ANOTHER WAY: CHAPTER 6
JUSTIFIABLE FEARS
After-hours, in the rec-room, at the Triad tables…
"Attention – Gimp on deck!"
Constanza was the only one in the slightly crowded rec-room who snapped to attention without thinking about who was actually on the deck or the title announced.
"Gimp, my ass Helo – you had better be talking about yourself. And Constanza, sit your ass down so that Captain Adama can take your money properly." Starbuck said as she approached the table, leaning heavily on a cane and favouring her left side.
Lee looked up at her as she waved Helo off of her arm and only spared half an eye watching Agathon find a spare bit of wall to prop his shoulders against. Everything else he used to appraise Kara. She was pale, a little drawn but otherwise she looked one-hundred percent Starbuck: cocky grin, razor sharp one-liners and the lazy sensuality that only served to amplify a swagger that half the men in the fleet could not hope to carry off with the same measure of success. The only thing that was missing was the barely-zipped hooded sweatshirt she used to wear when she played Triad. But, then again, she had not worn that since her return from Caprica.
"Since you have been on hiatus, I actually have money to lose Starbuck." Hot Dog chortled, not realizing that what she had said was actually a backhanded insult that he further re-enforced.
Catching Kara's attention with a shake of his head, he let Starbuck state the same thought that was on the tip of his tongue. "Glad to know that you are still the mental giant I have come to know and expect so little from, Hot Dog."
As much as he would love to hear what ever insults and comebacks she had been thinking of and storing up since being confined to sickbay, Lee had another priority that needed addressing.
"This is good for me because not only do I call, but the spectrum is mine people: full colours!" Lee laid down his cards to a round of groans and two laughs – one more of a male-to-male chuckle and the other more of the throaty variety.
"Damn, Apollo. I thought I had you that time." Hot Dog slumped into his chair and tossed his cards down on the table.
Gathering up his winnings, Lee offered an olive branch to the sulking nugget. "Don't worry Constanza, just because you cannot keep up with the Big Kids, does not mean that you have to give up being King of the Kiddie Table."
A spattering of applause came from those who heard his zinger.
Kara nodded in agreement. "Listen to him, Hot Dog. The man knows what he is talking about. Why, it was just last week that he learned to drink from a cup without using a straw and look at him now – he can play with the big dogs and stand up while using the head instead of sitting and tucking."
Shooting a wounded look at Starbuck, Lee rose to her bait. "Frak, Starbuck – you said you would not tell anyone."
"Who said I was referring to you, Apollo?" Kara feigned innocence and then cocked a thumb in Helo's direction. "I was talking about Agathon. But if you wanna go into telling stories and airing dirty laundry…" She let her voice trail off deceptively.
"Hey! What did I do?" Helo popped his lollipop out of his mouth long enough to point it Kara before sliding the candy back between his tongue and cheek. Talking around the stick in his mouth, he warned, "Careful Starbuck – what can be considered fair game is very subjective and I have just as much dirt on you as you have on me."
"No way are we going there, Starbuck. I like my dirty laundry right where it is – in the bottom of my locker, thank you very much." Lee stood up and pulled his BDU jacket from off of the back of his chair. "However, that does not mean that I suddenly have this urge to share what a certain former-cadet-now-Galactica's-flight-instructor might have done to a certain bunkette… Helo, didn't you hear something about that while you were at the Academy?" Lee looked expectantly at Agathon, inviting him to play along.
Pulling away from the wall, accepting Apollo's insinuation, Karl piped up. "Come to think of it, yeah I did hear something about that. There was this legend circulating around campus about someone named Thrace and some sort of incident involving someone-or-another that had reached almost mythic proportions by the time I heard it."
"You are bluffing." Kara cut him off with a laugh. "You have no idea what you are talking about. You were not even on campus when that went down."
"But I was, Starbuck." Lee folded his arms across his chest and quirked an eyebrow in her direction. His challenge was clear: let's see you get out of this one, Kara. "Or have you forgotten that night in your old age?"
Hot Dog lifted his chin off his chest. His dejected look over losing to Apollo vanished at the prospect of getting some gossip about his flight instructor.
"What? What did she do?"
A couple of slow steps in his direction had Starbuck bypassing the nugget and standing just outside of Lee's personal space. Her face was hard, but there was an element of teasing that hung around the edges of her jaw. He got the full force of a conspiratorial wink before she turned around and clapped her palms against the table top and zeroed in on Constanza.
"Somehow some knock-out drops made it into this nymphyte's tube of toothpaste and somehow she managed to sleepwalk her way out of the dorm." The way she emphasized 'somehow' was not lost on Lee or anyone, nor was the way Kara's voiced was steeped in double entendre as fit of coughing from Helo interrupted her story.
A cough that did not quite mask what Starbuck really did, "Dragged the girl clear across campus by her ankles."
