20 November 2005
BSG/03

one small spoiler for "Valley of Darkness"
shockingly not-dirty
not my sandbox


it's a little bit like flying





It's not all trauma.

She used to get up at five-thirty, mornings when she was that age, to go swimming.  Or, well.  To the big pool complex a few cliks down the road from her family's apartment, and it's not like she had to bathe before she left.  Little scruffy girl in sweats and jacket on the bus in the grey morning, bouncing up and down to the music in her headphones.  Cheap little tape player she got at a department store, bought it with her own money and made tapes from the radio.

Tracks of her father playing the piano mixed in with it.

Stripped naked and into her suit in a locker room with maybe two other people in it.  Rinsed off in the showers, then walked out to the pool.

Six laps of the pool to warm her up.  Just beginning to shift out of that baby-skinny able-to-run-forever body into her adult frame.  Breathe and plunge.  Butterfly strokes that drove her up out of the water and back into it every three and a half seconds.

She was out of the pool by the time the lane swimmers came in.  Adults with jobs, mostly.  Morning people or people coming off the night shift, running towards or away from sleep.

Kara could track all of them from the towers.  (She's lucky.  Never needed glasses, never needed corrective surgery.  It would have cut down on her edge, later.  She tells people it's because she never bothered to read.)  Seven lanes of bodies thrashing through the water, and echoes of radio.  Sunlight coming through the glass wall beyond the pools.

She learned to dive, they told her, because she pissed someone off critically and they decided to throw her off the highest point they could find.  She was lucky little girls bounced.

It didn't really matter.  She was good.  Somebody told her once that if they'd had a local team, she'd probably have been on it.  Maybe even the colonial team, in a few years.  If she went that way.  She should stop playing contact sports, focus on this. 

Hadn't told them yet that she wasn't going to stop jumping on boys anytime soon.  They liked it when she hurt them.

So.

She started the same way every morning.  Bent double, pressed her palms to the platform and breathed through the pull at the back of her knees.  Straightened.  Took one step back and ran forward, three bouncing steps, and jumped.

Double forward tuck at ten metres was nothing.  Easy.  Straight arrow down into the water.

This blue explosion.

She went down a long way.  The light at the bottom of the pool was totally different, and at the point where her fall ended, she'd just hang there for a minute, weightless in the water's breakup.  White streams all around her from the impact.

It was what she thought being in space might be like. 

She waited until her lungs hurt to kick hard up to the surface.  Warm wet air when she broke.  Climbed out of the pool and went to do it again.






jane
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