To Face The Future
By: walkingdaydream
to abandon expectations
The first early shift CAP has just finished its second sweep when Apollo and Starbuck launch from Galactica's port side. Launch is always exhilarating – near painful acceleration from the relative safety of the Battlestar into the freefall unpredictability of space – but is doubly so this time. Kara is at his side for the first time in years, handling the Viper like she's never been away. He hears her laugh over the wireless, a soft chuckle, obviously pleased with herself.
Lee can't help but grin. It's not the disaster his father and Tigh were expecting. She won't need retraining, or even a probationary period before she's off the repair crew and cleared for flight status. The routine pre-flight check, the ignition sequence, the high-gee catapult out of the launch tube: she hasn't forgotten any of it. He takes up standard formation and lets her lead, hovering just above and back to her right, where he can watch her through her canopy. Her hands are steady on the control stick.
Kara banks and turns over Galactica's bow and lets the Viper go, a controlled freefall into the heart of the fleet, passing between cruisers with just enough room to spare, a trademark Starbuck move. He follows easily, relaxed, reminded of their academy days.
It's in the instant after she drops out of the bottom of the fleet, before she recovers the Viper, when she's hanging in space looking down at some unfamiliar planetoid, that something goes wrong. He can't see her, but he knows, can feel her struggle in the minute waver of her wing. Her sudden intake of breath over the headset only confirms it.
The Viper continues its rotation, but without her guidance it continues to spin, and every few seconds he can see her. Lee knows she knows she's falling farther and farther away from home. It takes her nearly a minute to respond to his instructions, before he glimpses her hand reach for the stick.
Kara's landing is imprecise, struts scraping along metal plating before the clamps lock her Viper into place and pull her up to the deck. It's worse than a rook's first combat landing. Her breathing is shallow in his ear, and she's shaking when he finally reaches her. She's already vomited once, and Lee thinks he might do the same. The disappointment is acute, and he knows Tigh is right. If she can't fly by now, it isn't going to happen.
The psychiatrist calls it a panic attack and prescribes a new medication, which Baltar cooks up in his lab and Lee administers dutifully. After the first dose, Kara sleeps for ten hours. After the second, she destroys a Viper engine in a fit of rage while working with the repair crews, injuring two of Tyrol's deckhands. Lee stops giving her chemicals after that.
to survive hopelessness, any way possible
They spend the night in the corner of a ground-floor hotel lobby, plush leather couches pushed together at an angle to create a cramped nest out of sight of the bay windows overlooking the street. The sunset casts an odd glow over the opposite wall, reds and oranges and yellows mixing in with green paint in a way that makes Kara feel vaguely dizzy. She sleeps on one of the couches, slowly sinking into the leather, foam stuffing pushing out through a tear in the front. She keeps her face turned into the cushion, the slightly singed smell of the material a reminder that this is supposed to be home, but it is no longer safe or welcoming.
She wakes up mid-morning the next day and forgets that the couch back and Helo's watchful eye are all that protect her from Cylon detection. Forgets that she fell two stories yesterday and that the pain of moving is unbearable. Forgets that she is not in her own bunk, and tries to get up.
Helo yanks her back down by her wrist, and pain shoots up her back and spreads over her chest. Her gasp is loud, echoing against bare walls and high ceiling. It's a moment before she can manage even shallow breaths again.
Helo pats her shoulder and settles back down on the floor, his back against her sofa and her sidearm in his lap. "We'll wait for nightfall, Starbuck, get a ship, and get out of here," he whispers.
She thinks of her anger at Commander Adama, and her betrayal of him. The look on Lee's face in the hangar bay. Boomer, sharing a bunkroom with Kara's friends, pretending to be human – proof that their efforts for survival were futile. They were destined to fail.
Kara can feel Boomer's eyes on her, and focuses on the ceiling again.
"There's nowhere to go," she replies.
