Every Sense

Disclaimer: I didn't invent them, I don't own them, I won't profit from them. Thank you Ron Moore, David Eick, Sci-fi Channel, et. al.

how we squander our hours of pain (scent)

She'd been dead three days.

That morning, after the service, Helo caught Lee's arm as he filed out with the rest of the honor guard. Lee hadn't spoken a word – his father had given the eulogy – and he had to rally his concentration to take in Karl's instructions.

Helo mentioned the auction of her belongings that would be held in a few hours. As they walked through the corridors, he urged Lee to set aside anything that mattered to him. He deserved to sift through her relics without competition or publicity. Helo would give Sam the same chance, and then distribute the remainder himself. Lee nodded automatically, distracted by the tear tracks that shone on Karl's cheeks.

His own eyes were dry.

Deposited in the empty bunk room, he stared at the jumbled mess of her rack – that last day, she hadn't bothered to straighten the sheets or close the curtain. He didn't move nearer. He already knew he would take nothing.

All he'd ever had of her he'd stolen. It was only right that now he pay, and pay.

He thought it might be best to simply leave, but he closed his eyes and tried to imagine what she would want. His mind was a tired blank, but gradually his thoughts turned to her family: to his father, and Sam, and Kacey. She would want them to have tangible comforts. Sam could choose for himself, but the old man and Kacey were depending on him. He crossed to her locker and opened it.

The photograph was still there – all his father's children standing together in summertime, five years and two lifetimes ago. By rights, it should hang on Lee's wall, where he would have to face it every morning. But there were limits to endurance, even his. The image bent neatly beneath his hand. He folded himself away, just as she had, setting aside the defining embrace to await a fresh frame. It could hold a place of honor on the Admiral's desk.

He had no idea what Kacey would like. He shuffled through a few music clips in the back of the locker, then caught sight of a hairbrush and tiny mirror on the shelf at the head of her rack. He crouched down, reaching for them. Too near the pillow, he caught the scent of her hair.

He could not have prepared for it. He'd already lasted through the flight back, the first night, the empty casket. Tracing the folds of the funeral flag, he'd thought himself tortuously aware. But the body was a mindless brute, and until this moment it hadn't really remembered her.

His throat closed. Strange sounds started suffocating somewhere in his chest, and he felt muscles seize and lock. For the next few minutes, unable to straighten up, he gasped unevenly into her pillowcase. When tears threatened, he turned his head and pressed a hand tight to his face, suppressing them instinctively. He wouldn't wash away the smallest trace she'd left behind.

He was no stranger to grief. He'd suffered terribly for Zak. The shocks of the first days of war lingered still – his mother, Gianne, the thousand strangers on the Olympic Carrier. But this was pain made new, the final loss made first.

He knelt by the bed and let himself react. After a quarter hour he could breathe again, and he shifted, slack, against her threadbare sheets. For a time, his lips moved silently.

Then he rolled to his feet, gathered up the brush and photograph, and left.

not by bread alone (taste)

He saw more of her once she got thrown in the brig.

The first hours of her return were overrun by faceless crowds and medical tests and endless unanswered questions. She offered the same shoddy story to all those who asked for it. He never did. His disbelief had hung suspended since that weightless moment when her ship found his, and nothing was worth touching ground again.

He came to her for prescribed visits – fifteen minutes of monitored contact, twice a day. He was lucky to get that much; he was a civilian with no real business here. Through the bars he watched her writhe, starved and desperate for her distant planet. Sometimes he hated Earth more than the Cylons for all it had done to them, and all it might still do. But Kara couldn't abandon it – it was part of her, its absence a physical ache.

She asked what he'd done in the time she'd lost, and he told her everything. She confessed in turn to the debacle with Roslin. She wouldn't say much about the Admiral's response, but a bruising thumb-mark bloomed at the base of her throat, and for a minute Lee felt as though he were young again, standing outside his mother's door, too furious to move.

But the anger passed quickly. Lee knew his father by now, and though the old man might rage and strike to wound, Kara was family. In the end, he'd break the rules for her.

It was Roslin they had to worry about. She'd been dying inside for a long time, though he'd been too caught up in his private miseries to notice. The president whom he'd served at the start of this war would have asked questions before she shot. She'd have considered new possibilities instead of defending one predetermined course at all costs.

But now the vultures were starting to gather; every alternative took on the appearance of dissent, and she had lost all patience.

He needed to be on Colonial One. For himself and the fleet, for Roslin and Kara and their chance at Earth. He felt a pull that faintly echoed Kara's absent grass and sky.

He made his plans, said his farewells, and one last time he entered Kara's cell.

