Into the Fire
It's the same dream as always, and somehow waking from it feels like slipping into sleep.
.
.
.
She's in the cockpit of her viper, the lovely thing that flies like she wishes she could--dances better than her own two feet can swirl her. It's pretty beaten and battle-torn, but that's only because it's hers. Like viper, like pilot. It flies, and that's all that matters.
.
.
.
All that she sees.
She's flying, but there is no battle.
"Why am I out here?" she mutters, but the com is only static. No battle means no purpose for good ol' Starbuck. The viper plunges deeper, it feels, though there is no depth in space...only expanse. Only darkness. Only silence.
The silence is a welcome thing. Despite how it may feel, how vivid the tear of the Cylon Raiders can be, there is no sound as the massacres take place. She is alive in the silence. She is vacuum sealed, safe and away from life--Life. Life is too complicated. Too dramatic. She can't even keep the damn mess straight. She has to screw up for anything to make any sense.
Kara shakes her head, and the pieces slip back into place. Silence. Yes, silence is all fine and good. Welcome, even. Silence is like home. But there is no movement, and it unnerves her. The loneliness of it. There is no movement by her, and the small viper is a sailboat out in space. She feels so alone--so much for the escapism of dreams. Always alone. Always special. Always pushing people away...
Kara focuses, and sees the tip of her viper is pointed for the epicenter of that picture. The one that haunts her, taunts her. Slipped in her mind like a drug as a child, she can never escape it. She knows what this is now. This is that phantom memory, and it pulls her in, pulls her deep into it's mystery.
Unlike the time before, when it actually happened, she takes the actions she always does in this frightful dream, this shadow of what she supposedly lives. It's different when there isn't the curiosity, and there is only the cold hard knowledge that she knows, that she knows how to save them all and they won't listen. They can't see.
She wants to escape it. She knows what lies there, and she doesn't rush to discover it again. She claws at her restraints, at the top of her viper, viciously trying to escape. The Leoben-who-isn't-Leoben whispers softly to her, "Embrace your destiny."
"Frak the damn destiny," where was she "waking" due to that frakking destiny? The outcast, misunderstood and insane. Following an echo. She cries out in frustration. Lee's only just behind her. She can eject, and he can..he can... she can stop this. She doesn't want the destiny. She never wanted this responsibility...but, like usual, no one asked her what she wanted.
"I am going to die," and I'm actually going to stay dead this time. There is no destiny. Her nails have torn through her flight gloves and now are being torn from the nail-beds in her frantic desperation.
"What is there to fear?" The faux Leoben asks her, calmly. "You know what lies between life and death."
And she relaxes, because she already knows what the dream is telling her. It has been telling her for night after night. It has taken her back to where she belongs. In the space between her former life and her death. It is where she is suspended, watching her new body move around, manipulating it from a distance. The new body, which matches the new viper. Too clean, easy to maneuver...too good to be real. She is back where she is real, where everything makes sense. She is locked in the dreams, the space between sleep and waking, the sliver of existence between life and death. But when she wakes, she won't be able to explain it to a soul.
And she knows, she knows she would do it all over again. Because she loves them. Because they are all she has, and they need a home. Even if it means dying again.
She exhales, and lets the gravitational force take hold once more. Back into the fire.