Author's Note: This was originally posted for the Second Annual Lee Adama Daily Ficathon. Thanks so much to sci_fi_shipper for her patience as I struggled to get it done. The opening quotation is from Rainer Maria Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy as translated by Stephen Mitchell. Thank you for reading!
Forever taking leave
Who has twisted us around like this, so that,
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers –
so we live here, forever taking leave.
Kara spent much of her childhood screaming.
She built emergency bunkers out of blankets and furniture, and often hid under the bench of her dad's piano. When he was home, she would plant him at the keyboard and crouch beneath it, holding on to his ankles as his feet worked the pedals. Sometimes she would cry or bury her face against the backs of his knees, but he just kept playing and it seemed to help.
Her mother thought at first she was attention-seeking. Later, after Dreilide left, she was a cancer. She'd broken down her family from the inside.
By the time Kara was six she'd stopped yelling, for the most part. When she was eight she put fake bugs in her mom's closet to make her scared for once, and Socrata broke her fingers with the closet door.
Kara was a natural blonde, which made the small patch of white at the back of her head practically invisible. But one day when she was kneeling in Temple, a ray of sunlight fell against her nape and one of the priestesses noticed.
"Your daughter has a rare gift," she explained to Socrata. "She bears the mark of Apollo. He has chosen her for a seer – she carries the brand of second sight."
"Are you saying…are you saying Kara will see the future?"
"It is not always the future that the god reveals," the priestess said. "For each prophet, the visions he sends are different. What is it that you see, child, that no one else can?"
Kara tucked her arms tight around herself, but her mouth pulled straight and defiant.
"I see dead people."
Kara was seventeen the first time she got into a cockpit, and eighteen when she saw stars through her canopy. She loved space flight. Ghosts, for all their persistence, didn't float. They didn't imagine themselves free from gravity or able to live without air. They didn't follow her, and the cold of the vacuum was a comfort compared to the chill that misted her breath on the ground.
Once she found her escape, she never looked back. Life on army bases could be harrowing – the war dead walked with shattered skulls, bullet-blown eyes and missing limbs – but the air and the space beyond were solitary. She logged more hours in the cockpit than any other pilot at the academy.
She couldn't dodge the spirits entirely, but at least they were soldiers. They usually didn't want a shoulder to cry on, and they did most of their business in the bar between shifts. Sometimes she had to talk them through trauma, sometimes they were totally oblivious and flirted through the night, but much of the time they just jotted a name and an address on the back of a napkin and Kara promised to send their love. That was all they needed from her.
She became a flight instructor, going up several times a day. Eventually, a laid-back student who started as a bit of fun became something more than that. The drinking and jokes and lazy fraks were nothing new, but somehow they didn't rub each other the wrong way. Zak was just…easy. Warm and relaxing, and she never realized how complications had defined her life until she found someone who kept things simple.
He had a brother, a pilot with a callsign – Apollo – that would have seemed funny to anyone less persecuted. As it was, she didn't make any jokes. When a god is already making your life hell, you don't provoke him.
Lee Adama came over for dinner two weeks after she and Zak got engaged. When she opened the door her skin prickled, pins and needles, and the polite smile dropped right off his face. He was a strange combination of formal and familiar, standing there. It made her grin, but it wasn't comfortable – he wasn't comfortable. Zak called him a cynic, but he had more going on than that. He drank some wine, talked politics, and let her pry pieces of him into the open. The pieces didn't match. His earnestness didn't sit well with his anger. It felt like he should be hard to read – like he expected to be – but he wasn't. Even though simple was what she craved, complex was what she knew best.
They understood each other very well, and the night got increasingly complicated.
She didn't believe in love at first sight, or in souls marked for each other by destiny. In her experience the gods left their marks in crueler ways. Their gifts were dangerous, whether you accepted them or not. Lee was, without question, such a gift. She half-refused and half-accepted, and so did he. It got them nowhere. Their lips barely brushed before they broke away.
She shook his hand and said goodnight, and spent too much time thinking about him.
She spent more time with Zak in the bedroom to make up for it, even though he needed every hour he could get in the cockpit. He busted three moves on his flight test, and she told herself that she was to blame. It had been unfair to take any time away from his training; it would be even more unfair to penalize him for her mistake. She passed him, and promised herself they would spend extra time practicing to make up for everything. After he graduated, he'd have a month's leave before he reported to his first post.
