In the Whole World: Chapter 14, "No Time"
Chapter 14: "No Time"
~5,500 words
Disclaimer: Not mine, RDM's et al, and I thank them for the privileges despite everything.
A/N: Ok, once again I need more time and words. But the good news is that Act I is done, it just took me two more chapters than I thought. Chapter 14 & 15 are being posted together! And these will absolutely, guaranteed, be the last chapters for the first arc of the story. (Buckle up, K/L fans, shit's about to get crazy real.)
It was criminal, Kara thought, how few times she'd gotten to see Lee naked in the moonlight in her life. His skin picked up a gleam that reminded her of launch tube lights on the nose of her Viper. And his eyes… maybe everyone's eyes became infinite and impenetrable in the moonlight. But she'd never noticed it in anyone but Lee. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd trained herself to notice.
If Lee had been planning this night-no, she didn't want to think about that. Well, but it was only that he would have thought of things like food, and blankets. And they'd probably be inside the house, which would probably have furniture in it. Although, if he'd been the one doing the planning, he would have built said house with floor-to-ceiling windows, a giant fireplace and a back and side door, and a dozen other features that would've made it impossible to defend. She was really going to have to be the one to remember that the world was still…
The sharp pain ripping across her chest cut off that line of thought and she clenched her teeth to avoid letting it escape her lips.
"What's this tree?" Lee was leaning up against it, and it probably wasn't comfortable against his bare back, but he wasn't complaining. Kara was sprawled over his legs and began to busy herself by tracing her fingers over the muscles of his shoulders. It crossed her mind that she should have painted him. Naked, under a fruit tree? Gods, he'd hate it. He’d at least pretend to. She wished she'd thought of it a few months ago.
"A pear. That's what they're calling it, 'cause of the shape of the fruit." Kara adjusted his arms more tightly around her, because-she told herself this was why-she wasn't freezing, but she wasn't exactly warm. "Prob'ly blooms a couple times a year."
"Hmm." They were silent for a long while before he spoke again. "You know, I'd been saving up to buy a house, eventually. Somewhere in what's left of C City, there's a piece of paper that says I'm doing pretty well, for a military man."
"Let me guess, half of every paycheck?"
"More like sixty percent."
She bit her lip to stifle a laugh, unsurprised. She could just see Lee, sensibly foregoing pleasure after pleasure-off-planet vacations, steak dinners, new cars and new gadgets-for a future that had never come. Who knew? If it had come, she might have lived to envy him his foresight. "Guess you learned your lesson."
He let out a long, easy sigh. "Guess so."
Kara considered what he was saying. "Oh my gods, Lee. Were you, just now, trying to tell me that you have… good prospects?"
He smiled against the hair spilling down the back of her neck. "Had. Unfortunately, they're worse all the time."
Kara bit his shoulder, now. She didn't notice that she was happy, or that being happy immediately made her feel guilty-she just felt the guilt. "Oh, right. Should you be… getting back? They probably have election results now."
"Screw the election," he said, a touch pained that she was so ready to leave this place. But then he added much more gently: "There'll be others."
"You think you lost?"
"I know it."
"So what are you gonna do now?"
He leaned his head back against the tree again, giving a stock answer to avoid thinking about what he hadn’t ever let himself think about. "Whatever I can to help the most people."
"You'll like that… you get off on that stuff."
"Mmm, you're in a good position to tell me what I get off on."
She grinned, considering pulling him back down on top of her, couldn't have said why she didn't. "Being right. You really like being right."
Lee tensed, very slightly, which was when she noticed how utterly relaxed he'd been until then. "Who doesn't?"
She shrugged. "I'm not an addict."
"No kidding."
She grabbed the drop cloth that had been serving as their picnic blanket and pulled a side of it up around herself, little realizing how tellingly defensive the gesture was, just as little as he realized how casually he could wound her. Still, she kept her tone light. Mostly light. "You're shooting clay pigeons here, Apollo. Name one time when you've been indisputably right and I've been indisputably wrong."
