Chapter Text
Sometimes, when she woke up in the morning, Kacey could remember the bad man from that cold place. He’d always fed her breakfast first thing, always the same way. He smiled at her and she smiled back, but didn’t mean it. She could feel the wrongness in him.
When the bad man brought her to Mama, she remembered someone else with that name and didn’t believe him. Then he’d pushed her down the stairs and it didn’t matter, because Mama was there to keep her safe. And when she tucked Kacey under the soft covers, Kacey could feel that she was someone special. Kacey reached for her finger and tugged her close, then.
She didn’t remember all that for long. Mama killed the bad man and brought her to Daddy, and Kacey started to forget that she hadn’t always been safe. And then she was loved, and even if there was something wrong, Kacey needed things the way they were.
Kacey played while Daddy worked, and when Mama came home she would hold her and Kacey would feel at home. When the nightmares came in the night, Mama was always there. And then Daddy was always there too, all of them together, and Kacey forgot everything bad forever.
Other bad people stole her from Mama and Daddy, for a time, and she dreamed of crying alone in a box until Mama came to save her. Someone else came then, and Kacey called her ‘mama’ without knowing why, until Mama and Daddy took her home safe again.
Then the other dreams started. The dreams where Kacey was running through a huge house, and Mama was walking towards the light and leaving Kacey behind. She cried, and clung tightly to her once she woke, and Mama and Daddy would hold her until she forgot. Then she would be hungry again, or thirsty, and life would go on.
It wasn’t safe, though. She could feel something different. When Mama wasn’t looking at Kacey her eyes didn’t smile, and she pushed her yellow hair out of her face even when she didn’t have to. Daddy tried to hide behind smiles, but his eyes were tired. Kacey would hug him and pretend she didn’t see. But the dreams wouldn’t let her forget.
*
Sam woke before the alarm rang out, for once. Kacey had shifted to the foot of the bed and Kara had rolled away from him in the night, curled on her side. Her hands, still damaged enough that she took pain meds to sleep, were tucked close to her. He breathed out and lay back, rubbing his hands over his face. The past week had been a glimpse of Hades, having to help Kara more than Kacey, and having to watch his wife’s face tighten and close off with each independence lost. And there were dreams she wasn’t telling him, he could tell. But after their daughter was tucked in, after the lights had gone down, she’d leaned into his arms every night and breathed out a sigh. There was still caring, once frustration had faded.
Now, glancing at the clock, Sam saw that it was almost time to get up. He leaned over, brushing his lips against Kara’s shoulder until she stirred with an inarticulate noise. “It’s morning,” he murmured.
She rolled slightly back to look at him, blinking awake and mumbling, “It’s not.”
“Deny all you want, but eventually I’ll have to roll over you on my way out,” he said with half a yawn, fingers dancing lazily across her stomach.
Kara snorted a little. “So all your post-fatherhood romance went to that mess of hair, huh Sam?”
“You know it’s true,” he answered, feeling a bit of warmth.
But she leaned back and looked up at him with an almost-amused challenge. “That’s all you got?”
It felt too good to just bend down and nibble at her lower lip, then have her kiss him back in a soft mess of after-sleep-ness. Sometimes, for a moment, he could forget all the trial that had led them here.
Soon it was breakfast for them all, and even though Kara could gingerly hold a spoon on her own again, it was not enough normalcy for her to want to share small talk over the meal (which, granted, would not have been a given for Kara regardless). As always, she just gritted her teeth and carried on.
Sam knew they were both ready for her to be healed so that they could get back to life. They needed it, after everything. And yet, a small part of him liked the feel of safety that came from all three of them together, nearly all day long in case Kara needed him. Even if it wasn’t all it seemed to be.
“The last of the meds are gone,” she said after she’d downed enough food to keep her from starving. She grimaced, but Sam knew better than to comment on it.
“I should pick up the laundry too,” Sam said. “It’s on the way. Can I leave Kacey with you?”
“Sure, why not,” Kara said with only half a sigh. She rose from her chair and went back to the bed, sprawling back against her pillow. “Come on, kid.”
She didn’t tell him that she’d had a tough night and needed more sleep. Whether it was because she knew Sam could tell or because she didn’t want to acknowledge that he could...did it matter?
Kacey dragged some toys with her as she crawled back into bed with Kara. One of his loves was half-cylon, one had a destiny, but all Sam saw was the irritations and the blessings that made his life his. And yet on leaving their quarters, he knew he was going out into a fleet that would never understand that.
*
“You’re not lying to me, are you?”
Julia Brynn brushed the hair out of her eyes, blinking at Paulla. “What?”
Paulla Schaffer gave her the look of a teacher, and Julia frowned at her until she said, “Well?”
“I meant it,” Julia said, glancing back down at the algae processing she was supposed to be focusing on. Her hands had always been tough, ever since the resistance, but now they were dried with chemicals and constant use. It fit her well, she thought.
“And if I ask your bunkmates, they won’t tell me you’ve been throwing up what food you get down?”
Julia turned with a glare. “As if I could hide the weight loss from your hawk eyes.”
Paulla smirked at her, and reached out to touch her arm. “Okay, so you meant it.”