They had time. There wasn't a war on, and there were no ghosts in the air.
Lee was the first person Zak called to share the good news. He stopped by the next weekend in uniform and took the wings off his collar to pin them on Zak's. Zak brushed his fingers over them like they were made of solid gold. Lee slapped his shoulder and said, "Congratulations. It's a pleasure to be your superior officer. Get down and give me twenty."
"He thinks he's funny," Zak shook his head. "I would never, ever, in a million years, join your air group. It's in my paperwork. Right next to the line about preferred deployment stations, it says NOT the Atlantia. I got it notarized."
"You ruin all my fun."
"You want fun? How about I take you out for pyramid and let my girlfriend wipe the court with you?"
Lee glanced at her, wincing a bit. "Well, when you put it like that, it sounds…"
"Inevitable?" Kara suggested.
He laughed. It lit him up. She let Zak drive them in her old jeep – he loved swerving off road to joyride – and they wound up stripping to their tanks in a muddy field. They gave her a fifteen point handicap and double-teamed her, and still lost.
Zak wiped off his hands on her shirt, the jerk, then put his camera on the hood of her hummer and set the timer. He ran back over to wrap her up from behind, and Lee started to edge backwards, heading out of frame. "Where do you think you're going?" Kara called without looking. Lee stopped, a bit off balance, and the camera flashed.
When they got back to base, she taped the photo in her locker. Over the next week, she stopped too often to look. She could tell there was something Zak wanted to ask her, and guilt settled like a permanent itch at the back of her neck. But it turned out he was having doubts about his flight test, not about his brother.
"I don't want special treatment," he told her, and it was so generous and wrongheaded that she had to take him back to bed.
"You passed." She traced the shell of his ear. "By the skin of your teeth, but you passed."
After the accident, she tore the photograph in half and got alcohol poisoning trying to knock herself out before Zak would have a chance to find her. She couldn't face him. The thought of seeing the burns on his body made her feel like she was losing her mind. She wound up in the hospital, and an old man who'd died on the table during open-heart surgery kept shaking her out of her stupor to talk about his grandkids.
"You remind me of them," he told her, and around two in the morning when she started crying in exhaustion, he put his flabby, mottled arm around her shoulders and rocked her a bit.
When she got back to her apartment, Zak wasn't waiting. But the picture she'd ripped up – Lee on one side, she and Zak on the other – had been taped together. It was sitting on her pillow. She didn't know whether he'd meant it as a comfort or an accusation, but she took it with her to Galactica after the funeral.
Living on a battlestar, especially one old enough to have served in the first Cylon War, was much like living on an army base, except the ghosts were packed more densely. Some of them had hung on for forty years, still showing up for duty and perpetually confused to find their posts occupied. She set them rules against bothering her while she was on shift, and they respected those limits because military discipline defined them. She let them join her on her morning runs; they tended to talk her ear off. "Make a hole!" she'd yell, and the rush of cold they carried helped clear her path.
"Whaddaya hear, Starbuck?" Bill always called as she passed.
"Nothin' but the rain, sir," she lied.
Time had always passed somewhat strangely for her. Still, the two years she served on Galactica, before the brass stood it down for retirement, seemed long.
During the decommissioning, Lee dropped by the brig to play cool. She eyed him up and dressed him down, and as usual they got nowhere. If she'd known the worlds were ending, she'd have probably been nicer. She'd have tried to touch his hand, anyway, before he pulled it away from the bars.
The Cylons attacked, and she was good at war, except for the mission briefings when the ready room filled with pilots and she was too tired to figure out which ones were still alive.
She was on deck waiting for repairs to her bird when the Chief told her Lee was gone. It hit her so hard she wasn't safe to fly, so she walked to her rack and took out the photo Zak had left. She prayed. She prayed to all the Lords of Kobol, but in her heart she turned to Apollo and begged. Have mercy.
Two hours later she looked up from under her Viper and Lee was walking across the deck like he owned it. He was smiling and smug and a little bit invincible, everything that made most people dislike him on sight. Everything that kept her up at night; everything she'd never told him.