"Well, let's see. How long do you think you have left on Earth, again?"
"Date, place, and evidence, or it didn't happen."
An expression came to his face that she knew well and wished she'd seen more often. I'm about to do something reckless, it screamed. I need a moment to carefully prepare for my recklessness.
"11th Aprilis, must have been… eight years ago. Bright & Sharpe Tavern, Delphi."
She choked on a gasp. She never gasped. "Don't."
"I asked you to leave my brother. One last time."
Her distress became a snarl as easily as breathing. "Oh, yeah, good example. You were definitely in the right, that afternoon, 'cause you were the beacon of morality who was frakking his brother's girlfriend."
He shrugged. "How high the high ground is depends on where the low ground is. You asked for evidence of a time when you were indisputably wrong. Remember your answer?"
She was on her feet now, the gleam of combat in her eye, and he was there beside her in an instant.
"You said, and I quote, 'Zak needs me.'" Her blood froze. He reached down to pull on his boxers, then his dress trousers. "Need more evidence?"
He crossed behind her to grab his shirt, and tossed her hers. Above him, there was that house she'd built him, sturdy and non-judgmental. She kept her eyes on it as she pulled her shirt on over her head, foregoing her bra, wherever it was.
"He did need me."
"About as much as a Centurion needs a bubble bath, sweetheart."
"He was lost. I don't think you got just how insecure he was." Lee rolled his eyes. "He was such an extrovert-he hid it all, you know, with a joke-"
"Or a drink. Or ten."
"He drank, yeah. Just like you, but for different reasons. He drank to forget how much he didn't want the life your dad mapped out for him. But you… you drank to forget how much you did. 'Cause you hated how much you loved being a frakking warrior." She shook her head. "It looked the same on the outside, I gotta say."
She was pulling on her own clothes, now.
"I loved Zak. But I was not like him."
Kara snorted. "How do you figure? Because you thought your dad was the problem, and he thought you were?"
They stood tense, a few feet from each other, between the house and the pear tree. It was another boxing ring. Neither of them let the other out of their sights for even a moment. Lee's fists even clenched, by his sides.
"This is easy for you, isn't it? For you, there's no tomorrow. You'll be gone when the clock strikes midnight or a frakking cloud passes over the moon. I'm staring four or five decades of not knowing what the hell happened to my life." He swallowed. "That's if I make it."
"What do you want me to say?"
He didn't-for once-hesitate. "What do you think? I want to know if you ever meant it. Any of it."
A feeling shook her now, like the dull thud of metal hitting thick rubber at high speed. It reverberated powerfully, but didn't make a sound. The impact of Lee's bottomless doubt as it lashed out at her always felt just that way.
And on this last night of everything, it made her frakking furious.
"Listen. I know it goes against every story you tell yourself. But one of these days you gotta own up-you're the one who never meant it." She held up a hand to cut him off as she tilted her head back at the sky, found a constellation they had seen with the help of the Arrow of Apollo, on Kobol, and everyone knew now as Capricorn. Gods, Delphi was so much farther away than that, in real terms. If they could travel at only light speed, it would take them years to get back there. "You know what you said to me, when I said Zak needed me?"
"I don't remember." His tone tried to say that he couldn't care less.
"That's 'cause you said nothin'. Nothin', Lee. No arguments, no proclamations that you needed me, or even wanted me…"
He went still.
"No taking matters into your own hands and telling Zak yourself that we'd had an affair, which I kept thinking-dreading-frak, hoping, you'd do. You didn't even get mad, not in front of me, anyway. You went cold, and you walked away."
"I told you I needed you-frak, Kara, I can't help it if you weren't listening."
"You mean a thousand years later, on New Caprica? You didn't say that. No. You didn't! You got drunk and you started howling in the moonlight. And when I asked if you were sure-about me-do you know what you said to me?"
