20 November 2005
Battlestar Galactica 2003

adult/disturbing
spoilers for "The Farm"
not my sandbox.


Kara has reproductive.  Issues.




She dreams about things growing inside her. 

She could blame in on Caprica, but she had dreams before then.  More or less since she graduated from ladies-have-babies to the oh-god-slimy-place-inside-of-me baby-production concept, she's had dreams where things grew inside her.  Never looked like people.  Dead fish and lizards and shifty things with fangs and tentacles and shapes without sharp edges.

Since Caprica, the things have all had sentinel-cylon claws.  That might be the trauma.




She doesn't go to the doc about it, because it's probably just in her head, and there are other, crazier people walking around.  She's frakked some of them.

Mostly doesn't because she has this crawling feeling that if she does, she's going to get roped into a "chat" about the reproductive future of the human race.  Other people are talking about it.  Roslin's got this spiel about the importance of having babies, and Kara thinks sometimes she should have taken Roslin back to Caprica with her, let her see what happens when you make it all about making babies.

Make her spend half an hour with a friendly-looking cylon with cold doctor-hands and so much lube on his toys that she slides around for days after.

Doc Cottle knows her, though, or at least he knows her medical records and her psychosexual profile.  Mostly, he plies her with a range of birth control options and threatens to make her list everyone she's slept with, someday.  In the name of science, of course.  Or possibly to track infection.




Sixty-eight.




One.  When she was twelve.  Tree fort she built with boys from her school, where they used to hang out and read comics and throw things at small fuzzy animals.  Nothing like structurally stable, but she used to spend nights up there, sometimes.  Mostly by herself, but there was more than one sleeping bag stashed there, and sometimes she had company.

Plywood around the sides, no roof except this tarp they used to string over when it rained.  Board-ladder up the tree.  They'd hauled in old furniture people from the high-rises were throwing away.  (Skinny little kids and their wagon, moving smelly couches into the woods.)  She's still got those salvage skills.

Leaves all over the ground, in the fort, on the furniture.

She had black, high-topped runners that she liked a lot, and very, very short hair, that fall.  Baggy shirts and dirty jeans and mostly nobody would've picked her out of the pack of them.

She remembers Bender sort of rolling across the platform to her, all wrapped up like a caterpillar in his sleeping bag.  Asking if he could touch her.

He'd seen her naked before.  They used to go swimming in the creek, and it probably wasn't safe, and it absolutely wasn't allowed, but that hadn't ever kept her from stripping naked and jumping in, cannonball, as soon as the ice was off it.  No breasts and no hair anywhere except the blond-invisible dust on her arms and legs.

Bender was about the same.  A bit more hair on his body, a bit harsher, but the same skinniness, same buzz-cut hair.  He tasted like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches they'd been eating, and something else salty.

She didn't kiss him on the mouth.  Chewed on his fingers and his shoulder.  Scratched his back.  Jerked him off, finally, while he touched her.  Then crawled back into her own sleeping bag with the smell of him all over her hands and slept alone, curled up.  Went home the next day and took an actual shower and they didn't really talk about it later, though she frakked him again, five years on, and they didn't talk about that either.




Seven when she was almost-sixteen and they took her class to Caprica City to see the Colonial Fleet air show and she thought, yeah, yeah, I want that. 

Except she'd spent most of her life zombie-walking through school, because it was mostly a way to keep noisy children in a box eight hours a day, and because it taught you mostly to get up and move to another room when a bell rang.  And then they told her that she had to have advanced trig and intro calculus to get into the Academy. 

They hadn't told her before that she might actually need this for something.

So.  It wasn't like she couldn't do it, but she was something like a year and a half behind on her classwork, and she couldn't do it on her own.

Baby-faced math teacher, probably all of twenty-five, came in as a sub for one of the teachers on maternity leave, and she looked at him and thought, yeah, yeah, I want that too.

He got this grin on his face when he figured out she could do it.  Like he'd won some kind of prize, proving that one frak-up kid could be taught the beauty of mathematics.  He was going to redeem her from her school-slut boy-running phase and turn her into the perfect student and in twenty years she was going to come back and shake his hand and say, "Your teaching saved my life, mister."

She waited until she'd caught up to where she needed to be before she frakked him.  On the couch in the staff room at five in the evening when everyone else had gone home.  In his lap, so he could look at her.

