Nothing But the Rain

By Crystal Wimmer

Word Count:19,179
Date: 10/29/04
Series: Mini
Rating: T
Category: Character
Pairing/Focus: Kara
Warnings:
Summary:
Spoilers/Disclaimers:
Author's Note: From the first time I watched the mini, that “Nothin’ but the Rain” line just jumped out and grabbed me. Where did it come from? What did it mean? What was it’s significance? Well, an idea came to me…. And here goes…The first chapter is primarily narrative, but hang in there… the conversations will come.

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Chapter 1

Kara Thrace rolled over in bed and looked at the clock on her bedside table. It was just after midnight, and she had yet to fall asleep. She normally fought just a touch of insomnia when she was planetside, but this was something else entirely. This was the morning that was supposed to start the day that was supposed to begin the rest of her life.

It was her wedding day. One problem with that, though… she had killed her groom. Zak was dead. She had murdered him just as surely as if she had loaded a gun and handed it to him with specific instructions to blow his brains out, because in a way she had. Only the weapon differed from the analogy. She had killed him as surely as if she had sabotaged the Viper he’d flown into the wall of the landing bay, because she had done exactly that. She had given him the most deadly defective part a Viper could have; she had given him an incompetent pilot. It was no small wonder that she couldn’t sleep at night.

Kicking the covers of her bed away – her bed, not theirs – she pushed herself up to sit on the edge of the bed. Lords, she hated this feeling. The guilt was overpowering. The shame was enveloping. And it hurt; it all hurt so much that she could barely breathe. But she couldn’t say a word to anyone. She couldn’t. It had nothing to do with her reputation, or her job, or even her freedom. It had to do with destroying one of the few men that she really cared about. She couldn’t bring herself to say a word.

At first, her silence had mostly been shock. A woman could only be so coherent after watching the man she loved take out the inside of a landing bay, screaming the whole way. She still heard his screams, and the echoes of the subsequent explosions, in every silence. Her mind replayed the sounds like some type of a recording – Zak’s panic, her own shouting of orders, and then the endless explosions that destroyed half the bay, and all of Zak. She had thought the explosions would never stop.

But they did, and while what they pulled out of the wreckage couldn’t rightly be called a body, it had indeed been Zak. She had been a basket case. And because they weren’t married yet – wouldn’t be for another sixty-three days – she had no rights. She didn’t deserve them, nor did she expect them, but just the fact that she’d mostly been living with a man for two years and wouldn’t be allowed into his room to clear out his things was enough to tear her heart out. All she’d had left of him was in that room. Lords, she missed him.

Zak’s death had called the rest of his family home to Caprica for the funeral. It was another day seared into her memory, and no more pleasant than the one on which Zak had died. William Adama had been there, and he’d been as stoic and silent as ever. He had stood there like granite, never flinching. Kara thought he had probably been in more than a little shock himself. Unfortunately hers had numbed by then; she remembered everything. Iilya had been there as well, her soft presence both warm and comforting to those around her. She had been rather like an exotic flower. She’d looked slightly wilted, but still doing her best to brighten the situation. The only emotion that Kara saw Commander Adama exhibit was when he’d put his arm around his ex-wife and let her cry all over him. Kara had wished that she’d had someone to hold.

And there had been Lee. Lords, how Zak had idolized him. Lee Adama was the classic pilot. He was cocky, smart-ass, and underneath it all just pretty damned sweet. She knew that there wasn’t much Lee wouldn’t have done for his brother, and that he loved Zak in his own masculine way, but he hadn’t responded to the funeral with the sadness that everyone else had. He hadn’t taken the death of his brother as one of those military tragedies that couldn’t be avoided, but instead as the murder it had been. His only mistake had been in his choice of suspects. Lee was one of the few people who knew without a doubt that Zak hadn’t belonged in that Viper, but he hadn’t blamed Kara. He had blamed the man who had raised them both with a patriotic streak a mile wide and a love for flying that was unparalleled. Lee also had been born with the skill for flying that his father had possessed; Zak had not been so lucky.

As though it had been in one of the old slow-motion vids, Kara had watched the screaming start even before the funeral began. Lee threw accusations at his father from the time they entered the same room until the service started, and then again afterwards when everyone had met at the Adama home to remember Zak. Lee hadn’t been sad; he had been furious.

While she had sat next to Iilya at the service, once they reached the house Kara had crept into a corner of Zak’s old bedroom and had sat there and cried. She hadn’t wanted comfort – hadn’t deserved it – but she had needed it. Later, when she’d felt a little more together and the yelling had been stopped for a while, she had come out to find Lee and his father in separate corners.

Lords, Lee had looked so alone. He’d been so angry that no one in the room would come near him. Kara had fully intended to tell him the truth, so she’d gone over and sat next to him. But she hadn’t been able to say a word. Lee hadn’t seemed to mind. After sitting that way for longer than she could keep track of, he had reached for her hand. They had sat that way for a very long time. Most of the guests found somewhere else to be, whether because of his volatility or her vulnerability she would never know. But as the Caprican sun had descended down past the horizon, the two of them had sat there saying nothing, doing nothing, and just trying to keep themselves sane. At least that was what Kara had been doing. She had kept trying to think of a way to tell Lee the truth, but she had been afraid.

The great Starbuck – the most fearless pilot of them all – and she’d been terrified. What kind of a warrior did that make her?

Long after dark, after every guest had gone and both William and Iilya had gone to bed, she and Lee had still sat silently side-by-side. At some point Kara had fallen asleep, and when she’d awoken the next morning she’d been lying on the couch with her shoes off and thick quilt tucked around her. Lee’s note had said that if she needed anything, she was to call him. Kara had taken away his brother, and he had offered her help. In a way, it had been the final blow. She had said good-bye to the Adamas that morning, and she had hidden herself in her apartment for a week.

Thankfully, Kara had never been one to use a lot of her leave. The Colonial Service allotted thirty days each year, and allowed accumulation up to ninety days before it became “use or lose.” Normally, Kara maintained her balance as high as possible, taking the weeks required only when she had no choice. Leave meant planetside, and that meant no flight. When she was on the ground, she felt absolutely useless.

Even her current position of flight instructor was in the air, on one of the largest instructional vessels in the fleet. It was done that way deliberately because Colonial Service required long periods in space, and some people just couldn’t take it. She had always loved it herself, but there were those who never adjusted to the artificial gravity and limited living space. It was better to know this before granting a pilot wings. The mobile training facility also allowed space launches once the trainees passed basic flight – the simulators – which would not have been possible on the ground. Finally, keeping new pilots mobile was a tactical decision. The Cylons had targeted training facilities during the war, both to destroy morale and the new pilots. It was harder to hit a moving target.

But Kara’s leave balance had been near eighty days, so she didn’t have to worry about work. She had planned an extended honeymoon with Zak, so both had been accumulating days. It hadn’t been much of a hardship. The only off-time either of them wanted was together, and they got that with regular shift adjustments. There would be no time together, now. Kara had seen to that.

Lee had shown up nearly a week after she’d holed up in the apartment she kept planetside just so that she had a place to store things. It was a single room unit, and nothing to brag about. Lee and Zak had been just about the only ones who had known about it. Zak had even kept a key. Lee had found her there in her sweat clothes, hair unwashed and uncombed, face pretty much blank, and her body as dirty as her hair. She’d been a mess. He had given her a hug – grubby though she’d been – and had shooed her off to the shower. An hour later, clean and dressed if not any happier, he had hauled her off to lunch. It had been the first solid food she’d eaten all week. They had talked for a couple of hours about work, about flying, and about everything else except Zak and his father. And when he’d dropped her back off at the apartment it had been with two things of lasting value. The first had been a large box of Zak’s things which Lee had taken from Zak’s room – the same room that Kara hadn’t been allowed to enter. Lee had told her that they were rightly hers, and she had been grateful beyond measure. The second thing he had given her was a good, solid guilt trip. Would Zak want her to be this miserable? How would Zak have felt knowing that losing him had brought her to this? As cruel as it had seemed at the time, it had been just what she needed to start living again.

Well, maybe not living. But she had eaten, gone through the motions of each day, and had even kept herself clean and as well rested as she could manage. Going back to work had been out of the question; she had already killed one pilot with her judgement, and she would not risk another young life. It hadn’t really mattered; with the Callahandra grounded for repairs, her work would have been planetside. Mostly it would have involved basic instructional classes. True flight instruction was suspended until they completed repairs, but there was tactical theory, pilot-required maintenance, and targeting to be taught. Instead of going back, she simply stayed on the planet, and she used that damned apartment that she hated so much. She never opened the box that Lee had brought her. For all that she felt it was her right to have it, she also felt too much guilt to deserve it.

Sleep still came hard. Every time she closed her eyes, she continued to hear the explosions that had destroyed half of the flight pod on her training vessel. Many nights she would just lie in bed and stare at the shadow of the box, wondering what was inside and yet unwilling to find out.

So the box had sat there for two months. She hadn’t opened it, and yet she hadn’t put it away. It had just been there – always. And now, on the morning when she should be putting on the gown that she had returned and receiving the ring that she had buried with Zak, she found herself left with the choice of what to do with that frakking box.

While she’d sat there on the bed trying to decide what would be best, the sun had risen. A glance at the clock revealed oh-six-hundred, and she was shocked. Had she really been sitting there for six hours? It was a sign of how disconnected she felt that she hadn’t even felt the time pass. She had simply sat there in a daze, staring at the box in the increasing light of the early morning.

She would open it. She probably should, anyway. There might be things in there that she needed to take care of, or something he had wanted for her to have. Lee was bright enough, and sensitive enough, that whatever was in the box was undoubtedly important. She had to open it.

Removing the cord that tied the lid on required a strong pair of scissors. But she got it off, and took a look at the contents within. The first thing she saw was his secondary school yearbook. Lords, he’d been so young. She resisted the temptation to look through it, feeling it too personal for the mood she was in. So she merely moved it out of the way, and looked at what came next. A picture of the two of them, taken in front of the Callahandra just before launch. Zak was smiling, Kara was making a stupid face, and the gleaming ship behind them seemed immense. He had been so damned excited. He had only wanted to fly like the rest of them – she and his father and his brother. Had it been so much to ask?