"I said yes." His teeth were clenched.
"You said, oh, Kara, I didn't even know I loved you until ten seconds ago, I've been hiding it from myself, I really don't want to need you and I kinda wish I didn't have these feelings, but you know what, I guess I do. Dither. Hesitate. Howl. Not exactly your most inspiring speech, hotshot."
She shivered, feeling again the clear and certain uncertainty that had been emanating from him in waves that night. Who could have trusted that level of wildness from anyone, let alone from steady Lee Adama?
Kara didn't trust anyone at all. And she’d trusted Lee much less after that night than she had before it.
He leaned back on the corner of the porch. "It terrified you. I could tell you were terrified, but frak, you were always terrified." He shoved those fists, still clenched, into his pockets, hid them away. "You didn't believe I meant it… when I said I loved you?"
"I knew you didn't mean it. You couldn't. Even if you did…" She shook her head impatiently, and when she spoke again, it was like she was laying out one of her insane stratagems in the CIC. "If you didn't mean it-and you didn't-I had to get away to save you from me, because I would have used you up, Lee, just clung on like a leech and never let go."
His eyes were closed, and he didn't open them, now. "And if I did mean it?"
"Then you'd lost your mind. And I had to save you from yourself."
He almost fell forward at that, threw an arm across his stomach for a moment. He couldn't want to throw up any more than she did. "I should have known." She could barely hear him. "I thought you did it to save yourself. From having to finally give a frak whether you lived or died. But you married Sam to save me."
She shrugged. Column A and Column B were hard to distinguish, for her. "Don’t forget that I was there when you married Dee. You were pretty frakking relieved."
"Relieved! Kara, you are so frakking insane, the only wonder is that it took you 29 years to fly into a storm and blow yourself up! Save me! You wanted to save me, so you married Sam, who you also had to frakking save…" He bit out a laugh. "You want to talk about addictions. Get your heroism habit checked out."
"I don't have a 'heroism habit.'"
"Zak, Laura, Sam… every nugget you've ever flown with... I mean, you left the godsdamned human race to save it, Kara."
"You left me, sugar. You left me in Delphi, with Zak. You left me on New Caprica-"
"Does it matter that you were marrying someone else on both occasions?"
"You left me for Dee-a hundred times over. You left me in that-"
"Don't say it." His sorest spot, and though she'd never touched it or even seen it, she knew it.
"In that maelstrom. You let me go."
"Your plane exploded. Right in front of me, Kara. And I almost flew right into it, right with you, anyway."
She sighed. "Yeah, actually, that's not what I meant." Her head was shaking, and suddenly all the rage was gone and she was just sad, for both of them, again. "Look, let's just… let's not do this tonight. I'm at peace, now. I've accepted it. We did the best we could with impossible circumstances. You can’t win ‘em all."
"Frak that." Lee, on the other hand, was still in the grip of his grievances.
"What good do you s'pose regrets are now?"
"Yeah, well, what good are lies? You want me to believe that all the stolen time, the cheating, lying to Zak, the old man, to Dee and Sam-that we couldn't have done any frakking better than that?" He set his jaw. "No. I could have looked my brother-all of them-in the eye and told him the truth. So could you. It wasn't impossible. It was just harder."
"Fine. But we didn’t. And we can't change it."
"That doesn't mean we did the frakking best we could. Lords, if that was the best…? That's the heresy, Kara. That's frakking sacrilege."
"Then… I don't know what to tell you, Lee. You shoulda fought harder."
"Yeah, well, you should have stayed. Just one godsdamned time, you should've stayed."
For a long moment, while ram-shaped Capricorn gleamed over their heads and the house that both of them cherished and despised loomed behind them, the air between them was cut by a pendulum they'd finally named, swinging between two extremes. Back and forth, it swung, from not staying to not fighting, from infidelity to inconstancy, from distrust to distance. Again and again.
