Chapter 8
(Kara's POV)

"Okay, that's enough, I want everyone out of here, now!" growls Cottle but as soon as I make a move to get out of bed he glares at me and adds, "not you, lieutenant."

"You said 'everyone'," I point out.

"I'm sorry, doctor, but I do need an answer," insists the Old Man.

"Not right now," says Cottle, refusing to back down, and I decide that maybe staying here for a while is not such a bad idea after all.

"When?"

"Give me a few minutes and then we'll talk. There are some things I'd like to discuss with my patient first."

As soon as the Old Man, Lee and Helo are out of the room --or at least on the other side of the frakking curtain-- Cottle turns his attention back to me.

"He will be back, you know that, don't you?"

"Yes," I say, not particularly happy about the reminder.

"So, care to tell me exactly what that cylon did to you?" he asks.

"Other than remove a bullet, you mean?"

"Don't play games with me, Starbuck."

"I don't know, okay? When I first asked him about it he told me that he had had to go back in the middle of the night due to some internal bleeding but then when I heard him talking to the other cylon he mentioned something about the fact that he was waiting for some lab results from some samples of my ovaries," I growl, not even wanting to think about it.

"But you don't know the extent of it?"

"Not really... and to tell you the truth I don't particularly want to."

"Well, that's just too bad because we are going to find out," he says.

"Is that really necessary?"

"Yes."

"So what are you going to do?" I ask, trying hard to keep the fear out of my voice, though the truth is that I'm not looking forward to more poking and prodding, far from it.

"Nothing as awful as you are thinking," says the doc, with something that comes as close to a reassuring smirk as I've ever seen on his face. "First I would like to do an ultrasound in a few days --once I'm sure the infection is under control and the swelling has gone down a little-- and then, depending on how that goes, maybe I'll run some additional tests, just to be on the safe side, though going by what you've told me I think chances are that they just took a biopsy and if that's the case you should be fine. The way I see it, it really wouldn't have made sense for them to do anything more invasive than that if they wanted to be able to breed you in the first place, especially because harvesting a woman's eggs is a complicated procedure that has to be closely monitored and done at a specific time. In other words, just cutting you open and yanking your ovaries out in the middle of the night would not have done them any good, not to mention that it wouldn't have made sense for them to do something like that if they had already captured you and had no reason to believe that you would be going anywhere."

"Good," I say, trying hard not to cringe at the mental image.

"Now, about what you didn't want to tell the Commander..."

"It's nothing," I growl, really wishing that he would let it go.

"Yeah, right... and that 'nothing' wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the sixteen broken bones and seventeen fractures I found by going over your x-rays that are unaccounted for in your medical file, broken bones I'm all but certain predate your admittance to Flight School when you were eighteen, would it?"

"Sixteen?" I ask.

"All of your fingers, the ulna in your left arm, both the ulna and radius in your right arm --and one of those shows signs of two distinct fractures, though I can't be absolutely sure if that is because it was broken twice or if it is because it was broken in two places-- and three ribs."

"Three?"

"Two on your left side and one on your right side," he confirms.

"I thought it was just two," I mutter. I remember trying to curl up on myself as my mom kept kicking me time and time again when she broke those but the other one does come as a bit of a shock and I'm trying to figure out when that happened.

"Nope... the question is how could you possibly have missed the fact that you had a broken rib in the first place," he says, almost casually.

"I don't know, I just did," I growl, wishing that he would just leave me alone but knowing that there's no way that's going to happen now.

"What, you were so used to pain that something as minor as a broken bone completely escaped your notice?"

"How long have you known?" I ask, not really daring to look at him though I am oddly reassured by the familiar sarcasm in his voice. Sarcasm I can deal with, what I really can't stand is pity.

"Since you crashed on that moon. I pretty much had to x-ray you from head to toe to make sure there were no additional injuries at the time," he explains. "So I'm guessing that's what the cylon meant when he said that you were born to a woman who believed in suffering."

I nod at that, knowing that there's no point in trying to deny it, though that doesn't mean I'm happy about any of this.

"And, going by your reaction, I take it that the Old Man and Apollo don't have a clue about any of this... or at least they didn't until today, right?" he asks, almost rhetorically.

I shake my head in response, not really knowing what to say as I try to wrap my mind around what this whole thing is going to mean and the truth is that no matter how I look at it, it's a frakking mess.

"You do realize that you are going to have to tell them, don't you?"

I just glare at him at that, even though I do realize that he has a point, that they are not going to let this go and neither will Helo. The three of them are just too damn stubborn for that and I know it.

The problem is that while I know I have to tell them I don't know how to do it. My past is not something I talk about, not ever. As far as I'm concerned it's over and done with but people just don't get that. Besides, it's really none of their frakking business, though I do know better than to try to tell the Old Man something like that and that means that I'm basically stuck.