He might actually be alive. It could have been a garbled casualty report the Chief had told her about – that was more than likely in this chaos. Or Lee could have pulled a trick, saved himself with some retina-detaching move like she would have done. The gods could have been kind.
Or this could be the trick, right now, the horrible trick of her sixth sense – he could be dead and not know it yet, holding out his hand to her.
In that moment she decided she would never allow herself to find out.
She stared into his eyes and took his hand, but didn't come any closer. There wasn't a mark on him, as far as she could see. He'd just got in from flying, and the deck where she was working was relatively exposed, next to the outer hull. Maybe his hands were just cold.
"I hear you're the new CAG now," he grinned, raising an eyebrow at her.
"That's what they tell me," she shrugged. Then, more quietly, "I thought you were dead."
"Well, I thought you were in hack." He shook a little with laughter. She felt it.
She relaxed, suddenly happy beyond words. He didn't even look tired, and she'd never noticed the light in this room. It was white and clean on his face. She stood with him and talked about nothing until he pulled away to get back to work.
"Hey," she called after him. "Does your father know you're still breathing?"
He almost rolled his eyes. "I'll let him know."
Kara tried to do right by Bill by being the best CAG she could be; they didn't really talk about Lee, but they weren't talkers, the two of them.
She never assigned Lee to fly CAP with anyone but her. He didn't seem to find this strange, which was a bad sign, but she wasn't thinking about it. Maybe he assumed it was her way of flirting.
She almost lost everything when she tried to fight off a Cylon scouting party by herself and wound up stranded on an unnamed moon. She eventually managed to pilot a downed Raider back to the fleet, and once Cottle had bandaged up her knee and given her the good drugs, both Adamas came to visit.
"I guess I owe it to you that the fleet stuck around so long looking for me."
"You're family," Bill said.
"Sometimes we break the rules," Lee finished.
"I knew you'd never leave," she told them both.
On Colonial Day Lee made a crack about her hygiene. The sane response was obviously to ignore him.
Instead, she borrowed a blue dress and shaved her legs. She brushed her hair until enough static built up to give it a bit of volume. She got in line for a tube of lipstick that had already been passed around deck and rubbed it across her mouth in defiance of germ theory.
At the bar, she presented a mostly-bare back to the room and didn't turn until she felt him behind her. That prickling at her nerves, uneasy and strong, that was him.
It was a crowded room, but he looked like he couldn't see anyone else. He was flustered and gorgeous, talking nonsense, but he made his way to her with a knowing look that thoroughly suited him. He took her out on the floor, and she shimmied, and then he caught her waist and managed a basic sway. He was an awful dancer. It was a perfect dance.
Then Baltar cut in as if there were no one there with her at all. Lee disappeared into the crowd without a word, and Kara suddenly hated herself for not having the guts to face reality. She'd been living in limbo for weeks, cultivating every possible uncertainty. She was tired of fooling herself, but not tired enough to stop.
She frakked hard and pretended even harder, calling out Lee's name. She couldn't keep it up once Baltar was gaping down at her, though; Lee wasn't there, and she faced it. That was probably the healthiest thing she'd done since the worlds ended, but it only made her miserable.
She crawled back to her rack and heard the bane of her existence grinding his teeth in his sleep from the bunk below. He always did that. She lay down on her stomach, draped a hand over the side, and imagined she caught the hint of his breath on her palm.
His punch left a bruise on her cheek the next day. In the cabin of her stolen Raider she pressed her hand against the mark, made sure it didn't heal too fast. But that wasn't proof, not really. She could see the dead, she could touch and be touched. They weren't shades to her sick senses, they were flesh and blood.
If Lee touched someone else, that would be proof. But Lee wasn't the demonstrative kind, and Kara wouldn't see much of him for a long time, anyway. She was going to Caprica to chase down a different delusion. The President was pinning her hopes on a vision from the gods, and calling that crazy would've made Kara the worst kind of hypocrite.
So she was going to get an arrow, and possibly save the human race. She would need to keep those lofty goals in mind, because Caprica was gonna be crawling with dead people.
It was worse than she'd expected. It felt like coming home.
