"This has got to stop. These visions. I've got to find out about these visions. Will you help me?"
"Yes." Kara's eyes are wet, red with exhaustion, anguish and the knowledge that Laura Roslin really doesn't know her at all. "Gods, why is it always you?" she bursts out, sinking into the chair by the bed as, strangely, her fury suddenly leeches the strength out of her bones. "The old man has a handle on me. Lee…well, I have a handle on him," she admits with a short-lived burst of her old smirk, the one that Laura hasn't seen in months, the one that is giving her pause, now, because she would have sworn to any gods she managed to call up on the other end of a prayer that the Kara Thrace who had the world on a string, and knew it, was no more.
Kara continues with excruciating bitterness. "But you still think I'm a Cylon. Or a Cylon creation. Like a pet." She stands and walks to the edge of the privacy curtain, facing the clean, blank cloth. "You know something? When you look at me like that, you remind me of my mother." Her hand reaches out, grasping a handful of the curtain, twisting it, wringing the smoothness out of it. "That superior, pitying look. I'm just dirt under your feet, and that can never change, and why don't I realize it? Poor, stupid little Kara, still pathetically trying to be worth something." She pauses, momentarily indecisive over unlocking the rusty gates that will swing open on her younger self. 'Oh, what the hell.' The day she disappeared, Leoben saw the whole godsdamned show, and the resentment churning inside her now is nothing to what that son of a bitch put her through. She spins on her heel, lets the curtain brush reassuringly against her back. "The day I found out about my mother's cancer was the day I came home to show her my pilot's uniform; I'd just qualified. Gods, I was so proud, thought maybe she would be, too—a pilot, like her. She just sat there, smoking that cigarette, illustrating just how big of a rat's ass she didn't give. She was just sitting there smoking while cancer was eating her lungs, telling me to mind my own frakking business. I screamed at her that she could sit there every day, looking at that door, knowing that I was never coming back through it. And then I ran out of there so fast…"
She barely notices the tears scalding her cheeks. Simultaneously playing warden to her emotions and her secrets is a Sisyphean task of which Kara Thrace cannot remember ever being free, but what she has always admired most about Laura Roslin is her ability to stand the world on its head for its own good, and this moment is so right and so upside-down. "I don't know if going back would have been any use; I don't really think it would have changed anything. But I wish I had. So maybe it would have changed me, made me a better daughter, or just set a precedent I could have followed for turning to face things instead of just…running. I don't know how I made it back to Galactica that day, and I know you don't trust me, and I can't keep ignoring these things, hoping they'll just resolve themselves. I need answers, too; maybe the Hybrid has them, maybe not. There is one thing I've realized, though, and that's what I see when I look at you."
As an echo, Kara raises her eyes from the foot of the bed to Laura Roslin's face, and the spark of suppressed hope under the curiosity is what gives her the courage to answer when the obvious question follows: "What do you see?"
"A dream," Kara says simply. "Your dream for our future, the one you gave us. I believe you are the only one who can save this Fleet, this species, from the Cylons and from ourselves. And you are making your disease a part of that, using it for something. I know how easy it would be to let it define the rest of your life, to be just a dying woman, because I've seen that. And I know you can't do it. And if you could really see me, you would know that I can't be just a thing that looks, walks and talks like Kara Thrace."
Laura laughs, surprising both of them. "If it quacks like a duck…"
"It's a damn good thing I already have a call sign. Gods only know what the viper jocks would make of that one," Kara muses lightly.
Laura lets out a long breath. "The truth is, I don't know who or what you are, but I'm also not sure that it matters anymore. I can't afford to keep blocking your every move—there's too much at stake. We're traveling on the same road; we might as well walk together. And I do believe you can help me find out about the opera house. If you were a Cylon, it would mean you'd have a double dose of investigative fervor. And if you're Kara….gods, if you are Kara…then you're not only a resource, but a gift." She reaches out and wraps lean, trembling fingers around Kara's wrist, pulling her to the bedside. "My turn to tell you a secret—the reason why I convinced myself you couldn't possibly be Kara Thrace, miraculously returned home. I mean, aside from the improbability of our dead walking among us again. Lee was blind to all of it—if there was a simple explanation, he was going to take it. He was only too happy to believe you somehow survived the viper's sudden explosion, got knocked on the head, forgot two months of your life and popped back up out of the blue as if you'd just been on a little pleasure cruise."