Next she found a picture of the Adama family. It was a formal portrait, with all three of the men in uniform and Iilya looking so fragile and beautiful standing surrounded by them. Kara had to smile. The three men were so different, and yet at the core so much alike. They had good hearts, stubborn attitudes, and they loved the air as much as she did.

She dug through a few other things that she remembered from his room. A favorite book she set aside to be read later, and a few of the vids that they’d watched when they first started dating went into her own box by the viewer. At the bottom of the box, beneath much of her own toiletries and clothing, she found a wrapped box. The paper was just this side of obscene – naked women in impossible positions – but it was the writing on the envelope that caught her eye. “For Your Wedding,” it read. His wedding. Hers. That would be today.

Kara carefully returned a few of the miscellaneous items to the box. She would decide what to do with them later. She put away her clothes and the few of Zak’s that Lee had included, then she took the wrapped gift to the bed and sat there staring at it for a while. Finally, she opened the envelope to read the card. It simply said “To Zak, from Saul Tigh.” Great. The one gift she’d get to open was from the man she liked least in the Service. Okay, so that was an exaggeration, but not by very much.

She knew before she tore away the disgusting paper what was inside, and she wasn’t disappointed. The aged ambrosia was in a beautiful decanter. What else would a drunk give someone as a gift but booze? Expensive booze, yes. And with a sick smile, Kara decided that the idiotic Colonel might be good for something after all. She twisted the lid off the bottle, looked at the golden fluid inside for a long moment, and then she began to drink.

The bottle was empty. Damn.

On the other hand, Kara thought, it could be good. She could just go get more. She didn’t feel as bad now. The explosions that she’d been hearing for two months were muted, and she wondered just why the hell it hadn’t occurred to her to get drunk before. She knew there must be a reason, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of it now. She felt better; not good, but better.

Still, the bottle was empty, and she could still hear a faint echo of the usual roar in her mind. She would need more if she was going to get rid of the sound entirely. So she went to the small closet by the front door, groped around until she found something warm – a sweater, but not a coat – and she began a walk down the street. She was half-way to the bar on the corner when she remembered that she hadn’t closed her front door, but she decided not to worry about it. She didn’t have much worth taking. After all, the bottle was empty. She’d keep it, though. It was pretty.

The bar was closed, which really ticked her off. She didn’t have a watch on, but she was fairly sure that it was late enough that the bar should be open. Changing her route slightly, she walked into the little store next to the bar and bought another bottle of ambrosia. Then she sat down on the sidewalk in front of the bar to drink her bottle and wait for the bar to open so that she could get something better. After all, it wasn’t healthy to drink alone. She should be around other people to do it.

When the bar owner showed up, he didn’t want to let her in. She found that to be annoying, but thankfully she had her wallet in the pocket of her sweater, and sheflashed her military identification and asked as nicely as she could. The guy finally ushered her inside and offered her a cup of coffee. While normally that was her drink of choice, this was not a normal day. This was her wedding day, damn-it, and she could drink what she wanted. She told the bartender as much. He finally took pity on her and brought her a glass of his finest. She couldn’t really taste it, but she drank it anyway. Then she drank another… and another.

The bar gradually filled as the afternoon and evening went on. Kara sat at the bar, ordering one drink after another. Later, she would wonder why they hadn’t just cut her off, but at the time it seemed perfectly logical to keep drinking. Later, she would wonder why they had even served a woman sitting there in her pajamas and slippers beneath the sweater, but not at that moment. She was numb all over, and it felt so good not to hurt. A game of Triad had started on the wall-sized screen behind the bar, and she began rooting for her favorite team. She was actually having a good time, so she decided that she just might get through the day after all.

But when her team started losing, she went from giddy to angry in a flash. Throwing her glass at the screen, she had started ranting and raving and screaming. A couple of guys she knew – both grounded warriors from the Callahandra – managed to escort her to their table and bought her another drink to calm her down. She told them that it was her wedding day, and her team shouldn’t lose on her day. They had solemnly agreed with her, buying her drinks and listening to her tale of woe.

She hadn’t realized that they would expect her to go with them when they were finished drinking. They might be done, but she was just getting started. She liked feeling this way – feeling nothing – and she wasn’t going to give it up for anything or anyone. The warriors cajoled and pleaded, she refused and argued, and before she knew what was happening the punches were flying, thick and heavy and painful despite the haze of alcohol.

Frankly, she was a decent fighter. She could hold her own in a brawl with the best the military had to offer, but two on one – on a very drunk one – was more than she could manage. It had taken four military policemen to break up the brawl, and in the process of them saving her ass she had mistakenly punched one of them in the face. She hadn’t meant to, but her fist had already been in motion when the officer had stepped in front of her, so she had hit him. She had apologized afterwards, but it hadn’t seemed to make much difference.

Kara didn’t ever think she’d forget the feel of handcuffs as she was shoved into the back of the security transport. The damned things hurt. They were tight, and what was worse was that the pain seemed to take away some of the numbness that the alcohol had given her. She didn’t like that one damned bit. Neither did she enjoy the hard stone floor of a brig cell. It wasn’t that she hadn’t spent her fair share of time there in the past – she’d never minded making a little trouble when the occasion called for it – but being with Zak had changed a lot of that. She had wanted his family to like her, and she hadn’t thought routine imprisonment would bode well for such a goal. She had been a fairly upstanding little officer since she’d met Zak. Except that Zak was gone now, and so was her reason to stay out of trouble. Absently, she wondered if the stone floor was a preview of what the rest of her career would look like.

She was sober enough to think it, but not sober enough to care. Not yet, anyway. It didn’t matter where she was. With Zak gone, nothing seemed to matter except the blanket of numbness that had begun fading all too quickly, only to be replaced by a more intense version of the pain than she had experienced before. Finally unable to stand it any longer, Kara had crawled over to the bed and had leaned back against it. With her knees pulled up to her chest, and her arms tightly wrapped around her legs, she had put her head down on her knees and closed her eyes, just wanting to make the pain go away.

Chapter 2

William Adama hated to be on leave. No, that wasn’t right. He didn’t mind leave, but he hated sitting at home with nothing to do. Initially, he had scheduled this leave to be at his son’s wedding, and following the boy’s funeral William had simply forgotten to cancel it. Once he’d realized how close it had been, he had thought that Iilya might need some support during the difficult day, and so he hadn’t bothered with the time and effort to change things. And so he found himself now sitting by the fire with a cup of coffee in his hands and a large hole in his heart. The house was damned empty, too quiet, and not at all where he wanted to be. And yet he was, because he had thought his wife would need him here. Ex-wife. Hell, everything was just plain wrong.

Iilya had needed someone, but she had chosen to stay with Lee instead of staying in the family home. In a way it pleased William, because he knew that the two of them needed one another. If no one gave a shit what he needed, than that was just the way it was. After all, he was a Battlestar Commander; he didn’t need anyone. He did, however, want something to take his mind off the fact that his wife had left him, his youngest son was dead, and his oldest held him responsible. Perhaps saying that things were “wrong” was understating the matter.

When the phone buzzed, he was actually grateful for the diversion. He picked up the receiver expecting it to be another of Iilya’s well-meaning if nosey friends, but instead it was the Commander of the nearest Colonial Base. He listened for a moment, gratefully thanked the man for calling him first – which had not been an easy task given that he was on leave – and accepted the responsibility offered. It was the last thing he had expected, but he would take whatever diversion he could get.

It was worse than he had thought it would be. While not the first time he had seen Kara Thrace in the brig, previously she had at least been fully clothed and furious rather than huddled against a bed and shaking. The Security Commander had happened to recognize her, had called the Base Commander with the extenuating circumstances, and somewhere in the circle of command William had thankfully been considered. Now, he just had to figure out a way to get her out of here. It was the very least he owed his son, because if things had gone differently today this woman would have become his daughter.

“You look awful,” he called to her from his side of the bars. Her head didn’t even raise. He nodded to the guard beside him and the door was unlocked so that he could enter the small cell. He had expected her to be sleeping, or maybe crying, but what he didn’t expect was the absolute absence of expression that greeted him when she finally raised her head.

“Why are you here?”

He almost didn’t understand the question. Her words were more than a little slurred. He had read the arrest report, and he’d known that she was intoxicated, but he had heard rumor of this woman drinking grown men under the table and still beating them at cards. Granted, he’d never seen that side of her, but a quick glance at her record had been all he had needed to confirm that most of the rumors were true. If anything, they glossed over the details rather than exaggerating them.

“I got a call from a friend,” he admitted. “He thought you might like to spend the night somewhere more comfortable than the brig.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she muttered, again slurred badly. “I deserve to be in jail.”

“Some of the witnesses claim it was self defense,” William suggested as he sat down on the bunk just above and beside her. “Well, not the guard, but the rest.”

“I belong in jail,” she said again, and he was sure that this went beyond simple intoxication and fighting in public.

“Why is that?” he asked simply.

She looked up at him, sideways and backwards at an awkward angle. “I killed him.”

If her voice hadn’t been so clear following the previous slurring, and her expression so… dead, then he might have taken it as a joke. But the woman before him wasn’t joking. She was absolutely serious, whether or not she was drunk. “Who did you kill?” he asked quietly.

“Zak.”

William thought about that for a moment, and despite the many directions that he turned it in his mind, he could not find a grain of truth to the self-accusation. His son had died in an accident; a terrible one, yes, but an accident. “Why do you say that?”

“He shouldn’t have flown,” she said simply.

“You couldn’t know that,” he corrected gently. Wasn’t one of the stages of grief blame? Was that what was happening? Was she taking on some illusion of responsibility to cope with Zak’s death? Lords, he wished he had a psychologist handy, but he didn’t. All he had was the simple knowledge that his son had loved this woman, and Zak would not be capable of loving a killer.

“He shouldn’t have passed basic flight,” Kara said, putting her head back down on her knees and no longer looking at him. “He should have flunked out completely. His technique was so bad that he shouldn’t have even been recommended for retraining.”

“If that were true, then his flight instructor would have failed him,” William said logically.

“He probably would have,” Kara said slowly. “But he wasn’t there.”

William Adama looked down at the woman on the floor, at the slump of her shoulders and the resignation in her body, and he knew that something was terribly wrong. “Who tested him?”

