Title: Chasm and Flood, Part 5?
Author: abelard
Rating: T
Spoilers: Mentions of stuff through S2, pure spec on my part
Summary: Lee loses Kara, and finds her again. Speculation on why the Cylons keep telling Starbuck she has a "special destiny." LeeKara, of course.
Feedback: Please!
Archive: Yes, just let me know.
Disclaimers: Not mine, etc.
Part 5
"Yes," she says, calmly, a very slight, but amused, smile on her face and in her eyes. "My name is Kara."
Lee smiles back at her so widely he thinks his face might break, it's so unused to happiness.
Lee swallows. He feels his smile turn downward, his forehead start to frown. Kara is dead, he tells himself. Kara is dead! This isn't her. When she died, I spent the entire night holding her cold hand.
He takes the hand of the woman in front of him and she lets him. Lee makes himself feel, consciously, how warm she is. When I blink, this illusion will be gone, and this woman will not be Kara, will not be Starbuck. The simple fact is, this woman is alive and Starbuck is not. Starbuck's hand was cold and dead and the hand in Lee's is pulsing with heat.
He blinks.
And again.
"Is something wrong?" she asks.
Lee reaches up the hand that isn't holding hers and wipes his eyes, but when that hand drops, the woman hasn't turned into someone else. It's still that face, that form, that he has loved for so long that he couldn't burn it out of his mind if he tried – and he admits to trying, over these last two weeks, trying to buy back his own sanity with alcohol-induced forgetfulness. It didn't work.
And now, it doesn't have to. Kara is right in front of him, puzzled and getting suspicious of him not saying anything. So he speaks.
"Kara," Lee breathes, "you're alive."
"Yes," she says, and now she's looking at him askance, like she doesn't know whether to trust him or not. Of course, he's acting like he's out of his mind, which he very well could be, so he doesn't blame her for being suspect.
"I'm alive," she continues, "and I can see that you're confused about whether that's a good thing or not."
"I'm not," Lee says abruptly. One thing he's going to make damn sure of, even if this is another ghost, is to make sure she never feels rejected or unwanted by him ever again. "I'm not confused. It's a good thing." He's still holding her hand, he realizes – Gods, I'm touching her live flesh – and he squeezes her fingers, trying to communicate his gladness. He smiles at her; lets the rejoicing in his heart overcome the confusion in his mind, at least for the moment. "Your being alive is a very, very good thing. I was sure you were dead."
She inhales deeply and exhales. She doesn't remove her hand from his clasp, but she doesn't squeeze his back, either. "I thought so," she says.
"What do you mean?" Lee asks. She sounds just like Starbuck, on the verge of figuring something out.
"I mean, no one's shown up here looking for me. No family, nothing. I thought, maybe my people believe I'm dead. Maybe that's why they're not looking for me," she says.
"Wait, you mean you...?" Lee can't finish, he's trying to process too many things at once. Not the least of which is the fact that the woman he buried in space more than two months ago is breathing and blinking right in front of him. And they're still loosely holding hands.
"I don't remember anything. Except my name. I woke up in the woods outside this village – oh, Gods, it's been sixteen days now – and I didn't know how I got there, or where I'd come from, or who I'd come from. But I remembered that my name is Kara, and I just had a feeling that if I had people, they'd search for me. I've made some friends here, they've been kind enough to help me out, give me a place to sleep. So, since I woke up two weeks ago, I've just been...waiting."
Two weeks. Sixteen days. Sixteen days ago, Lee told someone – something – who looked exactly like the woman talking to him now that he couldn't see her anymore. The thing disappeared, and that very day, this – Kara – showed up in a forest on a small inhabited planet that no one in the fleet knew existed.
What the frak is going on? Lee is verging on panic.
"But you know me?" Kara asks. "I know you?"
Lee tugs her by the hand closer to him, into a strong embrace. She feels like Kara. He puts his nose against her hair. She smells like Kara. She's hugging him back. He's being held by her.
It doesn't matter, he decides. I don't give a frak.
"Yes, you know me. You know me," he says. "I'm Lee. I'm your friend."
She pulls back. She's pleased. She's been waiting to be recognized for more than two weeks, and here he is, giving her just what she wanted. It's one of the very few times in his life when Lee has felt that he is giving Kara exactly what she wants. He vows he's going to focus on that feeling, and replicate it, as much as possible from now on.
"So you thought I was dead, huh?" she asks, grinning without sarcasm or mischief. She's just happy. Happy to see him.
Gods, he is so happy to see her. "I thought you were dead," he says, and even as he says it, it feels like a nightmare falling away after a long, troubled sleep. Waking is so good, this reality is so much better than what he's been calling existence for months...
