Fic: Faith and Trust

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Title: Faith and Trust
Author: taragel
Characters: Kara, Laura
Spoilers: An extended scene set during 4.07 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”
Rating: PG
Length: 1523 words

For frolicndetour, who asked for “a story set in season four in which she bonds with anyone other than the usual suspects (Lee, Sam or Leoben), e.g. Adama or Roslin.”

“Will you help me?”

“Yes.”

It’s easier than she thought it would be to say it. Especially considering the last time they met the woman tried to shoot her in the face. But Kara knows a thing or two about being haunted. She’s replayed the hybrid’s words in her head enough times. She knows a thing or two about visions you can’t escape from too.

When Roslin asks her to get Captain Agathon, Kara almost smiles. The president still doesn’t trust her, (which is pretty clear from the way she keeps trying to insist the Cylons strung her up like their own little mousetrap and sent her back to the fleet—and who knows, maybe she’s right), but she’s asking for her help on this. Kara thinks it’s a start.

She turns to go but just as she reaches the curtain, Roslin calls her back. “Wait!”

Kara turns, face wary and body weary. She’s been back over 24 hours but she can still smell the stench of the Demetrius on her body. Despite the scarf and the sheen of sweat on the woman’s face from the doloxan in her bloodstream, Roslin seems stronger in comparison, fiery even. She’s got a light in her eyes that Kara’s seen before, back when a president asked her to travel light years to retrieve an arrow.

“Madame President?”

Roslin smiles, and even if her charm is stretched thinner now, she still looks like the woman Kara hugged after Lee came out alive from that tylium mission years ago. Her eyes are bright, when she asks, “What does it feel like?”

She blinks. “I’m sorry, Madame President. I don’t—”

“Dying.” Her gaze is penetrating, focused. “You’ll forgive my indelicacy, I hope, Captain, but I need answers and I don’t have a lot of time here. I think you’ll agree you’re rather uniquely qualified to provide them.”

Kara hesitates, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably. “Actually, I’m not. I told you. All I remember is blacking out and waking up in my viper. I was circling Earth.”

“Ah yes, the constellations matched the description in the Scrolls of Pythia and the tomb on Kobol.” Roslin frowns. “The signs we’ve been waiting for.”

Kara braces herself for more questions, prepared to go through the whole thing again, what she saw, what she didn’t see, how she found her way back. But Roslin surprises her. “You believe in the Gods, Captain.”

It’s not really a question. Kara nods slowly anyway.

“Do you think you’re the one?” Roslin clears her throat, and she winces a bit as she shifts against the pillow. “The dying leader from the prophecies?”

So that’s what this is about? The president’s jealous? Afraid Kara’s special destiny trumps her own special destiny? She could almost laugh. Yes, because it’s been real special so far.

“No, sir.” The bitterness catches in her throat and she pushes away the memory of the hybrid’s words echoing in her head. You are the harbinger of doom, Kara Thrace. “But I think we all have a role to play.” She steps closer, coming to the side of Roslin’s bed. “I don’t know what happened to me out there, but I have to believe I’m here now—back—for a reason. And finding that basestar…that was a sign. I know the Cylons hold the key to finding the way to Earth. I can feel it.”

Laura tilts her head, her expression neutral as she peers at her. Kara thinks the President would have made an excellent Triad player. “You’ve always had a connection with them, haven’t you?”

She stiffens.

“I remember you with the Cylon, that Leoben model from the Geminon Traveler. Your hand on the glass. You felt something then, too.”

“He— That model is—” She flounders for the words. Obsessed with her? Convinced there’s a pattern that only he can see? Right? She settles on, “He knows things.”

To Kara’s surprise, Roslin smiles. “Yes, so he says. In fact, right before I airlocked him, he whispered to me that Adama was a Cylon.”

She starts, her eyebrows raising. “The Old—The Admiral? A Cylon?” A harsh chuckle bubbles up, unbidden.

Roslin nods. “Or Lee perhaps.”

Kara’s eyes go wide, but she just says, “Hmm. That...might actually explain a lot about Lee.”