--
They leave the city as soon as Kara is able to walk. The Cylons are everywhere. Helo's become evasive about his plans for escape, and Kara can't be bothered to push the issue. The raider is long gone – reclaimed by the Cylons when she left it outside the museum – and she has no idea where she can find another ship. The city is crawling with Cylons.
They follow a river south of Caprica City to the outlying rural areas, camping along its bank during the day under the cover of dense bushes. Helo and Boomer walk together, and Helo's trust in her is as glaring as it is misplaced. Kara can see only deceit in both of them.
She limps along behind them, knee a mess and ribs barely healing, hand occasionally reaching into her pack to hold the Arrow. To feel its realness, her sort-of success. She fingers her gun next, and wonders why she doesn't kill them now.
--
A rustle pulls Kara out of sleep early one morning. In the pre-dawn haze, she listens as an old friend commits treason less than five feet away: his whisper, her groan, the slap of skin on skin. A wave of bitterness washes over her. Kara almost interrupts, but she knows what it's like to want someone to the point of desperation.
So she listens, silent, and considers her options.
The next day she convinces Helo that Cylons don't need anti-radiation meds.
to raise strong children
William Adama cannot think of anything more painful than watching his children fight endless, useless battles. The two of them crash into each other, and hang on, and pull apart, a repeating cycle that he feels powerless to break.
He's not blind, or stupid. He's watched them for a long time, Lee and Kara, long before Zak came into the picture. Bill thought Lee and Kara would suit, but Zak had a confidence with women that Lee lacked, and it's wasn't a father's place to get involved in his sons' love affairs.
So he stood back when Kara chose the wrong man and said nothing, and feigned ignorance when Lee confronted him about it years after the fact. Zak's death made the discussion pointless.
Instead, he reminded his son that he was Commander of the Air Group, and Kara was his Lead Pilot, and that Lee needed to set an example for the other pilots under his command.
Bill can forgive Kara anything, overlook her unsettling need for Lee, because she's all that's left of Zak now.
Then he watches Lee fall apart when she disappears, and witnesses his joy when Helo brings her back – battered and not-quite-herself. Allows Lee to take responsibility for her care when it becomes apparent that she'll need someone to make choices on her behalf.
When Kara and Helo return to Galactica, nearly three years after Helo was stranded on Caprica, Helo provides the command staff with a complete debrief. He details the characteristics of several Cylon models, his experiences with Cylon technology and insights into the Cylons' overall plan.
Kara is uncharacteristically, unnaturally silent, and refuses to meet Bill's eyes. Withdrawn, gone elsewhere, numb to her surroundings. She doesn't acknowledge Lee as he leads her to sickbay.
Cottle's initial diagnosis is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Kara spends more than half a year in sickbay. Her physical injuries heal rapidly, if imperfectly, but her mental state remains jagged.
The anxiety attacks don't begin until after she returns, at Cottle's urging, to squadron quarters, and Lee reports finding her curled up in a corner somewhere crying more than once.
Bill finds two psychiatrists in the fleet and brings both to Galactica. One diagnoses depression, prescribes a new medication, and wishes them the best of luck. The other says it's a simple anxiety disorder, suggests providing Kara with a consistent environment and familiar routine, and waiting it out.
He'd hoped, but not really expected, that Kara's first Viper flight would go better. When Lee arrives in his office to report, hair still damp from the shower and eyes downcast, Bill puts him out of his misery quickly.
"She isn't ready yet," he says to his son, gesturing to the chair opposite his. He'd been listening in on the wireless from CIC, along with Tigh and Cottle. He doesn't want to tell Lee that the doc thinks this is the end of the road.
Lee sighs, and his eyes meet his father's eyes briefly before darting away again. "She's not going to be ready."
Bill sets down his glasses on top of the book he'd been reading and waits.
"Tigh's right. If she was going to get better, it would have happened by now. She'll have to stay on a repair crew for the time being."
"The time being?"
