BSG Fic - Reparation, 16/?
Title: Reparation
Author: becisvolatile
Part: 16/?
Rating: NC-17
Pairings/Characters: Lee/Kara, Bill, Helo, Sharon, Sam, Leoben.
Word Count: 6600+
Category: Novella
Genre: Romance, Angst, Action with Romance, PWP, Drama
Archiving: The Fallout Shelter, Apollo/Starbuck Fan Fic, Beyond Insane all others please ask
Warnings: Language, violence, sexual content,
Spoilers: Up to and including S3
Summary: A Tauron poet had once contemplated intimacy and concluded that all it really required was that you could count your lover’s eyelashes.
Beta: Angylinni stars in her recurring role as patron saint of Bec and beta.
A/N: Yes. I know. Where the frak have I been? I promise the next one won't take so long.
Previous Chapters:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
A Tauron poet had once contemplated intimacy and concluded that all it really required was that you could count your lover’s eyelashes. In context and spirit, the passage had probably been a little more figurative, but Kara had liked the literal implication that with just a little concentration, intimacy was achievable.
The night after their wedding Kara had concluded that Sam had forty-eight eyelashes on the top lid of his right eye, fifty-nine on the top lid of his left. The lack of symmetry had bothered her so much that she could never bring herself to count the lashes along the lower lids.
On the most desperate of days during her captivity, she’d tried to count Leoben’s. Her mind still eased, just a little, when she remembered that the sun glancing off his pale lashes had made them impossible to count. No matter how hard she tried.
And Lee? Gods… Lee. Kara’s lips twisted, not a smile… more a sick acknowledgement of just how frakked that night had been. A blink. A single blink and her mind had been made. They’d been out in that field, Lee falling into sleep beneath her… not of his own will. Gods knew she’d felt him fighting the exhaustion and liquor for hours. Frak, maybe he’d seen it coming, but eventually he’d slept and she’d waited less than a minute to let her eyes strain against the dark and start counting. She couldn’t seem to make it into double digits. He’d move, or shift. Head to the side. A catch in his chest that stole her attention and finally with the fluttering of eyelashes, a blink that he’ll never remember, she knew that the time wasn’t right.
“Kara, I didn’t stay back so that we could stare at the wall.” Sam’s voice rushed at her like a warm breeze as his hand slid over her wrist. The debrief was done and everyone had cleared out. Everyone but Sam and, if Kara hadn’t been looking for a reason to avoid Lee, she might have mustered some annoyance at being cornered in the Ready Room.
Again.
Her eyes dropped to the space where his thumb brushed back and forward over her wrist and she had to remind herself of the fact that he didn’t have an even number of eyelashes. She shook him off. “Then why did you ask?”
Sam came up to stand beside Kara, where he’d found her frowning over some post-engagement statistics. She knew that quiet. The silence that fell when he searched her face and didn’t find the answers he was after. She left him to it. The sooner he left, the sooner she’d have to go and face Lee and that wasn’t something she was sure she could stomach. Not right after the Cylons… not even after what had happened between them.
“Is it mine?” Sam finally spoke.
Kara’s brow lifted as she turned to him with a question on her lips. But she didn’t really get as far as asking what he meant, because she wasn’t that stupid and Sam’s face was just too frakking easy to read. “Oh. Whoa. Wait.” Kara shuffled a few steps away and turned back to look at Sam, having put a safe distance between them, “Uhm… yours? You mean… like… ‘it’?” She gestured at her belly. “This ‘it’?”
She started to shake her head before Sam could even reply. “You have some serious faulty wiring, Sam. I promise you there is no ‘it’, yours or otherwise.”
Kara took a few more steps back and felt an involuntary grimace sweep across her face. If Anders had been misinformed, she was willing to bet that she herself was the source of the vicious little rumor. “Who knows?”
Sam’s eyes moved to the floor and Kara had to stifle a groan.
Everyone. Everyone knew and… oh, but didn’t that just make perfect sense?
