Fic: Descant (chapter 2)
Jan. 20th, 2012 06:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
embolaliaTitle: Descant Chapter 2
Rating: R
Characters: Kara/Sam, Kara/Leoben, Caprica, Boomer, & more
Word Count (this chapter): 2,232
WARNINGS: Non-canon character death. Canon-level violence and themes.
A/N: I've been working on this for months and it's finally ready for posting! This is an AU that begins as the Cylons reach New Caprica and before Leoben imprisons Kara, so for those of you whose aversion to Kara/Leoben begins with the dollhouse, I hope you'll try this out.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
“And once Sam gets far enough away, you set it off.”
“Boom,” Barolay mutters.
“Yeah,” Kara says tightly. “Boom.”
“And we all hope like hell he hasn’t started coughing and given us away,” Tyrol grumbles.
Kara glares, but she doesn’t argue. He’s not wrong.
“Captain, where is he?” Tyrol asks softly.
She folds up the scraps of paper with the layout of the detention center, tosses them into the fire. “Any questions?”
They glance at each other and back to her.
“Good,” Kara bites out. “We’ll meet here at nightfall.”
She slips out of the tent carefully, checking up and down the alley for Cylons before she emerges. Taking a deep breath Kara sets her pace to a stroll, moves unhurriedly toward the main thoroughfare. Tigh has been taken in the past week since the President went missing, and Zarek, and a host of others. She keeps alert beneath her nonchalance.
Kara worries her lip as she walks. Sam shouldn’t have missed this meeting. Cottle said the antibiotics were the real thing and Sam should be getting better by now. The doctor is the only one who has any idea what she did; Sam just thinks his knowledge of resistance fighting was worth a few doses from the stockpiled meds.
She grimaces. He may need to rest, but a soldier would know to show up when ordered to without complaint. Kara’s halfway to pissed off by the time she reaches their home.
“Hey,” she calls out as she lifts the tent flap. “What the frak, Sam? You missed the whole thing.”
He’s in bed, face relaxed in sleep. Kara sighs, sitting down by his knees and pulling off her boots. “Hey.” She squeezes his leg. “Time to get up.” Unease settles in her gut when he doesn’t answer. “Sam?” She reaches out, fingers trembling suddenly, and lays her hand across Sam’s forehead, feeling for fever.
His skin is icy to the touch.
“No,” Kara gasps, flinching away. For a moment she struggles to breathe. “Sam?” she begs, hesitating before taking his hand. His fingers are stiff. “Sam.” She falls forward, her face pressed against his chest through the blanket. He still smells like himself. Still feels real enough to wrap his arms around her. Tears streak salty and hot down her cheeks.
He’s gone.
Some time later, as the sky darkens, Kara staggers through the streets again and down the stairs into their secret chamber.
“Starbuck?” Tyrol asks in concern as he catches sight of her.
She bites her lip, swallowing hard. Willing herself to say the words without crying. “Sam is dead.”
Around the room, the others straighten, gasp, reach out. Barolay’s eyes fill with tears.
“Did the Cylons--” Duck starts.
Kara shakes her head. “No. The pneumonia--he was too sick.” Her eyes plead with all of them not to ask questions.
“Did you move the body?” Tyrol takes her cue, turns them back to business.
“No,” she says softly. “I’ll build him a pyre later, down by the river.”
The others shift and nod.
“It’ll do for an alibi,” Ellen offers. “We’ll all be there.”
“You shouldn’t break curfew,” Kara says absently.
The others trade glances over her head. “It’ll be fine, Captain,” Tyrol offers. “I’ll take Sam’s place. We won’t let the bastards win.”
“Good.”
Working methodically, Kara and Jean gather logs and branches, arranging them for the fire. No one suggested burial; she doesn’t have to explain that she won’t leave him behind on this waste of a planet when they go.
The remaining C-Bucs arrive after a while with the body, Ellen trailing behind and keeping the black cloth he’s wrapped in from dragging on the ground. Duck and Tyrol have already begun the mission.