Lee brought his own fingers to his mouth but stayed silent – and amused. Watching Starbuck torment a nugget meant that she was feeling better, as well as the additional perk of being entertained. Because as much as he remembered what she was like before the worlds ended, it was just as much an adventure to learn more about her as they all picked up the pieces of their lives and moved on despite having to survive a holocaust.
"Into the Commandant's office so that she was there, sprawled out on the sofa in his office, to greet him when he came in the next morning," Kara finished her story and straightened up with only a minor flash of discomfort flaring across her face.
Hot Dog took a couple of deep gulps as Lee saw him try to get his uneasiness under control. He knew what the nugget had to be thinking: if that was what Starbuck did as a cadet, what she could do to him now that she has had years to perfect her techniques, would be so much worse. Lee couldn't resist tightening the screws to Constanza's thumbs just a little more.
"What she is leaving out, Hot Dog, is that she stripped the bunkmate of her clothes and draped the young lady." Lee paused when Kara snorted at the term 'young lady'. "On top of an already knocked out and naked 'gentleman' who had the distinction of slipping pudding into Cadet Thrace's boots earlier that week because he lost to Starbuck on the firing range."
Somewhere in the back of the room a few chuckles could be heard. As far as they were concerned, anyone who was stupid enough to do something like that to Starbuck deserved whatever retribution she deemed worthy of extracting.
Turning her head towards where the laughter could be heard and she conceded that someone – once – had gotten one up on her.
"Yeah – well – I had to hand it to him. I never saw that one coming. I mean – who checks their boots?"
Tucking in his tanks and smoothing down his jacket, Lee turned to the group and issued a pop quiz.
"And what is the moral of this story, boys and girls?"
"Don't frak with Starbuck unless you are willing to pay the price."
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Three weeks later…
Images and words flashed against a star-scaped backdrop erratically and without rhyme or reason.
Cylon Raiders slicing through balls of fire that were once Colonial Vipers.
The haze of a radiation contaminated planet colouring the words that hung in the air between five different people, "What's missing is love."
Commands from CIC and wing-leaders issued too late and too by-the-book to save the squadron.
A tender finger caressing her ear while it's matching hand ghosted along the contours of her body.
A gentle looking dark-skinned man telling her, "A big guy named Anders brought you in."
Pilots filing out of the ready room, each were pressing their fingers against a picture of Lee – the same picture that hung in her duty locker – as they made their way to their planes.
Sharon, looking at her while Helo redressed the two new incisions on her abdomen, "If you volunteered, it would not have to be like that. They could even set you up with someone you like."
A quiet CIC as all eyes fell on her as she spoke quietly to Lt. Gaeta. "Tell Captain Adama: the back door is open."
Tainted sunlight from a sullied Caprican morning streaming in her face, was making her squint as she accused, "Like you two crazy kids?"
Her body arching off the mattress as waves of pleasure stole her voice and reduced her breathing to breathless pants while a pair of brown eyes looked down at her and found his own completion deep within her.
"Kara, I love you. If there is anything you want to talk about, I am here for you." Lee said as he leaned against her back, the chain-link wall separating them.
"Sue-Shaun, I want you to take the perimeter and watch our left flank."
A maelstrom of fire on the base tarmac as Zak's Viper crashed and ignited on impact.
The same dark-skinned man, Simon, telling her about Anders, "He's dead. Piece of shrapnel nicked his aorta and he bled to death."
The Chief, after admonishing her for bringing in a Viper sans its engine, asking in a quiet voice, "Did you hear about Apollo?" His voice filling in the words she could not bring herself to say.
Faster and faster the images and words spun around and echoed in her head. A sense of vertigo filled her as she looked across the last couple of months of her life.
It was too much: too much emotion, too much heartache, too many events that she had yet to even begin to sift through.
Pain, failures, accidents, incidents and victories few and far between were merging into unmitigated chaos. Chaos was making her heart hammer to the point where she thought it was physically thumping against her ribcage. She felt like she had too much blood in her body, that at any minute she was going to start seeing blood seep out of the pores in her skin. In her mind, she saw herself grabbing onto threads of thoughts and spools of reality, clawing and yanking at them, trying to get them sorted out before she went mad. Grasping, pulling, and forcing her way through the melee, her arms flailing trying to steady her, to…
Then, everything went black.
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Cally carefully put the safety cap back over the tip of the syringe. Slipping the used needle into her pocket, she used her other hand to pull out a small, sealed packet.
Breaking open the seal, Cally swabbed the alcohol pad against the puncture mark on Starbuck's neck and then reached down and grabbed the pilot's wrist and clocked her heart-rate against the chronometer on the wall. Despite having two doses of sedative pumped into her system, Starbuck's heart was still hammering away at an alarming rate.
Draping the older woman's arms across her stomach, Cally stepped back and faced away from Starbuck's now slumped form. Her body might be mostly healed, but judging from what she just witnessed and the deeply drawn circles underneath the other woman's eyes, Starbuck was far from being called well.