“Making me angry doesn’t help,” Julia muttered, turning back to her work.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Paulla said softly, stepping next to her to help with the work. Paulla’s hands were stronger, swifter, not plagued by the damages that Julia found comforting.
Julia chewed relentlessly on the inside of her lip and continued working. It had been almost two weeks since she’d cut her own heart out, given up on the one last hope she hadn’t dared to hope until it’d been thrust in her arms. The strange dreams she’d been having told her that she could get through this on her own, but it didn’t do anything about the hole in her chest. It didn’t help to hear occasional rumors about a half-cylon daughter that should have been hers, if she hadn’t been coward enough to give her up in a frantic stubborn gesture.
Paulla didn’t seem to know the meaning of gravity for desperate situations. Her belief that dry humor would fix everything was strong enough that, rankle as it might, it affected Julia. Something told her, though, that the questions that would come if she told her about the dreams—it would drive her insane to try to explain.
“I’m not lying, I’m just not telling you everything,” Julia said after a long minute.
“Yeah, well, that’s okay,” Paulla said. She put her hand to Julia’s back in a brief touch before turning to grab another algae tray.
Julia told herself that the comfort, the distance, was enough. Enough that she would stop seeing Kacey in every child down the hall, and stop thinking about how very real a possibility such a sight was now.
*
Meds in his pocket and laundry bag swung over his shoulder, Sam walked back home and prepared for another day of this leftover chaos. At least he could only count on one hand the suspicious looks he got going down the hall, and that was without Kacey’s innocent face to dissuade some of them.
The free air was driven from his lungs as soon as he opened the hatch to his quarters. Kara lay crumpled, sprawled on the floor like a rag doll. Kacey crouched at her side, shaking her arm with tears running down her cheeks.
Dropping the laundry bag, feeling as if there was no floor beneath his feet, Sam ran forward. “No, no,” he muttered, voice cracking with desperate need. Hands shaking, he knelt at Kara’s side, and Kacey’s frightened whimpers were no less than what he felt as he rolled her over. Her face was white, her body still. “Gods, Kara, don’t—you can’t—”
Kara’s pale eyelids flickered and her hand jerked. Sam resisted the urge to gather her tightly in his arms, feeling his heart finally beating again. “Kara?”
She opened her eyes, only bleary for a second before she frowned and tensed in his arms. “I’m not frakking dead, I just passed out,” she murmured.
Sam instinctively had his hand at her shoulderblades when she tried to sit up, even though the color was returning to her face and she felt solid. His stomach was still a knot. “Cottle told you no fast movements while on these meds.”
“I know, Sam, I was there,” Kara said peevishly.
“So, what, you were going to risk falling and cracking your skull just on a whim?” Sam demanded, not needing the picture of a reckless death that was not an unfamiliar image around Kara.
“I had to get out, Sam,” Kara snapped, pulling herself away from him and up on the bed, ignoring Kacey as she tried to cling.
“Kara, you could have hit—”
“I had to get out,” Kara said, louder than she had to.
Sam saw a mess in her eyes and his fear-induced anger twisted into bitter understanding. He sighed, lowering his eyes for a second. “And now?” he asked quietly, without looking up.
“Apparently I can’t even if I want to,” Kara muttered as she lay back on the bed, arms tight over her chest with the too-accustomed frustration of uselessness. Sam could almost see the walls rising around her as she tried to hide the shaking of her foundation. He hated what these constant dreams did to her, what they were doing to them. It spoke of Cylons, and everything that had happened that they didn’t want to remember. Farms, Leoben, occupation, enemies that couldn’t die, enemies that wanted their child. “I can’t deal with Kacey right now,” Kara said under her breath, staring at the ceiling.
Kacey, still rubbing at her nose at her fear for her mother’s fall, looked up with wet eyes. Sam nodded and said nothing, pushing the stress out of the way with a sigh. “Come on, let’s go for a walk,” he said as he scooped up his daughter and tried to be the simple support she needed.
Things would be better later. They always were. He and Kara, they always bounced back, dealt with the shit that life dealt them. And they had each other, surely that made it easier. Yet, it was being together with Kacey that had caused this. Hating himself for thinking it even for a second, Sam hugged Kacey closer and kissed her forehead.
*
Each time she drew, the picture changed shape. Julia had a single piece of paper and a pencil, all that could be spared in a fleet low on supplies. She let her mind disappear into the lead tip, inscribing nothingness across the cream-colored sheet over and over, curving each new line into the old ones, making the cobwebs more dense with each slow stroke. Sometimes it looked like circles, sometimes it looked like curtains, sometimes it looked like blonde curls and she wanted to rip it to shreds.
Still she let the pencil wander, and though she would no longer repeat scripture in her mind for too many reasons, she spoke to herself of life and not-death and how she might find the former and keep it. The soft scratch of drawing was real enough for her to hold on and keep breathing at the same, methodic pace.
As a friend, Paulla was invaluable, but it had been weeks now and Julia needed to think of self-dependence. The Cylons hadn’t caught up to the Fleet since the algae planet, Kacey would grow up in another woman’s home, and Julia should be free.
In these moments, with her paper and her quiet steady breathing, she thought she believed it. Days inched by, still too slow, but each one took a little more pain with it.