He could do this. He'd hoarded his visits like breadcrumbs – each day a breath of her air, a flash of her hands, frantic but warm. When the time came to part, he had saved enough. He could live on such fare for as long as necessary.

Or so he thought. Then, as he turned to go, she said his name.

Her hunger justified what his had not. He bent to her mouth, and tasted.

to love another person (sound)

Kara had been drifting at the ass-end of nowhere for five weeks when a faint encrypted signal filtered into the Demetrius's range. Helo couldn't trace its source or decipher its code. He piped it through to Kara's quarters, and the burst of hopeful anticipation she'd felt dissipated immediately. The encryption sequence was the old phone number of Zak's apartment on Caprica.

"How the hell are you doing this?" she asked once she'd completed the code with her own defunct home number. "We're way out of comms range."

"Missed you, too, Kara." She could hear the expression on his face. After a second, he sighed. "I'm focusing the transmission through two white dwarfs – their density alters the curve of the radio waves and amplifies the signal." His voice turned wry. "It's an old hypothesis from War College. I didn't really expect it to work."

She rolled her eyes. "Lee, don't take this the wrong way, but I know you, and you're not that brilliant. I refuse to believe that you made technological breakthroughs in every homework assignment."

The light huff of his laugh was barely audible. "I never said it was my homework. One of my roommates was dating a science officer."

His voice sounded tinny and distant. "How are you?" he asked.

There was no good answer to that. She grimaced. "Frakked-up."

"What's the problem?"

Her grip tightened on the receiver. "I've lost the signal from Earth."

"You can't hear it at all?"

"I can feel it, in the back of my head. I followed it at first. We jumped out here. Then the feeling just sort of…" she groped for a physical metaphor, "…sank? It…settled. I thought that meant we were close. But we've been sending out scouting parties for weeks, and we can't find anything. No comet, no ringed planet, no constellations."

"Well, maybe that's not what you need to be looking for yet. Maybe you're supposed to wait there for a signpost, like the Eye of Jupiter was before. Have you seen anything?"

"Trust me, nothing's happened in this entire sector for the last month."

"No, I mean have you seen anything? Visions, dreams, whatever? "

She rubbed her arm, ill at ease. Then she admitted, "A comet. A red comet. I've painted the stupid thing all over my bunk. But there's nothing like it anywhere near here, we've done every scan in the book. And no suns about to go supernova, either."

"Well, you can't expect the gods to use the same trick twice; it'd ruin the effect." It was glib, and he should have known better.

"You know what, Lee?" she bit out, overloud, "I get that you don't believe in this stuff, but I wish you'd just stick to your guns and stop dabbling. It doesn't make me feel better when you humor me, it's just insulting." She shook her head. "I don't know why I'm talking to you about this."

She lowered the receiver. Though he was clearly taken aback, he must have heard the preliminary buzz of disconnection. "Wait!" he called. "I'm sorry!" Her hand hovered, and his voice dropped. "I'm sorry. Believe it or not, I am taking this seriously, and from what you've said I think you're probably in the right place. You just need to wait for a sign. That seems to be how it works. If the gods want to test your faith, then let them."

She bit her lip. "You say that as if you believed it."

"I do."

"No, you don't. Lee – I get what you're trying to do. But you can't switch off your brain just because you love me. I can't trust that."

The line crackled with his sharp exhale. "Kara…"

She frowned. She'd forgotten that it stole his breath to hear her admit to his feelings, let alone her own. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the sentiment, but this wasn't a long-distance conversation she was ready to have.

He seemed to arrive at a similar conclusion. "I've been following drug-induced visions for the last three years, okay?" he offered. "I honestly like yours better – I don't have to ignore a rational explanation for them, there just isn't one. It's less work."

Kara snorted. "So, you're saying that my craziness is more credible than the President's?"

"She found the Tomb of Athena. You came back from the dead. On the scale of mystical achievements, I'd say you're ahead."

"You have a very strange world-view, you know that?"

He sighed. "Not really. After the Tomb, I couldn't doubt the road to Earth without doubting my own senses. I was there; I saw what you saw. I had to accept that unknown powers were at work – but I didn't have to trust them. They hadn't done a thing to earn my loyalty." He paused. "But now they have. So long as you live, your gods can have anything they want from me."

Dread prickled through her. "Don't make oaths, Lee. Seriously, you don't know what you're talking about. Loving the gods isn't about getting fair trades." She didn't know how to explain, how to warn him without betraying her own hopes. "It's about…about trusting that what they give is never wasted, and what they take is never lost."

"That's what all love is about, Kara," he answered, soft and certain.