Steeling herself, Cally triggered her ear-piece and spoke to the two other persons tuned into the same frequency channel.
"This is Cally."
"Go ahead, Cally." Apollo's voice answered.
"Talk to me, Cally." Helo's voice mirrored the tension all three of them carried.
"We're in the brig, D Deck level."
"Helo – what's your six?" Apollo asked.
"I just left the gym – was going to make my way to Central Mess – you?" Helo countered.
"Checked my office and the Ready Room – was going to go to the Nugget Room next," Apollo offered. Switching subjects, he asked, "SitRep, Cally?"
"She's out Sirs. Two doses should give her about six hours of sleep – seven if she doesn't fight it." Cally had to fight to keep the tremor out of her voice.
"Repeat that Cally?" Helo sounded like he had stopped in mid-stride.
"I had to give her the whole needle. She wasn't going under. I thought she was going to hurt herself." Cally barely got the words out if her mouth as Starbuck's desperate thrashing and crying out replayed in her mind.
Both men swore into their earpieces. Apollo was the first to recover his composure.
"Okay. Leave her where she is. We'll deal with this tomorrow."
Cally nodded in agreement, and then looked back to the woman she called friend.
"Okay, done," Helo agreed.
A long pause stretched between the three of them as they all stood in different points in the Battlestar.
"Cally?" Apollo asked, breaking into her thoughts.
Smiling in spite of the situation, Cally apologized. "Sorry Sir. It's just, well…" Her voice trailed off but neither of the two men prompted her in continuing her train of thought. "She has been back in the air for a week now. You all can have your flight-statuses reinstated, go back to being duty-bound to lay down your lives for lowliest bastard in the fleet, but no one thinks of issuing you all licenses to live and be human."
Cally's heartfelt introspection touched Lee on a level he himself understood only all too well. Having had come back from injuries himself, he knew about the progression from being released from sickbay, to being saddled with 'light duties' while sitting in at the Triad tables and hearing about what was going on without actually being able to participate except on the most rudimentary level while biding time until cleared to being allowed to do maintenance shifts; repairing Vipers and Raptors. But Starbuck was flying again. She was in the air every day and did her job better than most. She stuck her landings, taught her classes, and flew her C.A.P rotations as if she hadn't been halfway down the River Styx seven weeks ago. The trade off was that it was Starbuck being behind the stick of her Viper, and it was Starbuck in the rec-rooms playing cards and it was Starbuck on the hanger deck mediating between the deck crew and the air-men, sparring in the gym and being social in the Mess halls. The only time he saw Kara was when she left the bunk room to go sleep somewhere else, during her nightmares and the moments after she woke up but before she donned her Starbuck persona.
"It just sucks, Sirs." Cally's voice echoed in his ears and had him looking up at the ceiling of the corridor. The fact that Cally was using the term 'you all' as a euphemism for all pilots and E.C.O.'s was not lost by any of them. "I see her everyday on the hanger deck and she one-hundred percent on the clock. She acts like she is fine, says that she is fine, but she isn't."
Drawing a deep breath, he let go of the platitudes that sprang to mind to assure the young specialist. Honesty was precious and for everything she did on the hanger deck and as a friend to him and Kara, Cally did not deserve anything less.
What was interesting was that it was Karl who spoke before he could.
"Yeah, Cally, it does suck. We are our jobs, what we do is as much part of our identities as it is the reason we risk never coming back every time we take to the air. It is a symbiotic relationship that destroys as much as it heals. But she would not want it any other way and neither would any of us – no matter how frakked up that sounds – because it satisfies a drive that cannot be met in any other medium."
"Nor can anyone of us explain it fully, Cally. It is a paradox with too many permutations." Apollo added to what Helo said. "But, we have a long way to go before we get to Earth so maybe, between now and then; we can figure it out – all of us – together."
His closing comments had all the elements of a dismissal without him having to actually have to tell Helo and Cally that they could go back to where they were before they went in search of Galactica's lead pilot.
Turning on his heels, Lee signed off and slipped the earpiece into the side pocket of his cargos. Walking back towards the Senior Officer's Bunk Room, he made a mental 'To Do' list that included being in a D Deck Level brig cell in five hours. In the mean time, he had some homework to do, specifically in regards to why Lieutenant Thrace was not sleeping in her bunk.
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Sharon, Doral, Leoben, D'Anna and Six all stood around the centre console, star charts and navigational components arrayed around them.
He had told them it was time, and he – Number Two – was ready.
Holding hands, head bent in prayer, all five thanked Him for His blessings and that His will be done before all others.
In turn each looked up and shared a gleam of anticipation that could almost be considered cruelly cold.
It was the voice over the comm, comfortably ensconced in his Heavy Raider with a compliment of eight Centurions, which sealed the fate of Kara Thrace.
Number Two closed the communal prayer with a caustic benediction.
"So say we all."
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