Julia needed to find something to replace it with before she was left empty again. Her lips softened from their tight line at the idea that she might thank the gods when it was over, for giving her the strength to move on even while she defied them. Irony was dearer to her than faith now.
*
Kara flexed her fingers inside the Viper before twisting and turning away from her wingman, letting the Gs rock her hard against her seat for a second.
“Good to have you back, Kara,” Athena snarked over the comms as Stinger protested sharply at the near-clipping of his wings.
“Even stuck in a bed everything was screaming of staleness—don’t tell me this Fleet is getting complacent again.”
“Why don’t you ask me on a morning that didn’t end with my daughter wetting our bed,” Athena’s remarked dryly.
Kara’s smile was half a grimace. She knew the feeling.
But that didn’t keep her smile from broadening when a few hours later she hopped out of the Viper to see Sam standing, Kacey bouncing in his arms. “What’s this?”
“Got promoted to back-up deck security chief,” Sam said, giving a welcome soft touch to her arm as he passed her their child. “Not that I’ll probably ever be needed, but I get a free pass here.”
“Her too?” Kara asked skeptically, even as Kacey giggled at the way Kara’s long hair stuck every which way once her helmet was off.
Sam quirked his lips and Kara grinned again, following him off the noisy deck.
“Good day, huh?”
“It’s not that rare, is it?” she asked, and the look in his eyes wasn’t too dark. It was only half a lie, and one they clung to on the ‘good’ days.
“The Agathons invited us for drinks,” Sam said. He said it in a light tone but she could see the tightness in his shoulders. “There’s a new bar on Galactica, and I thought I could leave Kacey at the daycare for the night.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kara said, the thrill of flying still running through her veins and keeping her thoughts focused.
Once she got back to the showers, though, and the white noise of the water made her mind fall back to default—she closed her eyes and she could see red plush hallways that then swirled into a chaos of yellow and blue. The memories stuck like tar, dark streaks on her mind no matter how much she tried to clear them away. Alcohol helped. Sam helped. Maybe with both of them, she could keep this day as one of the good ones.
“This isn’t half bad, right?” Helo said as they finally assembled at the noisy bar, where everything was already a little too warm and none too fragrant, and therefore perfect.
“Kara, before I forget,” Sam said, leaning close to her over the bustle as they found a table. “Kacey wouldn’t stay at the daycare, so I brought her to Dee’s.”
Kara frowned momentarily, but before the thought could vanish from her mind with the rest of everyday troubles, Helo had burst in.
“Dee?” When Sam nodded, Kara’s oldest friend groaned. “That’s who I got to watch Hera for us...”
Athena’s eyes widened, and an involuntary snort escaped Kara. She didn’t have to know any facts to know that, well, there were some situations you didn’t want to be in.
“Poor Dee,” Helo finally said.
“Let’s drink first to her,” Sam offered.
“To her safety,” Helo said.
“And mental health,” Athena added.
Kara just downed the drink in silence, feeling the buzz of company that would eventually turn into an alcoholic rush.
“Gods, it feels good to get away,” Helo breathed out, setting down his glass. “The days seem longer with a kid, you know? At first I thought it would be good, but after a while...” He trailed off, Athena nodding.
“Yeah, it doesn’t get easier, man,” Sam said. “It’s good, though. Just—not easy. Not ever.”
Kara remembered sleepless nights, waking in a sweat to find Kacey clingy, mind terrified by the same nightmare. She tried to shake the image free with another gulp of the booze. “Can we not talk about kids for one frakking hour?” she asked shortly.
Sam glanced to her, reading everything there was to be read. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, and the discussion carried on from there. But his gaze held hers a few seconds longer.
For a while she forgot. Even after everything, Sam still giggled when he had more than two glasses, even if he didn’t have much more than that. Kara didn’t have to think about it to get lost in that giggle, falling against him as her own laughter bubbled freely out, then kissing him to stop the avalanche of mirth and taste the tang. His hands, marking her skin with unabashed groping and daring her to do likewise, felt just like old times. More than one ‘get a room’ comment made the evening worth it, as for once the only thought in Kara’s head was just how ravishable Sam looked.
She’d laid all her burdens down at the bar’s door, and inside there was only joy for a few brief hours. A little tired, a little cautious with the alcohol, a little rusty with the banter with Helo and Athena—yet they were but trifles. For too many hours, she and Sam were as one in a hedonistic relief. Even the amateur pyramid-arcade players with their glaring mistakes and dumb expressions of pride just made her laugh again, tip back her chair, drown in the chaos.
Helo and Athena left first, yawning, and Sam dragged Kara into teasing them mercilessly. But when they were gone, and the noise settled to a rushing murmur, Kara lost herself half straddling Sam and letting their tongues do an old familiar dance. Humming against his lips as his hands dragged through her hair, Kara forgot that she was trying to forget and just felt the goodness of life. Hope still thrived.
*
“Oof, I can’t believe you live here,” Paulla said with a dry laugh as she helped Julia drag a fresh mattress back to her little corner of Dogsville. It wasn’t any more bare than everywhere else in the resources-deprived sub-community, but Julia always felt—and Paulla had commented—that she made bareness its own stubborn policy. “You know,” Paulla continued, “there’s some unused compartments around here that we’ve been using for a commune, and you don’t need to be religious to get in.”
