It started with a ball in her hands - proud of what she had achieved through pure practice and the relentless need to have an excuse not to go home. Wasn't like she could hide at school - the teachers were on strike again. She threw the ball again - as she'd thrown it before again and again and… but she wasn't thinking about those times. Didn't need to. She was happy just standing there with the ball in her hands. Somehow throwing the ball was going to spoil that.
She threw it anyway, and it landed right on target. She was getting good. It was all the practice.
That was where it started. But now other things were creeping in. The ball was back in her hands, but her hold on it was feeble, small hands twisted, tiny fingers broken. She could look back at this with detachment - after all, once you've watched something done to you, experienced every moment of it, the pain afterwards isn't half as bad.
Her mother didn't like her playing ball games, but her hands would be healed by the time the schools opened again. The team's coach would frown at her bad aim, despite all that practice. Throwing again and…
She wouldn't be long off form, sitting in the cockpit of the Viper, ball now at odd in her hands, an alien object. The sky was flashing past, the ground rushing up to meet her as the parachute took her weight, and she wasn't sure if the lancing pain in her knee was from the crash landing that hadn't happened yet or from the day her ma kicked her until her kneecap broke, to be declared forever unfit for pyramid, ball heavy in her hands.
She saw blood when she thought of her mother, but she blocked both out - her mother and the blood - with thick-set doors her mind knew better than to touch.
Her coach looked at her with sympathetic eyes, stood on the loading bay door as she was lifted out of the cockpit. A silly stunt - her mother simpered from the sidelines - I don't know where she gets it from. The coach laughed. She was seeing blood again.
The ball in her hands was getting heavier and she couldn't hold it with her broken, twisted hands.
She felt it through every inch of her as she fell, and she sat up screaming.
"Kara. It's OK." No, no, not OK. Never OK. Every time she came back alive she'd failed.
"I just wanted to play." She sobbed, falling back onto the bunk, the Caprican sun feeling alien through the window. It wasn't true though. It had stopped being 'play' over a decade ago, when the Viper became the outlet for her passion. Everything had been simple for so long. She looked up into Anders' eyes and wondered when it had changed to 'I just want to die'. Had it been after Zak's death, or before?
More shockingly, she wondered when it had stopped being true. When having someone waiting for her to get home was enough to get her there in one piece. When the thought of them without you make it worth rushing to get back to them. When the thought of being alone was more scary than anything else.
What could she live on now, what would drive her?
Could she live for someone else? Could she take that risk again?