Down a Different Path
by RangerLord
Word Count: 409 words
Date: 7/15/05
Series: Any
Rating: K+
Category: Challenges, Secrets Kept/Secrets Revealed (7/16/05)
Pairing/Focus: Kara
Warnings: none
Summary: Kara agonizes over a past loss.
Spoilers: none
Archiving: DRADIS Contest Archive only, all others please ask.
Kara stood for a moment beside her Viper, listening to the deckhands voices drifting from the far side. One of the guys was grumbling, his source of frustration lost in the other noises of the hangar bay. Cally was teasing him, and despite the indistinct dialog the camaraderie between them was obvious.
There was a part of her, deep within her carefully crafted armor, that hungered for that sense of easy familiarity, that feeling of belonging. She could never have that, though, because she was Starbuck now. A legend in her own time, a hero of the fleet, she couldnt be on close terms with her fellow pilots. She was the top-gun Viper pilot of the whole frakking human race, for the gods sakes. She played hard, drank hard and fought hard. She never lost, not in a dogfight, a fistfight, or a card game. She was untouchable.
Untouchable.
Yet she ached to be touched. Not physically, by the firm grip and thrust of her latest conquest, but to be touched within by someone, anyone, who could pierce her defenses and find the true Kara that hid there. She wanted to experience, again, those feelings of comfort and safety that came from being with someone who truly knew her, truly loved her. They were feelings that had been missing from her life for what seemed like forever. She wanted them back, though she would admit that to no one.
There had been a time when the comfort of a true friend and soul-mate had been hers. That was long ago, when she was still an innocent child, but like so much of her life it had been stolen away. It was the first loss she had suffered, in a life that seemed to be defined by losses. Afterward, she had started down the path that led to Starbuck, started building her defenses against the world so that nothing precious could ever be taken from her again.
Now, when the world stole from her, she faced it with her armor, her attitude, and the clipped comments that some mistook for cold-heartedness. Still, her eyes gave her away, if anyone cared to truly see. That haunted look that would hover there, for a heartbeat, was her first loss looking down the path where Kara had gone.
A different path, she was sure, than she would have taken had her sister, her twin, lived beyond their childhood days.
