Fic: a long way home (Battlestar Galactica) [1/?] - for pellamerethiel
Kochana pellamerethiel, wszystkiego najlepszego!. Przede wszystkim dużo uśmiechu, szczęścia, zdrowia, spokoju i spełnienia marzeń. Samych radości: w fandomie, w życiu towarzyskim, na uczelni, no, w ogóle ;) Stad facetów w garniturach lub na motorach, dużo fajnych angst- i death-fików, zajebistej końcówki BSG, fajnych innych seriali, ciekawych książek… i wszystkiego, czego tylko mogłabyś sobie sama życzyć :)
A tutaj Twój prezent, a raczej jego pierwsza część:
Title: a long way home
Author: girlupnorth
Part: 1/? [maybe 3 or maybe 5; not sure yet]
Rating: PG [for now]
Length: 1,850 words
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters: Lee Adama, Caprica!Six, D’Anna, Eights, Twos and Sixes; Head!Six and Kara Thrace
Ships: in this part Kara/Head!Six and Lee/Kara
Summary: In which the Earth is being settled, and the Cylons try to figure out their next move.
Warnings: Cylon!Lee, God!Kara, angst, blasphemy, biblical and mythological references. In other words, weird shit.
AU since 4.11.
Notes: For pellamerethiel, on her birthday :)
The following is only the first chapter, so some things I mentioned in relation to this story are yet to come.
This happens in the same verse as Facts, visions, and the divine sense of humour.
novin_ha was, as always, the perfect beta.
Also, many thanks to miss_magrat for allowing me to use her ideas about Caprica and the Opera House vision. :)
a long way home
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
…
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis, 1:1-2, 28
She walks through the lobby of the Opera House in search of the little girl. The child is in danger, and she must protect her with her life. But then, even as she reaches out and cradles Hera in her arms, she doubts she will be able to keep the girl safe on her own.
Gaius opens the door before the two of them, and Caprica walks into the concert hall, the child still in her arms. As they make their way through the aisle between the audience seats, Hera becomes too heavy for her to bear, and Caprica hands her over to Gaius.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says, but his voice is shaking, so she rests a hand on his back to comfort him.
Together, they walk up into the stage. Caprica looks around, but the opera is empty; there is no one in the seats, and all doors are closed.
Then she looks up to the gallery and sees five figures in long robes, their bodies blazing with light.
Four faces she recognizes instantly; the fifth person is standing a little to the back, face hidden by the hood. After a moment, however, he steps to the front and rests his hands on the banister; and this is when she sees the face of the Fifth.
*
The settlement of Earth goes anything but smoothly and fast. This time, the people are reluctant to exchange the relative safety of ships for the uncertain weather on solid ground. The admiral sends out Raptors and Vipers to search the neighbouring planets for more habitable conditions; the pilots, however, return empty-handed, leaving the Fleet no choice but to go down to Earth and seek the most appropriate area for raising a town.
At some point during all this, Kara apparently comes to the conclusion that the project “Kara Thrace on Earth” has no future, so she ups and disappears in her Viper without as much as saying goodbye.
Of course.
He’s more disappointed than angry or upset, truth be told. They never had a chance to talk after landing on Earth; Kara went on long walks all by herself, and Lee kept himself busy with various government duties.
He finds himself imagining conversations with her in the few spare moments he has, between a meeting with the president, a Quorum session and visits from various people seeking his help. Defending Baltar has earned him some notoriety as a man willing to help anybody, no matter how lost the case; he’s ever so slightly amused with that knowledge.
What he would tell her is that he’s grateful for Earth, and that it’s not her fault it didn’t turn out to be a paradise; and that she was right, and that the prophecies were true, but that he’d rather they hadn’t been.
The Hybrid had been right, and the Cylons did give the humans the Earth; Sam, Tyrol and Tigh led Kara back to her Viper, and then Lee decided to trust that the Colonial signal really came from Earth. They wouldn’t have got here without him; but even Kara never suspected that he was not human.
She’d probably have jumped away even sooner, had she known.
