Title: Outside of the Inside
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Spoilers: through Torn, including Razor. Set in Torn when Kara goes to the head.
Summary: She is so frakking tired of hiding her sins and pretending to be whole.
Note 1: Thanks to tracyj23 for the beta. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
Note 2: The title is lovingly stolen from Richard Thompson's song of the same name.
Kara is jagged inside, pieces of her grating and crashing against each other, slicing her insides on nothing but shards of herself. It leaves her bleeding from a hundred invisible wounds.
She looks in the mirror and she wants to smash the face that stares back at her, wants for one second to be broken on the outside too, to wear her battle scars like Tigh and everyone else who has nothing to hide. She is so frakking tired of hiding her sins and pretending to be whole.
They say it is bad luck to break a mirror. Figures then that she must have broken many a mirror in her lifetime. Smashed an already broken mirror and used the glass to rip a hole in the neck of a Cylon that looked like a man. Shattered one in a drunken barroom brawl back when she had the luxury of such excursions. Her mother had crashed one over Kara's head once and the beautiful little pieces had rained down around her.
Caroline Adama gave her a hand-mirror at the wake; she said it would have been her wedding gift. It was wrapped in white paper, and the first time she opened it she saw her face reflected in the rich surface and she hated herself just a little bit more. She wrapped it back up and never looked at it again. She left it behind on Caprica, unwrapping it two years later while Helo slept in a chair fifteen feet away. She was afraid of what she'd see, but the delicate glass had warped and cracked and the face in the mirror finally looked like her own. In the end, that mirror got ruined too.
But the mirror in the head isn't like those others, and she's seen her face reflected in it countless times. She's thought about breaking it, about recreating that rain of beautiful little pieces. But that would be another seven years of bad luck, and she's a little bit wary of being thrown in the brig, not that it would make much of a difference anyway.
She still can't stand the sight of that figure in the mirror. Before she even realizes what she's doing she's reaching for the blade strapped to her leg. Everyone else leaves the head, turning their backs on her, just another angry shell of a person crumbling to pieces.
The knife is a familiar weight in her hand and as she clamps the handle between her teeth, she thinks of Kendra Shaw and Helena Cain and lives lived on the edge. She thinks that the person in the mirror was like them once until she fell and shattered like those mirrors. She's not a razor anymore, and this knife shouldn't belong to her, but it does and she'll use it, and remember them. Maybe she'll be stronger someday and maybe she'll be someone she recognizes again. Either way, she won't be this mess anymore.
As she tugs the blade through long locks of yellow hair she doesn't break eye contact with the figure in the mirror. As another stage of her life rains down around her she doesn't flinch.