And it was in that heavy silence that the klaxons from Galactica shocked through the night air.
With reactions honed to instinct by years of training, they both surged from the porch ledge to their feet in one simultaneous motion. "Binoculars?" Lee asked without missing a beat.
"Kitchen closet."
From the lookout, with binoculars in hand, Kara could see what she hadn't before. Those bonfires she'd believed were celebratory were houses on fire. And the binocular sights were good enough that she could see civilians wielding guns that were military issue. "Explains the arms theft," she muttered.
The camp was ablaze. The temple was dark. And so was Bill Adama's cabin.
"What's the situation?" Lee was methodically opening closets, recovering relevant supplies: tool belts, flashlights, shortwave radios.
"Enemy forces in echelon formation around Galactica, numbering maybe eight hundred. An unorganized mob behind them. Two guards on our tent, which we should assume's been sacked. Large-scale Cylon resistance in northeastern quadrant, numbers hard to guess, maybe a thousand." She bit her lip. "Cylon resisters aside, I don't see any friendlies."
"Right. Probably most of our people are holed up in the battlestar." Lee said it calmly, also believed it, but wouldn't let himself think about the alternative. "I need to go negotiate the end of hostilities. Gods know where they think I am and how much of this is about me being missing. You don't think they're doing this in my name?"
"Don't worry about that. You ask me, this is Leoben's frakked-up Cylon humanization scheme whipping up the bigots and terrorizing the other Cylons. You're just a foil.” Kara put handed him the binoculars and leaned back against the wall. “But you can't go down there, Lee. Not without an armed guard."
He winced as he got a picture of the chaos. "I have to go. To concede, and see if I can help Sarah Porter restore sanity-"
"Take a look. They are not in a negotiating mood, down there, Apollo. We have zero intel, zero probables…but there are a couple of certainties. There are people who hate you. They have guns. They will fire them."
Lee weighed her words as Kara pulled out some of the house blueprints from another closet, turned them blank side up and spread them across the master bedroom floor. She sketched a quick outline of the camp, X'd the location of the major structures. She thought rapidly, and out loud. "Shoot and scoot's not gonna get us very far, not with the numbers problem we have. Neither will infiltration, because we can't coordinate with Galactica to actually get inside, get some resources. Hitei Kan and Greenleaf make air superiority dangerous-even if we could get to the Vipers."
"We don't even have handguns at this point, Kara."
Kara shot him a disgusted look; what kind of house did he think she'd built him? "In the safe in the study. Combo is the same as the tent safe minus fourteen. And there's a false panel in the south wall of the attic. Eight light weapons on site, two heavies."
Wordlessly, he shoved away from the floor. When he came back, it was to lay a sidearm on either side of each of them. "I scouted the house perimeter. Remains clear."
She'd made the hard calculations while he was gone. "Lee. Any way you look at it-we need to get to the temple. It's the high ground, it has the power grid, and we're gonna need one or both of those to make contact with Galactica."
He’d done the same math. "Agreed. And I have some ideas about how to maintain our cover en route." He bent with her over the map, and they submerged their problems in the way they always had: they planned another war.
Karl Agathon was immensely grateful when the streetlamps in the camp went suddenly dark, for the third time in forty-five minutes. In the ensuing chaos, it was easy for his team to coordinate their moves past and through the militia that he'd learned was calling itself the Legion of the Twelve Tribes.
"Rendezvous point, Temple of Unity, codename Artemis," he repeated to the Sixes and the Eight in front of him. The Eight, he couldn't stop noticing, was looking at him a bit strangely-but what the hell, all Eights looked at him a bit strangely. "Galactica will send the Raptors by twenty-two hundred hours. Our goal is to evacuate toward Artemis discreetly, in groups no larger than four, to evade-"
He cut himself off as shells ripped through the air beside his head, and he dove for the Six and Eight closest to him, instinctively. The Six stayed low, covering her head with both arms. But Karl and the Eight rolled simultaneously toward a nearby fence and swung immediately to peer over it.
