Chapter 6
(Adama's POV)

The first thing I notice is just how pale she looks, propped up as she is in that damned bed. There are lines, tubes, wires and monitors all around her and even though I know enough to realize that each one of those things does serve a specific purpose --and in most cases I even know what that purpose is supposed to be-- the image still hits me and hits me hard.

I've seen my men get hurt more times than I care to remember and all too often that has been a direct consequence of my own actions but none of those injuries has ever made me feel this guilty before. Yes, people have been hurt and even killed because of my orders, that is one of the inescapable burdens of a military command --especially in a time of war-- but this is my 'daughter', damn it... and the bottom line is that this should never have happened. What brought us to this point wasn't a mission gone wrong, it was simply a mistake.

Oh, I could try to tell myself that I was just trying to get her to clean up her act, that her behavior was completely unacceptable and that even though I may have badly miscalculated the consequences of my words the point I was trying to make was still a valid one but that is not the whole story and I know it.

The truth is that when I said those things to her I was mad as hell at her and I had been mad for a very long time... ever since she left to settle on New Caprica, to be accurate. As petty as it seems I felt betrayed when my dead son's fiancee left me to start a new life with her new husband and that is one of the reasons why I never went looking for her when she came back, maybe if I had...

Sure, I know that 'what ifs' won't get me anywhere, that I can't change what happened to her any more than I can take my words back but as I sit here being confronted with the magnitude of my mistakes letting go of those 'what ifs' is all but impossible. I can't stop wondering if maybe if only I had bothered to go looking for her before things spiraled completely out of control --if I had tried to find out what had happened to her in the first place-- I would have realized just how bad the situation really was.

The thing is that even though Cottle seemed to be fairly certain that she will survive her physical injuries, the picture he painted of the current situation was still far from a comforting one. As he said, she is going to need her support system around her if she is going to make it but that support system has been shattered and there's no way around that fact. Hell, even Helo --a man who literally owes her his life-- turned on her. He was the one who told me what was going on down in the rec room in the first place and, while I certainly appreciate his loyalty, I suspect that his is yet another name I can cross off the list of people she can turn to... as for Saul --the last person I would have expected to be willing to be there for her a year ago-- he is such a mess himself that he can't be relied upon. In fact I'm afraid that if he were to be allowed anywhere near her right now the two of them would just end up racing each other to the bottom and that's a risk we can't afford to take. That's what they were doing earlier today in the rec room and that leaves... no one.

That, I think, is the point Cottle was trying to make, not to mention that even before the cylons got her Kara was not exactly the most trusting member of my crew. The problem is that if she is going to make it we are going to have to regain her trust... and somehow I don't think just saying 'sorry' is going to cut it here.

Of course, while all those are things we have to consider going forward, they don't represent the whole story, nowhere near it. What we have to do from now on doesn't tell us a frakking thing about what it was that brought us to this point to begin with and unless we can figure that one out chances are that we would just end up making the same mistakes time and time again.

Yes, Kara has been a mess ever since we escaped from New Caprica. That has been plain to see, but I suspect that focusing on that part of this mess is precisely what caused us to mistake the symptoms for the disease in the first place.

Oh, there is no denying that even by themselves those symptoms represent a serious challenge and they have obviously served to make matters worse. They were bad enough to cause me to kick her out of that chair and to drive Lee to volunteer to open an airlock for her but even though that was obviously the wrong approach, I'm not sure the alternative would have worked much better. In fact Sam did try to offer her some real support and from what we've heard she turned him down... hard. The problem is that we are going in blind here. We don't really know what it is that we are up against and that is what is causing us to stumble.

In other words, if we want to get anywhere with her we are going to have to at least try to put the pieces together before we end up making an even bigger mess of things, not that we have much room left to make matters worse.

True, that is more of a warning than a comfort but it is still something we can't afford to forget and that brings me back to the basic question of what brought her to this point in the first place... and what the frak happened to her on New Caprica.

That is likely to be the key.

We know that she spent four months in the cylons' hands. That is hardly reassuring. Saul was there for a lot less than that and yet he came back missing an eye... and in a way that is one of the reasons why I was so willing to cut him some slack.

When the time came for me to confront the two of them in that rec room I was not shy about letting him know that his attitude was unacceptable, that is true, but I also told him to take as long as he needed to clean up his act whereas the options I gave Kara were simply to shape up or ship out. The difference, or at least part of it, was that I could see the scars on Saul's body and that I knew how hard Ellen's loss had hit him. In Kara's case there were no obvious injuries and I simply assumed that the lack of physical wounds meant that there was nothing wrong with her.

That was obviously a mistake.

From what Anders told us Kara may have been unharmed physically but they were obviously playing some pretty twisted mind-games with her all along and in that regard they had plenty of time to do a lot of damage. From what he said they had even convinced her that she had a daughter. How they did that is something that I can't even begin to comprehend and much less do I know what it was that they were trying to accomplish with that particular lie in the first place.

Why tell her that she had a child? That doesn't make sense... at least not based on what little we know of what happened to her down there. Did that have something to do with the fact that she seems to have been held in some sort of apartment rather than in a cell? Maybe. She obviously wasn't treated like an average prisoner but that just brings me back to the question of why. I seriously doubt the cylons did that out of the kindness of their software so they must have had some sort of ulterior motive, some sort of plan. In other words chances are that they were using that little girl to their own advantage. Who knows, maybe they were just using that child to control Kara. After all, if they had somehow managed to convince her that she was her daughter then Kara would almost certainly have done anything to keep her safe... but my gut tells me that there was a lot more to it than that. Sure, Kara is not exactly the most nurturing member of my crew but I don't think she would have turned her back on that girl if she had known she wasn't hers. That means that that particular deception was probably part of a much larger picture.

That brings me to the next logical question: if Kara believed that girl to be her daughter, who did she believe to be the child's 'father'? That is not something I want to contemplate but in that regard the fact that Anders mentioned a dead copy of Leoben is far from reassuring... especially because in a way it does fit in with the rest of this picture.

I know all too well that that particular model is a master manipulator. It also has a 'personal' history with Kara, one that goes back to the 'Geminon Carrier', though I am pretty sure that there was more than just vengeance to this whole charade. In fact I suspect that the cylons had a very specific objective in mind and that Kara was anything but a random choice.

The cylons are machines and there is nothing random about their behavior. There can't be and that means that there was probably a point to keeping her in an apartment rather than a cell, just like there was a point to making her believe that she was a mother --and the same goes for Leoben's presence-- and in a way that paints a disturbingly simple picture because in the end what we have is a 'man', a woman and a child living together... a family.

That is a concept I had been deliberately trying to avoid, though the idea that she might have been brainwashed to the point of accepting a cylon as her 'husband' is one I'm still having a hard time trying to wrap my mind around... and then I have Cottle's words to Sam, words that all of a sudden take on a completely different --and far more ominous-- meaning.

Feeling almost physically sick at the thought I get up and I decide that the time has come for me to get myself some answers.