The ghosts of Caprica went about their normal lives, as most ghosts did. They worked in the high-rise offices and watched their kids play in the parks. But this time the illusion was perfect, because everyone was dead. It was normally jarring to watch the living share space with ghosts; their reactions to each other were never quite in sync. But here there were no survivors to unsettle the phantom routines. The city ran like clockwork, full of people who didn't find it strange that the sunlight had changed color or that the streets were littered with craters and broken glass. They didn't see it.
Some of the corpses were as gruesome as any she'd known, but most were spotless. They looked perfectly normal. Apparently – unlike getting shot – being reduced to your component atoms didn't leave a mark.
They could all see her just as well as she saw them, but no one was actually paying her any attention except the Cylons.
She went for the arrow, and that got messy fast.
When Helo pulled her up after her homicidal swan dive, she patted his arm and felt like crying. She hated meeting the ghosts of people she cared about; there was nothing worse. But then he pulled her closer – he was sweating, veins too dark under his skin. His body was fighting radiation poisoning. No one else on this rock even noticed the fallout; they were all long past harm.
He was still alive. That was so unexpected and made her so happy, she considered forgiving him for being a prize idiot. Then his robot bride stole her frakking ship.
"Nice family your girlfriend comes from. Charming culture, good values."
Kicking down her old front door was cathartic. There was a rotten smell in the apartment. Helo gagged and covered his nose, breathing through his mouth and making some joke about her cooking habits.
She tried very hard not to think about what else might have spread the scent of rot. If someone's dead body was behind one of these closed doors, she didn't want to meet it.
She pulled out a record chip and turned on her beat-up stereo. It was easy to close her eyes to the sound of her father playing piano, the way she had when horrors had still been new to her. She hitched a foot onto the dirty coffee table and wrapped a hand around her knee.
"Everyone I know, they're fighting to get back what they've lost. I'm fighting 'cause I don't know how to do anything else."
If she ever decided to be honest, patterns like that in her life would be worrying.
Inability to change. Openness to self-deception. Coincidental meetings with people you thought you'd lost. Familiar places that had changed little in the time you'd been gone. Loving a person you found reasons not to touch too closely.
These were classic warning signs; she'd walked a hundred ghosts through the same denial and out the other side. Those who lingered didn't know they were dead, and they only saw what they wanted to see.
If there was a body moldering in this apartment, it might be hers. She remembered being on Galactica when the war came, but death had a way of jumbling memories and skewing time. Had she survived the attacks? Had anyone, really?
"Let's go," she told her friend, grabbed the keys for the hummer and headed for the garage.
If her life were over, she would realize it when she was ready. If she was still alive, she intended to stay that way.
Sam was fun and hot, and gods was he tall. He looked happy enough to keep things simple.
"I can't handle anything serious," she told him upfront.
Sam laughed. "Shallow's good. I'm cool with shallow. You need some help with that?"
Kara pulled at her tanks, which had gotten stuck on an elbow. She tugged them free, annoyed. "I am hung up on a dead guy! A probably…a possibly dead guy. And it's pissing me off."
Sam put a hand on her shoulder. "I hear that. And I'm sorry. I hope you find him."
"Finding him's not my problem," Kara muttered, and after that they stopped talking.
It was impossible to get Lee to stop talking.
She'd been back with the fleet less than three hours, with Karl and an arrow and a Cylon in tow. Lee had so far kissed her, shoved her, insulted, annoyed, and made nice to her, and she was just about ready to kill him herself.
"You must have seen some…some tough things, back on Caprica." But even now, a part of her thrilled at feeling his weight shifting the fence links against her back. He was solid, in touch with the outside world. He could be alive. He could be. "I just want you to know, Kara, that I'm your friend. I love you. And if there's anything you want to talk about, anything you want to get off your chest – I'm here for you."
I'm here for you.
Kara's head tipped back a little, and her eyes slipped shut. That much was true, one way or the other. And she realized she'd needed to hear it, even more than 'I love you.'
"You can't take it back," she told him.
"You're dreaming it, Kara," he grinned.
Maybe so. She was coming to terms with that.
When they stood together in the Temple of Athena under the constellations of Earth, she felt humbled more than anything. Myths were becoming reality right in front of them; the gods were redefining possibility. She looked at Lee under the starlight and, for the first time in a long while, didn't feel any doubt.
