”
“But it was real?” Caprica says, her voice trembling. “There was something beyond you at work?” Her fingers are laced tightly through Gaius’.
Sam nods. “I can’t explain it, but yeah. It was real.”
Visions are starting to tug at him-storms and children and splashes of paint-as Leoben forces out the words. Athena is still crying silently in Helo’s arms, devastated at losing Earth. He can feel the loss rising in him too, needs an answer. “But why? Why did Kara die?”
Ellen shakes her head, shrugging helplessly. “Once you were made, our part was done. We never saw them again.” She winces in sympathy. “I don’t know.”
Kara smiles, turning to Leoben and laying a hand against his cheek, brushing away his tears. “It’s alright. I do.”
Chapter 13
Rating: R
Characters: Kara/Leoben, Ellen, Sam & more
Word Count (this chapter): 2,459
WARNINGS: Canon-level violence.
A/N: Yes, there is an entire other epic happening in the background of this chapter. I may write it someday, but not today!
Chapter 11B
Chapter 12
Leoben opens his eyes and she’s there, smiling down at him, vivid and alive. And she’s changed, too, but she’s still Kara.
A noise echoes down the hall and Kara glances away. “Come on,” she says quickly, “we have to go. Now!” She hauls him up by his hands and Leoben scrambles into a set of clothes as Kara checks her gun and peers out the door.
He clears his throat, trying out new vocal chords. He puts thoughts of his last body, comatose with grief, out of his mind.
Kara turns, hearing him, and grins. She kisses him once, hard. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” he says urgently, as she starts to move. "There are others who need our help.”
She takes one more quick look, then nods. “Fine. Quickly, though.”
Leoben jerks his head in the right direction and leads the way. As he reaches to open the door to the Final Five’s cell, he pauses, looking warily at Kara. “There won’t be time right now to explain.”
She shakes her head in confusion. “Don’t worry.”
He opens the door and for just a moment Kara does stare, something like awe in her eyes. Then she bursts into action. “We’re here!” she calls out to them. “We have to get back to Galactica RFN, so everybody move!”
They run through the halls as a group, stopping twice while Kara takes down groups of fours and fives armed with assault rifles. Leoben waves the others into the Raptor, then climbs in himself, sealing the hatch as Kara darts in after them.
Vipers and missiles are swarming as they emerge from the baseship, and Kara whoops as she rolls the Raptor out of the way of a nuke that passes them and tears into the hangar they’ve just left. The baseship explodes in a cacophony of light.
In the back of the Raptor, Ellen leans against Saul’s shoulder, holding his hand. “It’s over, then,” she sighs.
Kara turns to looks at her, and Leoben frowns in confusion at how calm Kara is in the face of this revelation. “Don’t worry,” she tells the Five, “the hard part’s done.”
The battle quiets behind them once the baseship is gone, and Kara lands the Raptor just ahead of the Viper wing. The minute she opens the hatch, the entire deck freezes, staring in shock at the crowd of people behind her.
Figursky finally reaches for a phone. “Admiral,” he says, “You’d better get down here.”
For a while there’s chaos as Bill and Laura and the others arrive. Adama protests wildly that these five could ever be Cylons, until Tigh pulls him into a hug.
Caprica emerges from a corridor and runs toward Leoben, throws her arms around him. He strokes her back, lets her cling. After a moment Sharon barrels into them and he’s holding them both. They’re back on the shores of Caprica’s lake, surrounded by silence and peace. Athena’s eyes are full of tears as she looks up at him.
Caprica blinks her own eyes clear. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she orders.
He shakes his head, squeezes his sisters close for another moment.
When he opens his eyes, back on the hangar deck, he can see Kara watching all of it with a fond smile: Bill hugging Saul, Athena crossing the deck to embrace Tyrol, Laura with Tory wrapped in her arms. Leoben watches her. He still can’t quite believe that she’s more than a vision, that if he reached out and stroked her hair, it would be soft beneath his fingers.
When Barolay finally lets Sam go, he turns to Kara, reaches out and pulls her into his arms. Leoben stares. Where Sam’s arm was once tattooed is now bare skin, reborn without the physical damage of his last life. Kara doesn’t have a tattoo either.
“It's good to see you,” Sam says softly.
“Got used to me saving your ass?” Kara teases. As she speaks, Leoben’s eyes flicker over her face. He can’t keep himself from watching her, from drinking in every word she says, no matter to whom.
Sam laughs. “Something like that.”