Julia lowered the mattress down with a plop, and let the puff of dust rush away before she sat down. “I’m good here,” she said. Then, for no particular reason, she gave a light slap to the mattress next to her.
Paulla sat with an easy exhale, leaning back against the artificial wall that didn’t block out any noise at all. “Hey, are those new?” she asked curiously, indicating the area of the wall where a headboard would be.
Julia glanced over, noted the swirls of pencil on the walls, drawn in defiance of impersonality. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to need neat surfaces ever again, not with the eternal mess of this life. “Just drawings.”
“They’re good,” Paulla said with a nod, reaching behind Julia’s back to touch the marks. “In more than one way,” she added.
Julia gave a small noise in answer. She’d gotten good at denial, repression, transference, through ignoring everything while she drew. At least it was something.
Paulla yawned. “Wanna go catch dinner?”
For a moment Julia considered it. But she shook her head. “Not hungry.”
“Yeah, you know I don’t believe that,” Paulla said as she stood up from the bed, with half a provoking smirk.
“Yeah,” Julia answered, which was answer enough. Until she could keep the world carefully arranged around her everywhere she went, a safety bubble of forced emotional stability, an active life wouldn’t do her any good.
After Paulla left, she lay back on the fresh mattress and thought only about the improvement in physical comfort. Basic needs were all she could count on at all times, but she counted on them with something that she called satisfaction. Even if calling it didn’t make it so.
*
Kara and Sam stayed too late at Joe’s, and Kara found an apology on her lips when they knocked at Dee’s hatch and she came to the door with hair and clothes slightly mussed. She yawned, and handed over a blotchy-faced but sleepy Kacey, and didn’t even glare. They got off lucky.
She didn’t notice any change when she sunk down into bed, Sam at her back and Kacey at her front, sleep tugging at her eyelids faster than thoughts tugged at her mind.
And then she woke in dream-land, weightless in a spiral storm of primary colors, a room in a phantom Opera House just out of reach. Kacey ran through it towards an unnamed destination—Sam wasn’t there—and Kara was suddenly there as well, no body to feel, just a light that was almost too familiar. She felt someone else in the shadows, and more than anything she felt the weight of purpose, a call that spoke of a destination that she wasn’t sure she wanted to see. Not just for humanity, but for humanity’s children.
Kara woke then, and held onto Kacey tighter, cradling her close and refusing to rouse Sam this time. “It’s okay, baby, I’m still here,” she whispered to the child who shared her nightmares, even as all she could think of was the raw wounds that ‘humanity’s children’ had left on her soul.
In the dark, unable to fall back asleep, Kara thought that maybe New Caprica had never been put behind her. She and Sam, they’d just kept pushing it far enough ahead that it was on the horizon, ignorable. But the more they pushed, the bigger it grew, until now they couldn’t push it that far. The horizon wasn’t at a long enough distance to be safe anymore.
*
There were two ways Julia knew how to go through life. Surround yourself with people, or isolate yourself. As unlikely as it seemed, more than a few managed to follow the latter on Galactica. Julia watched the world just enough to know that it was still a minority.
Yet another former resistance fighter was joining the military. Yet another was with Paulla and the religious factor. Yet another was married, and might be trying for a family. All Julia saw were hands, fingers, flailing to hold onto something in hopes that it would hold them steady.
And every time she just turned away, terror sliding into her heart at the idea that if she grabbed onto anything it might just be torn away. No, she was more solid on her own, and Paulla aside, she could make it possible on this ship.
*
Drip. Drip. Drip. The pale blue wax splashed down from the candle, nestling in the misshapen mess of colors, looking like nothing and like everything she feared if she closed her eyes too long.
“Kara?”
She jerked, turning around at the sudden touch of a hand on her shoulder. It was Lee, brow wrinkled. “What?”
“You’ve been standing there for twenty minutes,” he said with worried eyes.
Kara glanced back at the pool of wax on the floor and swallowed. Twenty minutes? She could have sworn she stopped just a few seconds ago.
“Something wrong?”
“Nope,” she answered, too bright and too fast, hiding the white-knuckled clench of her hand behind her back. “Just distracted.”
Lee nodded, accepting it with only a little hesitance. “You have CAP in a bit, right?” he asked as he turned to walk off.
“Yeah,” Kara said, feeling the pull of her eyes back towards the candle. She forced herself not to look, and walked a few more steps forward. Ever since Helo had shown her those frakking pictures of the Eye of Jupiter, her mind hadn’t stopped making the connections. Only it was getting worse.
She gritted her teeth, walked through the mostly empty locker room and pulled her suit out. At least there was nothing in space that ever changed, nothing that would distract her eyes. Slipping into the leather felt like putting on an old skin. Then, grabbing for the helmet, the light caught on the glass frontplate and she flinched, dropping it as if it was red hot. “Shit!”
Her heart restarted as she saw it roll on the floor, the light catching it again, and the mandala she thought she’d seen in the reflection was gone. Of course it was. It had never been there. Biting down hard on her jaw, Kara yanked the helmet up and kicked her locker shut.
“See a ghost?” Racetrack called absently as she passed through wearing a towel.
Kara glared at her, but for a second she didn’t want to look at her helmet again. Frak, she was losing her mind.
