Chapter 7
(Cottle's POV)

I am not particularly surprised when Bill comes looking for me when his ten --or maybe I should say fifteen-- minutes are up, after all I had already figured out that he was up to something when he insisted that both Anders and Apollo should go first and the most logical explanation was that he wanted to talk to me... alone. That doesn't sound all that unusual but this time around I don't think it is a good thing. In fact I suspect that I already know what it is that he wants to discuss and I know this is not going to be pretty.

"We need to talk," he says and I gesture for him to follow me, knowing that this is probably going to need some privacy.

"Tell me the rest of it," he orders.

"I've told you what I know," I reply.

"Bullshit!"

"Everything else I could say is just guesswork."

"That didn't seem to bother you earlier, when you were telling us what you thought the odds were," he points out.

"That was something you had to understand if Starbuck was to have any chance at all of making it. This is different."

"Let's cut to the chase, shall we? You think she was raped on New Caprica," he says, having a hard time even getting the word out.

"I won't deny that I think that's a possibility we can't afford to ignore, one that would explain a lot. It would certainly account for her anger, her drinking, her depression, her self-hatred, to say nothing of her attempts to push her husband away, but at the same time it is not the only viable explanation, not considering how long she spent as a prisoner so until..."

"It's more than that," he interrupts me, obviously not buying it.

"Maybe... probably. I won't deny that there are a number of things that would seem to point in that direction," I admit, knowing that there is no use in trying to deny it.

"Such as?"

"Such as the fact that she was held for four months by a cylon that apparently wanted to play house with her, one that somehow managed to convince her that she actually had a daughter. I don't know how he did that but I would say that if it came to that she was probably pushed way past her breaking point mentally if not physically... to say nothing of the fact that I don't think a cylon wanting to play house with her would have kept things platonic. That just wouldn't have made sense."

"And from what we know it wasn't just a cylon, it was Leoben," adds Bill, almost to himself.

"Exactly, but there's also something else," I say after hesitating for a moment. I may not want to share this particular tidbit but somehow I don't think Bill would forgive me if I were to keep this from him now and... well, let's just say that the rules are pretty much out the window on this one anyway. Besides, what are they going to do? Take away my license for a breach of doctor/patient confidentiality?

"Something else?" he asks.

"We know that the cylons are obsessed --almost consumed-- with the notion of finding a way to reproduce. As far as we know up until now they have had only one success but the results I got back from Starbuck's blood tests were somewhat unusual."

"Unusual?"

"To put it mildly. Some of her hormones are completely out of whack. At first I thought that was just due to the stress she's been under and I even thought that that could be a contributing factor to her current depression but at the same time I couldn't help but to feel that there was more to it than that --that the way in which those particular hormones were out of whack seemed familiar somehow-- though I couldn't quite figure out why. Now I know."

"And are you going to tell me any time soon?" he all but growls.

"Those levels are consistent with what you would expect to find in a woman who has recently undergone a particularly aggressive fertility treatment, one that throws caution to the wind," I explain. "That profile is not something I'm likely to encounter all that often here on a battlestar, that's why it took me a while to figure out what it was that I was looking at, but..."

"But you seriously doubt that the cylons would have pumped her full of fertility drugs if they hadn't been actively trying to get her pregnant in the first place," he mutters, closing his eyes.

"Pretty much," I admit.

"And that's why you made a point out of telling her husband that maybe trying to pick things up right where they left off was not the brightest of ideas."

"Among other things. So when did you figure it out?"

"When I was sitting with her. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something you weren't telling me."

"I see."

"But there's one thing that doesn't really make sense: wouldn't Starbuck have put her foot down if Anders had been pushing her? After all, we are talking about Kara here and she's never been shy when it comes to saying what's on her mind," Bill points out.

"Four months ago she probably would have, no question about that, but now... things have changed and the truth is that I'm not sure how much of a reference her past behavior is going to be here. The cylons had way too much time to frak with her head. Hell, even if my suspicions are correct and she was actually raped --and for the time being that does remain an 'if'-- I don't even know how relevant a factor that is in the grand scheme of things. What I can tell you is that if for months saying 'no' was not an option then expecting her to shrug off that conditioning overnight would be completely unrealistic and her husband could easily have found himself unwittingly perpetuating that particular pattern. In addition to that there's also the fact that she may well have feared that saying 'no' would have led to too many questions she didn't want to have to deal with or even that she may have been unwilling to acknowledge to herself that she wanted to say 'no' in the first place because that would have been a tacit admission of the fact that everything was not fine," I reply, not particularly comfortable with where this conversation is headed. On the one hand Thrace is my patient and my first instinct is to protect her privacy as much as I can but on the other I know that if my suspicions are correct then I am going to have to tell him anyway, that they will all need to know what it is that we are dealing with here.

"But if that is the case shouldn't her husband be warned about this?" asks Bill, almost reading my mind.

"Yes, but I'm not sure he is ready to hear it. Hell, you saw his reaction. He couldn't even understand what it was that I was hinting at when I told him that him being happy to have his wife back could be part of the problem and I wasn't exactly being subtle about it. I'll give him until she starts coming around to see if he manages to put two and two together on his own but if he doesn't I may have to tell him... and your son."

"They are not going to take it well."

"You think? I mean, even as things stand sometimes I am tempted to put up a 'no peeing' sign when those two are around," I mutter, shaking my head.

"A 'no peeing' sign?" asks Bill, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes. I mean, put those two in a room together with Starbuck in between and you can almost see them fighting the urge to mark their territory but if things are as bad as I think they are --and the fact that she damned near succeeded in killing herself would seem to suggest that they are-- then they are going to have to get over it and work together because she is going to need them both and their little pissing contest could end up doing a lot of damage here... and things are already complicated enough as they are."