Set the Fire to the Third Bar
Disclaimer: All characters, plot lines, etc. belong to SciFi Channel and Ron Moore, et al.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Kara/Anders (and Kara/Lee if you tilt your head and squint)
A/N: Spoilers for everything in Season 4.5. Also, quotes in italics are from Milton's Paradise Lost.
Kara never questioned his love for her, even after she knew what he was (less than flesh). Anders had not felt their relationship deserved questioning before he heard the signal. They were two pilots fighting on the losing side of a battle—it hadn't seemed very complicated.
She lived between two poles: fight and frak, and he'd enjoyed following her erratic path between them. He felt like he had only known her in transition. Anders was driven, determined, calculating, and he hoped he provided some sort of stability and a sense of "something greater" (the two of them) that she had never really had.
Now he heard only the hollow emptiness inside his own head. He looked for something to fill it. He hoped she would tell him important things about themselves. He knew he was many but he began to feel alone. She was one in thirty-nine thousand (maybe), but she was fulfilled like that.
She was always coming home, and he was always going farther away.
They were warriors, every day dying and resurrecting. Anders had never had to think about things before. He had been trained to fight, and he lived every day like it was his last. He loved Kara fiercely. When he lived to come back to her another day (and she likewise, he frequently forgot), he loved her even more. That was how things were.
Her death (or lack thereof) had been simple.
He mourned her in textbook fashion. He got drunk and wandered the battlestar and commiserated with her (sometime) fling and wept over the only thing he had of hers, a photo, that he gave up so that everyone could see her and remember. He kept flying.
When he thought of her, he spent most of his time thinking about that one day and night they had on Kobol. They had played among the ruins; they stopped frakking and started making love; he gave her the necklace and a promise, and there was nothing but Kara and Anders in her eyes.
Somewhere along this path he used to call "living his life" he found out he was a Cylon. He started wondering if that path was a track; maybe his life was only running on so many silicon wires. Non-living things could not own property; that picture of Kara had not been his to give to the fleet.
He had nothing. Then she came back from nothing.
He came back to himself the moment he shot Gaeta. It was, after all, the blood that did it.
Whatever he was or had been a hundred years ago, there was blood on the ground and hot metal in his hands, and he had put fear in their eyes. He had a hard time looking at Kara then because he did not want to see the fear in her, too, not while he was thinking things through.
He shot one of them.
A year ago he would have thought of it as having shot "one of his own", because he was a damned good pilot who shot in front of him, not to the side. A week ago he would have thought of it as having shot "a human," because that was what he was programmed to do, after all (maybe). Today, he was deciding between what was right and what was wrong.
And when he looked at Kara, he saw the fire burning brighter in her eyes, getting closer to the both of them.
They had only so much time. Gaeta and Zarek and whomever was deluded enough to follow them would break Galactica open before they would allow the resistance to succeed.
Kara had tilted her head at a funny angle to regard Anders. "I guess this is where you ask yourself, 'Where do I fall in line?' huh?" Then she snapped a clip of ammunition into the gun she held lightly in one hand.
He nodded. His hands were empty. He watched her load weapon after weapon. He said, "I don't have to wonder what you're planning on doing."
She raised her eyebrows and bit her bottom lip, keeping her eyes on her work. "I have to wonder about you, though, don't I?"
"N-no. Kara. You never did. I never questioned your decisions." He sighed.
She flicked her gaze up at him, slammed a cartridge into a hand gun, and shoved the weapon in the hem of her pants. "You were never one for rhetorical questions, either. So, what's it going to be?" She took a few steps toward him, and even though she looked him straight on, he could tell she was listening for the footsteps of someone else.
"Let's do this. Let's end it." He reached out, instinctively wrapping his hand around the handle of the rifle she handed him.
"You were always the best, Sam," she said. "No matter where you came from."
This time he was the one to take a step toward her. "I never doubted you. I always knew the real you. I still do."
Then she had pushed his arm aside and was pressed against his chest, was kissing him deeply and unlovingly (because, he thought, they were too much united now to have things like relationships stand between them) and he forgot everything, like the feeling of skin against metal and plastic, the presence of others, the future of hellfire and black abyss, and he kissed her back. Same.
Some of the other pilots would come, he was sure of it. Lee Adama would momentarily appear and forget about being a politician (they all would). It was not about humans versus Cylons anymore; it was about existing or not.
And if he and Kara were together, he had no fear of not existing. Fire never dies; it only disperses into space.
O shame to men! Devil with devil damned
firm concord holds; men only disagree
of creatures rational, though under hope
of heavenly grace, and, God proclaiming peace,
yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife…
He was with her on Earth. Somehow he knew the body he had known was elsewhere, or he had gone elsewhere… at any rate, he was with Kara, on Earth, and she was telling him Important Things.
He had been human, after all. He could not come back to the planet, beautiful as it once had been, and feel like this and not have once been human.
It had all happened before, and it would all happen again.
"Unless we do something to stop it," he finished for her. He was staring into her eyes and not staring into them. She was far away and she was not. He was metal and he was not. He didn't altogether dislike it.
"When were we ever meant to do anything this big?" she asked him. It was an honest question.
"When did Kara Thrace ever stop to question authority before she did what she damn-well wanted?" he countered. Question for question, philosopher king and queen.
She grinned widely. She was the Kara he knew, then. He could feel himself drifting in and out of this Earth, begin to feel the location of his body. "I never wanted anything this big. I just wanted to fly."
"We'll get to that. Tell me what to do."
He opened his eyes. He was on Galactica. He had been shot. He was in the hospital bay. Kara was not at his side, but there they were. One. Two. Three. Four.
She still felt closer to him than they.
The world was all before them, where to choose
their place of rest, and Providence their guide…