"I've given it a lot of thought." Lee pauses, as if looking for the right words or a way out. "Maybe she's just sick, and it's not something we can fix."
Bill frowns, considers the set of his son's shoulders, the meaning behind his words. "Kara's mother was mentally ill – schizophrenia. It's in her medical file."
Lee nods absently. "She can't stay on Galactica forever."
to accept a loved one's truths
It wasn't that he didn't love Kara, like a lot of people thought after his decision regarding her future became widely known. It was that he'd loved her too much, for too long, in too many ways. He wanted to end her suffering.
They called him heartless and selfish, accused him of abandoning her when she needed him, of not fixing her. As if making her what she used to be, was an end to be accomplished at all costs.
Lee Adama had shot more Cylons out of the sky since the holocaust then he cared to admit. He'd lost countless friends and pilots to the enemy's relentless advance. Watched too many civilian ships – innocent women and children – drop out of the sky when the fleet jumped, never to blink back into existence at their destination point. He'd seen too much ugliness in too short a time, as supplies became scarce and people fought over who was entitled to what. Borrowing someone's soap from their kit bag became a punishable offence, and eating more than your share of fresh produce was grounds for incarceration. People became desperate for any kind of contact or affection; looked as if they would kill or die for a kind word.
He wakes up one morning in his bunk, almost a year after Kara's return from Caprica, and listens to her breathing beside him, soft and steady. Calm. He watches her, smells her, careful not to wake her. Inhales on her exhale, tasted the sweetness of her breath and the candy he'd given her the evening before to calm her down. He's pretty sure she'll sleep for a while yet; she had worn herself out the evening before alternately screaming and crying over the state of her locker.
Why are they all trying so hard to put that desperation in her eyes?
This Kara is growing increasingly unpredictable, yes; prone to nightmares and flashbacks and wild mood swings. She forgets simple instructions and can't keep track of time. Her conversations are tangential at best, if she speaks at all. She can't manage a routine Viper flight, and can only work on a repair crew if supervised.
But even though her bad days are horrible, her good days are exceptionally good in a lot of ways. Kara is still the same woman he'd fallen in love with all those years ago – the evidence is there when he takes the time to look closely. She laughs, and can be playful, and can still kick his ass at cards, as long as she pays attention to the deal. Still stares at that picture of them and Zak when she's distressed, and trades quips with his father, and prefers Vipers over any other pursuit in her spare time. Still prays when no one is looking.
She's happy. Content with her existence. She's somehow found that sense of security the Cylons have been systematically stripping away from everyone else. Lee is sure that Kara believes she's safe, that the Gods haven't given up on her.
They are doing everything in their power to turn her back into the cynical screw-up they remembered, all because she was a good pilot and had always done a lot to keep morale up. Lee, like the others, feels the sense of loss her partial absence creates. But who are they to think that they have any right to do this to her? Or to expect her to be the same, just because Helo had returned to work as if nothing had ever happened?
One thing is for sure: she can't stay here indefinitely, surrounded by old memories and tension and endless deaths. She won't get better – healthier - here, only more like the rest of them.
But he also has to keep her near, and safe, where he can touch her and see her and talk to her. Lee isn't willing to let her go again, not after years thinking her dead. Kara is his responsibility, as much by his own sense of honor as by the formal notations made by his father and Doc Cottle in her personnel file.
He's tired, too. More than ready to leave this place.
That morning, he starts planning for Kara's eventual removal from the Galactica.
to exact retribution
They spend their first winter on Caprica in a rural community at the southern-most tip of the continent, near the ocean. Kara lives in the house on the property next to the one she grew up on, but doesn't tell Helo she's been here before when she banishes him from her chosen hideaway. He and Boomer make their bed in the house across the street, and Kara suppresses a morbid giggle when she considers the possibility of setting up a neighborhood watch or a street barbeque.