Kara reaches out one last time as they lay Sam in place, pulls back the cloth to see her husband’s face. “I love you,” she whispers, tangling her fingers in the chain around his neck, her dogtag pressed into her palm. She steps back.
The flames leap high in the night; the wood here burns hot and pungent, covering the smell of flesh.
Across the settlement an explosion rocks the main Cylon building. The gathered resistance members flinch. Kara doesn’t blink.
The bed of coals is glowing red in the darkness when Duck stumbles up, his hair singed and his eyes wild.
“He stopped,” he says haltingly. “He just--he was about to be far enough away and I pulled the trigger and he just--he stopped--I don’t know why--” He continues, his words incoherent.
Kara rises, slaps him across the face. “Is Tyrol alive?” she asks harshly.
Duck shakes his head. “No, sir.”
She nods once, tightly, sparing only a glance for the ashes of the fire before leading the way back into the camp. “We need to get out of sight quickly, before the Cylons do any sweeps.”
“Captain, I’m s--”
“Don’t,” Kara says, cutting him off. “This is war. Good men and women die in war. It’s what he signed up for. We have to keep going.”
*
As he walks up to the house, Leoben meets Caprica’s eyes where she’s sitting on the steps.
“She won’t let me in,” his sister says softly.
Leoben nods. “You get to have what she wants.”
Caprica flinches at the words. “Gaius...blames me. He doesn’t say so but he does. For what we did. For how guilty he feels.”
“So do you.”
Her eyes open wide in surprise.
“You love him,” Leoben says softly. “You wanted to save his entire race because you love him, and because you believe what we did was wrong.”
Now Caprica nods.
“It’s all part of the cycle,” he reminds her.
She glances toward the house. “It’s not as perfect as she thinks.”
“But it’s all she’s ever wanted.” Leoben rests his hand on her hair in silent benediction. “Go. I’ll stay with her a while.” Caprica smiles up at him and stands, disappears.
Leoben climbs the steps, knocks lightly on the door.
“Go away!” Boomer shouts from inside, her voice muffled by tears.
He opens the door anyway. She’s curled up on the couch. Leoben steps over the shoes near the door, a forgotten doll.
Boomer raises her head from his arms, turns to him with bloodshot eyes. Leoben doesn’t say anything, just sits and pulls his littlest sister against him and lets her cry.
“I didn’t know,” Leoben says. “I would have told you.”
She rests her forehead against his shoulder. “Why is it like this? Why would they make me love him like this? He didn’t,” she hiccups, “he didn’t even love me like this. He found someone else.” Boomer closes her eyes. “He wouldn’t even talk to me.”
Leoben strokes her hair. “This isn’t programming, Sharon. Love is from God. It’s the closest we come to his will.”
Boomer shakes her head. “It hurts too much. Don’t you know that? Don’t you see the way Kara loves Sam? And Lee?”
He shrugs the words away. “I can see the bigger pattern.”
She presses her hands over her face. “We were supposed to build this house together.”
Leoben hugs her again, slowly unravels Boomer’s projection. When he pulls away they’re sitting in Kara’s apartment from Caprica, his own sanctuary.
“We should leave,” Boomer says softly. “We should just go away and never look back.”
Leoben squeezes her shoulder. “No,” he says firmly. “There is only one stream.”
*
Two weeks after Tyrol’s death, Cally goes into labor.
Kara clutches her hands for hours, feeling her bones shift in Cally’s grip as she screams out in pain. “You can do this,” Kara promises the girl over and over, “Keep pushing!”
It seems to take a eternity, and then suddenly it’s done and Cottle is cradling a baby in his arms: a boy. He cleans the baby, hands him gently to Cally.
She smiles, for the first time in weeks.
“What’s his name?” Kara asks reverently.
“Nicholas,” Cally whispers, staring at him in wonder. Then she looks up at Kara. “Galen picked it out.” Her eyes flood with tears.
Kara blinks her own vision clear.
For the first few days, Kara stays with Cally in her tent, tending to her, getting over her own discomfort with the baby. It’s a shock when Cally asks her to leave.
“I’m sorry he’s not here,” Kara says tightly. “I was just trying to help.”