*
“Look, there’s some concern about your men,” Kelly told Sam, arms crossed over his chest with a worried frown. “Some rumors, at least, about them being too quick on that case. To be honest, it surprised me too.”
Sam tapped his hand against his thigh, for a second having no words. “I don’t know,” he said under his breath, shaking his head. He glanced back at the marines he was currently in charge of. “Look, those vigilante attitudes aren’t good for anyone.”
“I know that,” Kelly said with a snort. “But Anders, there’s a good amount of people who think that wanting vengeance against the Cylons shouldn’t have to be vigilantes’ jobs, it should be a patriotic responsibility.”
Sam knew that the automatic tensing of his body was obvious, as was the way his hand clenched into a fist. Kelly sighed, but Sam didn’t trust himself to give an answer straight away. He was proud of the Fleet—he was proud of the way that they’d grown since that first reveal. Kacey was accepted, he and Kara were accepted. Even Jean and Cally and Galen had come around, admitted that there were grey areas. Then with Athena and Hera, it seemed like people had stopped making snap decisions on a mere word. But there were always the ones who still thought in black and white. Maybe some who thought that those who’d kidnapped his child were saving the Fleet from danger.
“I’m just saying, you should be aware,” Kelly said with a sigh. “You know you’re never going to get everyone to agree, but especially on something like this.”
Glancing back again, stomach twisting for a second as he remembered training men to take out every last skinjob or potential skinjob on Caprica, Sam didn’t blame the man. “I know.”
And he didn’t want to admit it, but he felt guilty. The ghosts of Sue Shaun, Wheeler, Kai, Coach, and dozens of others, screamed out to him from his mind. Nothing that is Cylon should be trusted—life would be a lot simpler if he believed it. Staring at the marines as they marched, cocked their weapons, aimed, it was like he could smell the metallic air of Caprica again. Feel the radiation-colored sun on his skin as he crouched, fear at the back of his throat as any moment the toasters would find him, kill him. Some even pretended to be humans. It could just as easily be the cold blue of New Caprica, where a human or a Cylon waited around every corner to turn in “traitors”, whether they had evidence or not.
He closed his eyes, breathed in, but a touch on his knee made him reach for his gun in an unwanted panic. “Gods—” His hand was on the trigger before he knew what Cylon had found him.
But then his eyes opened and it was Kacey, come over to see him from where she usually played. The war disappeared in a flash, leaving him safe on the ship again, and his arm dropped in a guilt even more overwhelming than before.
“Daddy?” she asked, eyes a little wide.
“I’m sorry, Kacey,” he said, dropping to a squat and reaching out to stroke her hair. He’d almost drawn a gun on his own child—he felt sick. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Dreams?” she asked, sucking on her thumb, her toy in hand.
Sam stared at her, trying to pull himself fully back to reality and the present. And he was failing. “Nightmares,” he said softly. He shuddered, wondering when he’d started losing himself. He’d always made the ship a safe place for him and Kacey, and for Kara, and he couldn’t see how one traumatic event for them could just rip all that progress away.
“Hungry,” Kacey said, nudging him, her caution gone in the childish way that Sam wished now he could imitate.
“Yeah, lunch time,” Sam said, standing up with a sigh. Frak, what was wrong with him? He was a father and a trainer, not a resistance leader. Whatever had made him forget that, now he had to fix. He gave Kacey a weak smile and beckoned over to where their packed algae lunch waited. He could still do this, or at least look like it.
*
Kara stared at the hatch that would lead to her quarters. She didn’t want to go in. She wanted to go to Joe’s, drink herself half to death, then crash on a bunk somewhere and wake with a hangover. It would be easy that way. Easy. She had a bitter longing for easy, even if she had to tear up her life and burn a thousand mandalas to get it.
What the hell had she been thinking, making out like she had a stable family? The only stability life could offer didn’t have her in the picture. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, and she almost turned and walked away down the easy path. Then she heard Kacey’s laugh, or thought she did, and Sam’s low chuckle in answer. They were waiting for her, frak them. In all the madness they’d decided that they wanted her, and when they had her, they didn’t seem to change their minds. Kara wanted it to be the same with her. But standing here, remembering how her mind didn’t seem to be in her full control anymore, she wasn’t sure she could trust herself to just want them. Her gut told her that they could never be that easy.
So she didn’t know why she spun the hatch open and pushed it in, like she did when things were supposed to be normal. Kacey ran across the room to hug her leg with a toothy grin, and it was—so simple. Kara smiled at her, and as she always had she loved her. But her heart wouldn’t stop twisting in the fear that it was with a part of her mind that was shrinking, despite her attempts to hang on.
Sam half-smiled at her, eyes warm. She half-smiled back. Settling back into the couch, Kacey crawled up on her lap and snuggled against her chest. Kara let her fingers comb through her daughter’s curls, but her heart kept pounding. What happened when she forgot what she was doing, lost another twenty minutes to a nightmare of primary colors? What happened when she came out of it, struck out without thinking? What happened when she finally admitted that this was too hard for someone whose mind had never been properly unscrambled, and when she admitted that she couldn’t remember why she’d ever thought things were getting better?