Her childhood home is boarded up – abandoned long before the Cylons attacked – but she walks over every so often to find little forgotten bits of her past. The dishes she and her parents used on rare special occasions. Old clothing. The tractor in the barn, still with a half-tank of petrol. She cries, sitting in her mother's favorite chair, wrapped in an abandoned sweater, and prays for time and fate to rewind, to give her back her youth, to allow new and different choices to become available. That she never went to the Academy, or knew the freedom of a Viper, or met Lee Adama, or killed Zak. If any one thing could be different…
She sleeps later each day, and succumbs to exhaustion earlier each evening. She begins drowsing through long stretches of days, barely eating or drinking, huddled in bed to keep warm. She misses the only snowfall of the season; local temperatures are more conducive to heavy rains. Depression settles in. Kara recognizes it, and she doesn't fight it. She speaks to Helo less and less often.
She dreams of Lee; terrifying dreams in which he dies over and over, screaming her name, and she never does anything to prevent it. When she is awake, she wonders how he really died: in his Viper, or at Boomer's hand.
--
It's storming the night Boomer goes into labor, lightning creating eerie shadows each time it flashes through the windows. The thunder is deafening, rolling across the sky.
Boomer is huddled in the corner of the kitchen when Kara arrives, sopping wet from the rain and slightly disoriented. She hadn't realized so many months had passed. Helo is holding his lover, murmuring things that are supposed to be comforting but somehow fall short.
Kara sits at the table and waits. An hour passes, and the rainfall gets heavier, lashing at the windows. Boomer is crying now, screaming in pain.
Kara takes out her gun, sets it on the table. Begins cleaning each component, restoring the weapon to good working order after months of neglect.
The second hour passes, and there's blood spreading across the tiles, and Kara can see the panic on Helo's face then their eyes meet.
At the end of the third hour, Boomer has gone quiet and still, and Helo is searching the drawers for a knife. Finds one that's sharp enough, but not particularly clean. Kara can tell he's beyond those types of concerns now.
He pulls the baby out of its mother, sawing at Boomer's body with the knife, fingers sliding against bloody flesh. There is no cry.
Kara catches only a glimpse of wrinkled skin and sunken skull before Helo wraps the infant in his shirt.
Cylons don't need anti-radiation meds. But perhaps half-human fetuses do.
The boy never draws breath, and Helo is broken, and Kara can't bring herself to feel sorry for what she's done.
--
Kara sits on the tile and grasps Boomer's shoulders. Shakes her until her eyes flutter open. The rain has stopped suddenly; Boomer's breathing is loud and labored in the quiet. The damp earth smell wafts into the room through the open door – Helo is drifting away. It mingles with the smell of the blood, already dry and browning on the floor.
Kara slips the barrel into Boomer's mouth. The Cylon's eyes dart over Kara's shoulder towards the door, but she makes no sound.
"I waited," Kara whispers, and she can almost taste vengeance on her tongue, in the words. "I waited, for Helo's sake. But this is my right."
Lee is dead. The commander is dead. They're all dead.
Boomer makes no argument. There's a certain mercy in killing her outright, instead of leaving her to bleed to death.
Kara isn't feeling merciful, but she pulls the trigger anyway.
--
They bury the Cylon and the infant in a single grave, in the same field where Kara's father planted corn when she was a child. No words are spoken, and Kara wonders if the Cylons' God is anything like the Lords of Kobol, and would a Cylon appreciate prayers anyway?
Would the Lords – would any deity – listen to a prayer from Kara Thrace?
--
She returns to bed, and loses four days of that spring. Not the sleepy haze of the winter, but a true unconsciousness, just gone, and Kara is afraid for the first time since returning to Caprica for the Arrow.
She wakes, lying on top of the sheets, which are neat and straight. Her head aches. There are flashes of memory, images, things which could be dreams but aren't, not really. They're too real.
She emerges on the fifth day to find Helo at his kitchen table, staring at blood stains he hasn't cleaned, half-drunk on something homebrewed. He doesn't acknowledge her presence.