Then the Pegasus arrived and put paid to her optimism.
There was no sense pulling her punches. "Your father's ordered me to assassinate Admiral Cain."
Lee looked gutted; he turned away and leaned against the table in the empty ready room as if he might collapse. (She always chose empty rooms for their conversations. He never noticed.)
She asked him to be her back-up, and wasn't that intimate, inviting the man she loved on her suicide mission. She wasn't sure whether the fact that he might be a ghost made it better or worse.
He took her hand, clasping tight enough to hurt. "People have to have this, Kara. Trust. Your word and my word."
"I know," she whispered, and pressed "thank you" against his neck as he held her. It was selfish, it was so selfish, but she didn't want to die alone.
When the moment came, he was waiting for her, and he caught her arm before they made the long walk to CIC. "Don't do this, Kara. My dad and the President, they're wrong. We can find a better way."
"I don't have time for this, Lee."
"We can't just…"
"There isn't a better way! Okay? I trust the Old Man, and he trusts me. He says shoot, I shoot."
She pushed past him. She'd got half-way down the corridor, sweating and slow, before he fell into step. He held his hands behind his back and she knew he was done fighting her.
"You don't have to come," she said, facing steadily forward.
"I've got you."
They were at the doors. Looked like she wouldn't be dying without him.
Cain picked up the call from Galactica and traded congratulations, a few of which she might actually have meant. Then she handed Kara the phone. "It's not enough to survive," Bill said, sounding tired but sure. "We have to be worthy of survival. That's all."
Death didn't work by equity or logic, and she suspected survival didn't either. But she was glad to go on standing with Lee behind her and nothing permanently resolved. "That's very wise, sir," she answered, and let go of her gun.
An hour later, Cain was dead anyway. The bullet struck straight through her forehead. She wore the wound like a badge of honor when she arrived at her funeral, facing Kara across the black coffin. Her gaze held steady through the eulogy.
"I know it may be hard to hear. But I think that we were safer with her than we are without."
Kara returned to her place in the honor guard, and as the airlock doors closed, Cain moved to her side.
Kara felt a brush of metal and a touch, light and careful, on her back. Cain leaned to her ear. "Don't flinch."
She stared straight ahead while the ghost faded from the corner of her eye. She glanced down to find a switchblade closed in her palm. She hardly had time to look at it before Lee's fingers were unfolding hers – the knife dropped to the deck with a crack only covered by the whistle of rushing wind behind the airlock doors. He was standing at attention in the officers' line next to her, but no one noticed as he wrapped their hands together.
"Just be glad we both made it back alive, okay?" he murmured.
She couldn't find a word to say to that.
Mining ore in the middle of an asteroid belt kept them pinned down for weeks, and Scar picked off her pilots one by one.
Never let it be said, though, that Kara Thrace didn't know how to make a bad situation worse. She took too much responsibility, tried to drown it in drink, and unsuccessfully dodged the poor kids who died on her watch. They looked so bewildered.
"I did it right! I turned into the attack!" BB told her, smiling tentatively like she ought to be proud.
"Have you seen my girlfriend's picture?" Reilly asked. "I'm sure I had it in my wallet."
She threw up on his shoes. "Whoa. You okay, Captain?"
"You don't belong here. Leave me alone!" They never did. It was pointless to shout.
The rec room was empty apart from Lee, which was a blessed relief, and they got buzzed, then more than buzzed. She needed the haze, needed her brain safely offline to make sure that if anything about him was wrong, she wouldn't notice. She kissed him and pulled him toward their racks; she wound up with a cold metal table beneath her and blamed her rising gooseflesh on that. She bit at him, frantic.
"Hey, slow down."
She couldn't slow down.
"Kara…this isn't a race. Kara!" He pulled back and stared down at her. "What's going on?"
Oh, they weren't having this conversation. She'd been desperate for him a minute ago, but there was nothing like fear to take the edge off. "What's going on?" she echoed. "You know what, I don't want to know. I don't want to know."
She shoved him off. "There is nothing…" she choked, "nothing here…" Wait, no. She didn't want to say that. Drinking so much had been a mistake. And he was here, he was here for her.
He sat next to her and tried to be sweet, so she told him about Sam to shut him up.
