going/and/returning
going
Air and heat rush out of your body before you have a chance to think about it. You hardly realise it's happened. So quiet -- you don't even make noise. The exhale is silent, like the night-thief of proverb, not like a gush from an airlock seal, or the rushing whistle of vacuum breached, or the punch of leaving orbit. The breath merely left you behind, flowed through your throat and out your mouth and nose without even a souf of farewell.
And now you're standing alone, without oxygen to lean on, to take comfort in, and space rushed forward, black and forbidding, to take its place. This is why your guts have gone cold. Only ink-stained ice remains -- to fill you up, to blank you out -- so when you blink you see stars and darkness for a moment.
And before your extremities freeze up and your fingers and toes go numb, Tyrol has already looked away. You don't even have time to process, because your brain is staggering and underneath your carapace of skin the tundra wasteland is spreading, taking hold, and you move automatically to try and get back some of the warmth you've lost, and you follow the route of duty as it's the only pathway left.
And you don't want to think but you can't help but think: Lee, Lee, Lee...
You never believed he would fall, or that you would take his death so hard, but it doesn't matter now.
Knowing you're a fool in hindsight doesn't make it any less painful.
/and/
and when Zak died you were already crying before you even got out of the fighter. Wetness in your helmet. People trying to help you unbuckle and just getting the frack in the way.
Stumbling off the flight deck to a place, a quiet place, a any place, hopefully somewhere dark and unpopulated but the locker room is closer, and it's dark and unpopulated in your head at least. Somewhere you can throw things, and touch the ground, the small area you've cleared away, a space to crawl into. You can feel wet and dark in peace. You can scream there, it's okay.
But there's an Interruption, and you have to start throwing things again. Your hands hit metal and wood and skin and bone, and he holds you tight around the arms and you stop thrashing, now just noise-making, the moans and the crying out, and the awful awful wailing. You only stop when your throat goes numb, and then when the noises quietly continue you know it's not you making them anymore.
You faint, for the first and last time, but not before understanding this: that the only time you lose control around each other is in this grief.
and he's plying you with a bologna sandwich off his plate, for god's sake, and you don't even eat the stuff.
"Then take...here, look - bread, spreads, cheese. Whatever you want."
"What are you, my mother?"
"Just shut up and have a sandwich, Kara."
"Oh, you're really selling it to me now."
"Seriously."
"I already ate."
"Bull."
You're really staring into him now, leaning against the kitchenette bench, smoking furiously in your sweats. You have perspiration drying on your arms from the run and he keeps staring you down.
"Kara, I've seen you. You don't eat, you train like a maniac, and you smoke a pack a day. Do you sleep?"
"Sure I sleep," but said sullen and brittle, like an overtired infant.
He's forgotten about his lunch. You stand there propped up by the bench. The trembling in your arms and legs is probably from exertion, you did five miles today. On no breakfast.
"I sleep fine. And I eat fine too, so will you just drop it?"
You push off the bench, drop the butt of your smoke down the sink and grab a mug, fill it from the faucet, go hunting in his tiny cooler for ice.
"Kara," he says soft-firmly, your name floating on the air behind you, and he repeats it. "Kara..."
And you want to be convinced, to let him convince you to keep on living, because there's always the chance that he's the only one who can.
and your loyal to Adama, but you know that the Galactica is a shit posting for someone as good as you. But that's what happens when you can't keep your trap shut, when you can't keep your fists to yourself. You get shit postings, Siberia and the gulags, and the museum pieces all bereft of ambition now, fuelled-down and standing in the foyer for the tourists to gawk at. You know it'll probably be de-commissioned a year or so into your tour, and then you'll be doing routine flybys, sentry duty all for show, and you'll spend too much time drinking and playing cards and wasting yourself, wasting your talents. But that's just what happens to people with your condition, the dreaded illness -- foot-in-mouth disease.
And at least he comes to say goodbye, even if it wasn't what you wanted. The ignominious departure. You feel bitter, it's true, and some of the bile rises, and you say something hurtful, like:
"I'll keep an eye on the old man for you."
He glances down, then up.
"Better you than me," he says quietly, but is that a hint of jealousy there or is it your imagination? You feel bad about it, but the moment is gone, too late for sorry.
And you don't even hug each other goodbye, because contact like that is too open -- too intimate and too dangerous.
and you hardly expect to see him again -- be like penpals, like old acquaintances -- and sure as hell not with the bars separating you. But his face is just as you remember, the same curves and angles, the same grave expressions, and nothing has changed.
Nothing at all, because his presence still makes you drop your shoulders, and lift your chin, and grin, and get annoyed. Some things are constants, and it's good to have constants in your vagabond life. Walls to bump yourself off of. Maybe that's why you don't clasp hands through the bars, touch each other at all, because walls can be good, can be useful.
Who needs vistas of open space -- mountains and fields and lakes and rivers -- when you have walls?
returning
You're hollowed out now, but you're still functioning, you still go, and there's still way too much stuff that needs to be done in times of crisis. It's hard not to feel guilty that all it took to re-ignite your career, your dreams, was a mass of destruction and human misery.
The ship is so goddamn crowded, but at least the space under your Viper is dry and warm and empty -- if you stretch your arms out wide you have the underside, from helm to stern, all to yourself. Spanners here, and shifters there, and repairs are methodical and logical, and the overwhelming smell of grease and anti-freeze is a small price to pay for these moments of quiet sanity.
But there's an Interruption.
And when you hear his voice, when you see his face, air and heat come rushing in unbidden. Your sharp inhale sounds like a welcome.
Your body doesn't know how to react, little tremors setting in, setting off a jittery chain reaction. Warmth starts in the pit of your stomach, flares and burns, spirals up your spine to your chest, pinwheels through the arms and shoulders, kicks your knees out from behind. It's a good thing you were lying down.
"Hey," he says, and you feel the sluggish lava quicken in your veins and you wonder, you wonder what to say next.
And glaciers crack and move, and you feel alive clasping his hand, touching his walking, breathing, living deadness. The Lords of Kobol exist, and rivers and mountains exist, and he smiles and you laugh, and the permafrost will melt, given time and chance and air and warmth and light.