He doesn't realize she's been gone. He doesn't know she's been tampered with.
He's different now, too.
to despair, when all opportunities are lost
The day Apollo and Starbuck leave, Helo gets a promotion. He smiles for the cameras – any change of command on Galactica is big news in the fleet – but he can't seem to swallow around the bitter taste in his mouth. Long months of waiting, all for nothing. Lee is taking Kara far out of his reach.
They stand, inches apart, letting the rain wash over them. He has her gun; her only option now is to throw a punch, and he knows she doesn't have the mobility to do it yet.
Sharon sits, watches, shaking with adrenaline.
Kara swings, but she's slow. He blocks her easily, and they end up in the mud, scrambling for their guns.
But he's the stronger one – her injuries and his desire to protect his child are a fortuitous coincidence; this confrontation can only end in his favor. He pins her easily.
"She – it – has killed them all by now!" she screams in his face. Rage makes her features tight, dark.
"You can't kill her," he insists, putting his weight into the words, making sure she understands. She can barely suck in enough air to make her next threat.
"It's my right," she says, gasping, nails clawing at his hands around her throat. "I'll have my revenge."
He presses just a little harder before he lets go.
He had come close to killing her several times in the days immediately following his son's murder. Stood over her prone body. Watched her thrash about, her sleep disturbed, and wondered if she felt remorse. Hoped she would wake up, so that he could search her eyes for it.
His child would be a toddler now, and there are nights when the ache to hold his son becomes a physical pain. There are moments when all he can think about is the day when Starbuck is herself again, and it's his turn for revenge. He wants her to suffer, and this long spiral down into insanity isn't enough. He wants her to beg before he takes her life. He wants to murder a child of hers, destroy her hope, as she did to him. He wants to take someone she loves away.
If Kara can murder an innocent child for an imagined crime, he can certainly do it for a real one.
He buries his son in a field, wrapped in a blanket. Starbuck watches him as he shovels dirt into the grave. There's no marker, and by the end of the summer, there will be no obvious signs that they were ever here.
As he walks away, he hears her whisper, "No one will bury us when we die."
He ignores her. Leaves her before he does something brutal, horrible, to her.
"It was my right, you know that," she says, loud enough to carry, and there's desperation in her voice.
Helo knows she's confused, delusional, and he resolves to return Kara to the Galactica so that she can see just how wrong she is.
And then he will avenge his son.
to dream, together, of certainty
Their fights are as passionate as always, but they've lost some of the edge, somewhere between Kara coming home a little crazy and Lee becoming her well-intentioned (if somewhat unnecessary, in her opinion) protector.
But the day he explains to her that they're going to be landlocked, she whips her book at him. She regrets it almost immediately. It'll be a pain to find her place again in all that tiny text.
But that doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't be joining a colony and dooming all the new little children to death. When the Cylons come for her, she would rather be here, on Galactica, with guns and Vipers and military personnel. Not with people.
Kara doesn't stop fighting him until she's exhausted.
When Lee leads her to the Raptor two weeks later, the doc's given her a mild sedative. Just enough to make it hard to argue and easy to sleep.
--
They depart Galactica with a wave of emigrants for the second established colony. Living conditions in the fleet have been getting increasingly crowded with every day that went by, as ships were lost or abandoned and the population began to expand. If humanity was going to survive, they needed more room.
Lee, his father, Tigh and Roslin have spent weeks poring over old geological reports and data from Raptor patrols before choosing four planets. The fleet will leave troops and defensive weaponry at each colony, and groups of civilian ships will maintain trade, communication and mobility.
Lee has volunteered for command of the military contingent on the second colony, and Kara thinks he must be happy to be leaving the fleet. He hasn't wanted to be here for a while.
--
He buys two icons from a woman on Cloud Nine, and hangs one over the front entranceway of their home. "This is a safe place, Kara." The other he hangs at the head of their bed, so that she can pray.