"You are fine," Lee pushed, "you are fine with the dead guys. It's the living ones you can't deal with!"
Unbelievable.
Kara hit him for that, then kissed him, then got the hell out before she told him something she couldn't take back. She laughed in the corridor and refused to cry in the ready room. She sat down and tipped her bottle and watched the last moments of another pilot's life caught for posterity, but only by camera. The frames froze on a scarred, robotic eye. That was the closest most people would ever come to looking death in the face.
With Kat's help, she blew the frakker out of the sky. Unsurprisingly, it didn't solve her problems.
She went back to Caprica to rescue Sam, because he'd been good to her and she was a firm believer in minimizing the number of corpses in the worlds. As soon as they were safe with the fleet, she made out with him right in front of Lee, who barely reacted at all. He wandered out once she stopped talking to him, a faint frown creased between his eyes.
She saw less of him after that, especially once she was put in command of the Pegasus. But on groundbreaking day at New Caprica he was there in the crowd, in the same tidy blues he always wore. He circled her discreetly all day and into the night, and once her buffer of alcohol was minimally in place she took him off to a deserted field.
"What if this is it, Kara?" he asked. "The rest of your life. Is this how you want to spend it?" He moved in slowly. "Is this who you want to spend it with?"
They loved each other in the dark, and if he was breathless, so was she, and her pulse beat so loud in her ears that there was never a chance to hear his.
He jumped up in the moonlight, punch-drunk and loud, and it was impossible not to believe in him. Then he knelt in the sand and looked her straight in the eyes. "I was afraid…to admit how much I needed you. How much I needed anyone."
"Yeah," she nodded, and she understood perfectly.
Was this it? The resolution he needed? Would she wake in the morning to find he had moved on?
She woke in the morning with her head on his chest, and the silence made her pull away before she could be sure there was no heartbeat.
She pet his hair and his chilly skin, put on her clothes and walked back to Sam. That had been too close. She had almost known, once and for all, whether he lived or died; that kind of knowledge could not be approached again.
She couldn't survive without this uncertainty. She needed to hope when she looked at him. So she hurt him and made him leave. It was different than letting him go.
She'd forgotten how well he held a grudge. It was more than a year before she saw him again, an empty year on the Pegasus living with the fear that she might have lost whatever hold had kept him anchored to her life. Then the Cylons found them, and she ordered the Pegasus to fight for New Caprica. They positioned themselves to block the worst of the offense, while Galactica picked off three Raiders in every ten. Her jump drive was near failing when she tore her eyes from the DRADIS and found Lee staring straight at her across the tactics board. He was in his flight suit, and he looked like he'd run all the way from the hangar deck.
"Kara," he said, eyes eerie in the blue light cast upward from the panels. "Jump."
She stared at him, breathing hard. Then she got on the horn to Galactica. "Admiral, we have to get out of here."
"We can't just leave all those people behind. They'll be wiped out."
"We don't have a choice. We need to get out of here right now. We'll be back, sir. We'll keep fighting 'til we can't, but if we don't retreat now, then it's all over."
There was static on the line for a long moment, then she heard Adama shout, "Start jump prep!" at his end of the line.
"Let's go, let's go!" she ordered.
Organizing the rescue took months; Lee was not terribly helpful. But that kind of project required her brand of craziness, not his. When they swung back into action everything went as planned. She only carried a skeleton crew, which made it easier for Helo, her XO, to notice the oddity. "Wait. Who's in Viper 3?"
She smiled, but stayed focused. "Firing pattern delta!"
After she sent the Pegasus to its glory and they were together again in close quarters on Galactica, Lee stopped pulling his vanishing act, though he remained stubbornly silent. She cornered him in the gym – she cleared the room with nothing more than a smirk – and they punched and kicked at each other until they collapsed in a heap on the floor.
"I missed you," she told him, panting.
"I missed you, too. I missed you, too." It was strange how he sounded the more broken of the two. She wasn't sure, but it made her think that she might be all he had.
"Do you talk to your dad much, Lee?" she asked, lying on the mat, staring at the ceiling.
"Of course. I see him nearly every day, and there's always work to be done. He doesn't…" Lee paused. "He doesn't have much time for heart to hearts. But if he did, it'd be weird, honestly."
