How Things Tick

**Title:** How Things Tick  
**Characters/pairings:** Kara, Cain, hints of Cain/Gina, Kara/Leoben (gen fic)  
**Rating:** T/M ish [Warnings for cannon themes]  
**Setting**: Pegasus arc  
**Words: **1,500  
**Prompt by**: ******astreamofstars** (LJ) about Leoben being aboard Pegasus.  
**Beta:** **embolalia**

* * *

Kara breathed deeply as she stared at the image of them on the screen. Cain had given her free rein of Pegasus as CAG, allowed her everywhere except for the special prison: the boxes within boxes made of thick steel and explosive proof glass that sat on either side of a brightly lit hall. In one box, a woman. In the other, a man. Kara had seen copies of these two before. The tall, slender woman, she'd known as Shelly Godfrey; Kara recalled how with wide eyed guile, Godfrey had tried to implicate Baltar but failed to do so. The woman in the cell here appeared slightly different. She was just as soulful looking but her face seemed more beautiful for her lack of embellishment –and more awful for the starved hollowness to her cheeks and the blank deadness to her eyes.

The diptych camera image flickered and Kara's eyes were drawn to the next cell. The man, the cylon, he looked exactly the same as they one she'd known, abuse and all. He'd been starved and looked distant from his surroundings, faded, in a wavering way. Not stronger than the female but off behind a wall of ranting rather than silence. They both looked terrible. The woman more so than the man. Kara knew he'd been just as abused, but it was their histories that defined their breaking points and the depth of trauma. The female had been aboard this ship for months, been part of its crew. It was whispered she'd been loved by them, theAdmiral in particular. Sometimes it really took loving someone to want to tear them apart afterwards, Kara reflected. Moreover, it took loving them to know how to do it. Love was a cushion, but it was also the sharpest blade. As she looked at the man, images of water and words trickled at the corner of her mind until she shut them away. That was then, this is now, she told herself, and there was nothing she could do for this one.

She put her hand over his face on the screen a moment, whispering a prayer for this one's soul also. When she lifted her hand again, his gaze was pinned to the camera. His eyes seemed to haunt through the image straight into her chest.

"I see you found your way down here, despite my orders, Captain," came a clipped voice from by her side.

Kara inhaled and stood a little straighter but didn't look away from the blue eyes which appeared so black through the screen.

"Sir, not to be forward, but you said I wasn't to go inside." Kara paused, wondering at what point she would get demoted for her curt tone, then decided to carry on anyway. If her coffin was built, then she might as well nail it shut. "Outside looking at an image, is not in to view them."

Kara caught the flicker of movement in the screen before her. The Admiral had folded her arms across her chest. Kara had never been able to read that gesture, never sure if it was one of distance or pre-judgment and punishment. She waited. There was no point in trying to read Cain. The woman's marble countenance was far more firmly fixed in place than her disobedience which wished to rise against it.

"Are you curious about them?"

Kara bit her lip, refusing to meet her senior officer's look. "Not really. One thing you can be sure of in this war… if you've seen one cylon, you've seen 'em all."

"I've not had much experience beyond these two, however something I've come to notice, especially with the female, is that they're very adaptable. Very attuned to human emotions."

Kara wondered if she was hinting as the undisclosed things she'd heard mentioned by the crew before the speaker would realise what they'd let slip.

"It makes me believe that their chameleon nature is perhaps the only thing they might have in common after all. But then again, you've had more experience. Haven't you?"

Kara managed to go against a life time's worth of instinct in opening her mouth without thought when that starved little bit of caution which lurked somewhere within the depths of her brain gripped her. She gnawed her lip again instead and inclined her head by way of an answer before clearing her throat and simply commenting, "Sir."

"It's why I've ordered you away." Cain didn't move any closer to Kara as she spoke, but somehow Kara felt like hooks were being driven into her skin, luring her to somewhere where she didn't want to go. "I wanted to get a measure of you. Of the pilot that screwed up her last assignment, taught flight… whose pupil died. The son of the old grizzled commander Adama. The very same man who offered said flight teacher a place on his battlestar after said son was dead."