Helo told him, sounding quite surprised, that there were no acts of aggression towards the Cylons since their landing. Lee, however, doubts it could be down to good will; rather, people have decided to put the Cylon problem on hold and ignore it, hoping it will go away without their participation. The admiral pretends that he has never heard that his XO is a Cylon; people make as if Sam and Tyrol were human, and avoid other Cylons - except for maybe Athena - at all costs.
He suspects that learning that the admiral’s son is a Cylon might be the one piece of news that would set everything on fire. And as he continues to juggle the various political and social issues connected with setting the Earth, he thinks he’s not particularly eager to find that one out.
*
There used to be seven of them, standing among the baseship panels at times like this, with hundreds, maybe thousands more wandering the corridors of the ship.
Now only four models gather to discuss their fate on Earth, and only one Three walks among them.
“We should jump away. Look for a more habitable planet. We don’t owe them a thing, and they’d like to see us gone,” an Eight says.
They cannot jump away, though, and they’re too well aware of this. The humans told them - requested, Caprica corrects herself, they’re all friends now - to unplug the Hybrid. Their baseship floats above Earth among the ships of the human fleet, but they cannot escape.
“We should stay. God had a purpose in leading us here.”
The other Six rolls her eyes at Leoben’s words.
“We’ve decided that we can’t know that for sure,” she says.
“The signs-”
“A barren planet, Two. Which may as well mean that we have failed God.”
The conversation has played out before in exactly the same way; will probably play out again, until a third party weighs in and gives one of the sides a new argument.
The consensus among the Sixes was that whether they decided to leave or to stay, they shouldn’t leave anybody behind, now that there were so few of them. However, apart from Tory, the Four haven’t been interested in joining them. Anders, who went down to Earth, at least talked to some of their number, but Tigh and Tyrol have remained on Galactica, and refused any contact with the other Cylons.
“D’Anna? What do you think?” Caprica asks, as her sister and the Two continue to argue. “You talked to the humans yesterday, didn’t you? What did they tell you?”
D’Anna shrugs. “The president was absent due to her cancer treatment, and you know the admiral. He ignores us and hopes that we’ll turn out to be his bad dream.” She is quiet for a moment, and then adds, “Lee Adama asked if we were going to help with the settlement, and the admiral glared. He might not shoot at us, but he’s not happy that we’re here with them.”
Caprica watches the Three carefully, but there is no change in her expression or her voice as she mentions Lee Adama.
“We told you they would want us to disappear,” Eight says.
D’Anna smirks.
“Disappearing might be problematic,” she says, and they all turn to stare at her. “The Hybrid doesn’t seem too eager to jump away.”
“Three, the Hybrid’s unplugged,” Leoben reminds her.
“I plugged it in,” D’Anna says. “It doesn’t want to jump. It keeps on talking, it recites passages of the holy texts, it mentions your favourite human woman,” - she makes a gesture towards the Twos - “but it doesn’t want to jump.”
Caprica and the other Six exchange a look. It was wrong of Cavil to box the Threes, they kept saying; but then there are times like this, when D’Anna is acting absolutely unpredictably, and they think that Cavil had been just a bit right.
“And what about the Fifth?” the other Six asks.
“You won’t ask me to reveal my trump card just now, will you?” D’Anna says, jokily, and after taking another look at her Caprica feels quite sure that Three doesn’t know who the Fifth is.
*
For a few weeks after the landing Lee doesn’t dream at all, but then the dreams return, more disturbing than ever.
In them, he rarely sees the planet Caprica, or, indeed, any remnants of the old world. Normal dreams ceased with the destruction of the Colonies, leaving him only eerie, rather distressing visions.
Kara is standing in a field of poppies, looking very much like he remembers seeing her last: focused and quiet, her face beaming with some kind of otherworldly light. He wants to talk to her, but then he sees a mark of the goddess Persephone, written in blood on the inside of her hand, and he feels afraid.
“Are you going to come back again?” he asks in another dream. She is leading him through a forest, and from the landmarks they pass he recognizes the landscape to be one and the same as the mess of dried trees he sees outside his tent on Earth.