The woman actually giggles and Kara’s lips curve. She feels almost comfortable for the first time since she entered sickbay—maybe since the first time she came back to Galactica. But then Roslin freezes, her hand clapping over her mouth, and a look of horror settling on her face. “My goodness, they really did make you perfect,” there’s anguish in her voice. “Your face, your voice, the way you laugh. You seem so…human.”

Kara fights not to roll her eyes, but her irritation vanishes in a wave of anger. What more can she do to convince her, to convince all of them? “You are so sure I’m a Cylon, and you’re so hell-bent on protecting us—protecting the Fleet—that you can’t even frakking see what’s right in front of you.”

The edge in her voice has Roslin eying her defiantly but there’s something more in her gaze, a desperation or maybe it’s fear, that makes Kara soften her voice. “Look, these might be your people, but they’re my family. If I thought for even a second that I could or would do anything to hurt them, I wouldn’t frakking wait for you to open an airlock for me. Do you understand that?”

Roslin’s gaze is level but she nods.

Kara huffs a hard laugh and shakes her head. “We’re not so different, you know. We both want the same thing.”

“Earth.” Roslin says softly, her head bowing for a second, before she lifts it again, renewed fervor in her eyes. “These visions of the Opera House, they’re getting stronger, and I don’t know what they mean. I need to see this hybrid.”

Kara shifts, uncomfortable again. “And I’ll help you, but you should know it’s not exactly… well, the hybrid is…cryptic.” In her head, she hears the hybrid’s warning again. The harbinger of doom, but for whom? The Cylons? Humanity? She shoots a glance at the president who is looking pale again, lying back against the pillows as if the confession about the visions getting stronger alone sapped her energy.

Suddenly, Kara has an urge to confide in her. To pull up a chair and grasp her hand and hold on, as she tells her everything. How confused she is, how the picture of Earth is fading now, how she’s afraid they’ve found the cylons too late. But the woman in this bed whose body is riddled with cancer is not her mother.

“Just don’t expect miracles, okay?”

“Oh? Like back-from-the-dead miracles?” This time it’s the president who smiles and even as Kara smiles back, she feels a pang for time lost. She would have liked to have known this woman better.

Suddenly, Roslin shoots a hand out, wrapping it around Kara’s wrist. Her grip is amazingly strong for a bedridden woman on death’s door. “Why do you trust them, Kara?”

She pauses. Lee told her once that trust was something they had to have, the thing that made them human, that separated them from the Cylons. Kara doesn’t know if that’s true anymore. She saw trust on the Basestar when that Six let Natalie snap her neck.

She’d read once in some old book that trust was a product of your head, logically knowing everything would turn out for the best, while faith was in your heart, sensing on an emotional level that things would work out, despite any lack of proof or even proof to the contrary.

“Trust is about logic, Sir. I don’t necesarily trust the Cylons,” she says. “But I choose to have faith.”

Roslin is silent, those measuring eyes still watching her. Kara says, “Let’s get you out of here, OK?”

She flicks open the knife, blade pointing towards Roslin, and the President freezes, her gaze uncertain. Kara flips the razor, so the handle extends out. “Thought you might not want to wear that particular accessory to the basestar.” She nods to the medical bracelet snapped around the President’s wrist.

Kara watches the president take a breath, then reach a shaking hand out for the knife. Her grasp is strong though when she grabs it, and she saws through the thin plastic of the medical ID fairly quickly. Roslin closes the knife and holds it out to her, but Kara just looks at it for a moment, remembering how she used to think that it was a symbol— sharp and dangerous, cold and hard—of what you needed to be to survive. It didn’t protect her in the end.

Now she knows better. She puts her faith in other things. But Roslin’s still learning.

“Keep it,” she shakes her head. “I don’t need it anymore.”

She calls Helo and makes the arrangements, and as Kara escorts Roslin to the hangar deck, slowing her pace to keep in step with the President, she thinks about it. Trust and faith. Maybe they’re not so different really.

Perhaps you need both to move forward.

-0-

Comments

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I would've loved more scenes with them. They do have a lot of similarities and differences that it's interesting to explore.

The people/family line was probably my favorite in this one. It's where the story started to hang together for me. And yes logic is Lee but also Laura too! and faith is Kara, so together they're gonna make it happen.
♥