Part 1: The Frying Pan

Kara could still remember the cylons' arrival, being dragged from her tent and taken by Leoben back to an orbiting basestar where she had found Simon waiting for her. She wasn't entirely sure how long she had been there at his 'mercy'... after all, the lights had been always on, always so bright as to be almost blinding so she hadn't had any sort of reference. Her best guess was that she had been there for a couple of weeks at least and a little more than a month at most.

What she did know was that those days had been terrifying.

Unlike what had been the case back on Caprica, where Simon had at least pretended to be human, this time around he hadn't bothered. He had known that she was well aware of what he was and why she was there so he hadn't even tried to gain her cooperation... besides, it had become apparent almost immediately that her 'cooperation' was anything but necessary.

From the moment she had arrived she had been stripped naked and thrown into a room with no furniture other than an exam table complete with stir-ups and restraints and no company other than a centurion. There had been a metal toilet in a corner, that was true, but that was the extent of the 'luxury' her captors had afforded her. She hadn't even been given access to a sink in which she could hope to wash her hands, much less a shower... hell, they hadn't even bothered with anything remotely resembling toilet paper. There had been nothing in there to hold her attention, nothing that could possibly have enabled her mind to escape her prison.

Her meals had consisted of a bowl filled with a grayish, tasteless, gruel-like substance that had been brought to her by another one of the mechanical monsters and she had been forced to eat that with her bare hands because no utensils had ever been provided.

Every so often Simon would come in with a couple of centurions in tow. The centurions would invariably grab a hold of her, tie her to that table and then Simon would run his 'tests' on her. A few of those tests had been excruciatingly painful, most of them had been intrusive as hell and all of them had been utterly terrifying, especially because she had no idea as to what it was that he was doing or what was coming up next. She was desperate to know what was going on, what was being done to her body but Simon had never deigned to answer any of her questions, he had never even acknowledged the fact that she had spoken at all. In fact until the last day she had been on that basestar she had heard no voice other than her own... and then Leoben had come back.

She had felt particularly vulnerable, exposed. Yes, she had been naked for several weeks but while Simon's gaze was all but indifferent, seeing her as nothing but the lab specimen she had known herself to be, Leoben's was anything but.

He had been looking over Simon's shoulder as he examined her and she could hardly remember having ever felt that uncomfortable before. For a moment she had been relieved when Simon had released her from her restraints --that had at least enabled her to scuttle as far away from Leoben as the confines of her 'prison' would allow-- but that relief had quickly turned to panic when she had heard Simon tell Leoben that he was free to take her away.

That was the day she had been brought back to New Caprica, to the newly completed cell/apartment she had been calling home for the past two and a half months and upon her return she had been shocked by the changes that had taken place on the planet's surface, though in a way she figured it was only natural that with an endless, tireless mechanical workforce at the cylon's disposal, the construction should have progressed apace. After all that had been the promise that had led to the cylons' creation in the first place, that was what had started the whole thing, what had sealed the fate of the Twelve Colonies.

Of course, she hadn't exactly been given much time to contemplate those changes either, not when almost as soon as they had crossed the threshold Leoben had pushed her against a wall and forced himself on her, taking full advantage of the fact that Simon hadn't exactly bothered with clothes before handing her over to him in the first place.

That was when she had finally realized that --as bad as things had been on that basestar-- Simon had been nothing but the beginning.