“I did,” she said with a breaking voice. “His score was so low that he couldn’t have even retrained. I thought… I thought that if he could just pass, then I could work with him on it. We could have spent some more time in the simulators. If I’d turned in those scores, it would have been over. They would have pulled him out of training, and sent him Lord knows where.”

“So you changed the scores?” Adama asked, his body shaking in fury even as his mind denied it. It was one thing to fudge a recommendation, but to actually change computer scoring…

“No,” she admitted, sniffling some. “You know the second portion is subjective. I just… scored what I thought he might be capable of with some practice, instead of what he actually did on the practical. When Lieutenant Graham came back, he didn’t question the scores because Zak’s written exam results on theory were so high. It was only a few points, and I really didn’t think it would matter.”

“It mattered,” Adama told her quietly. But in looking down at her, he found that the fury which had initially pervaded him just could not take hold.

“I didn’t want to lose him,” Kara said in a quiet voice. “And he wanted to fly. It was all he wanted, and I understood that. I knew it would kill me not to be able to fly, and I didn’t want to do that to him. I swear it was only a few points – just barely a pass. He was a little sloppy, but I thought he could learn. Not everyone can… feel it at first. I just wanted to give him that time to maybe develop more of an instinct for it, but instead I set him up to kill himself.”

Adama looked down into pleading green eyes. He could be angry, yes. He could be vindictive, and hateful, and cruel. He could take out all his pain on her, just as Lee had done to him. Except that he knew what that kind of attack felt like, and William hadn’t even deserved it. Kara – in a small way – did. She hadn’t killed Zak intentionally, but the result was essentially the same. And if faced with an inquiry, she would most certainly be court-martialed, found guilty, and discharged from Colonial Service if not actually imprisoned. A dishonorable discharge would ground her as surely putting her in prison. It would slowly kill her – he had no doubt of that. There had been enough death; he wouldn’t be the cause of more.

“Why didn’t this come up in the investigation?” William asked her softly.

“Hmm?”

“You were engaged; conflict of interest goes without saying. Why didn’t that show up when they did the investigation?”

“Graham signed the forms,” she said with a sigh. She wasn’t crying now. She was only half with him. Her blood alcohol level had been nearly three times the legal limit when she’d been arrested; he had no clue how she was even conscious.

“Why?”

“It was his class,” she told him. “He trusted my judgement.”

William sat there watching as Kara laid her head down on her knees one last time, her green eyes fluttering closed, and either passed out or fell asleep. One was about the same as the other under the circumstances.

He watched her for a long time, remembering family picnics that she had attended and simple dinners before his and Iilya’s divorce. One thing he had no doubt of was her love for Zak. The two of them together had been… incredible. It had been enough to make William more than a little jealous.

Not that he was attracted to Kara; not exactly. He supposed it was more the type of woman she was that had been attractive. She was beautiful, yes, but she was also very strong. As much as William had loved his wife – still did if it came to that – she was not all that strong. She was like a child in many ways, wanting to be taken care of. His career kept him away from home more often than not, so she’d had to make due. In the end, it had been too much for her. She had asked for the divorce just over a year before, and he had allowed it uncontested. He couldn’t be the husband she needed, and he knew it.

But Kara… Kara would make a fine wife for a pilot. To begin with, she was one herself, and there was an understanding of flight that had to be felt to be understood. Iilya had never understood his fascination with flight, but Kara lived it. She and Zak would have had so much in common. Kara was also a survivor. Her childhood hadn’t been easy, at least not from what little she had said about it. And yet she was independent and responsible, if a little unorthodox at times. Her heart was pure, too. She had loved his son with everything in her, and Zak had loved her the same way. Hell, if he’d been thirty years younger, knowing what he now did he just might have fought Zak for her. He couldn’t blame his son for falling in love. There were days that he was half in love with her himself, although it was in a purely paternal fashion. She had become one of his children over the past two years. The words and the rings were mere formalities; she was already his daughter.

And he couldn’t condemn his daughter to either the slow death of grounding or the equally slow death of alcoholism. He hadn’t known her to drink before this, but it was in her record and with this level of guilt the potential was there. In three days he would return to the Galactica, and when that happened she would be alone. Her future was not something he could leave to chance.

William stood, and then knelt down to ease Kara to her side so that she wouldn’t fall over. He positioned her carefully on her side, just in case she should become ill. He had some phone calls to make, and some favors to call in. He didn’t often ask for a return on the things he did, but in this case he would make an exception. He owed it to Zak, and in a way he owed it to Lee as well because his oldest son had been right. Zak shouldn’t have been in that plane. The only thing Lee had gotten wrong was the person who had let Zak wind up there.

Adama shifted in his chair, in and out of a doze but never truly sleeping. He watched the young woman on the floor, and he had to wonder what she was dreaming, if she was dreaming. She had been out for the better part of a day, during which he had moved the heavens to circumvent military procedure. His reasoning had been logical, and was as professional as it was personal.

To begin with, Kara was a danger to others. She had shown that she was not objective enough to be an instructor, however talented she was. Chances were high that she would never be so close to a student that she would bend the rules again, but the possibility did exist. As good as she was at what she did, she needed to be doing something else right now.

Secondly, she needed a reason to live. Right now, from what he could see, Kara didn’t really have one. She was irresponsible enough to get dangerously drunk, and only a few phone calls had revealed that she hadn’t been out of her apartment, hadn’t been seeing friends, and hadn’t been to work since Zak’s death. She was dying a little each day, and someone had to put a stop to it. He didn’t bother with wondering why he had to be the person to give her a reason to get up in the mornings; he just accepted it as his responsibility.

Thirdly, she needed someone to look out for her. It was something he couldn’t really do himself, but as a Commander he could “suggest” to several others the idea that she needed some supervision, or food, or exercise and his wishes would be carried out without her ever knowing where they had originated. Yes, it was dishonest, but the end would justify the means.

Finally, he could use a good pilot, and Kara Thrace was better than good. He had seen her fight more than once in the simulations, and she was a sight to behold. She and the Viper were one, and if it ever came down to the point of war again, he’d be proud to have her on his side. It was unlikely that it would ever happen, but he’d seen enough during his hears in the Service to know that it wasn’t an impossibility. And if it came down to old-fashioned dogfights, a pilot like Kara could turn the tide in a battle. She had it in her.

So he had made some calls, and had begged some favors, and then he had indebted himself to a few other individuals along the way because that was how the military was run. Some called it a chain of command, but he preferred to think of it as a circle. They all wound around into one another – the flyers, the marines, and the security troops. A little push here, and some pull there, and he had netted himself a new crew member. Now he just had to break the news to Kara.

His first warning that she was coming around was a groan. It was all he could do not to smile. He had a friend who tended to drink – and often with good reason – so he’d pulled the bastard out of more than one barroom brawl over the years. It was rare for Saul to drink to the point of passing out, but those few times he had, the hangover afterwards had been something to inspire hysterics. Tigh probably wouldn’t think so, but to a man who didn’t drink it was damned funny. Self-inflicted poisoning didn’t make a bit of sense to William Adama, but then flying through space didn’t make sense to some so he couldn’t throw stones. To each his own. But Kara was going to be hurting.

Her eyes came open slowly, and her pain from even the dim lighting in the cell was obvious. She squinted, covered her eyes with one hand, and groaned in earnest.

“Good morning,” he said simply.

Those eyes that had been squinting popped open with startling speed, and she did her best to push herself upright. Her best wasn’t very good at the moment. He saw the panic in her eyes just before her hand flew to her mouth. He might be old, but he was still quick on the uptake. Fortunately, he also moved with more than a little speed when inspired.

He grabbed her from behind as she tried to lunge for the metal head in the corner of the cell. Without his support, she would likely have gone head-first into the concrete floor, but as it was she managed to at least aim towards the bowl before the vomiting began. It went on for a very long time. Long past the time when he would have thought there couldn’t possibly have been anything left, Kara continued to surprise him. When she was finally quiet, he made sure she was stable and then walked the few feet to the metal sink, soaked a towel in cold water, and brought it back to wash her face and wipe up the worst of the mess.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” she croaked out. Her head was resting against the cool metal, and she couldn’t lift just yet, but still she was calling him “Sir.” What in hell was he going to do with her?

“Don’t worry about it,” he reassured her. “Feeling any better?”

“Better than what?” she mumbled. William smiled at that. Yes, she was hurting.

Rather than talking to her, he decided to just wait. She wasn’t in any condition to reason with him, and there didn’t seem to be a point to explaining things when she was too ill to comprehend them. And he was delaying the battle as well, he had to admit to himself. She was a fighter, and she was not going to come along easily. Her pride was too well developed for her to let anyone take care of her. Zak had told him more than once that the way to get Kara to do something was to maker her think it was her idea. William didn’t have time to do that, but he wasn’t stupid enough to just order her point blank when she wasn’t even strong enough to sit up on her own.

“Sir?” she asked after a long time. He was pleased to hear that her voice was a little stronger, although not her normal tone by any stretch of the imagination.

“Yes?”

“Why are you here?”

He smiled again. He did like her style. “I got a call from a friend that one of my favorite pilots had gotten herself into a barroom brawl.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Sir. Yesterday was… difficult. I guess I didn’t do such a good job getting through it. I really don’t remember much.”

“Yesterday was painful,” he agreed. “It was supposed to be such a happy occasion, but…”

“Yes, Sir.”

He sighed. She wasn’t going to make this easy on him. “I’m here to make you a deal,” he offered.

“A deal?” He wasn’t sure which was more prominent, her confusion or surprise. But her head had come up, and she hadn’t turned green again just yet.

“A deal. I think we can agree that having you return as an instructor on the Callahandra would be counterproductive. Favoritism shown once might one day be repeated; after objectivity is compromised, it’s far too easy for it to happen again.” Her look of utter panic removed the smile from his face. “You didn’t kill him, Kara. You may have used poor judgement, but you wouldn’t have hurt him deliberately.”

“You know?” she said, just over a whisper.

“You told me,” he admitted. “You’re very talkative when you’re plastered.”

Her blush was almost enough to make him smile. Almost, because the panic was still in her expression.

“I don’t hold you responsible, but that doesn’t mean I want you tried in a military court for lack of objectivity concerning the man you were planning to marry. That wouldn’t do anyone any good. Hell, I’ve already lost one child, and whether you realize it or not, you’re a part of the family – with or without marrying Zak. I don’t want to lose another child to this mistake.”