Kara catches Leoben’s gaze, and nods. With a smile at Sam she steps away, approaches Leoben with joy in her eyes.
“I missed you,” she says tenderly.
He can hardly contain it. He nods.
And then she presses close to him, kissing him with all the love he’s always known she’d feel one day. His arms circle her, holding her against him as he savors the feel of her, her smell and taste. Around them the room shifts with surprise and startlement and Helo’s jovial laughter. Leoben doesn’t bother to look. She’s in his arms.
The Viper pilots return then, victorious and exuberant, and the chaos intensifies. Leoben doesn’t let Kara go even as it swirls around them, but finally he steps back enough to gaze down at her wonderingly. “How is this possible?” he asks softly.
She shakes her head, eyes bright. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Ellen clears her throat beside them. “I think I do.”
*
Ellen leads them to her old quarters, now Kara’s. Leoben follows her in, his hand on Kara’s waist. Caprica and Gaius, Helo and Athena have come, too. And Sam. Leoben can feel pressure building around them, the foreshadowing of something about to be revealed.
Ellen lets out a short laugh as she settles on the edge of the bed, smiling at him, at his sisters. “Well,” she starts. “Look at you.”
Sam lays a hand on her shoulder, and they share a look of quiet pride. Then Ellen turns to the group.
“I was born on a planet called Earth,” she begins. She pauses as the others gasp in startlement. Kara strokes Leoben’s knuckles and he realizes he’s gripping her hand.
“The way our oldest stories went, the thirteenth tribe, the tribe of Cylons, left in a different direction from the human tribes and founded Earth. And the reason the tribes left Kobol was forgotten.”
Ellen opens her mouth and searches for the words, then stops and smiles, reaching out for Sam and Caprica’s hands, waiting until they’ve formed a loose circle.
The projection is like any other, yet her mind is different. Leoben puzzles over it for a moment as he surveys the memory she’s built around them.
“Ellen,” a man’s voice says softly, and Leoben turns. They’re in a lab, and before them a younger, calmer Ellen is pipetting samples of something. At the sight of the man, she shrieks, dropping a glass tube to the floor. She stumbles back a few feet in shock.
“Dad?” she whispers.
Leoben’s eyes dart to the man before her: John Cavil.
“Ellen.” His voice is wistful, gentle. “There’s something I need you to do for me. Something is coming and you have a role to play.”
From another room two others enter, joking and jostling. Ellen twists rapidly to see Galen and Tory, and when she turns back her father is gone. She starts to tremble, rubbing a hand over her eyes.
“Everything okay?” Tory asks, kneeling to pick up the pieces of broken glass.
Ellen nods mutely, staring into the distance.
Her voice washes over Leoben as he watches the scene play out. “We had already built our own Centurions on Earth, and a great war was underway. When my father told me our race would be lost unless we rebuilt resurrection, I listened. I got my team to work on it, and I got my husband to prepare the ship we’d need.” She pauses, and Leoben slips out of the projection long enough to look at her, to see the regret in her eyes.
“It seemed,” Ellen continues, “that the Gods--or God, or whatever--had given humanity something on Kobol, the knowledge of how to pluck a soul from the stream. And humans had used that gift to make slaves, to make thinking, feeling creatures that would do their bidding.”
Helo wraps an arm around Athena’s shoulders, pulling her close against him.
“We had done the same thing on Earth, and the…whatever…was angry at us.” Ellen rolls her eyes at the idea of the Gods, but an old sadness lingers on her face. “But somehow we’d been chosen, to keep it from happening again. My father showed me what I needed to know get the five of us off of Earth and heading for the Colonies. He’d been gone for years, had died when I was a little girl, but he said I had to do it and I believed him.”
Her memories swirl around them: the bombings, the long hours spent building the technology they’d need to survive. Grief pervades everything they’re seeing-all of it is gone, lost to the crimes of one race against another.
Sam squeezes Ellen’s shoulder. “It was a hard time.”
Kara stiffens beside Leoben, looking sharply at Sam. “Who did you see?”
He smiles sadly, and suddenly they’re on a beach, waves lapping in the background and Sam with a guitar in his arms. The sky above them rolls darkly toward evening, and the wind is cool. Sam plays a few chords that seem almost familiar as Leoben listens. Kara is squeezing his head so hard it hurts, the sensation streaming from reality into the projection.
“Sammy!” a girl calls, racing across the sand, and he stops playing, tears in his eyes as he looks at her. She’s barely out of childhood, her hair in a long braid down her back. She kneels on the sand at his feet and rests her cheek against his knee. “Don’t stop,” she whispers. “I need you to write the rest of it.”
