VI.
Love does not redeem the scourge that the human race is if they cannot even manage to let it save them. Not when they so often just end up hurting and destroying the ones who they love the most. They are ruled by a senseless, weak pattern of self-destruction.
This was what Sharon had always been told, at least, before she ever had the chance to observe any of them herself and had only the memories of some from another eight who might as well have been seeing them through a human's eyes. And then she met one. Just one. After only a week of being with Helo, she really wasn't sure what she knew about humans anymore.
Maybe he was not like the others, she thought. And that much easier to use because of that. "He's a good man," she told her sister and brother as they watched him from a rooftop, the words coming out so easily. "He always does the right thing."
Later, she did what she did without knowing why, only that she couldn't handle the alternative. She ran with him. Sometimes she was foolish enough to forget that she would never be able to tell him what he didn't know. But most of the time she was sure of what he would do if he found out. And still she did what she did for him.
Then he figured it out. After struggling for too long to do it while staring at her face he made himself shoot her, and right afterwards his breath came out in weak, pained gasps as if he was the one who was injured. He came forward and looked down at her with the same conflict in his face she had been feeling the whole past few months, and she had never been able to care about him more than she did then.
VII.
At the funeral long ago, Kara and Bill stood together on one side and Lee with his mother stood on the other, with Zak in the casket dividing them. This was how it would be for two years.
A few weeks later, Lee just went completely silent when she told him she was taking an open position on the Galactica.
"He's going through a lot," she said to break the silence, easily reading his face.
"Yeah. Poor guy," he said with sarcasm that made her cringe a little.
She leaned across her couch to look at him a little closer, speaking quietly and carefully. "This isn't fair. Isn't it bad enough without him losing his other son, too?"
"That's the choice he made, Kara," he said bitterly. "We were never his first priority before, and it's too late now. Don't you get it? That's exactly why this kills him so much. Would he ever have even seen you that much once you were married if this hadn't happened?"
She shrugged carelessly. "I don't know. Maybe not."
"So why does he care so much about knowing you now? It's not like you can give him some second chance to know his son better. You don't get second chances for these things. And that is why this kills him so much."
It all just rang distantly in her ears like some kind of idiotic elevator music, meaning nothing to her. "What's the matter with you?" she asked, still quiet. "Zak never even felt that way about him."
"No, he didn't!" he said, his voice rising angrily. "This is what I've been trying to tell you! He didn't, and that's why he wanted so much for his father to just acknowledge him for something. That's why he wanted so badly to get his wings. It was all because of him."
"Is that what you said to him at the funeral?" she asked, starting to look shocked and angry.
He went silent, not answering for a moment as he was taken aback by the way she was looking at him. He looked almost like she was making him feel bad for a second. Almost.
"Lee...I am going to the Galactica." She stated it again as if he needed to hear it again to start accepting it. It already somehow sounded like it meant something different than it had minutes before.
He wouldn't look at her face. "I'm sorry you can't understand this," he said with a faint trace of bitterness coming back into his voice.
"I do," she said tiredly. "I get it, okay? But I'm asking you to let it go."
He shook his head, staring at her with disbelief. "Let it go?"
"Come on, Lee," she said, almost begging. "Zak wouldn't want this and you know that. Please. He loved us. He wouldn't want us to...Don't make me have to make a choice here."
The anger in his face matched hers then. "It looks like you've already done that."
She crossed her arms, taking her eyes off him to stare straight forward. There was a murderous moment of silence before she said almost in a whisper, "Get out. I don't want to frakking look at you anymore."
And she meant it. She had never thought he looked anything like his brother, but at that time it was all she saw looking at him. She couldn't get away from the whole nightmare any moment she was in his presence.
Maybe this was why they so easily separated, not even gradually drifting from each other like lots of friends do over time but loudly, painfully ripping apart at the tight seams. They were too used to it always being the three of them after all this time, never just the two of them. It would be too easy to feel his absence that much more deeply if they tried to maintain any kind of connection to each other.
But for a couple weeks after that she still maybe hoped for a while, foolishly and unconsciously, that he would stop being angry and she would hear from him again. To hell with him, she finally thought, and she took down a photo of the three of them she had taped up in her locker to fold one half over, leaving only her and Zak visible, and replaced it that way. Like a funeral, it somehow made it finally feel real. As she turned away after closing the locker, her breath came out sharp like a gasp for a second, a faint sting of something cut away.
VIII.
At the Colonial Day party he found her sitting at the bar all by herself like she was waiting for him, looking like some fairy godmother had taken a wand and done a hell of a number on her. She seemed to emit some kind of bright shine that drew him right there to where she was even as she was barely recognizable enough to catch his attention at first.
Maybe he saw something new then, a completely new shape in the spot she occupied, always there in the corner of his eye. She filled a hole in his life where Zak once was as much as she ever would be able to, but sometimes it was not that simple. Like when he looked at her now and did not see his brother at all but only a woman.
It was the first time he realized she was beautiful.
...Was it?
IX.
Caprica Six does not even know for a long, empty time that Gaius is still alive. But she sees him everywhere. She wonders sometimes if a human would think love is different for Cylons because they have the ability to project someone like this, even after they are lost.
Sharon is familiar with the name on the ID tag they find one of the resistance fighters wearing. "If she gave him this, he meant something to her," she says, looking at it with some wonder and surprise.
D'Anna tosses it away like it is nothing. Caprica picks it up from the ground and looks closely at it, running a finger across the engraved K. THRACE.
"You have it in your hand," he says close to her. "Hard, physical proof of one person's love for another."
It feels cold and hard, and so small. Small in the same way a human is fragile. It is nothing and it is everything.
"If only you felt so deeply about us," he adds.
"I do," she whispers to herself with deep, internal conviction. "I love you, Gaius."
That cynical raising of his eyebrow she is so used to seeing — "Where is the tangible proof?"
Typical of him. He was always so rational and reasonable, she thinks, the now-familiar pain resounding sharply in her all over again.
But it's a fair question, after all. She deceived and used him. She vitally contributed to the genocide of his race. Despite everything she had started to feel, she carried through with the plans that could have caused his death if he had not been unimaginably lucky. If she did all that, how can she love him?
She herself does not even know how she can logically explain it. She just knows she does.
X.
Lee finally learns from Helo what exactly happened to Kara on Caprica. The part she won't mention to him. Samuel T. Anders, he explains. Professional Pyramid player turned resistance fighter. Good guy. If he's even still alive, he adds somberly.
Lee knocks back a drink, something playing on his mind like an unreachable itch. It takes him thirty seconds to say anything.
"The C-Bucs?" he then asks, as if with confusion about the fact that anyone from that team could have survived on a Cylon-occupied planet for a week.
Helo's face tightens as he tries not to laugh. Because that was pretty much what she thought when they found them. And out of everything, that's all he has to say.
But in truth, something nags at him with a faint pang as if he's forgetting about something unspeakably important. It is not the first time, but he recognizes what it is a little more easily this time, and with it what was once something light and uplifting to first become half aware of — "Nice to see you too, Captain" — becomes a heavy, sinking feeling. He cannot keep himself so numb to it anymore. There is a new hole in his life that has nothing to do with Zak, one that has been growing so gradually like a cancer and starting out so small that he never became aware of it until it had already become threatening.
She is a figure always present in the corner of his eye, something he can always reach into a pocket and find right there. Kara has been his friend for a long time. A fiercely loyal and dependable one. She is like family. Daughter his father never had, almost sister-in-law, sister he never had. His friend.
It is not enough anymore. This is the first time he knows...
Or is it?