Title: Portraits
Disclaimer: Not mine; not for profit.
Characters: Karl, Hera, Hot Dog, Tigh. And Kara Thrace.
Setting: post-finale
Beta: Tracyj23
Summary: Some people don't fade away.
At first, Helo can't believe that she's gone. He's never had much faith in the Lords, but the night after Lee walked back alone Karl dredges up the words from some deep recesses of his memory and prays for her soul. He and Sharon don't talk about it but early the next morning he hears his wife praying too. It's good, he thinks, though he's not so sure if it's right. Kara wasn't Cylon, but they're saying she might not have been human either. Karl doesn't really care what she was. Anyone who knew her at all should have realized that she was just Kara Thrace; she wrote her own godsdamned rules.
He remembers her, of course, long after her 'death.' Sights, sounds, or smells may remind him of some distant event they shared. Or something will happen and he'll imagine her laughing at him, hitting him, calling him an idiot. The things that would have made her smile are rare, and he's not sure how he feels about that. Sometimes he's glad because they hurt more than the other moments. Too many moments to count.
Hera asks about her. It aches at first, to answer, but when Kara's been gone nearly a year he realizes that he can't recall the last time his daughter asked after her favorite 'Auntie' (Kara would kill him if she knew he was thinking of her that way). The ache, this time, is fiercer than before and for a few minutes he can't even manage words, can barely think past the wrongness.
He needn't have worried though, because Hera starts asking again even without prompting, and from then on the 'Auntie Kara' talks continue, albeit sporadically.
One morning Hera leaves a picture (rudimentary paint on bark) propped against the entrance of their hut.
"For Kara," she says when he picks up her handiwork.
The paint is smudged and the colors garish, but the figure's outline is clear enough. There's a shocking mess of yellow around what must be the head, so Helo decides to call that hair, but it's the odd shapes springing from her back that give him pause.
Kara always had wings, but she was never anyone's angel.
Brendan 'Hot Dog' Costanza carries the photographs long after he carries the name 'Hot Dog.' At first, the faces of the dead are burning a hole in his pocket, and he tries to pawn them off on every pilot he meets. But he doesn't meet very many, and they take only one or two pictures, if they take any at all. He can't blame them. He doesn't remember all of these people, and he didn't like half the ones he does remember.
So he carries the pictures. He doesn't have one for her, but he doesn't need one.
Brendan remembers her most when he's struggling. Climbing a mountain, trying to catch some game, carrying heavy loads. Teaching Nicky. "What would Starbuck do?" seems like a ridiculous question, but he imagines the answers anyway. Race up that mountain. Bring down an elephant, haul her kill on her back.
And she'd do it all without a drop of fuel.
When Nicky starts talking more, he eventually starts talking about Starbuck. Well, not about her—but that name slips in, not a noun or a verb or an adjective, but somehow all three. Fierce, it means sometimes. Wild. Impossible, improbable, unbelievable, inexplicable...the list goes on. The list is just starbuck.
Nicky likes bedtime stories, and they get into a routine. Every night the kid picks a photograph and Brendan tells him a story about that pilot. Kat is a hit, which is good because Hot Dog has no lack of source material on that score, and he likes talking about her anyway. For some of the pictures Brendan can't summon any stories, so he makes those up. No one will ever know, right? No harm, no foul, he figures.
Brendan doesn't have Starbuck's picture, so it isn't until they've been on Earth for years that she comes up at bedtime.
"I've heard all these stories before," Nicky says one night. "Tell me a...tell me a starbuck story."
The request takes him by surprise, but the words are already there. "There used to be this woman," he says. "Pilots called her Starbuck, but you may refer to her as God..."
When Hera is twelve, one of the men in their little patch of life invents the first stringed instrument: a box-like thing with a few bits of animal guts stretching taut between pieces of wood. Hera learns to play, though truly there's not much to it. Once she's worked out how to make as many different sounds as she can, it feels like muscle memory (though she knows that can't be) to pluck out a single tune.
The notes burn like stars under her fingers and she smiles at the orchestra she can hear all around her, echoing as though from a distant opera house.
She knows she will not forget the song or the girl for whom it was written, the girl she never met but remembers like she did. Remembers not the innocence but the trust, the faith, and the fierce desire for living.
She plays the song for her parents, and when she looks up she sees them smiling, curving in towards each other. There's something in her daddy's eyes though, something solemn. Hera understands. He can't see the girl the way she can, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know.
These things matter, she sees in his eyes.
For Saul Tigh, Starbuck has always shown up in his life whenever she damn well pleased, never mind any inconvenience to him. Her being dead now (really this time, or so they say) is hardly much of a hindrance.
On this particular day the strap for his eye-patch finally snaps its last synthetic thread and the damn thing falls to the ground, worthless now. He kicks at the patch, but its brief trajectory is wholly unsatisfying. He sits down on a rock, though it's not an action so much as a surrender to gravity. They've been on Earth (the good one) for years, but the planet's pull still feels heavy on his shoulders, his limbs, his feet.
Maybe he's just going senile, but he doesn't know how long he's been sitting there when Ellen finds him. She asks him if he's alright, ignores his grunted reply and kneels on the earth before him.
"You don't have to cover it up," she says. And, "Do you want it to be covered?"
She holds the patch in her cupped palms, as though it were an offering. She presses it to the rock just beside his fist and rises up on her knees so that her eyes are level with his. She gently traces the socket with her fingertips and then with her lips. It's not the first time she's done this.
The anger is not unfamiliar. Ellen's touch feels ghostly, or maybe he's the ghost. Starbuck's presence is not exactly a surprise, but it's certainly not expected either.
Thrace has been dead and gone for years, but in this moment her memory is more real to him than anything else. He's not sure where he is but his throat burns—from whiskey or screaming, he can't tell. He thinks about Starbuck, about Kara, about dank cells and echoing launch tubes. About the way she'd been on New Caprica, just before those metal bastards took her. He thinks about when he saw her back on Galactica, after their frakking rescue when they returned to a ship full of people pretending it was all just some nightmare already fading away. He remembers that he'd seen prison bars in her eyes but that fight was still there just the same.
Starbuck is at his back but now Ellen kneels in front of him. Her eyes—both of them—are soft and far too merciful for his liking.
"Saul," she says. "It's okay, Saul. I understand."
Her hand vanishes from his sight but he can still feel the brush of her fingers against his skin. For a moment, all he can think is You're wrong.
It's enough to drive a person to drink.
Hera has many children. Four survive to adulthood, which comes early in this new world. Of those four, three reproduce. Of her ten grandchildren, Hera only lives to meet three, and of those three only one—a girl named Ama—is old enough to remember the meeting. These things matter, the old woman would say to her granddaughter.
When they're older, her brothers and sisters ask about Hera. They ask what Ama remembers of her, and she tells them. Their mother tells them too, tells them stories that Hera learned from her mother and father—stories about stars and journeys and warriors.
Ama remembers her grandmother's hands, callused and still strong, and her grandmother's dark curls. She remembers some of the stories too, even when her own parents have forgotten and it is a new generation eager for Hera's wisdom.
She tells her favorite story, the story of the Earth that was and how the Earth that is came to be. In the story, there is a woman. This woman flies to Hades and back, and brings humanity to this world in the wake of her wings.
"She was more than this world though," Ama says, recalling the way her grandmother's hands had held her as she told the story. Ama lifts her daughter into her lap. "She could not stay, but she is not lost."
Her name? the child asks.
"I..." Ama hesitates, concentrates on the memory of the strong hands and black hair. "Kore," she says. "Her name was Kore."
"These things matter," someone says, someday. "She was a woman, and she had wings."
fin