“I know,” Cally says, her tone hardening. “But they see you. A Boomer watched you come in here when you got back with the diapers. They know who you are. You’re putting us in danger.”
And there it is. Kara can’t even deny it. She kisses Nicky goodbye and leaves.
When she crosses the marketplace now, Kara sees the children, the few who survived the fall, the dozens of infants, the pregnant women filled with hope and worry. She sees the arms reaching out to pull little ones away from Centurions, from skin-jobs. Fiercely defensive, yet not willing to risk their lives, their children’s. They’re not soldiers anymore if they ever were. They have too much to lose. They’re already giving up.
At night she sleeps restlessly, dreaming of Sam--and every once in a while, of Leoben.
Without Tyrol and Sam the civilians are more skittish, harder to organize. They need to fill the ranks of the resistance--with civilians, former convicts, whatever it takes. She spends as much time on the pyramid courts now as Sam used to, murmuring under her breath to the players or sitting in the sidelines, leaning in close, speaking urgently under the cover of the crowd’s noise. She promises that Galactica will come, promises that the Cylons can be taken down if they find their weakness, promises that if they stand together they won’t fall. But the Cylons can get blown up and be back the next day; these are the only humans left, maybe in the universe, and they know it.
Kara walks from place to place, one foot in front of the other, refusing to scurry away from the Centurions, to hide the way the rest of her people do these days. Then she turns a corner and sees a Centurion shoot a woman and has to swallow a scream as she darts back behind a tent. Peering out, she watches as a Doral spits on the body, mutters something about humans, and leaves her in the dirt.
Her heart doesn’t stop racing for long minutes. She clenches her jaw, fighting for silence as tears of shock and despair track down her cheeks. She used to be a better soldier.
On the nights when the Resistance doesn’t have missions, they dig graves. Out near Sam’s pyre the bodies of the dead lie in solemn, silent rows. At night sometimes Kara sits there with him, with them, and wonders how she’ll know when it’s not worth fighting anymore.
*
It’s easy enough to find him; she goes back to where they kissed and he’s sitting on a fallen log, arms wrapped around his knees, waiting for her.
Kara sits silently beside him. For the first time in weeks, she’s enveloped by quiet.
“It could all be like this,” Leoben says after a while.
“Like what? Brutal repression of one people by another?”
“It doesn’t have to be a war.” His voice is gravelly and calm.
“You killed billions of us,” Kara answers.
“You killed billions of us,” he echoes.
She bites her lip, shrugs wearily. “So we go our separate ways, what happened to that plan?”
“I told you. We couldn’t live without you.”
Kara shakes her head dismissively.
“Boomer loved Tyrol, Caprica loves Gaius. I love you. There’s truth in that, there’s God in that, Kara. We weren’t meant to be apart.” He smiles at her.
Kara’s eyes are wide, incredulous. “Frak,” she breathes. Leoben reaches out, runs a finger down her cheek, over her lip.
“Think of your mother, Kara. You can run away but it doesn’t stop someone from hurting you. You have to make peace, real peace.”
She stares at him a moment longer, then gets up and walks away.
*
Kara takes the next mission herself; she asks Duck first but she sees the way he looks at Nora. Better it be her.
It’s a simple job: get the bomb in and get out. Not her style, not usually. Sam’s. She tosses it under a van full of skin jobs and runs.
“Kara!” Leoben shouts after her.
She turns just in time to see his face contort in horror as his body turns to flame. The shockwave hurls Kara to the ground. She stares at the place where he stood, sobbing harshly. She lays there as darkness clouds her vision. Her head is aching. The world fades away.
*
D’Anna gasps to consciousness in a resurrection tub, awakening as if from a dream. A feeling lingers, something she has no name for. A baby was crying.
*
The moments when he’s in the stream, in between lives, are the times Leoben can see most clearly. When he opens his eyes the visions are a blur again, but this time there is something new left behind: a sense of imminence. It’s nearly time.
He dries and dresses and heads out into the world, reborn.
She’s curled on the ground, face dirty with tears and grit, right where he knew she’d be. Leoben lifts Kara gently in his arms, and carries her home.