She found the gunman first. "Ten o'clock," she muttered.
"If he shoots again without announcing his target, we have orders-"
The gunman, red hat tilting back off his head, raised his gun in their direction, and before Karl could finish his sentence, the woman next to him aimed and fired.
He watched the look in her eyes as she did, saw her wince and steel herself in one fluid expression, and his brain took a moment to catch up with his eyelids, which started blinking rapidly, and his legs, which tensed because they wanted to spring at her. He thought he might burst into tears. He'd never been as sure as anything in his life as what he said next.
"Good hunting-Sharon."
"Good…" She choked out a little gasp, and then there was a lump in her throat too big to breathe around. "You know."
They both sank back down behind the fence. "I know… I'm sorry. I swear to the gods that I know when it's not you-deep in my gut, I know you-and you have to come home, Sharon, because Earth doesn't mean a damn without-"
"I can't." She swallowed. "You don't understand."
"I know you're pissed about Boomer-and you're right, part of me can't really imagine what that must be like-but I swear to you, I would never knowingly cheat on you, because I'm in love with you, not her or any other frakking Eight-"
"It's not that simple. I…" Sharon peered back the barricade, eyes scanning swiftly in the darkness, finding none to distract herself with. "Karl, I think I… I think I did something wrong."
"No, no, of course you didn't. It was my fault. I know that."
"No, listen. Years ago. Gods. We never talk about this stuff, because I've always been afraid that it-scares you. But… you know that I'm… that I'm the first Number Eight, right? Not that it matters, exactly. I mean, the next five were made within days, and we were all exactly the-"
"What does this have to do with Boomer?"
"Nothing! It has nothing to do with frakking Boomer." If she were honest, she was still, on some level, furious about Boomer, and that had made all of her decisions easier, but he had to know it wasn't the point, not tonight. "Listen to me, Karl. I asked Delia to take my place so no one would be looking for me. I had to get away. To figure out where my missing memories were. And so no one would be looking for me-including you."
"Missing memories?"
She grabbed his wrist, held it gently, made herself tell him. Finally. "I heard some Twos talking-not long after we got to Earth-about how badly they wanted to forget something called the Petra Project. And I knew-for just a second-that there was something buried in my head, something I had forgotten. I could feel the space where the memory had been. Every time I thought of it, it ached… and I was scared."
Karl’s eyes stayed on her hand clutching his wrist. "What did you find out, Sharon?"
"Not enough. I trailed Twos for weeks. I was helping them build that frakking statue of Starbuck"-she rolled her eyes expressively-"and spying at the same time. It was only tonight, with the blackouts, that I was finally able to sneak into the base star, access the last vestiges we have of the central database. And… oh, gods, Karl, it's bad." She knew she was just being a coward, but she seized on an excuse anyway. "There's no time, just now. But-I have to find Leoben Conoy. He knows something that I have to know."
"OK. We need to send everyone else to the temple, and shuttle them to Galactica. And then you and I-we'll find him."
She nodded, jerkily.
"How bad?"
She bit out a word. "Murder." Then looked at the gun in her hand. "The bad kind."
Karl nodded slowly. He knew, without needing to ask, that she hadn't forgiven him. For that matter, he wasn't sure he'd forgiven her for sending one of her twins into the middle of their marriage, to sleep with him and raise their daughter-it felt like exploitation, like he'd been abused. But he also realized that now, in a poorly-secured position at the edge of a guerilla war, was probably not the time to argue about it.
He grabbed her shirt and jerked her back toward him, so that she fell face first onto him for a too-short moment. He pressed her to him with all his considerable strength, almost trying to absorb her into his body. She bit his lip playfully, in their old way, and pulled back.
"I love you, too, Karl," she murmured, but she couldn't meet his eyes.