Kacey went to sleep and Kara put her in bed. Then she turned and paced away, going to clean her gun because her hands itched. She broke it into parts, jaw tight, hands strong, slamming down the finished barrel after she pinched her finger putting it back together. She punched the table with a curse, and spun away, pushing her stupid long hair roughly out of her face as she got up to grab for a drink.
Sam let his paperwork fall, came to her side. “Bad day?” he asked in a voice that sounded like he felt it too well.
“Normal month,” Kara corrected in a mutter, but even when she sipped down the alcohol, it wasn’t easy enough. She shut her eyes, wanting to punch something. Any moment she expected to see a mandala, an opera house, a cylon, anything that wasn’t real and yet wouldn’t stop following her around.
“Hey,” Sam said, hand on her shoulder.
She didn’t want to turn and look up into his eyes, but she did anyways. There was more than just concern born of love in them, though, and for a second she hoped, though she didn’t know for what. The dark weariness in Sam's eyes made her want to sigh through gritted teeth, but instead she pulled him closer, drawing his head down until their foreheads pressed together. “Normal is frakking insane,” she explained under her breath.
“As if I don’t know,” Sam answered, shutting his eyes with a grimace for a second. But his hand slowly circled her waist, not crushing her safe against him, just making sure she was there. In the silence, in the calm before a storm Kara felt was inevitable, they stood with tension all on hold. “I’ve got all my sanity counting on this,” he murmured. “You, and this.”
“Bad idea,” Kara said as a bitter laugh made a lump in her throat. “Worst idea.”
He swallowed, nodded. “Don’t know if I’m ready to lose that yet,” he admitted then. When his eyes met hers for a brief second, there was fear. “Don’t know if my mind...”
Kara wanted to burn the fear away before it joined with hers and buried them both alive. “We need to frak, Sam,” she said, lips brushing against his for a second.
He gripped her waist tighter for a second, but hesitated, doubt all over his face. “You know, I don’t know if I care about insanity,” he said, voice dark and desperate.
“Good,” Kara answered, feeling the relief of her focus narrowing on something simple and short-term, and muttering as she pushed them towards the door, “’Cause I don’t know if what I cared about was anything else.”
It wasn’t hard to find a locker, to drop their clothes, for Sam to sit back and for Kara to straddle him, trying to breathe steadily and focus on this. Electricity, itching under her skin, meeting with his, mingling, lighting her body on fire, lighting his, bringing them closer, joined, overwhelmed, intent, together. The slick slide of him inside her gave her jolts of something a hundred times better than the adrenaline that had been plaguing her for weeks. He couldn’t hold back a soft groan as she rocked down onto him, breathing heavy, and then somehow she was pulling his head to hers and kissing him. Eager, needy, and full of a chaotic desperation that she could taste mirrored on his tongue. He pulled her closer, nuzzling at her breasts when breathing grew too heavy for kisses. They drowned in each other, and the heat of it burned everything away, fear and common sense alike.
When they were done, both hoping they were whole and afraid they were hollow, Kara didn’t make the first move from the naked mess they were tangled in. She listened to her heart beat, listened to his, and pressed her lips together as she hoped the simple beats would align and point the way to the end. They didn’t. She didn’t expect them to, just hoped. And when Sam kissed her forehead, the weariness was there even if the tension was gone for a moment. A frak wouldn’t fix anything, and they knew it.
But when they went back and cleaned up, settling down with Kacey to find sleep, Kara thought she recognized the tugging on her heart. Not guilt, but longing again. She wanted to make this simple—ever since they’d decided on a family, she had wanted that. She didn’t know how, though, and now she was sure that she couldn’t make it. Not with this insane, broken mind. And for the first time, Sam’s presence behind her wasn’t sure enough for the both of them.
*
Some nights, Sam lay awake and almost wished that his wife and daughter did not sleep so peacefully. When nightmares roused them, his mind caught onto the problem and it was tangible, and distracting. His own nightmares weren’t so easily parsed, and when he couldn’t sleep at all, there was nothing to blame but himself. He stared at the blackness above the bed and counted deaths. One for almost every mission he’d ever led, more for every massacre, none quite so many as the list of dead from the very first attacks.
He still heard the bombs. Even if it was only when he was trying to sleep. That year of peace on New Caprica had healed so much, and yet when the Cylons came back to occupy, it tore that wound right open again. Kara and Kacey couldn’t heal that—he couldn’t expect them to, and he wouldn’t. He’d lie awake, body taut, trying to remember to breathe and know that when he did so he wouldn’t smell smoke and burnt flesh.
The resistance still pulled at him, magnetic in its inevitable power. He’d tried to give up war and failed, and he was starting to think it was because he thought he had to keep it. Instead of setting those memories free, he’d bottled them up. He’d tried to lock away the pictures of the farms he’d liberated, full of dead women and women who wanted to be dead and women who weren’t sure whether they were alive or dead. He’d tried to hide the feeling of blood revenge, the desire to kill and murder and destroy for what the Cylons had done to his people. And he had hidden them. But they weren’t gone. Now, with something pulling Kara and Kacey into the Cylons’ web again, they started leaking out, as if drawn to the shared conflict.