Lee’s declarations of unending support. “Come on Sam. I’m being straight with you here, no kid. Return the favor.”
“It’s been spread pretty far and wide, Kara. Lots of speculation laced in but the loudest whispers are saying-”
“Cylon,” Kara cut in, “They think it’s a frakkin’ baby toaster.”
Sam held his hands wide and gave her a sad little smile. “There was a second there where it could have been, but then maybe your Gods aren’t that cruel.” The fleeting hope on Sam’s face told her that maybe he hoped they were.
Kara quashed the desire to reach out and touch him. Her sympathy at this juncture would be a lie. Sam didn’t need or want it. She pulled in a slow breath before finally asking, “Where did you hear it?”
*****
“Dee?” Helo couldn’t believe his ears.
Sharon shrugged, “I heard her.”
“Look, I don’t like the woman, but even I don’t think she’d sink to that. It’s just vicious. She has a well developed survival instinct, if nothing else.”
Sharon continued to nudge Hera’s toy blocks into a corner with her foot as she spoke to her husband. “Be that as it may, she was holding court in the head, whispering about how much Lee was suffering, tied to a woman about to have a Cylon.”
“Could you have heard it wrong?” Helo picked up a bottle of water, but pursed his lips just shy of taking a sip. If it was true, they were all in trouble and if it wasn’t true… then Dee was in trouble.
“Maybe.” Having cleared away all of Hera’s toys, Sharon dropped down onto the sofa beside Helo. “She stopped talking as I got there, so it’s possible.”
Helo groaned a little and shifted on the sofa to drop his head to his wife’s lap. “But not probable. You think it’s true?”
“That Kara’s going to have Leoben’s baby?”
He shrugged a little; he didn’t picture Kara handling something like that well. Surely she’d have given some sort of sign? Maybe her problems with sex were a big frakking sign and he’d just missed it. “I have to talk to her before Gaeta gives her some hand knitted booties in the mess and she tries to airlock his ass. If it’s true well… I’ll be planning a baby shower. The first function Kara’s ever attended where she won’t be drinking me under the table. If it isn’t? Better she know what’s going around.”
*****
Cutter kicked back in the small annex of the brig and listened. The Leoben had been calling out since he’d started duty and though he was only an hour into his watch, he’d found out during the change of watch that the Cylon had been quite vocal since Kara had left.
Cutter picked up a small ball and started to bounce it against the wall. He couldn’t figure out what it was that pissed him off so much about the situation. He caught the ball in one hand and clenched his jaw as the Cylon called for him.
It didn’t sit right that the Cylon could sit back in his cell with a victorious smile ghosting across his face. False or not, Cutter didn’t want to concede any victory to the enemy -especially not when it came at a cost to Starbuck. He knew she could look after herself, would probably twist his nuts clear off if she thought he was concerned about her. But he was. The short time he’d spent in her company had confirmed that she was one of the rare good guys. A bitch with balls and a mouth to make a grown man wince - but still good. She still flinched when Adama hurt. Still shook with the effort of containing her own tears when she left Lee’s side.
And not once had she ever taken his chair.
Cutter stood and let his chair slide back, it grated through the brig but he didn’t mind. He was going to take the smile of the Cylon’s face - the least he could do was let the frakker know he was coming.
*****
By the time she’d made it back to their quarters Kara had resolved that she did not, in fact, want to count Lee’s eyelashes. She wanted to pull each and every single mother-frakking one from his face.
Frakker. She ground her teeth a little as she shouldered her way into the empty room. He’d thought she was pregnant and now that the shock was wearing off she finally got it. Lee loved her. Like… really.
Oh…oh…oh.
That was going to be a problem, because it was one thing for him to say it, ad nauseam. But it was something else entirely for him to mean it.
Gods, what if Lee had managed to count her eyelashes?
Funny, she thought as she kicked off her flight suit and stomped towards the shower shedding clothes, that he’d say it and say it… but it took something stupid - something unwitting like Lee believing the biggest load of crap to circulate since that thing about her going down on Racetrack in the head - for her to actually buy it for a second.