“Not now,” she replies. “Not for a while, no. This isn’t the time.”
“We miss you,” Lee says, and he’s not quite sure who the “we” in this sentence is.
“Don’t worry. I will return. We tend to.”
“Kara, you know that you’re not a Cylon, don’t you?”
Kara stops, resting her hand against a birch tree, and laughs.
“Took you long enough.”
With every passing dream, Kara’s words make more sense. He might be remembering (if there is anything he can remember; he hasn’t quite figured it out); or, possibly, he’s just going insane.
It seems to be a cool day in early spring, and the earth smells of new hopes and promises of better times. They have reached the top of a hill; it looks vaguely familiar, though Lee knows that he’s never seen it outside his dreams.
He kneels down to pick a small yellow flower, growing in the middle of a footprint in the mud. Kara stands by, her hands in the pockets of her jacket.
When he wants to give her the flower, she shakes her head.
“See how it works out?” she asks, gesturing towards the fields and forests that are spreading out down on the plains. “We’re back where we began. I’m again giving you Earth to - what was it? Subdue and replenish, yes.”
Lee takes a deep breath.
“I don’t want Earth,” he says.
“You don’t get to say ‘no’ to God.”
There is laughter; turning around, Lee sees a number Six coming towards them from behind the trees.
“She’s frakking with you now, you know,” she tells Lee. “You weren’t there. None of us was. We don’t date back that far.”
“You’re lucky,” Kara says. “It was all darkness and void, and then cold and chaos, and still more darkness.” She sighs. “You wouldn’t like it. I didn’t like it.”
The Six wraps one arm around Kara’s shoulders.
“And there was light, and it was good,” she says in a distant voice. Kara looks at her, amused, and they kiss. In the dream, Lee isn’t even that surprised.
“Cold and chaos, just as we have it here,” he says.
“You should have believed in me,” is Kara’s reply. “I wanted to bring you home.”
The Six lays a kiss on her head, and then comes a few steps towards Lee.
“My sister is going to come to you for help,” she says, quite serious now. “You won’t refuse her, will you? She’s always trusted you.”
“We all have,” Kara says.
This is when a lightning tears the sky in half, and it begins to rain.
“We should go back now,” Lee says, but when he turns to look at the women, they are gone, and he is standing in rain all by himself.
A tutaj Twój prezent, a raczej jego pierwsza część:
Title: a long way home
Author: girlupnorth
Part: 1/? [maybe 3 or maybe 5; not sure yet]
Rating: PG [for now]
Length: 1,850 words
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters: Lee Adama, Caprica!Six, D’Anna, Eights, Twos and Sixes; Head!Six and Kara Thrace
Ships: in this part Kara/Head!Six and Lee/Kara
Summary: In which the Earth is being settled, and the Cylons try to figure out their next move.
Warnings: Cylon!Lee, God!Kara, angst, blasphemy, biblical and mythological references. In other words, weird shit.
AU since 4.11.
Notes: For pellamerethiel, on her birthday :)
The following is only the first chapter, so some things I mentioned in relation to this story are yet to come.
This happens in the same verse as Facts, visions, and the divine sense of humour.
novin_ha was, as always, the perfect beta.
Also, many thanks to miss_magrat for allowing me to use her ideas about Caprica and the Opera House vision. :)
a long way home
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
…
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis, 1:1-2, 28
She walks through the lobby of the Opera House in search of the little girl. The child is in danger, and she must protect her with her life. But then, even as she reaches out and cradles Hera in her arms, she doubts she will be able to keep the girl safe on her own.
Gaius opens the door before the two of them, and Caprica walks into the concert hall, the child still in her arms. As they make their way through the aisle between the audience seats, Hera becomes too heavy for her to bear, and Caprica hands her over to Gaius.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says, but his voice is shaking, so she rests a hand on his back to comfort him.
Together, they walk up into the stage. Caprica looks around, but the opera is empty; there is no one in the seats, and all doors are closed.
Then she looks up to the gallery and sees five figures in long robes, their bodies blazing with light.