Her eyes have drifted off, and Kara wonders what it is that Laura is actually seeing. "Bill wanted so badly to believe it, but in spite of the conclusion you drew, it wasn't my influence that had him doubting you. He couldn't take the risk. Not with the Fleet…with his heart. If he allowed himself to embrace an illusion, only to see it melt away into a Cylon ruse, I think it would have broken him. I reinforced his doubts with my own…to help him protect himself. To give him that strength. As for my own doubts, well, I had reasons similar to his"—Kara's head jerks up like a marionette's, eyes refocusing in surprise, and Laura gives the other woman's wrist a gentle squeeze of confirmation—"but the really bitter pill was the alternative route to Earth, the one I had nothing to do with, or I should say, the one that had nothing to do with me. I believed—I still believe, have to—that my cancer is part of the prophecy about leading these people to a new home. It was diagnosed the same day that the Colonies were nuked, and it's in Pythia. It can't be meaningless." She is back now, in the sickbay bed with Kara perched on the edge, but it is the President speaking. "I will not allow your little joyride to negate everything I have tried to do, everything I have done to keep humanity safely on the road to its salvation."
"And everything you've suffered. That's what you really mean, isn't it? Your pain and your death have to get us home, like some kind of marketplace trade with the gods—divine jet fuel. I told you, Madam President: you are getting us there. But is there anything in Pythia that says the gods can't send you a little tune-up when you stall from time to time? Is there anything that says this trip is a straight shot from A to B? I'm not a prophet, and I don't believe that the breadcrumbs I brought back are an 'alternative route.' I think they're a part of yours. Not much different than speeding off to Cylon-infested Caprica to dig up the arrow of Apollo, only this time, you didn't send me: something else did. And it was Leoben & Company who delivered the next piece of the puzzle. Doesn't mean any of it was in service of a different mission."
You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end.
Kara swings her legs up onto the bed and leans back; she tells herself that her ass is getting numb, balanced half-on, half-off the mattress like that. "I don't know where all of this is leading, or what we're supposed to do with a bunch of Cylon allies. I do know that I can only see the path one stepping-stone at a time, and none of them so far has spelled the destruction of the human race. We find the Cylons, we lose them, we find them again…it's like our journey is some kind of spiral, with Earth at the center, and we are not separate pathfinders; we're all moving together along those invisible lines. Meanwhile, whether or not you're the one finding the clues, you are always the one preventing humans and Cylons from blowing us all to hell and ringing the curtain down on human history. I'd say that's a skill even more important for a leader to master than walking at the head of the line."
"And if these visions are some sort of test? I don't solve the riddle, I fail, and we never make it to Earth?"
"Or you die, and we make it without you. Or we all die. It doesn't matter, as long as you follow the signs, the path of the gods, whatever you want to call it. Go where it takes you. And all of us will follow. Separately or together, we will all follow you. That's the only way we will ever find a home."
They are facing each other on the pillow, and Laura slips off her glasses to search Kara's eyes, as if she were peering through someone's front window. "You really do believe that."
Kara swallows hard, again losing dominion over several tears. "Always did."
The real Laura Roslin, the one who surfaces when she lays down the President's mantle, prefers silences to words, looks for truth in the absence of verbal distractions, and her prodigal pilot's eyes are telling her the truth. She reaches out, lifting a few blond strands out of Kara's face, and a flash of memory blinds them both: Bill Adama, unexpectedly materializing on Kobol, greeting Starbuck as a long-lost child, brushing away both their sins with one stroke, settling her hair behind her ear. Where it belongs.
"Do you believe in penance?" Kara whispers. "Atonement?"
"Not really. Where there's no forgiveness, atoning for a sin is impossible, and when forgiveness has been granted, it's unnecessary."
"And…if I don't know, one way or the other?"
Laura smiles softly. "Then you live with it. That's as good a penance as any. And don't make the same mistake twice. There's atonement."
Kara's answering smile is warm and satisfied. "Ok." She allows her eyelids to droop and curls her limbs more closely together, and Laura's last thought before she, too, lapses into slumber is: 'I wonder what Doc Cottle is gonna make of this.'