"Well, I'm not dead. Are you going to take me home now, wherever that is?" she asks with hope in her eyes.
"Apollo!" calls Helo. Lee vaguely recalls that when he started pushing through the crowd to get to Kara, he and Helo got separated. Lee turns and sees the lieutenant jogging towards him. Towards them – him and Kara. What will Helo say?
Then Lee has a sudden, certain realization in his gut that Helo will be the last person to say anything.
"Apollo...what...?" Helo sees her face. His eyes shift between Lee and Kara and he's the picture of confusion.
"I found her," Lee says calmly, smiling. "It's Kara."
"Hi," says Kara, a little shyly, and Lee makes the introductions.
"Kara, this is Karl. He's your friend, too."
"Hi Karl," she amends. And she steps nervously forward, gives Helo a quick hug.
"But," says Helo when she steps back, "it's...it's impossible."
"Nope!" Kara says brightly. "I'm not dead!" She reaches up and feels the back of her head for something. "I keep feeling around for a bump – I must have taken a pretty rough fall, to get a case of amnesia this bad. But I can't find any signs of an accident – I guess I have a hard head, huh?"
Lee laughs. "You have no idea."
"Are there any other people with you? People I would know?" Kara asks, looking over Lee's shoulder on her tiptoes.
Lee and Karl look at each other, and Lee knows they're both thinking of the ten other people on the planet from the Galactica. "No," Lee says quickly. "We're here alone."
"You're not from this village, right? I mean, we're not from here, right? Because no one here knows me. And the other villages – my name's been sent to all three of them, and it seems like no one's heard of me in any of them," Kara says. "So, where are we from?"
Helo gives Lee a kind of desperate look, and Lee answers, "We're actually from a village that no one here's ever heard of. We come from a long way off, much farther than the four villages."
Lee almost hits Helo when Helo involuntarily looks skyward. Kara says, "Oh. We're from up there, then."
Lee swallows hard. He and Helo exchange worried glances.
"Up from the mountains, right?" Kara continues. Her gaze follows Helo's line of sight from a moment earlier and Lee sees what she thought Helo was seeing: the ridge of jagged-peaked mountains in the distance, a citadel of stone that effectively limits how far the human settlements can fan out. "Everyone says those mountains aren't fit for human life, but I knew, I just had this feeling, that a group of people could live at that altitude if they only had stronger shelters, better tools. So we must be that group, right?"
"Right," says Lee. He's concentrating fully on Kara's face, but out of the corner of his eye he can see Helo staring at him like he's crazy.
"Will we make the journey back today?" Kara asks eagerly.
"That journey's far too long and arduous to attempt today," Lee says. "We'll need some time to prepare for it. Karl and I will need to get some rest first, and try to re-supply, before we can consider a trip back." Lee knows he's not making any sense to Helo, but the Lieutenant isn't disputing anything he's saying, and for that he's grateful.
He just needs to buy them some time. Some time that he can spend with Kara.
Kara looks disappointed, then brightens. "Do you want to come to my place, then? It's not much, just a shack, really, but you can rest there. And we can talk. I want to learn all about you. Rediscover who you are, and all that!"
She sounds playful, but Lee doesn't when he says, "That's what I want, too. Yeah, let's go to your place."
It really is a shack. It's a two-room shed, built for storing ploughs or large tools, maybe, that probably wasn't used for years before Kara moved in. Kara tells the story: A couple of villagers took her in for a few days, but when it looked like no one was coming for her, they suggested she take over the abandoned shed, and helped get her set up. Lee looks around. A table, some chairs, a straw-filled mattress with some decent blankets, equipment to clean and cook and garden with, is all of Kara's existence. A few other villagers have donated a few clothes to her, tailored them to fit her. Someone has shown her how to bake bread for herself. The vendors at the market have been generously putting her bills on a kind of tab, "which I hope I'll be able to pay off, as soon as I figure out what kind of work I'm good for," Kara says ruefully, obviously embarrassed to have been living off of people's kindness for two weeks.
"You're good at cards," says Helo before he can stop himself, and Lee's glare shuts him up.
"We have some things we can trade, to get your debts paid," Lee says.
"But then I'll just owe you instead of them," Kara says, shrugging off the offer.
"You'll never owe me. I owe you my life already." Now it's Lee who's said too much, and Helo who's giving out the hard stare.
"What does that mean?" asks Kara, smiling and frowning at the same time.
Helo puts his pack down loudly enough to draw attention to himself. "So, where do I sleep? Got any extra blankets?"
The distraction works. Kara says, "I was thinking I'd go next door and ask my neighbors for their spare cots and blankets. Then we can put them in here," she says, gesturing to the space in front of the hearth, in the front room. "I sleep in the other room. Sorry to put you in the front, which gets draftier at night, but you'll have the fire to keep you warm, and for the neighbors' sake, I just can't have two handsome strangers sleeping in the same room as me!" she says, laughing a little.