A couple of tears streaked down her face, but she said nothing.

“So, this is what is going to happen,” he told her with as much authority in his voice as he could manage under the circumstances; she looked awful. “You are going to come back to the house, clean up, get something on, and then we’ll go clean out your quarters on the Callahandra. You’ll stay at the house under my supervision until we report to the Galactica at the end of the week. There, you will report for duty as a pilot, be assigned group quarters, and in general continue life in the military as you know it. Any questions?”

She just sat there, looking up at him in utter confusion. He knew she was sober enough to understand him, but her expression saddened him greatly. There was so much guilt there, and so much fear as well. He knelt down so that she could look him in the eye without straining, and he had to give her credit for that as well. Despite all that she had done, and the clear embarrassment and guilt, she was still looking him in the eye. The girl had guts. Damned, why hadn’t she been around thirty years before?

“Kara, you’re the best pilot I’ve seen in a very long time,” he told her simply. “You’re meant to be in space, not in a military prison. I know you’re capable of staying out of trouble when you put your mind to it, and you would be an asset to any squadron. You just need time; let me give that to you.”

She shook her head in denial. “I don’t deserve…” she began, but he cut her off.

“For Zak,” he told her gently. “If you won’t let me do this for you, then let me do it for Zak. He’d want to know that you’re okay.” Two more tears streaked down her cheeks before he put his hand out towards her. “Deal?”

She sniffled, nodded, and took his hand. Her smile was tentative, and her heart wasn’t in it, but it gave him a little bit of hope. There was still some of the woman his son had loved in her, and he just had to get her to remember that.

Chapter 3

Kara decided that somewhere, sometime, in some other life, she must have been a whole lot better person than she was this time around. That was the only explanation she could come up with for the genuine forgiveness that William Adama had granted her for no more reason than that Zak had loved her. Hell, just having Zak love her had seemed like more than she had ever deserved, and to have had the opportunity to be a part of the Adama family had always seemed too good to be true.

What was that old saying? If something looked too good to be true, it probably was. That was one of the first rules she’d learned when she’d started playing cards; the foundation of bluffing. If something looked like a sure thing, it was anything but. Marrying Zak had been a sure thing; and now he was dead. So somewhere in the plans of Commander William Adama, there must be a flaw, because this deal was far too good to be genuine. She hadn’t done anything to deserve such a chance.

The only reason she was even able to believe the reality of the situation was that just as soon as the alcohol had left her system, the memory of Zak’s Viper exploding had returned to her mind. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the remains that were pulled from the wreckage. Every time she was someplace quiet, she heard the explosions full force. She might not have lost her career, but she was quite sure that she was going to lose her mind. She hoped vaguely that it would happen quickly.

The eldest Adama had been true to his word. He had taken her back to his house, sent her upstairs for a bath, and when she’d come out there had been a slightly tight pair of jeans and a very large sweat shirt. From the writing on the arm, she knew that it was one of Zak’s, and she wondered if his father had chosen it deliberately. After a moment’s thought, she decided he had. William Adama never did anything without a reason.

She had to lie down on the bed to get the jeans zipped, but once she had they loosened up nicely. The beauty of old denim was that it stretched well. And if she had been worried about the snug fit, Zak’s old Academy sweatshirt fell half-way to her knees, so she was more than decently covered when she walked down the stairs.

“You look better,” William commented as he placed a cup of coffee on the table before her along with a glass of something fizzy. “Drink the analgesic first,” he told her. “It’ll help knock down the headache.”

“That obvious?” she asked as she picked up the glass and looked at its sparkling contents.

“Actually, yes,” he admitted. “And I have a friend who tells me that’s the best thing for it.”

She downed the contents of the glass, making a face at the sour taste. “I’d rather have the coffee,” she muttered. “But thanks for thinking of it. It’s been so long since I really drank anything that I forgot how bad the morning after is.”

“Try to remember this time,” he suggested blandly. He set a plate of toast before her, thankfully unbuttered. Her glance at him netted a smile and wink.

“I’ll expect you to eat something more substantial for lunch, but at the moment I really don’t want to clean up a mess,” he joked. Then, with a more serious expression, “You’ve lost weight.”

She shrugged. She wasn’t one to stand on a scale often, so she hadn’t noticed. She ran enough that she kept her weight within military specifications with little difficulty, so she’d never been one to really pay attention. She had friends that had fought with the regs, and she had always thought it was pretty silly. After all, a few pounds was nothing that a good run couldn’t solve. She should know; she did it every day. Or she used to; she hadn’t run a step since the morning of Zak’s solo flight.

Closing her eyes against the memory, and finding it only clearer without the house to distract her, she instead forced herself to look around. The house hadn’t changed much in the year since Iilya had moved out. The two-story wooden home was still cozy in its feel, still casual in its furniture, and still more of a home than she’d ever really seen before, even without the mom and kids to go with it. “It’s quiet here,” she observed softly.

“Too quiet,” he admitted. “I’m going to have to put it up for sale, but I just don’t have the heart to get rid of it. Iilya doesn’t want it; she prefers an apartment where she doesn’t need to care for the yard or keep a lot of rooms clean. I suppose I can’t blame her. But to me, this was home. It was where the boys grew up, and where she was always waiting…” His voice trailed off sadly, and he gave a self-depreciating smile. “I sound like a pitiful old man, don’t I?”

“No,” she said softly. “Just maybe a little lonely.”

He shook his head. “When I’m on the ship, I can forget. After all, I was never really here much. But when I’m on leave, I realize just how much I’ve let slip away.”

“Why didn’t you fight the divorce?” she asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was none of her business.

“Because she wanted it,” he told her, then he took a long drink from his own coffee cup. “And because it was the one thing I could do for her. I was never the husband she wanted, or needed. She stayed so long as the boys were here, but once Zak moved out there was no reason for her to be here. She was tired of being alone.”

Kara just nodded. She didn’t know what else to say.

“So, did you want to rest awhile, or would you prefer to go get your things now?”

“Whatever is easiest,” she told him quickly. She felt like enough of a bother without his rearranging his day because of her preferences. But when he glared at her over the top of his glasses, she was forced to make a decision. “I don’t think I can sleep, though,” she admitted.

“So, let’s go get your things.”

And it really was as simple as that. Kara made a mental note that rank was not entirely a bad thing as she watched people jump to attention when the Commander walked into a room. Even out of uniform and off his own ship, the respect his presence commanded was startling.

He helped her with cleaning out her locker, placing uniforms and off duty clothing into a standard issue Service duffel, and he waited patiently as several of the instructors expressed their condolences or said good-bye. Word seemed to have traveled quickly that she was being reassigned, and she wondered just exactly what had transpired while she had been passed out in the brig. She wondered, but no way in hell was she going to ask.

It was with great relief that Kara finally left the Callahandra for what she hoped was the last time. The ship had simply held too many memories. Zak was around every corner to her, and it had made her nervous. That was the primary reason she hadn’t reported back for duty, instead using leave by the month to avoid it.

William Adama stopped in front of her apartment without being asked or directed. She looked at him with frank shock – very few people knew that the place existed – but he had just winked. “Leave form,” he had told her in response to her questioning look. She was reminded again just how much pull his rank held, and how much information he had access to. The thought was downright intimidating.

He walked her to the door, which was standing slightly open. She looked at it in confusion as they entered. Nothing appeared to be out of place, and the door showed no signs of forced entry. “I wonder why…?” she began, but he stopped her with a sideways grin.

“This might explain it,” he suggested, lifting the crystal decanter that she had emptied before leaving the apartment. She blushed faintly. It certainly did. “I’d guess that if you didn’t stop to think about clothes, you probably weren’t worried about your door.”

The faint blush turned bright red as she walked across the room and picked up the box sitting on her desk, then grabbed a couple of other things to add to it.

“Were you planning on moving?” he asked in confusion. He had taken a seat at the foot of her messy bed to watch as she packed up what she needed.

“It’s… Zak’s things, mostly. And my stuff from his room. Lee brought it over a while back. I hadn’t gotten around to looking at it until yesterday.”

She didn’t miss the look of pain that crossed William’s face at the mention of his sons. She wasn’t sure whether it had been grief for Zak or pain from Lee’s accusations. She said a silent prayer that it wasn’t from the latter, as she realized suddenly that William knew she was the reason Lee was furious with him. “I’m glad he thought of it,” Adama said quietly.

She shrugged off his gentle voice. “They wouldn’t let me into his room,” she admitted bitterly. “I wasn’t a relative.”

The expletive that he muttered went a long way towards soothing her anger from the old wound. “If I’d known how much influence you had, I might have had you pull some strings,” she told him with a shrug. “People really jump when you come into a room, and you aren’t even in uniform.”

He grinned at that. “After more than thirty years, they should,” he said with a wink. “And all you would have had to have done was ask. I would have made sure they let you in.”

She sighed at that, taking a seat in the chair by the small desk. “I didn’t even think of it,” she said.

“What else do you need?” he asked, glancing around the mostly empty room. She didn’t stay here often, so it held only the bare necessities. Even though she’d been living there for two months, she still hadn’t bothered with decorating or filling it with the knick-knacks that everyone else seemed to acquire. It was ironic really, because she kept the room for storage. She had just never really needed to store anything.

“Most everything’s in the box,” she admitted. “It’s the stuff I kept at Zak’s, so it’s pretty much enough to get by with.” She didn’t look at Adama as she made the admission. While she was more than certain that the man knew the extent of her relationship with his son – they were going to be married, after all – essentially admitting that they had lived together still felt odd. But she didn’t see any need to lie to him about it; she had never been embarrassed by her relationship with Zak, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to get timid about it now.

“Then let’s lock up,” he suggested as he stood. She followed him, making sure the door was secure before following him back to the vehicle.

Walking into the Adama household this time posed an awkward situation, though. Where would she be staying? Normally when she spent time there she had stayed with Zak, but she didn’t know if his room was appropriate under the circumstances. She knew there wasn’t a guest room – Zak had told her as much when he had brought her home for the first time – so that meant she would likely wind up in one of the boys’ rooms. There would be something weird about sleeping in Lee’s room, although she couldn’t define why. Maybe she would ask for the couch.