--
Lee's away from home as little as possible, but now that she's settled he's started taking short trips back to Galactica or to the other colonies. Politics and defense.
Someone always comes to stay with her if Lee is going to be away for more than a day. She resented it at first, this unanimous agreement that she can't be left on her own. She's used to taking care of herself, after all, has been doing so for years and years.
And she hasn't done anything truly stupid in a while, now.
Over time, she's decided it really isn't that bad. The more other people are around, the less she has to eat her own cooking. The Old Man is good company, and if any of her old pilot buddies are available, she pulls in some winnings at the triad table.
Dee always brings her kids with her, and one fated weekend Tigh was the only one Lee could find. The former XO of the Galactica had been sober or a couple of years – liver problems – but Kara saw to that. She broke out a couple-year-old bottle of whatever it was that passed for wine and they'd had a great time. The look on Ellen Tigh's face when she arrived to collect her husband had been priceless.
--
She trails her fingers along the dividing wall between their yard and the neighbor's as she walks, trying to decide between left (the town, buildings, Lee) and right (the lake, the beach, running) before she reaches the walkway. The earth is hard and dry under her feet; patches of grass are yellowing in the heat and the brittle blades tickle her soles. She lifts her hand from the wall and her fingertips are dry, dusty.
This place is very different, not like home at all. Kara wants recycled air, metallic, the smell of engine grease. Wants the stars around her, not above her. Misses her Viper, can't remember where she left it. Doesn't like the chill here at night, the fact that there is night, that it rains sometimes. It reminds her of things she's forgotten and doesn't want to get back.
She reaches the walkway. Pauses. Considers: left or right. Almost decides, before Bill says, from the porch, "Kara, stay in the yard."
Caught. She smiles to herself, finds a good spot to rest and lies in the grass where she can watch the gate.
--
In the evenings, they lie in the grass and watch the stars move. The others have started to label the constellations most easily found, naming them for old gods that aren't relevant here, and Lee's been helping her find them. Then he tells her about more important things: the politics of survival, the progress they're making with large-scale agriculture, the new secretary in his office who keeps hitting on him. He always waits for her to touch him first.
--
Afterwards, they lie in bed, his fingers playing with her hair just behind her ear, body curved around hers.
She's tired, but it's a good tired, because Lee said that for the time being she'd be given odd jobs to do, and today her To Do List had had twenty items on it by 0900 hours. She'd rewired a generator to reduce the output voltage, duct-taped a hole in the fuel line on one of the shuttles, weeded and put down fertilizer on a section of garden where one overly hopeful Geminon woman is hoping to grow tomatoes, and helped to scrub the ground floor of one of the new office structures. All before lunch.
She's utterly relaxed, satisfied, and the rhythm of Lee's voice whispering in her ear makes her sleepy. She doesn't think she'll dream tonight, even though she's had nightmares every night since they arrived here.
Lee keeps saying she hallucinates because of all the change, but she knows better.
to face the future
Eventually, the images from those four lost days on Caprica come together into something resembling memory. She rarely dreams anymore, but is struck again, at odd moments throughout the days, by what she's seen. By the horrific nature of what's been done to her head. She can only understand it on a primitive level, basic but inexpressible.
She's approached Bill twice about it, and tried countless times to explain it to Lee, but the words just aren't there. When she tries, all that comes out are jumbled facts and random words, and her head starts to ache.
She knows she was held down by hands that were familiar to her. She knows there was pain. She knows there are things inside of her, even now, that aren't actually hers. She knows that when she cried out she was comforted, and the eyes that met hers in the dim light were those of a friend, a trusted someone.
She knows the Cylons will come for her – for all of them – soon.
She knows there was never anywhere to go back to.
But Lee encourages her to leave the worrying to others, so Kara chooses to forget, and takes Lee's hand, and lets him lead her away from the past.