Faith
Kara cannot find faith again.
She tries; late at night, wrapped in a blanket, eyes focused at some distant point beyond the bars of her cell. Kara looks for the positive point, the small sign from the Gods that everything will be alright. There is nothing. The pain medication confuses her, blurs the edges of the world and makes anger difficult. Depression sets in.
Fifty-thousand-odd people drifting through the empty space between systems with no place to go. Earth is a myth. A story that the survivors tell their children as they tuck them in at night. A lie to motivate the troops when most of them, if not all, want nothing more than to join lost loved ones.
Kara acknowledges that she does not understand Cylons. In her gut, she knows that she cannot defeat an enemy she does not understand. In her heart, she is not sure she wants to. Cylons are not toasters, they are alive. They are beings, almost human, with lives. You cannot program people, her friend, Sharon, like a computer. Sharon existed.
She wonders where the Boomers are. They are not here, with her, in the brig. Out an airlock already. Helo visited Kara once, right after the three of them had returned to the Galactica, but he did not talk about Sharon, or the child, and Kara did not ask. He brought her the idols from her locker, but Kara cannot bring herself to pray.
The Commander is out of life station now; Kara knows this because the guard told her when he brought her dinner this evening. The Old Man has not come to see her yet. Kara supposes he is re-establishing relations with the President (Roslin is not in the brig either) but she doesn't want to think about him right now.
Lee has not come. He will not come. If there is anything Lee can do well, it's hold a grudge. And perhaps she's earned his hatred this time. For leaving, and frakking up the plan, and all that came before that…
Kara has been alone for a long time. There isn't anyone to put her faith in.
She reports to the life station, as ordered, when Tigh releases her from the brig. He says very little; hands down her sentence –
double shifts on repair duty, flight status revoked until further notice
and sends her for a physical –
to make sure that knee will heal again, Lieutenant
and directly to her bunk after that.
Kara doesn't speak to anyone in the hall, even though several people call out greetings as she limps past. She is uncharacteristically co-operative with the medical staff.
blame it on the meds
They re-wrap her ribs and adjust the brace on her knee, then give her back her crutches. She is offered a painkiller and told to take it before she leaves.
can't have pilots committing suicide in the showers with hoarded pills anymore, we've put a stop to that
She hobbles back to Officer's Quarters, slowly, unable to balance without bracing her right crutch at the base of the wall each time she shifts it forward. Kara feels nauseated –
should've eaten dinner
and confused -
where in frakking hell is the hatch?
and then she is inside and the first horrible hour is nearly over. She ignores Helo's "Hey, Starbuck" –
he kicked that nugget out of his bunk
and refuses to notice that Lee's here, off shift, reading in his bunk, except that he's put down his book –
do not look up do not look up donotlookupdonotlookupdonotlookup
Kara eases herself onto her bunk and lays her crutches on the deck where she can reach them. Lee is above her now, she cannot see him. She manages to pull the curtain halfway shut and shove a pillow under her knee before motivation seeps away and lethargy takes over.
She does not sleep, but does not think either, and that's acceptable.
By the time her flight status is reinstated, several months later, Kara has a layer of engine grease under her nails that will not scrub out and Helo is the only one still talking to her.
He thinks he understands, and maybe he does, a little. He understands about Sharon, anyway.
Kara desperately wants Lee to understand. And Starbuck wants to have Apollo as her wingman again. But as long as she was on a repair crew, she is not his responsibility and he does not have to talk to her. And when her name finally appears on the flight roster again, he is flying patrols with someone else, and she is assigned a rook.
Roslin released a public statement exonerating Lieutenant Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace of any and all wrongdoing and admitting her own role in Kara's manipulation. So Tigh did not strip Kara of her rank or court marshal her for disobeying orders, theft of military property and desertion of her post. Kara is released from the brig and allowed to return to Officer's Quarters. Publicly, Kara is grounded until her injuries have healed sufficiently for flight, but everyone knows she is being punished.
A week passes, long patrols and routine maintenance. The Commander asks Lee and Kara to dinner in his cabin. She sees the anger flash across Lee's face, in the instant before he goes carefully blank, so she declines the invitation ("It's been a long day, and I want to put my knee up."). They have dinner without her. When the invitation comes again, Lee is on patrol and she sits through an awkward dinner with his father, unable to swallow around the lump in her throat, saying very little. Nothing feels resolved.
The Arrow is on display on Colonial One, and there is a daily shuttle service – even all this time later – for people who wish to go see it. Now that she is off probation, Kara could go, but she doesn't, and wonders why others do. The Arrow wasn't helpful. They've left Kobal behind with no more idea of where they're going than before.
Besides, she's seen it already.
There is a skirmish with a Raider – probably a scout for a basestar – and the fleet jumps again. No pilots lost, but one of the civilian ships doesn't make the jump. When the Vipers are ordered to stand down and Kara is released from alert status, all she wants is a hot shower.
She stands, hands braced on either side of her in the stall, and lets tepid water run over her back. Hot water was hard to come by in communal showers long before the days of rationing and fuel shortages. Absently she eases her knee slowly up and down. She was on a long patrol before they went to alert status and her knee still stiffens up if she's in the cockpit too long. It might not have healed as well the second time she frakked it up, but she isn't going to ask about it.
Kara shuts off the shower without bothering to wash her hair, and puts on a clean set of tanks and some sweats. She completes the motions by rote, and when she is dressed and lying in her bunk with the curtain closed, she can't quite remember how she got there.
Too much of her life is like this lately. Too many things forgotten. She's tired, more tired than she's ever been before, and she wishes for those first days of war when all the did was fight and run and she had the adrenaline to carry her through – I want to die quickly, not like this –
When she wakes up, Lee is sitting at her feet, and the bunkroom is empty. She twists her head around to see the time, but she isn't late for patrol. She looks back at him, but cannot see his eyes in the darkness and doesn't know what to say now that he's here.
A minute passes, then another. Finally, "I'm tired," he whispers, "and it's only a matter of time before – "
She sits up in a rush and reaches for him, one hand grips his shirt as the other propels her off the back wall of her bunk. It's alright for her to think these things, but she cannot listen to him say them.
She pulls him close and feels his arms come around her back, tightly, desperately. Lee has always been steady and sure. Kara needs him to be steady and sure. Confident, when she is faking.
A fine tremor moves through his body, and Kara falls back, so that he has no choice but to lay down with her. His fingers tangle in her hair and he inhales against her neck, and Kara lets him, because she's missed this too, and there's no point in being angry when it's the end of the world and the end of your lives and there aren't a lot of comforts left.
Lee doesn't say anything else, and Kara prays for him, and thinks maybe this is faith, because she doesn't want to die.