A Rush of Blood to the Head

"So long ago I don't remember when,

That's when they say I lost my only friend.

Well, they said she died easy of a broken heart disease,

As I listened through the cemetery trees."

--The Wallflowers

DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine.

AN:Sorry for long, long, long, long. long delay. College is kicking my butt. I'm writing my senior thesis right now. Erg.

She dreams of flying...go figure. Always of flying. Flying among the stars, weaving around space rocks, drifting through clouds of brightly colored free-floating gases and vapors or maybe, in a more mundane atmosphere. skimming the tops off waves of grass and water. Her machine, sleek and pale, marked up and scratched with years of close calls, was sensitive to her every brief touch. Flying close to the waves and clouds like this made her feel whole, untouchable and powerful, like a god once again.

To stay here cushioned in space, wrapped in dim cold and smooth black, forever...oh, gods to stay.

But here inside this dream, the viper, a machine tangible only in her unconscious, even here, Starbuck could feel the ties that held her in reality. She felt the tubes down her throat and the needles piercing her veins. The less literal ties, the incessant voices constantly whispering sweetly in her ears. They pleaded and they prayed and they drove her deeper into these imagined skies.

There is a beauty in fighting, it's true, in struggling on to the curled and burnt edges of endurance against all reason, against all odds. There is grace in defiance embraced by body and soul. But it is a beauty only truly appreciated by those safe and untouchable on the sidelines. Both glory and regret are concepts belonging to hindsight, neither much use to those people stuck in the moment. And Starbuck was very much in the moment or at least aware enough of the moment to not want to be.

Why couldn't she fly in these fair skies forever? No one could blame her if she slipped away finally into the peaceful stars. Not after the months of captivity and torture at the hands of the cylons. Not after her ruined bones and burnt flesh. Not after the years of struggle. And yes, it had been years since Starbuck had first started her endeavor. What had her life been but a battle since that first night her father left her alone with her drunken raging mother? She'd grown up surrounded by maelstroms of conflict. It formed her earliest memories. It toughened her spirit and hardened her soul. It created in her a simultaneously fearful and an unflinching heart. Starbuck learned the many languages of blood and anger prematurely and it was one lesson that was constantly consistent through her life.

The gods in all their mercy and wisdom had blessed her with plenty of chances to give up. There were a thousand times Kara could have gone free. One wrong turn in combat. One hesitation. One time she didn't get back up. One moment of inaction. Just one time in the thousands when it seemed the gods and cylons and her fellow humans were telling her to stay down and she could have flown forever. Mostly, though, she was stubborn. Mostly, she spit out blood and a frak that and kept breathing. Mostly, she was Starbuck. There were times, especially lately, when giving up sounded fraking good even to Kara's unconquerable soul. But something always stopped her. There was some barrier that she couldn't cross. There were always insistent hands that gently held her back. Every time there was no conceivable way or reason for Starbuck to live, when even she herself could see no way or no reason to stay, these hands softly pulled her quietly back from whatever lay beyond death.

And such was the way of things this time. So for a time, a short time, Starbuck rested, cradled in gentle hands.

And then Starbuck opened her eyes.

"Years later on his deathbed Aureliano Segundo would remember the rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son. Even though the child..."

"Bill."

For these long several weeks since the rescue of the settlers on New Caprica, Starbuck had been all but dead. But finally the infections began to clear and her wounds heal. Cottle was still cautious of course. Any stress on her system or slight illness would be tantamount to a death sentence, even now after weeks of healing. And regardless of how her body healed, Cottle warned that no amount of medicine could heal the psyche and they all knew Kara hadn't exactly started off with a full set of marbles anyway.

So they planned as if she would one day wake and prayed for it and tried to combat their guilt as best they could. Weeks ago, Laura and other resistance leaders had been debriefed. Afterward, after the stories of all the courageous dead, after officially filing reports that know one would read, Laura told Bill and Lee what she knew of Starbuck's fate. With the continued support of Gaeta's inside information, the resistance had learned that Starbuck was being kept under close guard and that Leoben continued to take an unhealthy interest in her. They couldn't learn exactly where she was being kept or why the cylons had such an elevated interest in her. They couldn't find her. They didn't save her.

Laura and Bill often stayed up nights together, neither able to sleep or to be alone with their dark thoughts. Thoughts of all the children lost and scarred, and how they selfishly prayed for this one to make it. They lay awake together at night, reading their own guilt in the other's eyes. If only...if only.

Laura Roslin interrupted Admiral Adama with a hand on his arm as he patiently read through the words on the page. When they first got her back and saw the condition Kara was in, Doctor Cottle said that familiar voices sometimes helped pull coma patients back to the world. So Adama and Roslin, Helo and Sharon, Lee and others flitted in and out of sickbay visiting, bringing news and gossip, trying to nudge Kara back to consciousness. Admiral Adama started showing up and reading to both Starbuck and Laura in sickbay as Kara lay barely alive and Laura received her weekly treatments.

Bill and Laura watched with baited breath, briefly stunned by what they'd hoped for all these weeks. Starbuck's eyelids flickered open, the eyes unfocused and slow as the blue orbs tried to make sense of the ceiling.

"Kara, can you hear me? You're safe. You're on the Galactica. You're home."