Four faces she recognizes instantly; the fifth person is standing a little to the back, face hidden by the hood. After a moment, however, he steps to the front and rests his hands on the banister; and this is when she sees the face of the Fifth.
*
The settlement of Earth goes anything but smoothly and fast. This time, the people are reluctant to exchange the relative safety of ships for the uncertain weather on solid ground. The admiral sends out Raptors and Vipers to search the neighbouring planets for more habitable conditions; the pilots, however, return empty-handed, leaving the Fleet no choice but to go down to Earth and seek the most appropriate area for raising a town.
At some point during all this, Kara apparently comes to the conclusion that the project “Kara Thrace on Earth” has no future, so she ups and disappears in her Viper without as much as saying goodbye.
Of course.
He’s more disappointed than angry or upset, truth be told. They never had a chance to talk after landing on Earth; Kara went on long walks all by herself, and Lee kept himself busy with various government duties.
He finds himself imagining conversations with her in the few spare moments he has, between a meeting with the president, a Quorum session and visits from various people seeking his help. Defending Baltar has earned him some notoriety as a man willing to help anybody, no matter how lost the case; he’s ever so slightly amused with that knowledge.
What he would tell her is that he’s grateful for Earth, and that it’s not her fault it didn’t turn out to be a paradise; and that she was right, and that the prophecies were true, but that he’d rather they hadn’t been.
The Hybrid had been right, and the Cylons did give the humans the Earth; Sam, Tyrol and Tigh led Kara back to her Viper, and then Lee decided to trust that the Colonial signal really came from Earth. They wouldn’t have got here without him; but even Kara never suspected that he was not human.
She’d probably have jumped away even sooner, had she known.
Helo told him, sounding quite surprised, that there were no acts of aggression towards the Cylons since their landing. Lee, however, doubts it could be down to good will; rather, people have decided to put the Cylon problem on hold and ignore it, hoping it will go away without their participation. The admiral pretends that he has never heard that his XO is a Cylon; people make as if Sam and Tyrol were human, and avoid other Cylons - except for maybe Athena - at all costs.
He suspects that learning that the admiral’s son is a Cylon might be the one piece of news that would set everything on fire. And as he continues to juggle the various political and social issues connected with setting the Earth, he thinks he’s not particularly eager to find that one out.
*
There used to be seven of them, standing among the baseship panels at times like this, with hundreds, maybe thousands more wandering the corridors of the ship.
Now only four models gather to discuss their fate on Earth, and only one Three walks among them.
“We should jump away. Look for a more habitable planet. We don’t owe them a thing, and they’d like to see us gone,” an Eight says.
They cannot jump away, though, and they’re too well aware of this. The humans told them - requested, Caprica corrects herself, they’re all friends now - to unplug the Hybrid. Their baseship floats above Earth among the ships of the human fleet, but they cannot escape.
“We should stay. God had a purpose in leading us here.”
The other Six rolls her eyes at Leoben’s words.
“We’ve decided that we can’t know that for sure,” she says.
“The signs-”
“A barren planet, Two. Which may as well mean that we have failed God.”
The conversation has played out before in exactly the same way; will probably play out again, until a third party weighs in and gives one of the sides a new argument.
The consensus among the Sixes was that whether they decided to leave or to stay, they shouldn’t leave anybody behind, now that there were so few of them. However, apart from Tory, the Four haven’t been interested in joining them. Anders, who went down to Earth, at least talked to some of their number, but Tigh and Tyrol have remained on Galactica, and refused any contact with the other Cylons.
“D’Anna? What do you think?” Caprica asks, as her sister and the Two continue to argue. “You talked to the humans yesterday, didn’t you? What did they tell you?”
D’Anna shrugs. “The president was absent due to her cancer treatment, and you know the admiral. He ignores us and hopes that we’ll turn out to be his bad dream.” She is quiet for a moment, and then adds, “Lee Adama asked if we were going to help with the settlement, and the admiral glared. He might not shoot at us, but he’s not happy that we’re here with them.”
