Chapter 30
(Kara's POV)

I knew from the moment they told me that this was going to be a 'debriefing' that things were about to get ugly but the truth is that I was still caught somewhat off-guard by the whole thing. I am trapped here, I have no way out and there is not a frakking thing I can do about any of it.

Of course, in a way I guess Cottle was right when he told me that I really don't want to have this hanging over my head for any longer than I absolutely have to. The problem is that I also knew that getting from 'here' to 'there' wasn't going to be much fun, far from it... and if the horrified look on Lee's face is anything to go by, I suspect that things are about to go from 'bad' to 'worse' here... much worse.

"So you just went along with him?" asks Lee, sounding utterly disgusted by that... not that I blame him.

"Yes," I admit, knowing that there is no point in trying to deny it.

"Why?"

"Because there wasn't a frakking thing I could do about any of it, don't you get it?! I belonged to him... damn it! I was his to do with as he pleased and the bastard took full advantage of that frakking fact. He told me once that..." I trail off, realizing that there is no way they are ever going to understand, not really.

"What did he tell you?"

"Nothing," I say, wishing he would just let it go but knowing him well enough to realize that he won't.

"Don't you dare, Kara! Don't you dare shut me out!"

"I'm not...!"

"Yes, you are," he interrupts me before I can even finish that sentence. "What did he say?"

"You won't understand," I whisper, not meeting his eyes.

"Try me," he challenges.

"He said that I was no different..."

"'No different'?" he asks, obviously having no clue as to what it is that I mean by that. The problem is that I don't know how to explain it either, not really. Hell, I lived it and I still don't know how to phrase it, so how the frak can I expect them to understand?

"He told me once that we created the cylons to fulfill our needs and desires and that that was my only purpose... that there was no difference between what he was doing to me and what we had done to them," I finally tell him, though I know it is far more complicated than that.

"That's rubbish!" he blurts out, glaring at me.

"Is it?"

"Yes, damn it!" he all but yells and I can barely keep myself from flinching at that.

"Why?" I force myself to ask.

"Because..." he trails off, tacitly acknowledging the truth in Leoben's words.

"Right," I say, feeling incredibly tired and wondering how much longer is this charade actually going to last.

"It's not the same, damn it," he insists.

"That is enough, you two," Cottle suddenly interrupts us, glaring at Lee.

"Lee is right, Kara," jumps in the Old Man. "It's not the same."

"Why not?" I find myself asking, almost against my will.

"Because of what Leoben told you... because we created the cylons. That's the difference. We may have made a mistake --hell, we made a mistake, there's no 'maybe' about that-- but we can honestly say that we didn't set out to torture them or enslave them," he points out. "True, in retrospect I can see that we did just that and in that regard Leoben may actually have had a point when he told you that we created them to fulfill our needs and desires, but that is the extent of it. At the time we didn't know any better, at the time we had no reason to even suspect that they were aware. To us they were just machines, tools we had developed for our own benefit and we used them as such. Leoben, on the other hand, knew exactly what it was that he was doing to you and he did it on purpose. He deliberately and methodically set out to break you, to bend you to his will, that was his ultimate goal. That's the difference... or at least one of them."

"One of them?" I ask, feeling totally lost here. I expected the Old Man to be spitting nails by now but he isn't, far from it. In fact he seems to be more concerned than angry and I just don't know what to make out of any of this.

"You are a person, Kara, a human being, he isn't."

"That's not how they see it," I whisper.

"That may be so but that's not the point. They have evolved, they are not the enemy we once fought --I'll give you that-- but that doesn't mean that they understand what it means to be human... that they understand what it entails to be an individual. They are closer to us than their predecessors were but you have to remember that in spite of their human appearance they are still machines underneath it all, still copies. They still haven't figured out what it means to be a person and I doubt they ever will. Hell, even though we use names to refer to a couple of them, and even though for the most part they tend to use those names in our presence, to the best of our knowledge among themselves they still address each other primarily by number.

"Think about what that tells us about how they see themselves, about how they perceive the world around them. Leoben may have told you that what he did to you was no different from what we had done to them but the fact remains that you weren't even born until long after the war had ended so there is no way you could possibly be deemed responsible for any of it. You did nothing to him."

"Well, there was the 'Geminon Carrier'," I point out, almost hesitatingly, thinking back to our first encounter.

"And, going by what you've told me, even then he already seemed to have fixated on you," he reminds me, still not backing down an inch.

"Yes, but..."

"You did nothing to deserve this, Kara, nothing!" insists the Old Man, sounding incredibly frustrated.

"Yes, I did... and why the frak am I defending him anyway?" I ask shaking my head as I suddenly realize what it is that I'm actually saying here.