Chapter 3
Rating: R
Characters: Kara/Sam, Kara/Leoben, Caprica, Boomer, & more
Word Count (this chapter): 2,232
WARNINGS: Non-canon character death. Canon-level violence and themes.
A/N: I've been working on this for months and it's finally ready for posting! This is an AU that begins as the Cylons reach New Caprica and before Leoben imprisons Kara, so for those of you whose aversion to Kara/Leoben begins with the dollhouse, I hope you'll try this out.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
“And once Sam gets far enough away, you set it off.”
“Boom,” Barolay mutters.
“Yeah,” Kara says tightly. “Boom.”
“And we all hope like hell he hasn’t started coughing and given us away,” Tyrol grumbles.
Kara glares, but she doesn’t argue. He’s not wrong.
“Captain, where is he?” Tyrol asks softly.
She folds up the scraps of paper with the layout of the detention center, tosses them into the fire. “Any questions?”
They glance at each other and back to her.
“Good,” Kara bites out. “We’ll meet here at nightfall.”
She slips out of the tent carefully, checking up and down the alley for Cylons before she emerges. Taking a deep breath Kara sets her pace to a stroll, moves unhurriedly toward the main thoroughfare. Tigh has been taken in the past week since the President went missing, and Zarek, and a host of others. She keeps alert beneath her nonchalance.
Kara worries her lip as she walks. Sam shouldn’t have missed this meeting. Cottle said the antibiotics were the real thing and Sam should be getting better by now. The doctor is the only one who has any idea what she did; Sam just thinks his knowledge of resistance fighting was worth a few doses from the stockpiled meds.
She grimaces. He may need to rest, but a soldier would know to show up when ordered to without complaint. Kara’s halfway to pissed off by the time she reaches their home.
“Hey,” she calls out as she lifts the tent flap. “What the frak, Sam? You missed the whole thing.”
He’s in bed, face relaxed in sleep. Kara sighs, sitting down by his knees and pulling off her boots. “Hey.” She squeezes his leg. “Time to get up.” Unease settles in her gut when he doesn’t answer. “Sam?” She reaches out, fingers trembling suddenly, and lays her hand across Sam’s forehead, feeling for fever.
His skin is icy to the touch.
“No,” Kara gasps, flinching away. For a moment she struggles to breathe. “Sam?” she begs, hesitating before taking his hand. His fingers are stiff. “Sam.” She falls forward, her face pressed against his chest through the blanket. He still smells like himself. Still feels real enough to wrap his arms around her. Tears streak salty and hot down her cheeks.
He’s gone.
Some time later, as the sky darkens, Kara staggers through the streets again and down the stairs into their secret chamber.
“Starbuck?” Tyrol asks in concern as he catches sight of her.
She bites her lip, swallowing hard. Willing herself to say the words without crying. “Sam is dead.”
Around the room, the others straighten, gasp, reach out. Barolay’s eyes fill with tears.
“Did the Cylons--” Duck starts.
Kara shakes her head. “No. The pneumonia--he was too sick.” Her eyes plead with all of them not to ask questions.
“Did you move the body?” Tyrol takes her cue, turns them back to business.
“No,” she says softly. “I’ll build him a pyre later, down by the river.”
The others shift and nod.
“It’ll do for an alibi,” Ellen offers. “We’ll all be there.”
“You shouldn’t break curfew,” Kara says absently.
The others trade glances over her head. “It’ll be fine, Captain,” Tyrol offers. “I’ll take Sam’s place. We won’t let the bastards win.”
“Good.”
Working methodically, Kara and Jean gather logs and branches, arranging them for the fire. No one suggested burial; she doesn’t have to explain that she won’t leave him behind on this waste of a planet when they go.
The remaining C-Bucs arrive after a while with the body, Ellen trailing behind and keeping the black cloth he’s wrapped in from dragging on the ground. Duck and Tyrol have already begun the mission.
Kara reaches out one last time as they lay Sam in place, pulls back the cloth to see her husband’s face. “I love you,” she whispers, tangling her fingers in the chain around his neck, her dogtag pressed into her palm. She steps back.