“You have your choice,” Adama said as he walked in behind her proved once and for all that he was a mind reader. “If you’d like to stay in Zak’s room… Well, we haven’t cleared anything out. There didn’t seem to be a point. No one is around to need it. I think Lee took a few things, but Iilya couldn’t even walk in there. So if you feel the same way, I’ll understand. I can put you in Lee’s room if you like. He emptied it out when Iilya moved out, so I assume she’s storing his things. You’ll get clean sheets either way. I have a cleaning lady come in every week or so to keep the dust within reason. She keeps things freshened up.”

Kara was reminded once again of the chasm that was between this man and his son because of what she had done, however inadvertently. And yet here he was, helping her. She didn’t understand that kind of forgiveness. She’d been beat to a pulp for so much less, and yet he didn’t even seem to be bothered by what she’d done. Was that just the way a father – a good one – thought? Was she just that lucky? She couldn’t deal with the questions now, so she focused on the immediate concern. Where would she sleep? As sick as it sounded, she knew where she wanted to be. Just as she had felt a touch of comfort when she’d slipped on Zak’s shirt, she wanted to be in his room.

“I…” she began, then had to clear her throat and start over. “I’d like to stay in Zak’s room, if it’s really okay.”

“I wouldn’t have offered it if I hadn’t meant it,” he told her seriously. “I’ve been known to go up there and sit sometimes… probably sounds morbid to you.”

“It sounds like you miss him,” she offered.

He just nodded, reached out to take the box from her, and led her up the stairs. Once he’d put the box on Zak’s bed, he quietly left her there. He had been right; it was just the same. She could remember a dozen times when she had snuggled up next to Zak on this bed. They had never done more – not under his parents’ roof – but it had been nice to just sleep with him. She walked around for a moment, touching the wooden dresser with his Triad trophy sitting dead center, and glanced out the window at the tree house that he and Lee had built years before. They had made love there, which she had thought was completely hysterical at the time. Zak had just laughed and told her that it was his roof, not his parents’.

She finally sat on the edge of the bed and closed her eyes. Lords, she missed him. She missed being held, and she missed how he had made her laugh even when she had felt miserable. She missed that wicked glint he’d get in his eyes when he was plotting something stupid, and she missed the way he had kissed her “just because.” She even missed the arguments, and the debates, and the disagreements. They had loved one another, but that hadn’t made them think identically. She had considered it to be a challenge, and a fun one at that. And he had loved to rile her up. How many times had he argued with her for hours, and then later told her that he’d agreed with her all along? He had just wanted to tick her off.

She didn’t cry. Not now. There weren’t any tears left, she decided. But neither was she numb. The pain had just eased down into her, leaving an ache that didn’t go away, just like the constant ring of explosions in her mind.

It was those explosions, and the memories associated with them, drove her from Zak’s bed later that night. She couldn’t make them go away. She couldn’t stand to listen to them any longer. The evening had been pleasant enough. Surprisingly, William Adama was a fine cook. He had told her a good deal about the Galactica over dinner, and afterwards they had both sat in front of the fire reading for a couple of hours. He had gone to bed first, reminding her where to find the extra blankets, and she had followed when she’d finally been too tired to focus on the small print in the murder-mystery any longer. She had been too sleepy to even care who had done it. But once she had lain down, the noise had become unbearable in her mind. Crashes and screams and the endless thundering explosions that seemed to get louder the more she tried to ignore them.

She had thought about turning on a vid, but she didn’t want to wake her host. Besides, when her mind seemed this loud, external noise was hard to focus on and just made matters worse. This wasn’t the first night that she had fought for sleep, and she doubted it would be the last. She finally settled on going back downstairs and trying to manage her way through the book for a while longer.

She didn’t know how long she fought with the book, but finally she decided that she was just going mad. There was no other way to describe it. She was hearing things, and it was making her insane. She couldn’t stop it. Putting her hands over her ears only made it louder, and closing her eyes only added to the horrendous memories. She eventually did both, hoping that if she was indeed going to go crazy, it might happen quickly so that she wouldn’t have to deal with it much longer.

That was the way William Adama found her. “Kara?”

She heard his voice only after he’d put a hand on her shoulder. “Hmm?” It was the only sound that would come out. She took a deep breath and tried to pull herself together, but she was too tired to manage it.

“Are you okay?” he asked softly, coming around the couch to sit next to her. “What the hell am I saying,” he muttered. “Of course you’re not.” He gave her a tired look, and a long sigh. “I don’t know how to make it easier for you,” he said softly. “Losing someone is never easy.”

His voice drove some of the muffled noise out of her mind, but not all of it. Oh, Lords, she didn’t want him to see her lose her mind.

“What can I do?” he asked her gently. She could barely make out the words. She shook her head, trying to clear it. Gradually the sound faded somewhat, and she began to think well enough to realize that she was crying. Great. Even after the funeral she had confined her bawling to Zak’s room with no witnesses.

She shook her head again, only then becoming aware that her hands were still covering her ears. That was probably half the reason she couldn’t hear him. She was already insane, she decided. He might as well know it. It was better to tell him before he took her to his ship and she became a basket case in space.

“Kara?”

She forced her hands down from her ears, then made herself look up and meet his eyes. The sadness there was almost more than she could take. “I think I’m going crazy,” she said in a whisper. To voice the thoughts would make them real, and she was afraid of them.

“Why do you think that?” he asked. His voice was so damned calm. He didn’t understand.

“I can still… I hear it. It won’t stop,” she explained, or tried to.

“What do you hear?” he asked.

“Explosions,” she told him. “Zak’s plane. I remember every sound, every scream, and it just… it won’t stop. I can’t make it stop.” Her words dissolved into a hiccuping sob and she put her head in her hands. “How do I make it stop?”

He was quiet for a long time, and she knew he must be thinking she was nuts. She was; she heard things that weren’t there. “Kara, can I tell you a story?”

She took a couple more breaths, trying to stop the shaking that was starting to make her teeth chatter. She didn’t try for words, but instead she nodded.

He watched her a moment, then reached over to the huge chair he’d sat in earlier and grabbed the afghan from the back of it. Wrapping it around her shoulders, the pulled it tight, almost like a hug. It helped a little.

“Better?” he asked. At her nod, he sat back and watched her for a moment more. “You’re hot hearing things,” he eventually said. “You’re remembering things. That’s different entirely.”

Kara pulled her legs up beneath the afghan, keeping it tight around her, and listened. She didn’t believe it, but she would take anything that kept her mind off the sounds that would not stop.

“You’re too young to remember the war,” he said softly. “But I grew up with it. I can remember Cylon Raiders cutting across the landscape with weapons blazing. I was just a kid – maybe eight or nine – but somehow a squad got in past the perimeter defenses. My dad swore it was because he was on leave,” he added with a wink. “One of the Raiders cut out over the hills and I thought for sure he was coming right at my house. When you’re a kid, you think that way. It’s all about you. Anyway, my dad grabbed me and got me down into the basement. The thing never really got close, but I could hear ordinance blowing so loud that I thought for sure we were dead.”

Kara was paying attention now. His voice was low and clear, and he knew how to tell a story.

“Anyway, I had the most horrible nightmares after that,” he continued. “I’d wake up screaming, swearing that I could hear the Raider coming back. My mom just told me to stop being silly, but my dad… he understood. He was off for those first couple of weeks afterwards on medical leave, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, he listened, talked to me, and usually got me back to sleep. Just before he went back on duty we had a storm, a big one. You’ve seen the storms that just tear apart the sky? This was one of them. Thunder from here to hell and back. Even my dad couldn’t get me to stop screaming that night. Finally he got desperate. He carried me outside in the middle of the storm, and sat me down in the middle of all the rain. Something must have knocked some sense into me, because I finally started listening to my dad. He was so aggravated by that point that he just kept yelling, ‘what do you hear?’.”

“Did you tell him?” she asked.

“Sure did. ‘Nothing but the rain.’ But, being a military man, my dad didn’t leave it at that. He kept asking ‘what do you hear,’ and I kept answering ‘nothing but the rain’ until it was drilled into my skull.”

“Did it help?”

“Actually, it did. Because he was right. I wasn’t hearing anything that was going to hurt me; I was remembering something. Once I realized what was real and what was memory, I was able to… turn it off. Probably sounds stupid, but it was a lot of years ago.”

“Your dad sounds… nice.”

William smiled. “Nice? I don’t know, there are a hell of a lot of non-comms that would argue that. Most of the time he was more warrior than father, but with me it worked. I was raised with the Service from the time I could understand what it was. As stupid as his… method was, it was what I needed. Just like when he’d drilled ‘yes sir’ into me, and standing at attention, and not asking questions, every time he asked me what I heard, I just told him ‘nothing but the rain’. It wound up being some kind of code, I guess. Instead of ‘how are you’ and ‘I’m fine’ we had that.”

She sat and thought about that, and realized that Adama had a point. The only sound was in her mind, and if she let it make her crazy it was her own damned fault. She had never been one for a lot of discipline, but she could use it when she had to. And when she thought of it, the explosions did sound a lot like thunder, and the crash of metal coming down onto the deck did sound a bit like rain. It was a lot easier to cope with than the alternative.

“So, Kara, what do you hear?”

She looked up at him and wondered at what he was offering. It was more than unconditional forgiveness of her poor decision, or even the future that he was making possible by taking her on as crew. He was offering her a part of his childhood – something that felt like family, even though she’d never really had the chance to become an Adama. It was damned close. “Nothing but the rain?” she asked.

He shook his head with a mock frown. “If you say it, you have to mean it. You have to hear it. The rain can’t hurt you, Kara. Rain is just water, and we need that to live. Just like we need to remember… even the bad memories. We learn from them, and they make us stronger. So, what do you hear?”

She considered the question, closing her eyes and listening. She still heard it, but it wasn’t as frightening. It was a memory, and while it was a bad one, it was no more than that. “Nothing but the rain.”

“Again. What do you hear?”

“Nothing but the rain,” she said, her voice a little more clear.

“What do you hear?” he asked again, just a little louder, but he was smiling.

“Nothing but the rain,” she said firmly.

“What do you hear?” he shouted.

“Nothing but the rain!”

He smiled at her. “Remember that,” he said simply.

“Yes, Sir,” she said softly. “And… thank you.”

He shook his head. “No thanks,” he requested. “I haven’t thought about my dad in a long time. Lords, that was a long time ago. You know, sometimes… it feels good to remember.”