He thought it would mean more, to hear that again, but there was new metal encasing his heart, a new grudge, and a new war all around them that meant that they were all becoming machines again. So he just grabbed her hand and set off for the nearest safe house.
Kara couldn't contain a disgusted sound when she came into the temple's center vestibule and saw the statue of herself.
"Flattering. Particularly the neckline," Lee muttered, though the face-her face, in hard stone- gave him an awful chill. "You pose for that?"
"In your dreams, Apollo."
They'd made it down undetected. They'd gleaned, on the way, that Sarah Porter was believed missing. Judging by the shouts from the commons, some seemed to think that she was dead at Lee's hands, others, that they had both been killed by some larger conspiracy of the Cylons.
"Now what?" Lee looked around. All the columns, and the dark shadows around them, made him edgy. They could be approached on all sides.
"The flares. There's a way up to the roof over…"
"Kara." A voice came from the center of the crossing.
"Oh, my gods… Sam!" As their eyes both swung Sam's way, Lee's face grew immediately guarded, but Kara's lit up. "Are you… I mean, you're alive."
Above the edge of the hybrid bath, Sam's face was ashen and grave. That he'd come awake-and tonight-in the damned hybrid bath… Lee realized only at that moment that he was, once again, standing right on the sidelines of Kara Thrace's miraculous frakking destiny.
He wanted to curse, but he stayed silent at her wing and listened.
Sam's voice was almost too quiet to hear, and he sounded strained. "I could say the same about you. What the frak is happening out there? No, don't answer that. No time. I was waiting for someone I could trust to come along. Of course it's you two. Starbuck and Apollo."
Lee stayed several yards away, scanning the perimeter, trying to keep his attention divided in case they were approached.
"What do you need, Sam? Should we-should we unplug you, get you out of there? And," Lee could tell she was choking on a frakking giggle, here, as she realized that Sam was still lying naked in the bath, "find you something to wear?"
"No time. No time, no time, no time. Listen to me. You have to go get the Horn."
Kara's eyes widened. "You know where it is?"
"The-what horn?" Lee couldn't believe they meant what he thought they must.
"The Horn of Cronus." Kara tried to remember why she hadn't told Lee about all of this-to spare him the worry? Because it made her seem all the more insane? Because she knew he hadn't wanted to talk about the fact she was late for a second date with death? It seemed pointless, now. "Hera said… I should have told you before, Lee. Hera said that my brother was coming-for the Horn-"
"Hera said-" Lee was dubious.
"Your brother! Oh, gods, no, Kara, that's not possible." Sam's voice had new urgency.
"You don't have a brother," Lee said flatly.
"No, she doesn't-not exactly." Sam grip tightened on the edge of his bath. "No time. Listen. Kara. When you left-back on Caprica, when you left with the Arrow of Apollo-I got curious about what else might still be in the museum. I was… almost drawn to it. So we set up camp there, for a few days. You know, the Horn of Cronus hadn't been on display in forty years-but I found it. It was right where it belonged, in the left atrium, across from where the Arrow had been. Like someone left it there for me."
"And you took it? Gods, so it is here. Sammy. I've torn this camp apart. Where is it?"
"It's in my locker. Or it was. Just… you have to believe me, I never thought it was important, it was just a talisman of what we'd been through, just a… just a souvenir. I tested it for radiation, and somehow it was clean… so I kept it in my pack, at all times. Kara, you have to find it. I've been having these dreams…"
"Hybrid dreams?"
"If Leoben Conoy-or your… your brother-if they get their hands on it, you'll die. And thousands of others. Again. You have to use the tunnel. He's already ahead of you."
"The tunnel?" Lee was once again a step behind.
"There's a tunnel, under here-behind that statue, in the floor. I think it goes straight up into Galactica."
