Title- Aftermath

Complete

Author- PTBvisiongrrl

Part- 20/20 (Epilogue)

Date- 5-29-07

Rating – R

Pairings/Characters- Lee/Kara

Word Count- 1475

Category- Short Story

Genre- Angst

Archiving- The Fallout Shelter, Apollo/Starbuck Fan Fic, All others please ask!

Warnings- Not really- just language…

Spoilers- AU from S2 finale.

Disclaimers- Unfortunately, I don’t own any of these characters, and make absolutely no profit from taking them out to play…

Summary- How do Kara and Lee reconnect after both losing spouses in the Battle for New Caprica? Can they?

Epilogue

Present day,

Memorial Corridor on Galactica

Lee was getting restive. Kara had asked him to meet her here, yet she wasn’t anywhere to be found. Ten minutes standing in front of Duck and his girlfriend’s picture, sore and tired and waiting for the analgesics Doc Cottle had given him to kick in, Lee breathed an internal sigh of relief when Kara finally showed up.

She had a bundle in her hands, which she juggled awkwardly as she met him, breathless. "I was beginning to think you might have forgotten that you left me a note," he said, trying to keep his tone of voice light and not accusatory. He did not want to set Kara off with the wrong response.

She smiled shyly. "I’m sorry. I got caught up trying to find something I needed."

Casually shrugging- forgetting about his injuries yet again- Lee wondered aloud, "What did you need? And what for?"

Kara bit her lip and looked over Lee’s shoulder. "I, uh-" she stumbled over the words, unsure how to best explain her purpose here. She decided that honesty would be best. "Your accident made me think a lot of things over, Lee."

"Was that the burning smell?" he joked, trying to lighten her obviously troubled mood.

She ignored him. "I want what we used to have. I want us to be friends, Lee, real friends. No tiptoeing around each other, ignoring the hundred pound elephant of our history every time we are in the same room together-"

Lee interrupted, his voice low. "I want that, too, Kara. It’s just so-"

Nodding, Kara finished his sentence for him. "Hard," she said. "I know. Our past is so much of what we are, I don’t know how to forget it. I don’t really want to. I just don’t want it to ruin what we are today." Quickly kneeling near the wall, Kara began untying her bundle. "I thought of something we could do to help let go of the anger."

Lee eased himself down to the floor, leaning against the wall and sliding down gently. Eyeing her bundle, he raised an eyebrow. "And that is?"

Kara produced thick, stubby candles, some photos, and four lumpy, indistinct clay statues similar to those that used to be sold at temples in the Colonies. "We need to say good-bye to the past, formally. We’ve talked about it, yelled about it, but we’ve always gone our separate ways to deal with it afterwards." Spreading the photos out, Kara looked intently into Lee’s eyes. "We are going to do this together."

"Kara," Lee began, unsure if he really wanted to do this. "You know that I don’t believe in the gods, and some ceremony-"

"It’s not a ceremony, Lee." Kara sighed. "And this isn’t about the gods. This hall is about saying goodbye to and remembering people who are gone. Our entire relationship is a tangle of people who have died and left us a legacy of pain." Reaching for his hand, and pressing a photo into it, she continued, "And it’s time that we ended that pain."

Looking at Kara, Lee was at a loss for words. Unsure how to respond, instead he looked at the photo. It was a picture of Dualla in her formal dress uniform. She did not smile in the picture, her official portrait for the Fleet; it was a cold and distancing pose from another time, before the end of the worlds. His heart still tightened a bit at her face, but not an agony of hurt as it had before. He was, he reflected, beginning to heal. "Who is in the other pictures, Kara?"

Holding two of them up for Lee to see, she said, "Sam and Zak."

"Zak died two years before the attacks, Kara." The pain was still evident in Lee’s voice when he spoke Zak’s name. Kara wondered if the pain over Zak’s death would ever fade for him.

"This is about remembering people important to us, Lee, whether they died before or after the attacks." Kara held her breath as she showed him the final photo, the one that had taken her the longest to locate and was only in the Admiral’s collection by a miracle anyway. "Even those we don’t know about for sure." The picture was of a blond, tall and thin.

"Gianne," Lee breathed her name rather than said it.

Kara turned to pin Sam’s picture up on the wall at eye level, sitting a candle beneath and lighting it. "Sam Anders was a good pyramid player, even if he was a lousy husband and traitor." She proceeded to tack up Zak’s picture as well, "And we all know how I failed Zak, in so many ways. I loved him, but maybe not enough." She bent her head in silent prayer for a minute, ending with a low, "Hermes protect your soul in Elysia, Zak," then drew herself up and faced Lee.

Lee shifted uncomfortable. The mass funeral for the fallen of New Caprica had allowed him to push away the act of saying goodbye to Dee; he could focus on any number of the fellow soldiers who had died in the rescue, ignoring the one most important to him. After the funeral, he distracted himself with avoiding Kara and his CAG duties, neglecting to add Anastasia’s picture to the wall. He never liked showing emotion, and he was afraid that putting Anastasia’s photo up would be the crack in the dam. He didn’t want to break down like that in public.

So he had successfully avoided the whole idea for months. Now Kara was forcing him to do it, and in front of her. He shook his head, "I don’t think-"

Kara closed her eyes. "You need to really say goodbye, to acknowledge what she was to you, and-" Kara thrust one of the lumpy statues into his hands, "what your son meant to you."

Lee stared at the lump in his hand. He had often seen them at the temple of Apollo on Caprica; as the God of Healing, Apollo was often approached by those who were ill or needed help. As Protector of Children, Apollo was the patron for many a parent of s sick or dying child. When a child was lost, it was customary to leave a statue representing the child at the temple, to ensure that Phoebus Apollo would care for him or her in the afterworld. The statue Kara had given him was not as smooth or detailed as those he had seen on Caprica, but clearly, upon close-up inspection, a child.

Cradling the statue in his hand, Lee closed his eyes and thought of the child he had never wanted but had been gifted with; of the child he had lost before he could meet him. Holding the anthropomorphic rock tightly, Lee said a silent goodbye to the child he had never gotten a chance to know. Placing the statue carefully under Dee’s picture, he placed a candle near the two and lit it.

Kara nodded in approval and reached for a statue as well, taking one in each hand. Gently rubbing the figures, she took a deep breath. Wetness in her breath showed her emotion. Laying one figure beneath Zak’s picture, but to the left, she stated softly, "This one is Arianna, holy one." Placing the second one on the other side of Zak, she said, "And this one is Amara, eternal." She placed her second candle between the two statues, directly beneath Zak’s photo, and lit it.

Lee felt the need to reach out to his own statue again. "Matthew, gift of the gods."

Kara took a deep, cleansing breath. "That’s a good name."

Picking up the last statue on his own, and putting it with the last candle, Lee placed Gianne’s picture carefully. He centered the last statue beneath it, considering for a moment. The guilt over what he had done to her had not faded with time; the idea that a child of his could have suffered through the attack on the colonies was almost as painful as the child being aborted. "And- Perdita, the lost one." He lit the last candle.

Giving him a moment, Kara considered the weight that seemed to have lifted from her spirit. She had never publicly acknowledged the two children she had lost; even when discussed with Lee, she had never dealt with the fact that those fetuses were potential people, with names and a tangible place in her heart and life. Both Lee and Kara stayed silent for several long minutes, lost in their own thoughts. Lee broke the uneasy silence first.

"Can we move on from here, Kara?" Lee asked in a small voice.

"Do you want to?" Kara asked in an equally small voice.

"Frak, yes." And they left memorial hall gripping hands tightly, as if afraid to let go.