Takes place during Home: Part I in Season 2. I wanted to try to examine thoughts and feelings Kara might have had following her Caprica experiences in conjunction with "the kiss" after her return. First BSG fic, hope it's suitable.
In the short time she'd been on Caprica, she had let herself come to care for Anders, which was a mistake if there ever was one. Hell, she mused, she could probably even love him, if given a long enough leash and the proper chance to try. But then Lee had kissed her like that on impulse, and she had felt two seconds of electricity and pure bliss flood her senses and her heart and her brain. So good, and so damned right.
Sure as shit there was something about those frakking Adama men that made her feel thrown on a pedestal and ground beneath the heel at the same time. First Zak, then the old man, and lastly Lee. They each had claimed her in turn as their own and fought with her and withstood her, and all the while the love they poured into her soul fought a losing battle against the impossibly sad demons of longing and desire. She yearned to be able to fully claim the Commander and, more importantly, his surviving son as they had her, but her past and her mistakes with Zak and now her living hell on Caprica shoved her further away than she'd ever been.
She mocked him with typical Starbuck sarcasm after he told her he loved her, her lips curling up into a smile that disappeared the instant his steps had faded away. Damn if she didn't want a smoke. Instead, still fiddling with the Pyramid ball, she wandered until she found an empty store room in some dark and musty corner of Zarek's godforsaken prison ship. Sure no one would find or even think to look for her there, she backed into a tight gap between two crates, wrapped her arms about her beaten body, and laid her aching head down on her drawn-up knees.
The tears came then, and she let them fall freely down her cheeks, chalk white from loss of blood and who-knows-what the frakking Cylons had done to her on Caprica. They weren't for Zak being dead or for Sam probably being dead soon or for the old man almost being dead, and they weren't for Lee either, not exactly. More than anything they were for her. For the first time since the attack, she wanted nothing so much as to pull a partner towards her in life instead of pushing one away. She wanted to forget about Anders and tell the old man he was the father she'd have liked to have had all along. She wanted to let go of Zak and hang on tighter to Lee, to go to him now and tell him she loved him too and to frak his brains out until there was no question in anyone's mind that he was as much hers as she was his.
She cried because now more than ever she knew that she couldn't and shouldn't risk a relationship with Lee, and she cried because Caprica was to blame. Going back had ripped her open and drained every last bit of her down to the dregs. Being home again; finding out about Sharon; playing Pyramid; fighting for survival at the farm; essentially murdering Sue-Shaun and all those other women …
She cried because all of it made her feel exposed and powerless for the first time since she'd escaped her mother's tainted clutches, and worse still, it seemed to have opened her mind to Leoben's poison. She didn't think it was fair to push herself on Lee when the frakking Cyclon's toxic voice kept returning to her, silky smooth and so damned self-assured, intoning again and again of destiny and being special. "Cry for now," he whispered, "but we're all God."
She cried because now, when she felt she might finally be ready to allow herself to want and love her almost-brother, she didn't think it fair to expect him to share his love with her.
She cried because she had changed too quickly and completely, and because it had now become impossible not to realize that she would not live to see the end of this war.
She cried because she had never wanted to before now.
- fin -