The flames leap high in the night; the wood here burns hot and pungent, covering the smell of flesh.
Across the settlement an explosion rocks the main Cylon building. The gathered resistance members flinch. Kara doesn’t blink.
The bed of coals is glowing red in the darkness when Duck stumbles up, his hair singed and his eyes wild.
“He stopped,” he says haltingly. “He just--he was about to be far enough away and I pulled the trigger and he just--he stopped--I don’t know why--” He continues, his words incoherent.
Kara rises, slaps him across the face. “Is Tyrol alive?” she asks harshly.
Duck shakes his head. “No, sir.”
She nods once, tightly, sparing only a glance for the ashes of the fire before leading the way back into the camp. “We need to get out of sight quickly, before the Cylons do any sweeps.”
“Captain, I’m s--”
“Don’t,” Kara says, cutting him off. “This is war. Good men and women die in war. It’s what he signed up for. We have to keep going.”
*
As he walks up to the house, Leoben meets Caprica’s eyes where she’s sitting on the steps.
“She won’t let me in,” his sister says softly.
Leoben nods. “You get to have what she wants.”
Caprica flinches at the words. “Gaius...blames me. He doesn’t say so but he does. For what we did. For how guilty he feels.”
“So do you.”
Her eyes open wide in surprise.
“You love him,” Leoben says softly. “You wanted to save his entire race because you love him, and because you believe what we did was wrong.”
Now Caprica nods.
“It’s all part of the cycle,” he reminds her.
She glances toward the house. “It’s not as perfect as she thinks.”
“But it’s all she’s ever wanted.” Leoben rests his hand on her hair in silent benediction. “Go. I’ll stay with her a while.” Caprica smiles up at him and stands, disappears.
Leoben climbs the steps, knocks lightly on the door.
“Go away!” Boomer shouts from inside, her voice muffled by tears.
He opens the door anyway. She’s curled up on the couch. Leoben steps over the shoes near the door, a forgotten doll.
Boomer raises her head from his arms, turns to him with bloodshot eyes. Leoben doesn’t say anything, just sits and pulls his littlest sister against him and lets her cry.
“I didn’t know,” Leoben says. “I would have told you.”
She rests her forehead against his shoulder. “Why is it like this? Why would they make me love him like this? He didn’t,” she hiccups, “he didn’t even love me like this. He found someone else.” Boomer closes her eyes. “He wouldn’t even talk to me.”
Leoben strokes her hair. “This isn’t programming, Sharon. Love is from God. It’s the closest we come to his will.”
Boomer shakes her head. “It hurts too much. Don’t you know that? Don’t you see the way Kara loves Sam? And Lee?”
He shrugs the words away. “I can see the bigger pattern.”
She presses her hands over her face. “We were supposed to build this house together.”
Leoben hugs her again, slowly unravels Boomer’s projection. When he pulls away they’re sitting in Kara’s apartment from Caprica, his own sanctuary.
“We should leave,” Boomer says softly. “We should just go away and never look back.”
Leoben squeezes her shoulder. “No,” he says firmly. “There is only one stream.”
*
Two weeks after Tyrol’s death, Cally goes into labor.
Kara clutches her hands for hours, feeling her bones shift in Cally’s grip as she screams out in pain. “You can do this,” Kara promises the girl over and over, “Keep pushing!”
It seems to take a eternity, and then suddenly it’s done and Cottle is cradling a baby in his arms: a boy. He cleans the baby, hands him gently to Cally.
She smiles, for the first time in weeks.
“What’s his name?” Kara asks reverently.
“Nicholas,” Cally whispers, staring at him in wonder. Then she looks up at Kara. “Galen picked it out.” Her eyes flood with tears.
Kara blinks her own vision clear.
For the first few days, Kara stays with Cally in her tent, tending to her, getting over her own discomfort with the baby. It’s a shock when Cally asks her to leave.
“I’m sorry he’s not here,” Kara says tightly. “I was just trying to help.”
