Title: To Call Your Own
Disclaimer: Not mine; not for profit.
Word Count: 538
Author's Note: This ficlet was written for a ficathon at the livejournal community karathracelives over a year ago. The prompt was "battlestars i have known." I recently rediscovered this piece and decided to post it here.
When you get your first battlestar posting straight out of flight school, the days until your new assignment seem like a curse.
Hotshot, hot to trot, you've been called. Starbuck, always bursting her britches (and other people's too). You have an eager fanbase waiting for some spectacular exploits to spread far and wide throughout the fleet. Who are you to disappoint them?
The Triton wasn't your first choice, but you figure a battlestar's a battlestar, and these days in between just cannot pass quickly enough.
As soon as you set foot on board, you know you're going to hate the LSO, and the CAG, and probably the XO too for good measure. That's okay—they'll probably hate you too and it'll make life a lot more interesting. You've got your bag over your shoulder and as much swagger in your step as you can manage while the NCO leads you to the bunkroom. Girl's gotta make an entrance, after all, and it's just a shame you had to hitch a ride on that hunk-of-junk they call a Raptor.
From that moment on, you make this battlestar your territory. Your time on the Triton is about moment to moment, going from one event to the next and ignoring the time in between. You define your stay by your first flight, first full colors, first frak and first court martial. It's about the stunts you pull and the stories you know are trickling through the ranks. You don't write to anyone back home and no one writes to you, but you never have time for that bullshit anyway.
You may not have friends on the Triton, but you do have cronies, which you think you prefer.
The court martial is an annoyance that caps your posting at one year, but you always wanted to go out with a bang. The Triton won't forget Kara Thrace, and you won't forget the Triton either.
Two years later you board the Battlestar Galactica. It's not like before, but that's okay. You're not like you were before either. Galactica's old and battle-scarred. You feel a kinship with the old girl that eases some (though not all) of your loneliness.
You spent a year on the Triton, a year of flying, laughing, frakking and frakking up. You did all of those things on the Triton but you think maybe you lived on the Galactica.
The worlds end and you and the old girl keep on living.
Your time on the Pegasus never seems real. Every moment there is just counting down until your inevitable return.
The war's been going for two years now, with no end in sight. You've taken up space on seven of the Twelve Colonies, plus New Caprica to boot. You've known eight worlds and three battlestars, but only one of them has ever been your home.
You've lived there and you expect to die there (or flying with its patch on your shoulder). You're sort of right in the end. Pilots joke that Elysium wouldn't take you and Hades kicked you out, but you don't say what's really going through your mind. That you just can't let Galactica go. And you're Kara Thrace, who sees everything through to its bitter end.