“Did he die in the war?” she asked him.

Adama nodded. “Most warriors did,” he admitted. “But he died doing what he loved most.”

“Let me guess?” she requested. “He was a pilot?”

“One of the best,” William said fondly. “I was in secondary school when he died. I was angry for a while, but later I realized that you can’t wish a pilot out of the sky. He must have been in a thousand battles and shot down a thousand Cylons over the years, and one day… he missed.” He looked somber for a moment. “The Cylon didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she offered.

“Me, too,” he agreed. Then, he smiled again very wistfully. “My dad would have loved you. No one back then really gave him much in the way of competition when it came to flying. He was just… the best. I think you’d have given him a run for his money.”

She finally smiled. “Thanks,” she said simply. From Commander William Adama, she had received the ultimate compliment.

“You ready to try sleeping again?” he asked.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and listened. “Nothing but the rain,” she said softly, reminding herself. The rain couldn’t hurt her, but it could teach her.

He nodded approvingly. “That a girl.”

Chapter 4

William Adama looked at the clock when he heard Kara coming down the stairs and stood up to fill a cup with coffee. It was just past midday, and he was happy that once she’d finally gone to sleep she had stayed that way. He had looked in on her a couple of times – much as he had the boys when they had been younger – just to be sure she was okay. Each time she had been sleeping soundly, curled into a ball and huddled under the covers. He had to wonder if that was how she normally slept, or whether it was a reaction to all she had been through.

“Good morning,” she said with a yawn as she entered the kitchen. She was dressed in the same beige pajamas that she had been wearing in the brig, rubbing her eyes, and looking for all the world like a ten year old. Her hair was sticking out in every direction from sleep, and her footsteps were shuffling but quiet in socked feet.

He grinned over at her. “Good morning,” he replied. “What do you hear?”

She looked blank for a moment, and then smiled. “Nothing but the rain,” she replied with a wink.

“Then grab your gun and bring in the cat,” he told her.

If her face had looked blank before, it was nothing to the confusion she was showing now. Between looking so young and so lost, he had to laugh. “An old saying,” he explained. “I’m not even sure where I heard it. If it’s raining, there’s nothing you can do but bring the cat in, right? And you’d never leave your gun out in the rain.”

“I’d rather shoot it with the gun,” she replied in a wry tone. “Conceited little beasts, every damned one. I had a roommate in college who had one; it bit me every time I got close. Obnoxious animal.”

“Obnoxious, sometimes,” he agreed. “But they’re good companions. Unless they’re wet – then they’re mad as hell. So you bring them in when the rain starts. It saves on bites and scratches.”

“I’d still rather shoot it,” she said with a shrug, joining him at the table and taking the cup of coffee he offered. She glanced up at the clock. “I don’t remember ever sleeping so long,” she admitted. “Not since…”

When she trailed off, her expression more than sad, he knew she was still hurting. “You needed it,” he told her. “And enjoy it while you can. The first few days on duty will run you ragged. Our CAG has a tendency to be rather nasty to the new pilots. You can take it, but he’ll keep you hopping until he decides you’re fit.”

“Great,” she mumbled. “If he gets out of line, can I hit him?”

Adama laughed at that. “Only if you want to spend a couple more nights in the brig.”

“Oh well, it was a thought.”

“Normally he sticks new pilots on regular eight hour patrols, then adds a four hour maintenance shift to it. If you survive eight or nine days of that, he’ll cut you back to six and two. If you start whining, he comes to me. Ripper is a firm believer that we need to keep a combat ready crew, and he would rather weed out a weak pilot early in the game than find out later the hard way.”

“You sound like you agree,” she commented.

He thought about it. “Prepare for the worst, then hope for the best,” he told her. “I remember the war. I lost my father to it, and I spent almost four years fighting in it. I watched a lot of people die because they were too busy complaining to be effective. I suppose it changed my perspective on the service. Now I just see too many kids coming into the Service as either an obligation to be served or a simple job that they have to do. You can’t be a warrior eight hours a day and then be a civilian the rest, not if you want to be good at either. A warrior is just that – day and night – rain or shine.” He said the last with a wink, wondering if she would get the reference. He shouldn’t have worried. Her smile told him that she definitely understood the joke.

“So, everything’s manual on the Galactica?” she asked.

He nodded. “Networking is what got us into trouble with the Cylons in the first place. Technology is a good thing, but too much is just the opposite. When a system goes down, you have to be able to work around it, otherwise you’re a target. A few weeks ago I was picking up some things at the commissary and the power went out. We were politely escorted from the building. Everything ground to a halt. That’s an inconvenience when you’re shopping, but for the military it’s purely irresponsible. We can’t be dependent on technology of any kind.”

“The Galactica sounds fine to me,” she said. “I’d rather fly myself than let a computer do it anyway. Computers can’t feel the plane, can’t adjust the right way. I guess it sounds silly, but I don’t trust them.”

“That’s why you’re so good,” he told her. “You’ve developed the instinct. The rooks coming in now… hell, you’ve seen how they fly.”

“By instruments rather than feel,” she agreed. “It was frustrating when I was trying to get them to think instead of react.”

“Well, you’ll be with a lot of rooks on the Galactica,” he told her. “Because of our limited technology, they tend to send me the kids. If they can manage the Galactica, then any other Battlestar is a snap. It’s also a great way to find the weak links and get them out before they wedge in and weaken the Service.”

“So mostly rooks,” she said with a grimace. “Great.”

“You can handle it,” he told her. “You’re used to instructing. This will just take you to a different level. They come in knowing the basics, and you can help guide them from there. It’s more subtle than teaching at the academy, but you’ll be instructing whether you intend it or not. We don’t have a lot of experienced flyers right now; it’ll be good to have someone who comes in qualified for more than the basics.”

“You really want them following my example?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“You can stay on your best behavior,” he replied with a grin. “I know you’re capable of it.”

She shrugged. “So when do we report?”

“I go back day after tomorrow. You can fly in with me, unless you’ll need more time to get things together.”

She shook her head. “I’ll take your supervision over a prison cell any day.”

He looked up and met her eyes. He should have known; she wasn’t stupid. Her release had been contingent upon his keeping her under close watch to assure that she didn’t try any other stupid stunts, but he had hoped she hadn’t realized that. “Caught that, did you?”

She nodded. “Unfortunately, I know the system. But I’ve never had anyone take the chance of sticking me on probation. I guess most of my commanders didn’t trust me that far. I wanted to thank you for that.”

He shook his head. “Like I said, I need some experienced crew.”

“Expecting a war?” she asked.

“Always,” he admitted with a sigh. “I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to lose every ship around me to those damned Raiders. The Cylons were… inhuman. I can’t believe that a truce with them will last indefinitely. I pray that we never go to war with them again, but if we do I plan to be ready, and I plan to have my crew ready.”

“Better safe than sorry?”

He nodded, and decided that the discussion had gotten far too serious for his last days of leave. “So, what would you like to do during your last days of freedom?” he asked, changing the subject.

She smiled at that. “I’d like to go running,” she said. “If you need to supervise, we can find a track or something.”

He shook his head. “I trust you, Kara. If you want to run, do it. I know you’ll come back.”

Her expression was oddly grateful for a moment, and he knew he’d been right with his guess. He’d thought that she’d had few people believe in her – and she had said as much about her commanding officers – but the look on her face confirmed it. While a part of him understood it, having dealt with a few rogue officers along the line, another part was angered. She might be a bit unorthodox, but nowhere in her record had he found any destructive intent. She didn’t fight without provocation, and most of her offenses had more to do with her mouth than her fists. She was honest to the core, and she didn’t much care about who ranked above her or how they took her version of the truth. Insubordination was the most prominent pattern in her disciplinary history, and he didn’t really think he would have a problem with her. She had never been disrespectful to him off duty; he saw no reason for her to be insubordinate on duty. She hadn’t shown a dislike of all officers, only those who didn’t really deserve the respect of their rank. A judge might not recognize the names and reputations of those she had mouthed off to, but he’d been in the service enough years to know most prominent names, and some of them he’d had run-ins with himself. He was just high enough in rank that he could get away with the honesty.

“There’s a path down through the woods,” he told her. “If you go down beside the house, you come to the lake edge. The full perimeter of the lake is a mile and a half. The walk down and back makes a good warm up and cool down.”

“That sounds like experience,” she said, setting her empty coffee cup down on the table.

He shrugged and gave her a slightly embarrassed smile. “I haven’t always been an old man,” he told her. “And I still have to fitness test annually, just like the rest of you.”

She cocked her head sideways, observing him, and he could tell she had something on her mind that she was reluctant about.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re welcome to come along,” she told him. “I haven’t been running since… well, in a couple of months. I’m going to be pretty slow. You’d probably make a good pacer for me.”

“You don’t look like you’ve lost much muscle,” he said. “I’m sure I’d still slow you down.”

She shook her head. “It would be nice to have some company,” she admitted. “I’ve been… alone a lot. That was how I wanted it, but…”

It was as close as she would probably come to admitting that she was lonely. He knew the feeling. Having her around for a couple of days had gone a long way towards relieving the depressed exhaustion that had hit him when he’d realized that what was supposed to have been a happy occasion was instead going to be a week of sitting alone. He knew what it felt like to just want companionship of another human being. And truthfully, he hadn’t been keeping up with his fitness on this leave. A run would probably do him good, even if she did lap him a couple of times.

“I’ll meet you down here in fifteen minutes,” he offered. “I think I have some running shoes upstairs somewhere. How about you? I didn’t see you pack any, though.”

“They were already in the box,” she said softly. “I kept a pair at Zak’s.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. Anything seemed to just make it more obvious that he had put his foot in his mouth. She knew he was sorry. He knew that she was as well. And he didn’t like the inadvertent tension that the incautious remark had caused.

“Fifteen minutes,” she finally said.

“I’ll be here,” he told her.

And he was, dressed in standard issue military sweatpants and tank tops. She was dressed in the same. They walked down to the lake together, picking their way around the mostly overgrown path that was beside and behind his house. This had been one of the major reasons he and Iilya had chosen to build here so many years ago; the lake was also good for fishing and swimming, and as a younger man he had looked at that kind of thing. He hadn’t realized how little time he would spend here. Neither had Iilya.