Kara bit her lip, then sat up, aching. She leaned on an elbow and craned to look over at him. "Well, you might try telling him more what's on your mind. He might have time to listen, even if he doesn't have time to talk. You know?"
He looked up at her, still knocked flat. "Why Captain, that was positively sweet. Who are you and what have you done with Kara? She was here just a minute ago, trying to kick my teeth out."
"Don't make me hit you again."
"You couldn't hit me again if I paid you. Lie back down, there's no way you're gonna make it to standing. You'll just fall on me from half-way, and I'll be forced to resent you."
"Is that supposed to be a threat?"
"My resentment is a force of nature. Hear me roar."
Kara lay back on the floor and sighed. "I think you may be the most ridiculous person I've ever met."
"You've met Gaius Baltar," he refuted.
"Okay. Point."
They were good. No, they were better than good. The best they'd ever been.
After a show-down at the Eye of Jupiter, the Cylons didn't seem to be pursuing any longer, or if they were they were keeping their distance. The problems in the fleet were no worse than hum-drum overcrowding and a monotony of algae.
Lee kissed her with a passion and ease he'd never quite let loose before. He never said a word about the marriage tattoo on her arm. She suspected he didn't see it, but she never asked.
The only unwelcome disturbance to her sleep were increasingly vivid nightmares – she dreamed of Leoben and the ringed symbol she had painted as a child when she'd needed a calm place to go in her imagination. The image was no longer calm, but she didn't get truly upset until she began to see the circles while she was awake.
She'd had visions all her life, but they functioned according to clear and consistent rules. It was terrifying to be touched by the supernatural in ways she didn't understand. When she climbed the ladder to her Viper and saw her younger selfstaring up, she cracked.
She only saw dead people. What the hell was this supposed to mean?
She'd spent nearly three years playing mind-games with herself, deliberately loosening her hold on reality in order to keep believing what she wanted. It was a risky gamble for anyone whose mind was haunted and traumatized, and she might have gone too far. This could be the outbreak of insanity, and she'd brought it on herself.
The reason she'd done so showed up soon enough, and sank to sit beside her.
"Kara," he said. "Everyone gets rattled. Even the best."
She shook her head. "I'm not going out there. I don't trust myself."
"Hm. Then trust me. I'll fly your wing."
"Gods, Lee. I know that." She huffed a laugh, looking away across the deck in the direction he'd first appeared from, that day the worlds had ended and she'd made her decision about what to see when she looked at him. She turned back and caught his eye. "It's funny, you know. After all we've been through, we are right back where we started."
He tilted his head, inquiring. "What do you mean?"
"I made a choice here. A long time ago, now. I'm not sure that it was right."
"Did you think it was right then?"
"I wasn't sure then either."
He narrowed his eyes at her, but she couldn't read more in them than quiet confusion. He covered his mouth with a hand.
"What if...what if what I did was a mistake?"
"I don't know what you did, Kara. All I can say is that…well, I believe that following your heart is never a mistake. I hope that's what you did."
She closed her eyes. "Yeah," she managed. "That's what I did."
She started when he touched her face. He tipped her chin and kissed her. His hand came to rest on the back of her head, just where her hair streaked white. "That's all I ever do now, huh?" she mouthed, and his smile broke their kiss.
"It's all we ever do now," he corrected, and gave her a hand up to her plane.
"Hey," he called as she settled in the cockpit. "Be good."
"Kara, come back! Come back!"
Life and death were confused, tangled. She saw her mother, her mentor, herself. Waking dreams spread like weeds, too fast to pluck out, and she didn't know anymore which visions came from her gods. She'd let herself be pulled down a tunnel, too deep to climb out. She didn't know whether or not she breathed, or who among her loved ones she had already lost. Her mind was spinning, and she had to let it go.
Life was uncertain. Death was clear. Maybe the Lords of Kobol were guiding her.
"Lee…" she said into the static. "I'll see you on the other side."
Maybe Lee was already there.
She found Earth in her sleep. It was easy. She should have done this ages ago. She snapped a few pictures. It felt surreal, to be dead in her Viper, taking pictures. Not at all what she'd expected.