Frak, were they ever going to get it right? Kara turned the shower on and waited for the water to warm before stepping underneath the spray. She grinned up into the hot water. Of course they weren’t. They didn’t do right. They did right now and right here and right when I frakking say so. But maybe just hours ago Lee had come so close to right that… what? She grabbed at a pot of dried algae by-product. Was everything they used these days made of frakking algae? She scrubbed the scentless substance over her shoulders and fell a little deeper into thought.
That thing… after the oh-my-frakking-Gods sex? That wasn’t love. They were uteral contractions interrupting her brain functions and if the klaxon hadn’t sounded when it had she might’ve frakked things right up and professed her love for him. Love that, realistically, she could never back up. Not with Earth still out of reach and Cylons clinging to the bulkheads in plain sight. Oh, Lee wanted her. He even wanted her burdens and she could manage that… but frak, she thought she’d be sharing a secret or two with him. But to Lee it had been so much more. He’d been willing to claim a child. Not his child. Not a human child. A baby toaster.
And she didn’t doubt for a second that he’d have done it. She could see it with sickening clarity. She’d be unstable, she’d frakking lose her shit every second she thought about it growing inside of her and Lee? Lee would hold her and cover for her and make jokes in the mess about Starbuck’s cravings and whatever expectant fathers were meant to talk about. What was in it for him? There was no gain in that. Just loss and… frak, she was big enough to admit that pregnant and trapped, she’d do nothing but make him miserable.
He was robbing her of choice because how could she say no to commitment like that? How could she walk from him when finally she had proof that he might just follow her?
“You’re thinking. You’re wet and glistening and naked… and thinking.” Helo propped a shoulder against the frosted glass of the small bathroom and filled the small space with his bulk. “The wet, glistening and naked are always good. But the thinking never bodes well. Not with you.”
Kara snorted and cut off the water. “Towel.”
Helo picked up a towel but made no move to swing it over the shower door. Instead he allowed himself a very slow appraisal of Kara’s body. His eyes slowed over her belly and Kara rolled her eyes. “No, I’m not.”
His eyebrow shifted, “You sure?”
“Yup.”
“How sure?”
Kara pointed to a faint mark on her right shoulder; it looked like a small insect bite. “Cottle stuck me with a contraceptive device, before that all the regular tests came back clean.”
“Okay.”
Kara crossed her arms over her chest, making some token gesture to suggest she was cold. Helo had seen the package many times, but somehow it didn’t feel like it had back then, when they’d both had less weighing them down and that stupid grin and the sheer size of him was enough to have her shrugging off her reservations and having a little fun with him. “Can I have my towel?”
Helo’s grin grew a little as he leaned more heavily against the glass. “When I’m ready.”
“I promise you,” Lee’s voice cut through the dissipating steam of the bathroom, “That you are more than ready .”
If it was possible, in such a small space, Helo jumped a foot clear into the air and lobbed the towel over the glass with such force that Kara nearly missed it entirely. She caught just the edge, narrowly saving it from hitting the wet tiles and buried her grin in the fabric. She tried not to giggle, but as Helo edged to the side and Lee shouldered past him, she couldn’t help but find amusement in the way that Lee’s shorter frame seemed to dwarf Helo with sheer annoyance. “I like you, Agathon, but I will airlock you, am I understood?”
“Yes sir.”
“Leave.”
Kara’s giggle turned into a snort and then faded quickly when she realized Lee had turned on her and Helo had vacated their quarters. “What the frak was that?”
“I was having a shower.”
“And Helo’s presence was required? Frak it, Kara, I just… Gods you drive me insane. You know that, right?” He passed a hand over his face.
“Nothing happened.” Gods, she was surprised at how frakking whiny and defensive she sounded. “He was here looking out for me.”
“Yeah, I did happen to catch the looking.”
“It was nothing. Just… really old times. Like, ancient times, Lee, and I don’t need to justify this to you.”