"It does." Kara nodded. It had been in that frakking drawing, and so she'd built it. She'd tried to visualize likely scenarios for weeks, which could tell her why she'd built the damned thing. It had never occurred to her that it would come down to this, crawling through a narrow earthen tunnel underneath a burgeoning civil war to fish the Horn of Cronus out of Sam's godsdamned locker. If only she'd picked up his things weeks before, like Hoshi had asked her to… it had felt too much like she'd be admitting he was dead, and she couldn't do that, so there his pack had stayed. Waiting for him. And now…
Sam leaned his head back. "Do you have a flashlight?"
She patted her belt. "Yeah."
"OK. On my count, I'll give you ninety seconds to open the hatch, and close it behind you. Then I'm going to throw the power grid for the whole sector so that you can get past Galactica's defenses. It'll take the whole camp down, for a few minutes."
Kara swallowed, and found herself looking at her own frakking statue for guidance. Lords of Kobol… what the hell have you done to me? "You're hooked up to that grid, Sam." Her voice was so quiet that Lee almost couldn't catch it. "What's gonna happen to you?"
Sam reached a hand out of the water, and the marriage tattoo on his arm trembled over his bicep as he did. He touched her face gently. "I'll finally be gone, Kara. My body's failing, even now." He swallowed, too. "But, hey. Don't worry. I've already lived a few thousand years longer than I originally planned."
Lee swung away, his chest aching for Sam, pounding for himself. There was nothing he could say-thank you for being decent to her while she attempted to self-destruct? Sorry for being so indiscreet about frakking your wife? He turned toward the hatch, to pry it the frak open, wishing himself out of this private scene. But Sam didn't let him escape.
"Apollo-Lee."
"Yeah."
"Do it right this time, buddy." He let the heavy significance of those words sink into the silence that followed them.
Lee heard him, and let the tears come to eyes finally, even as a wry grin came to his face. "I don't like my odds, Sam."
"Yeah, me neither. So go easy on 'im, Kara."
"Never." Kara was crying openly, pressing his hand between hers. Lee knew as well as she did that those tears were half relief, and half mourning. Once again, Sam had given her something Lee'd never been able to manage.
Absolution.
The truth was, Lee might never forgive her. No, probably never, at this rate. But Sam Anders had always been the better man, better because he hadn't had to try at it nearly as hard as Lee had, and if Kara hadn't been much better to him, well, it hadn't seemed to hurt him as much.
It wasn't what was killing him.
"See ya on the other side, babe." Sam laid his hands on the edges of the bath, looking ready to be launched, seeming to concentrate on something they couldn't see. "Counting one, two, three, four…"
His voice sounded like a hybrid once again. Kara was still clutching his shoulder when Lee grabbed hers.
"Kara. Come on. He's giving us time. But we have to go now." She looked at him, then looked down at Sam. She pressed her lips to Sam's head and muttered a swift prayer.
And then they ran, threw open the hatch and slammed it closed behind them even as the whole world outside went dark.
And Sam Anders went dark with it.
In hiding with his wife, Gaius Baltar heard stomping and scratching on Bill Adama's roof for a quarter hour before he steeled himself to investigate.
Respect, he reminded himself. You need her to respect you.
So he kissed his wife, whose hand hadn't left the bulge of her abdomen in hours, whose eyes had never looked brighter or more frightened, and stepped out in the yard to see who was on the rooftop.
He’d barely left the porch when he was knocked off his feet by the suck of air caused by the back thruster blast of a Cylon Raider which had been parked in the house's front yard.
"What in God's name…?" Gaius took several running steps after it, saw it spool its FTL and disappear in the air overhead in seconds.
And then he turned back to the house, to see that the Raider-its pilot, anyway-had stolen, of all things, Bill Adama's weathervane, now only a jagged lightning rod jutting up from the roof.
He shivered, thought about it. Lee Adama would have recognized his thoughts. Because Gaius Baltar swiftly calculated that he, too, was standing on the sidelines of Kara Thrace's destiny.
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