Persephone

By Labyrinths

Note: BSG, Kara/Leoben. Spoilers up to episode "Faith."

Persephone's name was not safe to speak aloud. Instead, one must use oblique references. Kore, the maiden. His name was not safe to speak out loud either, lest she invoke him. Nevertheless perhaps she had called him forward, for in the end he had appeared, a tattered raider heading towards her.

Yet if she had pulled him towards her, what might that mean? Why would she conjure him? Her enemy and her captor.

Once again Persephone comes to mind. She attracted the attention of Hades and he kidnapped her, spiriting her into the underworld. There, in the darkness, he tricked and she was forced to eat three pomegranate seeds. This is all it took to damn herself. Queen of the Dead, his consort, she must remain at his side for a few months of each year.

Just like he had done to her.

Only she had not eaten from his hand.

Oh, he'd wanted it. How he'd wanted it. Cooking her meals, bringing her a beautiful dress she tore to pieces, even materializing a damn pearl necklace for her.

How suffocating, how unbearable it all was; his gaze following her around every corner, never giving her any repose.

Like he was trying to peel her skin off with those eyes. Like he'd never seen a damn woman before. The look did not change even after she'd stabbed and kicked and trampled over his body.

One time when he'd come back in a newly minted body and sat next to her she asked him why. Why did he keep her caged and never raised an angry hand her way and let himself be killed? If the roles had been reversed, and they had been reversed once, she would have tortured him until he squirmed in agony.

“Out there you'd be dead already,” he said simply. “You would have gotten yourself shot ages ago.”

She thought he was right. There was no way, no damn way, she would have stayed still while the cylons enslaved them. She might have blown herself into pieces or become target practice for a centurion. But that would have been a much cleaner and efficient option.

“Thank you for considering my well-being,” she said sarcastically.

And then he tried to touch her hand and she leaped back, ready to claw his face off if he inched closer to her.

“I care about you,” he intoned, liked he did constantly. Babbling, babbling on and on about destiny, streams, life, even love.

Of course, he didn't get it.

His thick, artificial brain couldn't process it.

She was a coyote in a leg-hold trap trying to gnaw her leg off.

But maybe he did get it.

Because then he brought Kacey and she stopped her vicious snapping.

And she would not forgive him this.

Because she almost swallowed the seeds.

#

When she woke up with the pressure of him still against her body she blamed it on some latent perversion boiling to the surface. It was the result, she assured herself, of her time spent as his captive. She had heard of similar cases before, she had recognized the mind tricks he was trying to play and knew he has trying to appear as her ally, her friend, in order to dominate her.

This was all because of New Caprica.

Only it wasn't.

Long before that she dreamed of him, thought of him.

It had begun when she pressed her hand against the glass, fingers never touching.

She had wished for his soul to be saved. A funny thought, as though his kind could have a soul, but she had wished it with an earnest and unselfish desire.

Let him be saved.

And she had thought, as she lay in bed, that it might have been interesting if they had met under different circumstances with none of those cat and mouse games. Just a man and a woman bumping into each other by chance, chatting up and learning that he also liked to paint and his name and his age and all the minutiae of such things.

He wasn't a man.

He was dead.

But perhaps somewhere, somehow, someone had heard her cry and swept down to save him, soul or conscience or whatever you wished to call it, and she had damned herself with her kindness.

Because this had been the moment that had drawn him towards her. A fascinated, demented suitor.

He had told her himself one time.

He said that if there had ever been any doubts in his mind these had been wiped clean that day when she gave him that last look. He had known she was different from everyone else, special.

He had loved her from then on.

She hated him.

For a second, perhaps despite all her protestations and long before New Caprica, she had bitten into the sweet pomegranate.

She had tasted regret.

#

When he stood next to her, his hand guiding her wrist, there was still hate. Red anger and black memories. There was also the blue shade of that old regret she never scrubbed away. The white glimmer of a hope she did not understand and that he sometimes brought to her.

The siren's song, the cryptic words he spun never tantalized her as much as his silences and that hope that nestled inside them. There was this calmness he pressed against her, as if for a moment she might drop shield and sword and stop spinning. As if she might be still for a moment and breath. It had become so hard to breath, so difficult to keep a balance.

And she thought that he in turn seemed to bask in her restlessness; he was glad to share in her active and random thoughts, energized by her irrational, volatile, sometimes aggressive mixture.

#

He sat across from her, a table separating them. Through the fleet there were concerned murmurs about this new alliance. Could the cylons be trusted? Would they turn on them?

She looked at him, fishing for answers. No easy ones came to her. If he had provided them she probably wouldn't have believed it anyway.

You don't trust Hades when he feeds you secret pomegranate seeds to eat. At least, you don't trust him fully.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

It startles her because it's exactly what she was about to say and she shakes her head.

“An old story,” she mutters.

“Oh?”

“Nothing of any importance.”

She glances away. She pulls her chair back. She's spent too much time near him, keeping an eye on him as she should because this is a frakking cylon, and fears it is infectious.

“I'd like to hear it.”

“No,” she says angrily because he's not helping anything by using that friendly tone of voice.

She's about to rush out when he stretches his hand towards her. She considers slapping it away.

She touches him only with her index fingers instead; the lightest contact. They've touched before. This isn't new. But it feels new and frightful as though she's altering something that is inalterable, like the cycle of the tides turning.

“Kara,” he says, and this also sounds new.

She doesn't want him to say her name. Like Persephone it is best to refer to her in euphemisms.

“Damn it, Leoben,” she mutters and holds his hand.

In the end, not like Persephone at all.

Because maybe Persephone was tricked into eating those seeds. But Kara's no maiden carrying sheafs of grain and her grip upon him is deliberate.

THE END