She sucked a massive hickey up just under his jawline, and later she saw him rub it, and then she waited and watched while his face changed and he realized just how spectacularly he'd frakked up.

Didn't stop him from frakking her again in the school's book-storage room at lunch hour, two days later.  Or in his car in the rain the next night.

And then she stopped.  Put her clothes back on and went back to classes and played pyramid at noon and played in after-school tournaments, like she always did.  Kept up in her classes and handed in the same beat-up messy assignments she always had, only for a change she made sure the answers were right.  Nobody except the odd teacher noticed.

Baby-faced teacher kind of looked like he might throw up.

She walked into his classroom after the last bell, locked the door, and leaned against it.  Said, "I'm not going to tell anybody."




Eighteen while they were on summer leave from the Academy after her first year.  Ten of them went up the coast to Cumia.  Huge island chain there, all heavy forest and cold, cold water.  Good surfing, as long as you kept your wetsuit between you and the actual surf.  All of them together renting some tiny wreck of a house where they took turns sleeping on the floor, and where the only thing they always had in the fridge was alcohol.

She learned to sea-kayak.  Went out beyond the breakers into flat water and paddled out to the islands.  Came back soaked in spray and high from the exertion.

Silver was in the house when she got back, reading.  Pretty girl, shorter than Kara, solid from her ribs on down.  No fatter than any of them, but built like she could run through a wall. 

She remembers shivering.

Silver dumped Kara in the shower and poured hot, blinding water all over her.  Pulled her out, towelled her off, then backed her up to the sink and kissed her stupid.

Frakked her right there on the old soft rug in one corner of the bathroom.

Not her first girl, but the first one who blind-sided her.  She remembers being high off it.  Both of them naked on the living room floor in a tangle of blankets and foam not-mattress with sweet, sticky girl smeared all over their faces.  Days of it.  One whole day when Kara actually didn't go back out to sea.

Both of them running down the road in the early morning.  Stopping dead in front of a bear sitting in the middle of the road eating berries.

Girl-hamburger for sure, except the bear just howled at them and then wandered down to the beach to fish.

She didn't exactly tell people, but everyone on that trip got pictures of them, Starbuck and Silver, naked or in their underwear, making it on every surface in the house.




Twenty-six in a bar on a weekend she can't remember, and the only reason the number spikes for her at all is that she wound up on her back in a very cold metal place six weeks later while they took care of what she should have taken care of herself.

That's in her medical records.  One of three.




Forty-one was Zack.




Forty-two was.  Well.

He was kind to her in ways she didn't deserve, but he understood, too.  Understood enough.  Like he wouldn’t ever try to treat her like she was made of glass, but he knew there was shredded metal just under her skin.  That it was going to be there for years.

He was in as bad of shape as she was.  Carried it better.

And they didn't mean to, either of them.  Just, they'd been drinking, a lot, because he needed to tell her some things and she needed him to stay there looking at her like that, and they were already in his hotel room, so the bed was right there.

She remembers the size of him under her hands.  The skin damage and the way he smelled like expensive whiskey and like Zack.  Except older, smarter, stronger.  Except that he loved her totally differently.

She still thought of him as The Old Man, after.  They don't talk about it.  He invited her to serve on Galactica the next week.




Fifty-odd.  Because they were strung-out from manoeuvres and officers' quarters are close and they were all naked to begin with.  Just, somebody (her) started wrestling, and then they were pulling people down out of their racks and howling/laughing on the floor all shower-wet-slick and it was probably inevitable that they'd end up with busy hands.

She remembers people licking her belly.  Fingers and tongues and cocks and breasts and legs everywhere.

Still laughing when they were finished.




Eight people since the world ended.




She misses Anders, sometimes.  One particularly vivid nightmare, the thing that crawled out of her had his face.




So now she has two abdominal scars, one above the other, and she knows -- knows -- it wasn't internal bleeding that sent them into her the second time.  All the sick things in the universe and she wonders sometimes if she's incubating one more. 

It's been three weeks.  She's counting.  Waiting to bleed, except her body's under so much stress she can't count on bleeding at all, month to month, and anyway she lost count at some point.

She figures if there is something, it'll show, sooner or later.  They can rip it out of her then.

Crouched in the shower when her shifts end.  Belly against her knees so she won't have to look at it.





jane
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