Once down at the lake, Kara started a slow jog. It was a fairly easy pace to maintain. He matched her stride, careful though it was, and was grateful that the lake path hadn’t deteriorated as much as his access trail. By the end of the first lap, he was breathing heavily, although not completely exhausted. Nevertheless, he waved her on and slowed down to a walk. At his age, the Service allowed him to qualify by walking rather than running, but he had never taken the option. He had started running in the weeks before testing to get himself back up to standard. It wasn’t that he let himself get out of shape; he couldn’t afford that any more than he could let his crew or ship become unfit. But he did choose lower impact exercises to do so, because running had a tendency to bother his knees and ankles after a time.

Kara was showing no such difficulty. Once he had dropped out, she lengthened her stride to what he had thought she was capable of, and she took off. He had to smile. She wouldn’t have done it if he’d stayed with her, and she probably needed both the physical and emotional release that running would allow. If she was like most runners he knew – like he had been ten years before – she was probably more than a little addicted to the adrenaline that a good run could create. This would do more for her outlook than a year of counseling or a bottle of drugs. Depression was often improved by physical exertion, as it gave a person control over something once again, even if it was just her own body.

As he had expected, she lapped him twice by the time he’d walked around the second time. She slowed to walk next to him for the last quarter of their track, her breathing heavy and her ability to talk gone. “Feel better?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

She smiled as she nodded; the first true smile he’d seen that actually touched her eyes, putting a glint there that reassured him as nothing else could. Her face was beet red, her breathing nearly a gasp, but she looked better than she had in a long time. After about a minute, she was able to speak. “I’d forgotten,” she got out, taking in another deep breath quickly. “How much… it takes… you know?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “That’s why I stopped.”

She gave a feeble laugh, most likely due to lack of air rather than lack of agreement. “Zak and I… used to…sorry.”

“No, go ahead,” he encouraged. “Unless it bothers you, of course. I love hearing about my son.”

She gave him a weak smile. “Sometimes I almost… forget,” she said, but the breaks were more for thought now than for breath. “Then I hear his name, and… the past tense…”

“It hurts,” he told her. “But the two of you had something good. It’s okay to remember that.”

She nodded, but she didn’t look at him. “Zak and I used to run five miles every morning,” she finally said. “He got so damned mad when I’d beat him. He wouldn’t say anything, but I could tell, you know? The way he got all quiet; I swear it was the only time he ever got quiet. Anyway, I stopped winning. I never really thought it was a race anyway. It was Zak that made it into a competition.”

“Blame Lee for that,” Adama said softly. “Zak always wanted to be just like him. It was ridiculous, because their personalities and talents were so different, but Zak never saw it that way.”

“He always said that Lee was a hard act to follow,” Kara admitted.

“They were both… such good men. Hell, I talk about both of them in the past tense.”

“That’s my fault,” she said quietly as the completed the last lap and started up the trail to the house. “I should have told him the truth… but…”

“No,” William said firmly. “Lee is… not ready to accept Zak’s death. I know he feels responsible. Half the reason Zak wanted to fly was because Lee did it so well, and Lee knows it. He’s feeling more guilt than any of us. I think he needs the anger right now, and I’d rather take that than have it directed at you. He’ll forgive in time. He’ll accept it in time.”

“You sound so sure.”

He shrugged. “I used to know him pretty well. Or maybe I didn’t; I don’t know. But I believe he’ll come around when he’s ready.”

“And in the meantime?” she asked.

“He’ll need friends,” William said. “I saw you with him after the funeral. You’re a good friend.”

“I’m not,” she said as she stopped on the porch to face the eldest Adama. “I killed his brother, and then lied about it.”

“You loved his brother,” Adama corrected. “And killing, by definition, is intentional. You didn’t kill Zak. He died in an accident; that’s all there is to it.”

Kara looked at him for a moment, and then stepped forward and put her arms around his neck. Without thought, William hugged her back. For a long moment they stood that way, her clinging to him like a child, and him holding her to give the comfort and acceptance of a parent. “Thank you,” she said softly, and he had a feeling that her wet face when she pulled back away was from more than sweat.

“You’re welcome,” he told her gently.

Chapter 5

When William Adama had told Kara that the first few weeks would be difficult on the Galactica, he had understated the matter. At some point in the last few days, Kara had decided that Captain Jackson Spencer was demon-possessed, and he was out to kill every damned pilot he could before they had a chance to touch his birds. It was taking every frakking ounce of respect she had for Commander Adama not to just kill the CAG outright.

To be fair, he hadn’t asked for anything she wasn’t fully capable of. And if she was honest, the work had at least kept her mind off… well, everything. There was no time at all for thought when you spent your day at a dead run from before oh-six-hundred to well after twenty-two-hundred. She even ate on the run, usually with a sandwich smacked into her hand by one of the deck crew or a protein drink handed to her by another pilot. She had yet to see the inside of the mess hall.

Or the inside of a Viper.

Still, she set her alarm every morning for oh-five-hundred, and took the time to pull on some sweats and run the corridors of the Galactica. The adrenaline rush was the only thing that managed to get her through the day, and it was worth losing a half-hour of sleep to get her usual morning greeting from the one person on board that seemed to like her. She wasn’t back up to five miles yet, but she was getting there.

This morning was like any other. Her alarm beeped only once before she slammed it into silence, slid out of her bottom bunk, and pulled on sweatpants. She quickly put on her running shoes, tied them, and took off out the hatch. She could do it all in the dark.

Once in the corridors, she knew that she had from between three and four laps before she’d see him. Commander Adama didn’t go on duty until seven – at least not according to the official roster – but she saw him on his way to CIC almost daily around five-thirty. It turned out to be three laps today. “Good morning, Sir,” she said as she slowed her pace for a moment.

“Morning, Starbuck,” he said back. “What do you hear?”

He wasn’t asking about what she was listening to. He was asking how she was holding together. He was asking how she was managing the killer shifts, obnoxious CAG, and knowing nobody besides him. Was she ready to crumble, or did she remember the lessons she’d learned the hard way about maintaining her sanity? “Nothing but the rain,” she told him. All was well; she might not like her bunkmates, her CAG, her duties, or her shifts, but she was surviving them.

“Then grab your gun and bring in the cat,” he told her. He knew it would make her smile. As always, it did.

“Boom, boom, boom,” she replied, reminding him that she’d rather shoot a feline than save it.

Some days he would look up and smile. Some days he just watched. And some days – like today – he actually laughed at the morning exchange. It was good to hear him laugh. With the pressures that his duties entailed – even though they were only a peacetime training vessel, not much more advanced than the Callahandra had been – he didn’t laugh often. The morning exchange was as much her way of checking up on him as it was his checking up on her. It was a simple way they could stay connected, regardless of his being the Commander and her being a simple Lieutenant. It was normally the only time they saw one another during the day, and there was nothing overtly personal to be observed. To the crew, she was just another new pilot. He had seen to that, and she was grateful. On the Galactica, she was Starbuck, or Lieutenant Thrace, or just Thrace when someone was mad at her. She wasn’t Kara here; not to anyone. Not even to the Commander.

And if there were times she regretted the friendships that she had left behind, she tried not to dwell on them. Sometime between her ending shift more than a week ago and the time she’d gone to her bed, she had scribbled out a letter to Lee. At the time she’d been lonely, and she hadn’t known if he even had a clue where to find her. It had been a quick note telling him of her transfer, her schedule, and asking him about what was happening in his life. She didn’t even know if he’d answer it. He had never been much for writing, at least not according to Zak. She figured it was worth a try.

Kara finished her fifth lap of the Galactica, breathing hard but not gasping. The path she had chosen was about three-quarters of a mile, so she figured she was up to just over four miles. Her goal was to get up to seven laps in the forty minutes she had allotted herself to run, but it wasn’t happening today.

The lights were on in quarters, telling her it was past five-thirty. Great, she was right on schedule. She grabbed a towel and headed for the showers. She had cleaning up down to a system, quick and efficient. She showered and shampooed her hair, dried off and combed the unruly strands straight back out of her way, and went back to her bunk to put on a clean uniform. Glancing at her watch, she was actually five minutes ahead of her usual schedule, and she wondered if her pace had improved that much. She certainly hoped so.

She went back to her bed to make it, and she was stunned to see an envelope sitting there. Mail delivery was usually early, but she hadn’t ever gotten a delivery here. Picking up the envelope, she saw the return address and smiled, tearing open the paper to find the letter inside. As the envelope tore, out floated a picture as well. She picked it up, and sucked in a breath at what she saw.

It was a simple photo taken of her and Zak, with Lee standing off to the side. It had been taken on one of the first days Zak had been at the academy, and just after she had met his family. She couldn’t remember who had snapped it, and she hadn’t ever really thought anything about it. After staring at it for a long moment, she sniffled once and reached for the letter that had fallen out of the envelope with the picture.

Dear Kara,

I hope this finds you well. I’m glad to hear that you like your new assignment. Yes, it should get easier with time. Most CAGs are pains in the ass until they learn to trust you.

I’m doing fine – no complaints. Just finished testing for Captain, so I’ll let you know what comes of it. I don’t think I have enough time in grade to make it, but I’m hoping.

Try to stay out of trouble. I know that’s a stretch for you, but a good idea all the same. You may want to make Captain too someday.

Take care of yourself,

Lee

She read the letter twice more then folded it carefully and took both it and the picture to her locker. The letter was placed on the top rack so that she could find it to answer later, when she had time. The photo she looked at for a long time before sticking it into one side of her locker where she could see both of the Adamas every time she got out a uniform. Maybe it was masochistic, but it was nice to see a friendly face at some point in the day, and this would guarantee her at least two opportunities – getting uniforms out, and putting them away.

She grabbed her boots, lacing them quickly and glanced at her watch. Frak. She was five minutes late. So much for getting ahead. Ripper would have her ass, and this time she couldn’t even blame him. It didn’t matter though; it had been worth it to read a letter from a friend.

The worst part about coming into a job with a reputation – good or bad – was that you had to battle the damned thing both ways until people got to know you. And when Kara was working the better part of sixteen hours a day, or more sometimes, it was hard to get to know anyone. She seemed to spend most of her time on the deck, fixing this or checking that, so her first friends weren’t pilots, but rather the deck gangs.