Then a comet passed, and a ringed planet, its rocks and dust beautifully suspended. Almost hypnotic, those rings. She slept again, which was not best practice while flying, but what more could happen at this point? Not much, in her estimation. There was nothing to worry about.
She woke again in the middle of a nebula. Pinpoints of starlight peeked through layers of pink cloud, and dead ahead she saw the blue engine flames of another Viper.
It was Lee. She'd know him blind, she'd know him deaf – none of her senses were necessary anymore, not even her sixth. Not for him.
She cut overhead, diagonal across his canopy, then eased back alongside to let him see her face. He looked at her like she was a revelation.
"Kara."
"Hi, Lee."
"No, no," he stuttered. She wanted to laugh. "No frakking way. I saw your Viper explode!" Just then, it seemed funny that she'd wasted so much time wondering if he was alive or dead. Those seemed like the wrong categories, now. He was himself or he wasn't. That was all.
"Don't lose me this time, Apollo."
"Oh, not a chance."
They banked into battle, fighting all the way home.
The moment her boots hit the deck on Galactica, her bubble of serenity burst. It was startlingly sudden, like waking from a dream; the inside of her head went out of focus. She remembered the peace she'd known and the places she'd discovered, but could give no reasons for any of it, no proof.
She'd thought when she crashed to the hard deck, she'd at least have the certainty of death; an end to the mind-games. But she knew the way ghosts worked, and she didn't fit. For one thing, everyone could see her. Unless they'd all become seers in the weeks she'd been away, she couldn't be a spirit. No one tossed a spirit in the brig.
"We're going the wrong way!" she screamed at the Admiral. Lee slipped in behind him, pulled his fingers off her throat, and knelt beside her to brush at her hair while she cried on the floor. It felt like someone had drilled a hole in the side of her head and the particles of blue-green planet she'd carried inside were seeping out.
"I'm not a Cylon," she told him.
"Of course you're not," he soothed. "I never thought that for a minute."
"Lee," she stared up at him. "I'm a prophet."
"Okay," he nodded, unperturbed.
"That's it?"
"What's to argue? Roslin's a prophet, too, you know."
"I'm not like her. It's not new for me. All my life, I've seen things."
"Things like Earth?"
"No," she whispered. "Things like dead people."
His hand stopped moving in her hair.
"You…you see dead people, Kara?"
"All the time."
"In your dreams?"
She shook her head.
"When you're awake?"
She repeated: "All the time."
He looked down at her, carefully calm.
"What are you thinking?"
"I…I don't know how to answer that yet."
"I could be mad," she acknowledged. "I've definitely considered that. Especially since I've started seeing other things. The old rules aren't working anymore."
He brushed a wisp of her bangs away from her eye. "You've been demented and deranged from the first day I met you. That's not the same as being crazy. You're inspired, and if you tell me it's divine, then it's divine."
"I was born with the mark of Apollo."
"Now you're just making this up."
She sat up, then stood, pulling him with her. "I need you to believe me. You can't help me if you don't believe me."
He kissed her – lips, cheek, forehead. "I believe you." He pulled her close. "I'm Lee, and you're Kara. The rest of it isn't worth a damn. Right?"
She closed her eyes in pure relief, and felt no need to answer.
She led them to the promised land.
The savannah was stunning in the afternoon sun, and Laura looked fragile and lovely in Bill's arms as he lifted her up.
Kara pulled Lee into the hug she shared with the Admiral, and they made their goodbyes.
She watched their Raptor fly away, and thought: no ghosts in the air. Spare them, please gods.
"He's not coming back this time."
"No, he's not." The wind caught her hair. "Neither am I."
There was no confusion on his face, no panic. Just understanding, so unhurried and deep it seemed unnatural. He'd figured it out, she realized. About her, about him.
"I needed to help these people," she said slowly. "I think I did. And now I'm done here. And it feels good."
Lee's face was tender, and she watched him shove his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching for her. "I used to think, when this was all over, I'd want to…I don't know. Explore. Climb mountains, sail oceans."
"And now?"
He stepped closer, and she didn't retreat. The hard lines of his body relaxed. "Why don't we sleep now, Kara? Does that sound all right to you?"
It sounded heavenly.
"Everything will be different in the morning," he promised.
They lay down in the tall grass together, and held hands as they closed their eyes.