Who says she's gone for good?
He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt his toes. The wind whistled around his head, screaming of guilt and regrets. He lifted his arm and painfully wedged his fingers into the next reachable fissure in the wall. There should be a ledge soon, he thought, judging from the preliminary examination he'd made from the valley. Just a few feet further...he could make it. Enough for today, then...he'd pitch camp and warm himself. Godsdamnit, it was frakking cold.
Climb a mountain, Lee...well, sure. But the adrenaline rush he got from pitting his strength against nature...it was the cure for what ailed him. Even the pain of the cold and the ice and the rock felt good after so many years inside a climate-controlled Battlestar. He'd rather take the bruising from a nasty fall any day than get shot again any day, or worse, take the emotional bruising that came from letting people too close. Here, he didn't have to remember any of his frakkups...it was just him and the rocks and ice and wind and the exhaustion of total physical exertion and the concentration of making sure to carefully choose each foothold. No abandoned pregnant girlfriend. No dead brother. No Olympic Carrier, no suicidal wife, not even, most recently, the bleak faces of Helo and Sharon when Sharon miscarried their second baby because of the lack of any medical support on this planet.
Best and worst of all, no Kara Thrace. Funny, that, because the thought of her coming with him had been one of the biggest advertisements for adventuring in the first place. Frak her, anyways. How many times did she need to leave him in a field all by his lonesome before he got the picture? Sometimes a guy just didn't know what he needed until he got it.
He pushed off the lower foothold with his leg and slammed his makeshift icepick into the rock and ice another foot up. Thinking about Kara wasn't smart, was going to make him make mistakes where one could be fatal. He'd thought he'd finally reached an equilibrium with those feelings...guess it was going to take one or two more trips to the ice before he got there for real. He'd gone through it in his head. She really was dead. That stupid frakking suicidal trip she'd taken into the Maelstrom, that had been it for her. Special destiny and all, she'd screwed that one up. Whatever second chance the gods had given her to live out her destiny and find them a home, that time had run out once she'd succeeded in that mission.
Finally, to have their chance taken away from them just when it seemed like nothing could screw up their third, fourth, he had no clue how many chances they'd had and wrecked before... that was the blow to the gut. He didn't think it should have mattered whether the gods thought they deserved another shot at fixing their frakked up relationship – it mattered that he'd thought their chance was within reach. It wouldn't have been easy for sure, but she was there standing next to him, they had survived the last battle, they were together, and it didn't matter how many dances it took to get it right, as long as you managed it in the end, right? Until he turned around and found himself in an empty field. Again.
He didn't blame her, this time, he knew she hadn't had a say in leaving him then, but gods, he hated the thought that her exploding Viper had really been the point when he lost her for good. He had blamed himself for that suicide to the point of wrecking his marriage, as much as he knew that she'd been screwed up long before he ever met her. At that point, he'd been all she had left, and he'd refused to leave Dee to be with her. Maybe he'd been afraid, but he knew he loved her more than he could ever love Dee, and he knew she loved him, and he'd taken the safe choice because he just couldn't make that leap of faith and trust her again, give her another chance to hurt him. And after that, there was no hope, no other family...nothing left for her. She'd never been afraid of death. It was the logical next step. It had been like redemption when he'd seen her flying next to him four months later, in that squeaky-clean Viper that they never quite got a fix on.
He had an analytical nature. Had been a real ally in the courtroom and in tactics, but frak, did it bite the big one at 3 AM when everything you've ever done is playing in your head like your own personal edition of Bloopers. It meant soul-crushing guilt and regret for his actions. It meant he couldn't let go of his tattered past. Two women whose love for him had been an integral part in their suicides, hell if he was going to take Ellen Tigh's advice and let her set him up with one of the Colonial girls so he could work his special magic on a third.
It was much safer to work out that tension on the unfeeling rocks and ice. And the ledge was within reach, and there was enough room to pitch his tent in the crevasse.
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