As the Commander had warned her, most of them were just kids. Some fresh out of secondary school – barely of age – and out to make their families proud. Others were trying to get out of trouble by joining the Service. Still others were just plain lost, and space had seemed as good a place to wind up as any. The reasons were as varied as the names and faces, and Kara gradually became familiar with most of both. The crew was amicable enough, even though most of them initially stayed clear of her as an unknown entity.

The pilots, on the other hand, were a royal pain in the ass. It wasn’t just her esteemed leader – she had expected Ripper to be on her case – but most of the men had a tendency to not believe a woman could be an effective Viper pilot until they saw otherwise. Kara was used to that. What she wasn’t used to was missing the opportunity to embarrass the living shit out of them. It was hard to prove your worth as a pilot when you didn’t get to fly the planes. She’d been in the simulators a couple of times, but so far her CAG hadn’t seen fit to let her run a patrol or even check out a routine repair. Her feet hadn’t left the stability of the battlestar since she’d come aboard. It was driving her out of her mind.

Today, as with most days, her time was divided between routine maintenance with the deck gang – she now knew more about the innards of a Viper than she’d ever wanted to – and then manning a wireless in launch control. She honestly believed that Ripper was trying to kill her; it was bad enough not to fly, but to listen to others communicate while they did so was torture. Nonetheless, still wiping grease from her hands she headed up to the control room for the second half of her shift. The only good news was that by the time she finished with six hours in control, she’d probably be tired enough to get some sleep.

After an hour on duty in control, it was all that Kara could do to stay coherent. It irritated her to no end that they kept sending out Rookies that were barely fit to fly. Half of them she wouldn’t have passed through basic flight. They were terrified of anything resembling g-force, and they panicked at the least hiccup in either the controls or their wingman’s flight.

To make matters worse, this shift had her observed by the primary thorn in her side, one Captain Jackson Spencer. Lords, she hated the man. If he could find a way to make her life more difficult, he managed it. She kept one eye on him and the other on her screen as she monitored the progress of one rook, and one pilot who should have known better. They were coming in from a totally routine patrol, preparing for the most dangerous aspect of any flight – the landing.

“Galactica to Viper zero-seven-four, you are cleared for landing on port primary bay,” Ripper said into his com.

Kara watched the blips on her screen as the lead Viper pulled up, and then down, and finally straightened himself out for the landing. Ripper continued to give simple commands, but her attention was focused elsewhere as she saw a problem developing with the landing pilot’s wingman.

“Galactica to Viper zero-six-eight, report on status,” she demanded, the tone of her voice bringing Ripper’s glare in her direction.

“’The controls are sluggish,” the rook admitted, although she could have figured that out from a combination of his erratic path and his terrified voice. She was also fairly certain she knew the reason.

“Viper zero-six-eight,” she said crisply. “Bring your nose up, decrease speed, and wait for further instructions.”

“What are you doing, Starbuck?” Ripper asked in irritation.

“You watch your plane and I’ll watch mine,” she snapped back. “He hit a backwash.”

Obligingly closing his mouth and never taking his eyes from her, Ripper concluded the landing on his lead pilot. It was the standard procedure on the Galactica to bring in the experienced pilot first, more as an example than anything. Kara disliked the procedure, and she’d never used it at the academy. She preferred to be out there to keep an eye on her kids when they were coming in for a landing; it kept her appraised of conditions as she couldn’t be if she was working on her own landing or sitting in control. She didn’t like to be unaware of what the rooks were dealing with.

“Viper zero-six-eight,” she said quickly, then looked at her roster. “Hopper, this is Starbuck. You need to bring your nose up,” she said urgently. Her voice wasn’t panicked – she wasn’t panicked – but she was getting there. The erratic path of the Viper was similar to the one that had ended Zak’s life, the product of inexperience and panic over a simple fluctuation in atmospheric pressure caused by the previous Viper’s afterburners, but it was enough to kill a rook if he lost his head. “Hopper, do you hear me?”

“The nose won’t come up,” the rook called frantically. “No response from the stick. I don’t know what else to do!”

“Hopper, take a breath,” she told him quickly. “You can’t land if you pass out. Now listen to me. You’re just fine. You don’t have control because there is pressure in the space around you. If you can’t come up, then I want you to ease down. Very gently, very quickly. Ease down, and fly below the Galactica. Do you copy?”

“Why?” he asked.

“Trust me,” she said simply. “Ease down, come under the Galactica, then circle back around. You can do this.”

“I just want to land,” Hopper said, his voice almost breaking.

“You’re already too low to land,” she said with a forced calm. “Ease under, bring yourself back around, and then we’ll go again. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for ten years.”

“Roger that,” Hopper said, and a little of the fear had left his voice. She watched her screen carefully, seeing him follow her directions and drop down, circle beneath the Galactica, and then turn to come back up.”

“Great job,” she assured him. “Now, I want you to do a systems check with me. Ready?”

While the Viper was well away from the Galactica, she did her best to talk the rookie through an impromptu systems check. Nothing was wrong. She had known nothing would be wrong, but she had needed the time. Or rather, Ripper had, as he’d been calling down to the flight deck to get emergency crews in place and everyone else out of the way. They had a scared pilot, and scared kids screwed up. At the very least, they didn’t want this one taking half the deck crew and most of a flight pod with him. When she saw that Ripper was giving her a nod, she turned her full attention back to the kid that was hanging on the other end of the wireless.

“Viper zero-six-eight, you are clear. Every system checked out perfectly. I want you to come around for a second approach on the port landing bay. Do you copy?”

“Roger that,” Hopper said a little more calmly. She would explain to him later what he had done wrong the first time – following his leader too closely – and be sure it didn’t happen again. But for the moment, she just wanted to get him safely aboard.

“Bring it up just a touch,” she said gently, as though the kid would panic at her least interruption. Truthfully, he just might. Lords knew that Zak had freaked just as soon as the controller had started talking to him; he had panicked, accelerated when he should have decelerated, and he had killed himself and three other men in the process. She had watched it happen, and she had known that nothing she could have said in control would have made a difference. She had heard his screams, his frantic cry, and she had known that he was beyond logic. Thankfully, Hopper was not. “Looking good,” she assured him. “Now level… down a bit…nice. Okay, kick in the burn now… that’s it… you’ve got it. Now hold… hold… easy… doing good.” She felt a trickle of sweat make its way down the center of her back as she hunched over the panel to get closer to the screen. “Great… bring it down… down… and mag lock… now.”

The control room gave a collective sigh of relief when the locks engaged and Viper zero-six-eight was no longer a threat. Kara did the same, grateful that no one had died today. Granted, the kid was parked in the wrong direction – there was no way she was going to try to talk him through a one-eighty with his confidence so low – but he was down, safe, and as far as she was concerned the world was right.

“Nice work, Starbuck.”

Kara looked over her shoulder when she felt Ripper’s hand on her arm. He smiled then – something she’d never seen him do before. “You had him calm before I saw he was having a problem. Nicely done.”

She gave an absent shrug. “I’m used to walking kids through the sims,” she explained. “Although it’s easier to do when the worst that can happen is a few alarms ringing and having to flunk them or retrain.”

“That was the real-deal,” Ripper assured her. “Are you as calm in the cockpit as you are in control?”

She thought about that for a moment. “When it’s necessary,” she said honestly. “Sometimes you need the edge more than you need control.”

He nodded as though he understood, and she figured that he did. Most pilots with any seasoning at all knew that there was a time for rationality, and a time to just fly.

“When’s our next patrol in?” he asked her.

He already knew; he had to, as he’d written the roster. “Two hours,” she said with suspicion. “Why?”

“Making sure I had time to get someone else up here,” he told her with a wink. “I want you to go down there, get Hopper into a sim, and walk him through landings about ten times, or until he can do it without panicking over a little airflow. When you finish there, go ahead and crash. I want you on the deck at oh-six-hundred.”

Kara sighed. Great. Another day on the deck. Still, it was better to spend some time with the simulators than to sit here for two hours and wait while they did nothing. Maybe Ripper would see fit to keep her in the sims for at least part of her duty. She didn’t mind training kids; she never had minded. She had just wondered for a while if she still had the capability. She had wondered if the first time that something went wrong, she would hear Zak’s screams and fall apart on all of them. Now she knew that she could manage it, so it didn’t scare her. Only when the fear left her did she realize that she had even been facing it. She had been scared. Imagine that.

“Lieutenant Thrace?” Ripper called from behind her as she removed her headset and headed for the door.

She didn’t bother with “sir”, but instead just turned back to look at him.

“Starbuck, get a good night’s rest. We have a long patrol going out in the morning, and I want you to take point.”

She digested that for a moment. “Excuse me?”

“You do fly, don’t you?” he asked with a grin.

She couldn’t help smiling back. Maybe she wouldn’t murder the man in his sleep after all. “A bit,” she said simply.

“Good, then you can take my patrol,” he told he with a wink. “I could use some down time.”

Shaking her head, she turned her back on him. She had things to get done. She had a kid to talk down, and then she needed to get him in a simulator before he got too damned scared to ever fly again. She needed to check over Ripper’s Viper, and be sure it met her specs. If she was going to fly it, she wanted it right. Oh, and she needed to answer Lee’s letter before she went to sleep. He would be thrilled to know that she was going to be back in the air. It had been too damned long since she’d controlled her world around her. Finally, she needed to leave a message for the Commander. She figured a simple “thank you” would do the job. He would understand.

And so she did… she spent over three hours with Lieutenant Hannings – Hopper – until he could land in the sim without breathing hard. She checked over the Viper, pleased that she knew its mechanics as well as any of the deck gang, and she even scribbled out a letter to Lee while she grabbed a bite to eat in the Ready Room. Finally, just before she got ready to shower for bed, she scribbled a note on a piece of paper and walked down the hall to slide it under the Commander’s door while nobody was looking. With a smile on her face, she went back to quarters and made sure her alarm was set for the morning.

Commander William Adama glanced down as he prepared to open the hatch to his quarters. It had been a long day, and he was more tired than he really wanted to admit. A small blue piece of paper was tucked into the metal at the door’s base. With a curious expression, he picked up the paper and flipped it over to look at it. His smile grown as he read each word, finally turning to a gentle chuckle at the code only he could understand.

Thanks!

I fly tomorrow.

Nothing but the rain!