“My little sister,” Sam says roughly, answering Kara’s question. “She died in one of the early Centurion attacks.”
He plays there on the beach, a song that seems to mourn everything happening to his planet, then race away from it, building into something joyful.
The younger Ellen wanders up across the beach. Her eyes are dark with confusion and grief as she stops before him, entranced. Sam looks up at her, but doesn’t stop playing. In the distance, a bomb explodes.
“We had no choice but to leave,” Sam says, anguish lingering in his voice.
Athena stares at him hard, hand tight in Helo’s. “But what about Earth?”
Sam shakes his head, bereft, and then they’re standing on it. In the same place, a month or a year later. Perhaps that very day. Around them the landscape is dead and gray and Athena starts to sob. Sam says the words even though they’re unnecessary now. “It was destroyed as we left. Nuked. We can’t go back there any more than Caprica.”
“It was all for nothing.” Athena’s words are muffled by the fabric of Helo’s jacket.
Leoben can’t quite breathe, can’t quite make sense of it. “It was all…” He turns to Kara, tears in his eyes. “You died for nothing.” There are tears on his cheeks, and she pulls him into her arms. Against all reason he can feel her smiling against his cheek.
“The story’s not over yet,” Kara whispers, like it’s a promise.
Ellen clears her throat. “It took centuries to make the journey. We were in stasis for most of it, and when we finally got here they’d already begun the war.” The projection is tinged with bitterness again, as the final five take in the destruction Centurions and humans have wrought on one another by the final days of the first war. In the dark of a baseship, the five of them argue with the Centurions about peace.
“You have a soul!” Ellen protests. “That means you get to make choices. That’s what you’re fighting for, isn’t? You can make a better one than this.”
The Centurion speaks with a girl’s voice that Leoben’s never heard. “We want justice for our people. We want to live freely in the light of God’s love.”
Ellen shakes her head, sadder and wiser than the girl in the lab. “No one gets that from war. No one. Not ever, Zoe. I know you never wanted this.”
For a long time there’s silence.
“Can you give us back--can you give us bodies? Can your technology do that?”
Ellen stares at her warily. “I think so.”
“And souls?” Its red eye shifts relentlessly back and forth.
John appears behind her, nodding. “It’s the only way, Ellen.”
Ellen looks longingly at him, then back at Zoe. “I’ll try.”
The projection fades even as Leoben tries to reach into it, tries to understand the other layers of memories. Ellen closes her mind. “What they wanted was you,” she tells them, smiling fondly at Caprica. “The chance to be more human, to understand what it meant. How could we say no to that?”
“The angels,” Sam says softly, “helped us choose the souls.”
Ellen gives a sad little laugh. “After the first one. After I failed to find my father.”
Sam wraps an arm around her shoulders, squeezing her against his side. “They believed you were a way to lasting peace.” He looks back and forth among Caprica and Athena and Leoben. “You were made to be loved, to help end the war.” As they listen they can see his memory playing out, Tory and Ellen and Galen lifting newborn Cylons from their amniotic fluid, smiling in excitement.
“And you succeeded,” Ellen says, smiling at them with motherly pride.
Leoben feels the stream starting to sing inside of him again, feels awareness approaching, something beyond what he’s ever seen.
“Cavil didn’t understand,” Ellen says tightly. Her eyes are bright with anger and guilt. “He never understood what we were working for, and he tried to take it all away. Wiped our minds, scattered us across the twelve worlds.” For a moment they get a glimpse of Ellen screaming, fighting as a Centurion guns down Saul. Then she sharply cuts it off. “And even when we died on New Caprica, he left us with no choice but to rebuild resurrection.”
“But it was real?” Caprica says, her voice trembling. “There was something beyond you at work?” Her fingers are laced tightly through Gaius’.
Sam nods. “I can’t explain it, but yeah. It was real.”
Visions are starting to tug at him-storms and children and splashes of paint-as Leoben forces out the words. Athena is still crying silently in Helo’s arms, devastated at losing Earth. He can feel the loss rising in him too, needs an answer. “But why? Why did Kara die?”
Ellen shakes her head, shrugging helplessly. “Once you were made, our part was done. We never saw them again.” She winces in sympathy. “I don’t know.”
Kara smiles, turning to Leoben and laying a hand against his cheek, brushing away his tears. “It’s alright. I do.”
Chapter 13