He got out of the bed cautiously so they couldn’t tell, and sat at the foot of the couch. Knees half brought up to his chest, he rested his head in his arms and tried to breathe easily. Thinking of Kara was better until he remembered Leoben and Kara’s carefully worded fears. Thinking of Kacey was easier until he remembered Julia and the place that she had come from with her child. Nothing good in his life had come from good—it all came from pain.
Sleep finally took him, but when he woke in the morning, he knew it wasn’t enough. He stood at the sink and stared at the water dripping over his hands. It wasn’t going to be a good day, and when he saw Kacey hop out of bed, he sighed.
“I’m going to drop her off at daycare,” Sam told Kara when she got up, nodding towards Kacey and noticing that Kara looked twice as rested than him and yet still haggard.
She glanced sharply at him. “Something up?”
“It’s getting tough to have her there,” he admitted with a sigh, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “But today it’s just—I’m halfway to the end of my rope already.”
Kara’s brow narrowed. “I thought,” she said, putting up a hand with a firm frown, “that we weren’t going to just abandon her.”
Sam furrowed his brow. Given the days before, he should have been more careful, but he was so godsdamned exhausted. “Kara...”
“So all that fuss about being attentive parents was just for when you didn’t feel frustrated?” Kara said, hints of betrayal and disdain in her voice and a twitch in her aggressive stance. “Because really, Sam, you should have told me, I would have given her up a hundred times already if that was the criteria.”
Sam didn’t mean to point his finger at her, but he did anyway—”Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m just saying it would be better for Kacey today, and since you don’t ever take time off.” He waved his hand, trying to brush off the irritation that conflict sprouted in his weary body.
“Better,” Kara intoned. Sam looked back, saw her meeting his eyes with a hard stare. “Sure, Sam, she’s better off among strangers who may think she’s an abomination.”
“Kara, you know them, and you were fine for letting them watch her when we went to Joe’s,” Sam protested, frowning.
“For a couple hours, yeah, not a whole frakking day,” Kara retorted. “You have no idea how their security is. And regardless of that, who the hell’s going to know how to deal with her nightmares?”
“All kids have nightmares,” Sam sighed, biting back the urge to say she was overreacting. She wasn’t; their history was complicated. He just didn’t want to negotiate it right now... He didn’t want to be patient, no matter how much he knew that he should.
“Not like these,” Kara shot back, one hand clenching at her side. Her lips were tight and almost bloodless. Kacey was trying to climb up into a chair, and Kara moved with short jerky motions to help her.
But Sam felt his stomach in a knot at the idea of this choice, the idea that taking a day to make sure he was in control of himself was going to ruin his daughter’s life. “Look, I don’t think I can handle Kacey today. It’s not about whether I love her or not—”
Kara didn’t face him, profiled in a tight stance as she gripped the back of Kacey’s chair. “Don’t do this to her,” she said in a low, open voice, and it was about more than just Kacey.
Sam felt frustration turn to anger. And this was just with Kara, who knew exactly what she was doing to him—he’d barely been awake an hour, and he was more certain than anything that he wasn’t capable of taking care of a job and his own screwed-up head and an innocent child who depended on him for everything. Not all at once. He wanted to shout, but instead he turned, resting his fist against the wall far too hard. “This was a lot more reasonable when we both cared about her safety,” he snapped, not thinking.
“What’s safe is if she has a frakking parent keeping an eye on her,” Kara shot back, eyes like dark flames.
“And what if I can’t, Kara?” Sam was getting too loud; he was failing, the fear and the frustration getting the best of him. He remembered that gun, and the sick feeling that he’d forgotten who he was with for almost too long. “What if I can’t even say that she’ll be safe with me?”
“Then you’re a frakking useless sack of shit,” Kara spat, hand shaking as it still gripped the chair, white-knuckled. He could see the breath catch in her throat, unsteady. “And I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, assuming that you at least had the will to fight for this choice, no matter how idiotically hopeful it was.”
Sam stared at her, and there were a thousand words to say that she didn’t understand, and yet a thousand ways her words hit all his fears. He didn’t have time to say any of them. Kara quivered with too much emotion, and then in a sharp move she’d grabbed a mug from the table and smashed it against the wall. It fell in glittering sharp shards and she stared at it, breathing heavily.
Then Kacey burst into tears. Sam watched as if outside his own body, as if watching a situation that he had started but had no power to control as it fell apart. Kacey curled up on herself, eyes wide as she glanced between her parents, and then down into her hands. The only sound filling the room was her weeping. Kara looked at her, all the anger suddenly gone and only vulnerability stark on her face. She looked broken—she looked guilty and crushed. Sam caught his breath, feeling again like he could barely stand, but his heart was cracked and he hated what he’d done.
Kara didn’t raise her eyes, though, and with arms at her sides as if she didn’t trust herself to use them, she turned for the door. Kacey sobbed, and Sam knew what Kara was doing, what he had tried to do, and what mess was left. He moved in to Kacey’s side, hands hesitant as he didn’t know what he could possibly do. But he had to try. Looking back, he also knew something else. “Kara, don’t leave now,” he said in a voice that snapped in the middle.
She stopped at the door, back facing him, but didn’t move. Kacey’s cries felt like stabs to Sam’s heart, telling him exactly what he’d done, and he could barely feel like he was worthy to even give her comfort. But he and Kara were all she had. “Don’t leave this mess,” he called to Kara, as he wrapped his arm around his daughter and sharply swallowed the first rush of guilt.
