Chapter 26
(Lee's POV)

I am somewhat taken aback by Kara's easy acceptance. The truth is that from the moment I walked in I had been steeling myself for a confrontation and the last thing I had been expecting was for her to give me what amounts to a blank check to ask her whatever I want... and yet that is pretty much what she has done. Now, I may have been spending too much time with her lately but I can't help but feel that there is something very wrong with this picture. After all, if experience has taught me anything when it comes to dealing with her it is precisely that when things seem to be uncomplicated it means that I'm either reading them wrong or I am about to walk straight into a trap. Either way I know better than to take her offer at face value. If nothing else at least I know I have to tread carefully here. There is something about her attitude, something that doesn't quite add up and I can't help but wonder what the frak is going through her mind... not that I've ever had much luck when it comes to figuring that one out before.

The problem is that, even though I do know better than to take her offer at face value, I also have something like a million questions I am itching to ask.

I have been thinking about this almost nonstop for the past twenty-four hours, ever since I found out that there is an awful lot about my best friend I don't know and that in turn has enabled me to piece a less than pleasant picture together. In addition to that, a number of little things I had never been able to understand about her all of a sudden are starting to make an awful lot of sense, to the point that I can't keep myself from wondering how I could possibly have missed this in the first place, if maybe I didn't see it just because I didn't want to see.

The thing is that that is a mistake I am determined not to repeat and going by her attitude I am afraid that I am already on the brink of doing just that. That means that I have to pay more attention, especially because I am fairly certain that there is more to her easy acceptance than meets the eye. Sure, she is trying hard to hide it but I know her well enough to realize that she is scared half to death here, though there is also something else, something I can't quite put my finger on. In fact when she asked me what I wanted to know she seemed to be almost resigned. The question then must be: resigned to what? That is what I have to figure out before I proceed. Knowing that pushing her for answers is probably not the best thing I can do, I decide to reply to her offer by asking her what happened. It is an ambiguous question, one she has some leeway to answer in any way she wants but also one that will hopefully give me at least some sort of an insight into what the frak it is that I'm dealing with here.

After hesitating for a moment she says, almost defiantly, "it's pretty simple, actually. My mom was a drunk and not a fun one to be around. When I was seven my dad decided that he had had enough of the whole thing and left. Once he was gone she started drinking more and more, to the point that she was rarely completely sober. That didn't exactly go over well with her superiors so she was dishonorably discharged and, you guessed it, that caused her to turn to the bottle even more until she could barely function. Eventually it got so bad that she couldn't even hold a job, she was frustrated as hell and somehow she figured that the whole thing was my fault... though to be honest she had been telling me that I had ruined her life ever since I could remember so I can't really say that it was the ambrosia talking. Anyway, she was mad at the world but seeing how she couldn't really beat the crap out of the world she settled for beating the crap out of me instead and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. That, in a nutshell, is the whole frakking pathetic story. So can we go to the mess now? I'm starving here," she points out.

"How old were you?" I insist, pushing down the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and ignoring her rather obvious attempt to put an end to this conversation.

"When she was discharged from the military? Nine," she replies, shrugging her shoulders and trying to sound casual but not really fooling me, not this time around.

"So from the time you were nine..."

"Actually it started long before that," she whispers, not meeting my eyes.

"Before your dad left?" I ask, seeing red at the thought of a man willingly abandoning his child in the hands of a woman he knew to be abusive.

"Yeah..."

"And it lasted until...?"

"Until I was about thirteen, for the most part," she says. "By that time I was old enough to avoid going home when she was likely to be awake and the last time things got really bad between the two of us I was fifteen. Sure, I did have to dodge the occasional flying bottle every now and then even after that but I rarely ever went home to begin with, not to mention that she was usually too drunk to see straight so her aim left a lot to be desired anyway. The thing is that by that time she could no longer overpower me as she had when I was little and for the most part I could take care of myself so she pretty much lost interest in me and left me alone, at least as long as I stayed out of her way and didn't remind her of the fact that I was alive."

"At fifteen?" I repeat, rather stupidly, not quite daring to ask what she meant by 'the last time things got really bad'.

"Well, it was every kid's dream," she points out, obviously trying to distract me.

"What do you mean?" I ask, deciding to play along, at least until I can figure out what the frak it is that she is not telling me.

"Come on, Lee, when you were fifteen did you really want your mom and dad hovering over you 24/7?"

"No, but..." I begin but she interrupts me.

"I was free to do whatever I wanted, to come and go as I pleased or not come home at all even on school nights, not to mention that I could see whoever I wanted without having to worry about her throwing a hissy-fit about me hanging out with the 'wrong crowd' or anything like that," she insists and I can help but to admit that when she phrases it like that it doesn't sound so bad, at least not from a teenager's perspective, but I am not a teenager and I am all too aware of the fact that there is a lot more to this story than I am being told.