Chapter 40 Hangovers
The next day Starbuck swore off booze.
If anyone had ever suggested she do it, she'd have laughed in their face right before giving them a well deserved black eye. But when she awoke late in the morning with the headache from hell and stomach to match, it hadn't taken much to convince her that consuming the better part of two bottles was a little excessive, even for her.
But it wasn't how horribly sick she felt that decided Kara that abstinence was the way to go. No. It was as she stood under the tepid spray of water and memories of the previous night slowly surfaced that she realized that alcohol might have ensured her a dreamless sleep, but it had also led her to seek Helo out last night. Her memories were pretty fragmented; what she did recall was that she'd gone looking for her tall friend with the intent of laying all her dirty secrets at his feet to sort out.
What a disaster that would have been!
Sober, she had no delusions that once he'd heard what she'd done while held by the Cylons, she'd be less the last person in this world that gave a damn about her. As she touched a sore spot on her chin, another image flickered forward. Blinking shower water from her eyes, and hoping to clear her confused thoughts, she fought to make some sense of the vision of Sharon pressed to the wall with hands wrapped around her throat. Closing her eyes, Kara felt conflicting emotions build as she tried to concentrate on the elusive picture. Her eyes snapped open and she jerked out from beneath the spray as the memory clicked into focus. She was choking Sharon. It was her hands that sought to crush the Cylon woman's throat.
She fell back against the shower wall and pressed her palms to her throbbing temples. It was Leoben all over again. The build up of rage until she lashed out and killed him. Only he wasn't here now…and she'd turned to another target.
On the waves of that realization, the blocked memory of engulfing anger came flooding in…
She and Leoben had just finished another silent breakfast and she was standing at the sink, dish in hand when his touch on her elbow let loose the pacing beast of her rage…
Her mind replayed the attack that had left the Cylon male a pulped mess.
She turned on him with a snarl. Her first hit immediately incapacitating him as the plate edge struck his vulnerable throat. He'd dropped to his knees, clutching and choking. Her second strike, a kick to the face, laid him out on the kitchen floor with blood spurting from a broken nose. Follow-up kicks blurred one into another as she stomped at the exposed face and chest, a berserk rage consuming her until she'd abruptly halted with her foot still held aloft as the fog of fury finally lifted enough for her to see the wreckage of the Cylon's body before her...
Slumped against the shower partition, Kara could still hear the moist thumps her heel had made as she had stomped down, over and over until his face and torso had partially caved in and were practically unrecognizable. The memory of the crunch of his trachea beneath her sole made her stomach give a convulsive lurch and Kara retched, eyes closed as she tried to expel the memory along with the contents of her stomach.
Opening her eyes, she watched the water from the shower wash the vomit down the drain. The drain pushed another image to the surface, of another time she had trampl—
The vision abruptly broke off and Kara jerked her head up with a gasp, shudders shook her and she quickly stepped back under the stream of the shower spray. She cranked the temperature up and let the painfully hot water cascade over her, attempting to scald the revulsion and panic from her skin and mind.
When she finally turned the faucets off, her calmer thoughts flowed back to Sharon and the night before, and Kara realized that she had attacked the Cylon woman, but couldn't remember why or what happened afterwards. Only her own rage and the fear in the brown eyes were clear in her mind. Well, she wasn't gonna apologize to the skin-job. And since Sharon had probably told Helo, he wasn't likely to be a sympathetic ear now…even if she had wanted to seek him out.
"Right. No more booze," she muttered out loud as she wrapped the towel around her overheated body. She couldn't risk losing control again, and was afraid she might go to Karl and beg him for forgiveness if she did. She'd had enough of begging in the detention center. So he, along with Sharon, Apollo, the Admiral and the rest of the whole frakkin' ship could just go to hell before she'd sink that low again.