Lee pulled a face and nodded. It was his ‘Lee gets it face’, which was a load of crap because he only used that face when he wanted to make some derisive comment. He used the face to let her know that the only thing he ‘got’ was that she was full of shit. He started to wander out of the bathroom, but turned back as if something had just occurred to him. “Out of curiosity, what is it you just washed from your body?”
Kara’s lips formed a stiff line.
Lee smiled, “Yeah. Me. So I’m thinking that maybe you do need to justify it. Okay?” He stepped from the bathroom leaving Kara fuming in his wake.
Frak you too, she thought as she followed him into their room. “Didn’t I put you on CAP?” she muttered as she passed him on her way to the wardrobe.
“I swapped.”
“I didn’t approve that,” Kara noted a little churlishly as she pulled on her panties.
“Yeah, well, I’m frakking the CAG; I figured it gave me a little wiggle room.” Lee dropped himself down onto the bed and propped himself up on his elbows to watch Kara wander around the room pulling on a shirt and an oversized pair of socks but not much else. “Also, for the record, I plan on frakking you solidly into tomorrow too, so you might want to rethink the panties. You won’t be needing them.”
Kara paused where she was standing. Lee was, and had been, many things, but he’d never been blatant or crass. That was usually her job. She narrowed her eyes in his direction, trying to convey irritation she didn’t feel because damned if her body hadn’t kicked into overdrive with his words. Being frakked into tomorrow didn’t sound all that terrible. Just complicated. She was still reeling from the idea of just how far Lee was willing to go to back up his insane declarations of love, frakking him now would just compound things and make him think that he really was going to have things his way, finally.
Hunh. His way. What had she done to him? How badly had she - had the war - frakked up the pride of the fleet if he really was willing to play second string to her and claim the mongrel Cylon runt of a woman who was half spare parts and all screwed in the head. That wasn’t love, it was grounds for being scheduled.
From where he was half draped across the end of the bed, Lee threw up his hands. “You’re thinking so loud I can practically hear it, Kara. So just… tell me what a dick I am and we can move on. I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now. That’s what Helo was here for, right? Shoot the breeze, stare at your rack and share scuttlebutt?”
Kara sneered a little at his back as she mounted the bed near the pillows and kicked her way beneath the covers. “He was going to scrub my back too. Before you interrupted us.”
Lee didn’t even bother to turn back to her as he yanked the zipper on his flight suit down.
Fine, he wanted to discuss it? How about they start with what had been wrong with Lee’s assumption that she was pregnant. “You thought I’d frakked Leoben? A Cylon?”
Lee stood and dragged his flight suit down, leaving him in shorts and tanks. Kara’s eyes fell to the watermarks forming a neat oval on his lower back, marking where sweat had been and dried. He didn’t look back at her, but to his credit he had the good grace not to point out that she’d been doing just that with Sam. “I knew it,” he muttered as he hauled his tanks over his head.
“Knew what?” Kara tried not to drool as he casually stepped out of his shorts and moved towards the shower.
“I knew, even when I was running here to just frakking be with you, that there would be a way that you would turn this against me. Clearly, I can’t do the right thing with you. But stupid me, stupid frakking Lee, thinks that maybe if you’re not pregnant that things might just be a little more clear cut. I’ll never learn, right? So have it out, Kara. Yell, throw a couple punches, break something, I’ll be in the shower. Hell, call Sam for a quick frak to spite me. Just let me know when you’re done.”
Gods, he sounded tired. Maybe even a little disappointed. Kara frowned, burrowing a little deeper into the bed that they’d vacated not two hours earlier, and for a few seconds tried to see things his way.