Caprica watches the Three carefully, but there is no change in her expression or her voice as she mentions Lee Adama.
“We told you they would want us to disappear,” Eight says.
D’Anna smirks.
“Disappearing might be problematic,” she says, and they all turn to stare at her. “The Hybrid doesn’t seem too eager to jump away.”
“Three, the Hybrid’s unplugged,” Leoben reminds her.
“I plugged it in,” D’Anna says. “It doesn’t want to jump. It keeps on talking, it recites passages of the holy texts, it mentions your favourite human woman,” - she makes a gesture towards the Twos - “but it doesn’t want to jump.”
Caprica and the other Six exchange a look. It was wrong of Cavil to box the Threes, they kept saying; but then there are times like this, when D’Anna is acting absolutely unpredictably, and they think that Cavil had been just a bit right.
“And what about the Fifth?” the other Six asks.
“You won’t ask me to reveal my trump card just now, will you?” D’Anna says, jokily, and after taking another look at her Caprica feels quite sure that Three doesn’t know who the Fifth is.
*
For a few weeks after the landing Lee doesn’t dream at all, but then the dreams return, more disturbing than ever.
In them, he rarely sees the planet Caprica, or, indeed, any remnants of the old world. Normal dreams ceased with the destruction of the Colonies, leaving him only eerie, rather distressing visions.
Kara is standing in a field of poppies, looking very much like he remembers seeing her last: focused and quiet, her face beaming with some kind of otherworldly light. He wants to talk to her, but then he sees a mark of the goddess Persephone, written in blood on the inside of her hand, and he feels afraid.
“Are you going to come back again?” he asks in another dream. She is leading him through a forest, and from the landmarks they pass he recognizes the landscape to be one and the same as the mess of dried trees he sees outside his tent on Earth.
“Not now,” she replies. “Not for a while, no. This isn’t the time.”
“We miss you,” Lee says, and he’s not quite sure who the “we” in this sentence is.
“Don’t worry. I will return. We tend to.”
“Kara, you know that you’re not a Cylon, don’t you?”
Kara stops, resting her hand against a birch tree, and laughs.
“Took you long enough.”
With every passing dream, Kara’s words make more sense. He might be remembering (if there is anything he can remember; he hasn’t quite figured it out); or, possibly, he’s just going insane.
It seems to be a cool day in early spring, and the earth smells of new hopes and promises of better times. They have reached the top of a hill; it looks vaguely familiar, though Lee knows that he’s never seen it outside his dreams.
He kneels down to pick a small yellow flower, growing in the middle of a footprint in the mud. Kara stands by, her hands in the pockets of her jacket.
When he wants to give her the flower, she shakes her head.
“See how it works out?” she asks, gesturing towards the fields and forests that are spreading out down on the plains. “We’re back where we began. I’m again giving you Earth to - what was it? Subdue and replenish, yes.”
Lee takes a deep breath.
“I don’t want Earth,” he says.
“You don’t get to say ‘no’ to God.”
There is laughter; turning around, Lee sees a number Six coming towards them from behind the trees.
“She’s frakking with you now, you know,” she tells Lee. “You weren’t there. None of us was. We don’t date back that far.”
“You’re lucky,” Kara says. “It was all darkness and void, and then cold and chaos, and still more darkness.” She sighs. “You wouldn’t like it. I didn’t like it.”
The Six wraps one arm around Kara’s shoulders.
“And there was light, and it was good,” she says in a distant voice. Kara looks at her, amused, and they kiss. In the dream, Lee isn’t even that surprised.
“Cold and chaos, just as we have it here,” he says.
“You should have believed in me,” is Kara’s reply. “I wanted to bring you home.”
The Six lays a kiss on her head, and then comes a few steps towards Lee.
“My sister is going to come to you for help,” she says, quite serious now. “You won’t refuse her, will you? She’s always trusted you.”
“We all have,” Kara says.
This is when a lightning tears the sky in half, and it begins to rain.
“We should go back now,” Lee says, but when he turns to look at the women, they are gone, and he is standing in rain all by himself.