“I know,” Cally says, her tone hardening. “But they see you. A Boomer watched you come in here when you got back with the diapers. They know who you are. You’re putting us in danger.”
And there it is. Kara can’t even deny it. She kisses Nicky goodbye and leaves.
When she crosses the marketplace now, Kara sees the children, the few who survived the fall, the dozens of infants, the pregnant women filled with hope and worry. She sees the arms reaching out to pull little ones away from Centurions, from skin-jobs. Fiercely defensive, yet not willing to risk their lives, their children’s. They’re not soldiers anymore if they ever were. They have too much to lose. They’re already giving up.
At night she sleeps restlessly, dreaming of Sam--and every once in a while, of Leoben.
Without Tyrol and Sam the civilians are more skittish, harder to organize. They need to fill the ranks of the resistance--with civilians, former convicts, whatever it takes. She spends as much time on the pyramid courts now as Sam used to, murmuring under her breath to the players or sitting in the sidelines, leaning in close, speaking urgently under the cover of the crowd’s noise. She promises that Galactica will come, promises that the Cylons can be taken down if they find their weakness, promises that if they stand together they won’t fall. But the Cylons can get blown up and be back the next day; these are the only humans left, maybe in the universe, and they know it.
Kara walks from place to place, one foot in front of the other, refusing to scurry away from the Centurions, to hide the way the rest of her people do these days. Then she turns a corner and sees a Centurion shoot a woman and has to swallow a scream as she darts back behind a tent. Peering out, she watches as a Doral spits on the body, mutters something about humans, and leaves her in the dirt.
Her heart doesn’t stop racing for long minutes. She clenches her jaw, fighting for silence as tears of shock and despair track down her cheeks. She used to be a better soldier.
On the nights when the Resistance doesn’t have missions, they dig graves. Out near Sam’s pyre the bodies of the dead lie in solemn, silent rows. At night sometimes Kara sits there with him, with them, and wonders how she’ll know when it’s not worth fighting anymore.
*
It’s easy enough to find him; she goes back to where they kissed and he’s sitting on a fallen log, arms wrapped around his knees, waiting for her.
Kara sits silently beside him. For the first time in weeks, she’s enveloped by quiet.
“It could all be like this,” Leoben says after a while.
“Like what? Brutal repression of one people by another?”
“It doesn’t have to be a war.” His voice is gravelly and calm.
“You killed billions of us,” Kara answers.
“You killed billions of us,” he echoes.
She bites her lip, shrugs wearily. “So we go our separate ways, what happened to that plan?”
“I told you. We couldn’t live without you.”
Kara shakes her head dismissively.
“Boomer loved Tyrol, Caprica loves Gaius. I love you. There’s truth in that, there’s God in that, Kara. We weren’t meant to be apart.” He smiles at her.
Kara’s eyes are wide, incredulous. “Frak,” she breathes. Leoben reaches out, runs a finger down her cheek, over her lip.
“Think of your mother, Kara. You can run away but it doesn’t stop someone from hurting you. You have to make peace, real peace.”
She stares at him a moment longer, then gets up and walks away.
*
Kara takes the next mission herself; she asks Duck first but she sees the way he looks at Nora. Better it be her.
It’s a simple job: get the bomb in and get out. Not her style, not usually. Sam’s. She tosses it under a van full of skin jobs and runs.
“Kara!” Leoben shouts after her.
She turns just in time to see his face contort in horror as his body turns to flame. The shockwave hurls Kara to the ground. She stares at the place where he stood, sobbing harshly. She lays there as darkness clouds her vision. Her head is aching. The world fades away.
*
D’Anna gasps to consciousness in a resurrection tub, awakening as if from a dream. A feeling lingers, something she has no name for. A baby was crying.
*
The moments when he’s in the stream, in between lives, are the times Leoben can see most clearly. When he opens his eyes the visions are a blur again, but this time there is something new left behind: a sense of imminence. It’s nearly time.
He dries and dresses and heads out into the world, reborn.
She’s curled on the ground, face dirty with tears and grit, right where he knew she’d be. Leoben lifts Kara gently in his arms, and carries her home.
Chapter 3