_Seems nothing remains a secret for long around here_, Kara concluded, biting back the old ache while narrowing her eyes on the screen in an unfocused way so that the cylon's eyes danced in lines of blurs. "What has my placement aboard Galactica got to do with these toasters?"

"Nothing, insofar as your assignment to Galactica was within the last two years. Nothing aside from the fact that you're young, beautiful, and have the love of its commander and the Commander's son."

Kara went white and then stilled. "What are you insinuating, Sir?" She fought to keep her voice level. Her eyes flicked to the woman prisoner laying limp and bloody on her side and then back to the male.

"You sound ruffled? Guilty? And your actions since you arrived here seem very at odds with a woman who should hate the things that killed her world. More than that, we could look at the evidence of your adventure so far. The Commander loses you on a moon, you return in a Raider. The same commander orders you to do something, you disappear for several days and return in a Heavy Raider, with another machine, and this one pregnant. You have to admit, your story is… full of little miracles which, given a rational mind, have a better explanation."

Kara put her hands behind her back and finally looked at Cain. "If you are calling me a cylon, then just say it out loud." She looked back to the screen and schooled her expression into one of clinical detachment. "Put me in with them. Have me frakked and beaten before the Commander, President and the entire crew, if you think so."

"Captain, look at me," Cain ordered. Her arms were unfolded and now matched Kara's in stance. "There is a further reason to doubt you."

Kara steeled herself.

"The cylon in there, he spoke of you. He told us how to find you. What you'd be like… only after we'd broken him of course."

It passed through Kara's mind to throw back that no one could, but once again she curbed the impulse. The bruised and bloodied flesh flickering in bands of light upon the screen seemed to work for her caution even if her reason wouldn't.

"Maybe it's the same one." Kara had heard how he'd been found, days after Roslin airlocked her Leoben, floating in a damaged Heavy Raider.

Cain placed her hand on Kara's stiff shoulder, her face coming in close. Her hungry expression ate at Kara and then intensified when her eyes flickered down to the image of the female cylon as if drawn. When she looked back up the need was still there, although laced now with irritation. Kara knew that look from her mother. _A moment of weakness._ "I said we'd broken him, but I'm not sure that's true. Pain and abuse from a stranger's hand is hard, but one learns to overcome it. One only knows the bringer of such pain to give pain, and it becomes accepted. The true way to break someone-" Kara's heart thudded at hearing her own thought come back to her, "Is to love them a little. But more importantly, for them to love you." Cain's lips were tight as she spoke; as she exposed herself. "That thing in there, the male. He loves you. It's in his face. Half starved, and humiliated, he rambled about you. Fed, he tried to backtrack." The Admiral squeezed Kara's shoulder, not tightly, but it felt harder, like it might crush her bones. Cain then trailed the hand down to where Kara's were clamped together at her back, stroking across her skin. It felt even more intimate when Cain dropped to bring her mouth down to Kara's ear where she paused for an indeterminable amount of time, before finishing with, "You're dismissed, Captain."

Kara tilted her head down in a nod of acknowledgement, then dampened her lips, before asking. "You never answered my question. Do you think I'm one of them?"

Cain's hands came away and she stepped back, her dark eyes narrowed with a small smile playing at the corner of her lips. It wasn't a taunting one or a happy one. It looked pained. "If you are, then they made you perfect too." She turned and walked away from Kara, presenting her with her back as she moved towards the entrance to the cell hall. "Report here tomorrow after CAP. I have a job for you, Captain Thrace." Cain stilled for a breath, then pressed the release on the door slowly, drawing the motion out. Kara felt the sweat bead on her temples as she waited. "I want you to finish what you started. I want you continue after you were ordered to stop," Cain said.

The cell gave off a sour smell as the door opened. "Why...Sir?"

"Because I like to know how things tick," Cain replied, and closed the door behind her.


End file.