Kara didn’t. She came back, her face a mess of emotion that welled further in her eyes, and she knelt at his side. “Don’t cry, Kacey,” she said in a hoarse whisper, gingerly putting her hand to her daughter’s back. “We love you, Kacey. We’re—” She clenched her hand, looking unable to put anything into words.
“We’re sorry,” Sam put in, all he could manage.
Kacey buried her face in Kara’s chest, and with a shaky breath, Kara embraced the child with all the clearly self-hating remorse she had in her. And Sam, knowing nothing else he could do, put his arm around his wife and cradled his family in his arms. Each breath came haltingly as he tried not to fall apart, just hold his loved ones and pray to the gods for forgiveness for—for everything.
It seemed like an hour before Kacey grew silent. None of them moved, and Sam felt Kara flinch every so often as if she didn’t trust herself to stay. He didn’t know what to say, and for once she was the one to find the words. “I’m losing it, Sam. Staying here is just going to hurt you both.”
Sam closed his eyes and leaned his head back until it hit the table leg with a thump. “Stole the words from my mouth,” he said in a dead voice.
Kara laughed bitterly. “What the hell are we doing to our kid?”
Sam gripped them both tighter and didn’t say a word.
*
“Look, we’re not weak,” Sam had finally said, after they’d handed Kacey safely over to the daycare and found the proper place for harsh confessions. Their shared insecurities, madnesses, seemed like a crushing burden when put in words. “We can get through this.”
“I’m seeing illusions,” Kara had pointed out the most obvious problem, feeling the more they talked that she was a wreck who didn’t deserve a Viper let alone a child. And yet, she couldn’t give up. What else did she have?
“Frak, we are not the only ones who had to see horrors,” Sam muttered, crossing his arms. “We jumped back into routine without thinking. Maybe we need time, space, to just—deal.”
Kara flinched at the words. “What does that mean?”
But Sam leaned over his knees, staring at his hands as if he’d just got an idea. “Maybe you’re right, maybe the daycare isn’t good for Kacey in a lot of ways. And if we need to have time to talk more, fix our heads, then we need something else.” He looked up at Kara, and some of the pain had left his face, leaving a strange determination. “What about Julia?”
Kara stared.
“Kacey’s surrogate mother,” Sam explained.
Kara clenched her fists as she remembered that name. “Sam, I—”
“We know she loves her,” Sam interrupted her. “And that’s what matters, right? Making sure Kacey’s safe and loved?”
For a moment Kara forgot that she was losing her mind as she shook her head. “What are we supposed to say, Sam? What is she going to think? That we’re giving up our child because we’re too much of a mess? Because we’re not—frak it, I can’t give her up just like that—”
“Gods no,” Sam added, a little horror on his face. “But Kara, she’s obviously not a small-minded woman. I think she’d understand. And I can only hope that she’d want to help Kacey.”
Kara bit down on her first thought, that they had no idea at all what she was like. Then she remembered. Then she forced herself to recall Julia’s face as she’d held Kacey on that fateful day, the joy and the tragedy displayed on an innocent woman’s worn countenance, and Kara remembered how her heart couldn’t help but identify with that fear of inevitable failure tied to Kacey’s life. If she’d been in Julia’s place now, she knew she would have done everything in her power to make Kacey’s life better.
And yet, all she could do was give a painful laugh. “And if it doesn’t get better?”
“It can’t end like this,” Sam said in a low voice, shaking his head. “We’re better than this, we’re stronger than this. I’m not accepting war as an excuse to lose myself, and definitely not one to hurt my family.”
Kara nodded once and met his eyes, feeling the burn as she curled her hands into determined fists. “Fight till we can’t, then.”
Sam nodded. “Fight till we can’t.”
*
Julia sighed and pushed her hair back from her face. Paulla had yet again asked her to come to Joe’s at least once, let herself get hammered, and for the first time Julia was thinking that maybe she was ready. She thought that perhaps she’d closed off all the painful parts of her mind so well that even alcohol wouldn’t loosen the locks.
Her shift was over, and she returned to her place in Dogsville, limbs loose and just weary enough to make the prospect of intoxication worthwhile. She turned the corner to her dwelling, and then stopped short.
Her breath caught in her chest at the sight of the blonde woman standing there, hair pulled back from her face and dress blues, hands tight at her sides as she stood in Julia’s dwelling. Her face was the kind of grey-pale that Julia had once seen every day in the mirror—death warmed over. But the light in her eyes was strong, and Julia remembered her. Kara, Starbuck, Captain Thrace. Kacey’s mother. Julia still couldn’t catch her breath.
“Julia Brynn,” Kara Thrace said, taking a small step forward and putting out her hand. Her mouth was tight, but her intent was firm and non-hostile. “Can we talk?”
From the shaking in Julia’s mind that she couldn’t stop, she knew that she still wasn’t over all that had happened. Despite everything she nodded, and swallowed the sudden doubts and admonitions of her common sense. She had to take this.
Julia Brynn, without any logical reason, waved her hand to offer a seat in her dwelling to Kara Thrace.