She heard faith in his voice, and didn't know what to do with it.

thou art the grave where buried love doth live (touch)

Kara returned to the fleet in a basestar, a definite step up from her long-ago Raider. Its ravaged, magnificent bulk outclassed even the pristine Viper cordoned off on the hangar deck.

Mystical missions in progress, the fleet in chaos, and Starbuck appearing in style – some things never changed. Yet after Kobol, after death, she'd come home to the rush of his arms. Without that jar of impact, it felt as though she were still away.

She made her reports to the Admiral. She caught half a glance of Lee around green curtains in the med center, then saw him reflected more clearly in the new self-doubt behind Roslin's eyes. When she'd left, the President had been immovable. But with Lee pushing and the gods pulling in the same direction for once, Roslin had no choice but to turn her head toward Kara, and to dedicate her last strength to convincing the people to accept the unthinkable.

Kara accompanied the Cylon rebel leader to Colonial One – this alliance had been their doing, and she assumed they would be accepted or pillaried together. Yet Kara seemed almost invisible as she took her place at the base of the conference table. The Six drew the eye of every delegate, save one.

After the speech had ended and the politicians filed out to do whatever it was they did, Kara confirmed the arrangements for security and then slipped quietly back to the conference room. Lee was sitting alone, sorting slowly through papers – he'd always covered stress that way, ever since the first week he'd been appointed CAG. His hands stilled as soon as she walked back in, a hint of silver catching the light. He rose and moved toward her.

"You still wear your ring," she remarked.

He blinked, thrown a little off stride. He glanced down at his hands, then back to her. She felt the brush of his gaze as it traced down her throat. "You still wear Zak's," he said. And it was true; that tarnished circle hung over her heart every day. He didn't mention the blue sweep of the vow staining her arm; he didn't have to. It was only skin-deep, but it would always be there.

They both acknowledged past mistakes in small ways every day – that much they owed to the people they'd hurt.

But they also refused to repeat them – that much they owed to themselves. And at this point, maybe they'd made so many mistakes that the only thing left to try was getting it right.

He pulled her close. "Welcome back," he whispered.

She tucked her head into his shoulder, burrowing in. But when she pulled back, she pressed her hand against his chest and something wrong had taken root in her expression. "I've left my mark, too, haven't I?" she murmured.

He stared at her blankly, and she pressed harder, two fingers jabbing into the line of his lapel. It took another minute for the gesture to click. Though she hadn't seen his bullet scar in years, he realized she'd pinpointed it through three layers of clothing with her usual precision.

"That's me," she told him, and tried to step away.

He caught her hand, shifting his arm forward and arching the heel of his palm against her touch. It felt awkward, like they were botching an old ritual, but he pressed her fingers closer until they dug into his wrist. She felt the thrum of his pulse.

"That's you," he said.

every day's most quiet need (sight)

In public – where they spent too much of life – Lee was not demonstrative. She'd learned to read his tells years ago: the tiny quirks of his mouth and cheek, the turn of his wrist or the dip of his neck that told her she'd caught his attention even when he appeared to be focused elsewhere. It had always been arresting, his silent language. Restraint touched her in ways nothing else ever had. She found herself more aware, more awake, in his presence. These days, when her own body felt like a stranger she was tracking from across the room, his familiar habits pulled her in close. At times, she imagined that both of them were living behind his eyes, while nothing moved inside her own.

When people swerved too far around her in conference rooms and hallways, she assumed they'd caught the hint of empty space.

It came as a surprise to see that some of his tells had changed. It took her a while to notice, but the brief flutter of lashes and the flash of his throat in involuntary breath definitely constituted a new vocabulary. Idly, she puzzled at it, and over the course of a few weeks in occasional proximity, she deciphered the reaction as a response to some scent. Her hair, perhaps, or the lingering oils that every maintenance shift soaked into her skin.

Since both shampoo and deodorant had finally gone extinct, with toothpaste soon to follow, she was glad he still found something to appreciate. Most denizens of the fleet were doing their best to shut down their olfactory nerves in self-defense.

Having discovered his new proclivity, she tried indulging it – bending her head to read over his shoulder, leaning forward with one hand on his desk. It was almost unsettling to watch his quiet, constant pleasure in such simple gestures. She distinctly remembered a time when it had been hard to make him happy.

Since her return, he rarely touched her. But the few times he'd abandoned restraint, he had buried his face in her hair.

She didn't know what it meant to him, and she'd never ask. But she let the pale, soft strands keep growing out; she wasted her last slivers of soap scrubbing them clean twice a week; and she trained her ear to catch the tiny hitches of his breath.

She'd been offered many identities since she returned: an angel, a harbinger of death, a Cylon. Perhaps all would prove true; perhaps none.

But he'd offered her Aurora – and here and now, she put light in his eyes.