"This'll work," Helo says. "I'll go ask the neighbors, if you like. I'll explain who we are – that we're friends of yours, from your, ah, your home village."
"Oh, no, I'll go...," Kara starts.
"He'll go," says Lee. "Stay and talk with me for a while." He tugs at her hand and she doesn't pull away. They've shared more casual touches in the last hour than they ever did when she was – when they were on Galactica. And she doesn't even know him.
Kara hesitates, but she must see the need in Lee's expression, because to Karl she says, "Okay, then, if you don't mind. It's the house to the left. Their names are Evie and Jonas."
Helo nods and leaves.
Kara and Lee sit in the chairs at her small, functional table and she says, "I have so many questions. About you, about myself."
"Is it okay if we talk about you first?" Lee asks. He doesn't know what he'll say when she starts asking her questions, and he wants to put that off for as long as he can. Besides, he really is curious, more than curious, to know about her life here, on this hidden, backward, unexpected little world.
"Sure, but there isn't much to tell," Kara says.
"Just tell me the ordinary things. What you do every day. What it's like for you here," Lee pleads softly.
Kara begins to describe her life, which is the only life she remembers. Lee is filled with something like nostalgic joy listening to her talk about it. What she tells him of is a world so far removed from the daily, fear-ridden grind of the Galactica, he can hardly believe it's real. Here, she doesn't operate vessels that can kill people. She doesn't spend sleepless nights wondering, worrying about dozens of pilots or thousands of civilians depending on her. She doesn't run from one emergency to the next, scraping together miracles with bits of wire and sheer adrenaline. And the people she's with here, these villagers, they don't spend every minute of their day trying to keep from collapsing from exhaustion, anxiety, malnutrition, madness.
She wakes up in the morning, she tells him, and stokes the dying embers of the fire in the hearth. She has to keep the fire burning even in the day, for as long she's home, because she refuses to wear a cloak indoors, and the place is damned cold. Next she gets some bread baking, which she's terrible at but she's getting slightly better, she thinks. Whatever she bakes is her main sustenance for the day. Next, she helps Evie and Jonas tend their garden, which isn't yielding enough produce for two people, let alone three, so Kara doesn't take any of their vegetables, even though they offer to share. "They do so much for me, the least I can do is keep my hands off of their food," she says. She figures she'll take her chances getting produce on loan from the marketplace, even though she's nervous about how she'll manage to pay her bills. She spends her day chopping firewood for the fire, and trying to help out the other villagers who've helped her by doing some manual labor for them, if there are things she can do. She's so unfamiliar with their implements and methods, she's not terribly useful, and she just knows she was not meant to do the women's work, sewing and weaving and all of that. She plays with the children sometimes, which she enjoys, and at night, a neighbor or two will come by and talk for a bit about small matters, or invite her over to share a meal. She only goes if she senses the family can really afford to be so generous. Then she goes to bed, lying awake for a while imagining who she is, where she comes from, before falling asleep.
Lee understands this world has its own precariousness – food is scarce for some, and survival is a matter of physical work, of farming and milling and doing hard labor. But it's...peaceful. They don't live in a state of war. This is what it is to live in a world of peace.
"I like the sound of your life here," Lee says when she's finished talking.
She rolls her eyes. "It's not as idyllic as it sounds. If you had to really live it..."
"Maybe I'll get that chance," Lee says. "At least for the next few days, right?"
"Right," Kara says, looking at Lee with open curiosity.
Then Helo returns, bearing cots, blankets, and pillows.
After finishing off Kara's homemade bread, which tastes very good to the two men, who've been living on bad synthetic food for too long, Helo suggests he and Lee go for a short walk, familiarize themselves with the neighborhood. Kara says she'll set up their cots while they're gone. Lee's tempted to stay and watch Kara be domestic, but Helo is insistent, and they start walking.
Helo gets right to it without preamble. Lee acknowledges if Helo has ever been anything, it's direct.
"She was dead, and now she's not," Helo says.
"I know," Lee says.
"You know what it means, right?" asks Helo.
Apollo turns and faces him. "You're the last person to criticize me for making this decision, Lieutenant."
Helo assumes a slightly more military stance. "What exactly is the decision you've made, Major?" he asks.
"I've decided that we're not going to tell the Fleet that we've found Starbuck," says Lee, and he starts walking again, and so does Helo.
"Because...," Helo begins, but it's not a question. Lee can tell that Helo grasps the decision perfectly well, and just wants to hear Apollo say it aloud.
"Because you know better than anyone," Lee says, "what they'll do to her if they find out she's a Cylon."