They’d frakked. It had been… Gods, it had been beyond amazing… and then what? Cylons, flight, fighting. Doing what they were made for. Some time after that he’d been told that she wasn’t really pregnant, but who knew that? Half the Battlestar was convinced that she was, but only three people - five if you counted Helo and, by extension, Sharon - knew the truth of it. Cottle might have told Lee, but hadn’t Trucker taken a hit during the attack? No, Cottle would have been seeing to the injured first. That left Cutter and the Admiral. She almost felt sorry for the Old Man, stuck as he was between them. It must be tough shit when your one time almost daughter-in-law is frakking her way through your sons and leaving them dead and worse in her wake. Really, she was amazed he hadn’t airlocked her long before. So he’d done it. He’d been the one to pull Lee’s head from his ass and force his own son to realize that she wasn’t knocked up. Just frakking, albeit indirectly, with his head once more. And what had he done? Ran. For her. Hadn’t he said that? He’d come to be with her, thinking that maybe a little of life’s debris had been cleared from their relationship only to find her naked with another man. Admittedly, even Lee couldn’t really find anything untoward in her being with Helo. But that hadn’t mattered because she’d done nothing but bitch at him and tear into him for thinking she’d slept with Leoben which, frankly, she was pretty sure actually had happened. She just wasn’t clear how, or on whose terms, the supposed coupling had taken place.
That didn’t mean she owed him anything, she reminded herself as she moved onto her back. Frak, she could have a change of heart and purpose and a blinding moment of discovery at the realization of her fate… but could she just once admit that maybe Lee was in the right?
Not without being damn near mortally wounded by it.
In the bathroom Lee cut the shower and there was a moment of silence as he listened for a clue as to what she might be up to before she heard the rustle of him dragging a towel over his head. Clearly he’d decided that she was not, in fact, banging her husband against the bulkheads. That deviant part in her mind, the part that she could never contain, warred with itself, pissed that she’d missed an opportunity to frak things up and pleased that she hadn’t done exactly as Lee had predicted.
She sat up in the bed and watched Lee step back into the room, still toweling his hair and dripping water onto the floor. That alone told her that he wasn’t as ambivalent as he seemed. It was too calculated, too choreographed. His hair was dry but he still held that one arm over his head, displaying the neat group of muscles in his arm to their full advantage. Droplets of water ran from his chest and over his flat stomach, drawing her eye to the heavy swing of his cock and the flex of his thick quads.
Lee was playing his final card. But the thing that really struck Kara was that he didn’t even know it. He thought he was playing on her drive for sex, but what Kara read was something too much like her own doubts about her right to be with the man standing just feet away. Who was she to lay any claim to him when all she could offer was trouble?
There on his face Kara could read something startlingly similar. Who was he to offer anything more than a few easy fraks?
It was there, impulse and necessity converging to stop her mind and just propel her forward and out off the bed. The shock on Lee’s face was almost insulting, but she hardly registered it as she reached up and pulled the towel from his fingers and swept it once across his chest, then up and around his shoulders as she started to dry his body. Her mind searched for another instance where she’d been this tender with his body, but even New Caprica had been borne of an urgency that ate away at the sort of gentle desire to just touch that she felt then and there.
Kara was trying to say sorry without ever really saying it, or even acknowledging what there was to apologize for. She knew that if she started cataloguing her sins she’d drown in them, or remember Lee’s own transgressions, and she was so tired of that. Pitting sin against sin and seeing who outweighed who. It didn’t help them and it sure as frak didn’t absolve them. They had both been so consistently wrong that neither had a foot to stand on when it came to moral high grounds.
Kara stalked around Lee and lowered the towel to pass it over his ass and smiled gently as the tight flex of muscles belied his frustration at her ministrations. She’d diligently avoided any of Lee’s ‘hot spots’ and with reason, she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. She dropped the towel and raked her fingertips across one shoulder and down diagonally over the ridge of his spine and the curve of his ass. He made a noise low in his throat, a bizarre mix of frustration, need and confusion.
“I know,” she murmured as she dropped a kiss to his shoulder blade and stepped with him, keeping to his back, when he tried to face her. “We’re strong, Lee. So strong. Even when we don’t feel it, when we can’t see it, it’s there because we’re still here and that has to count for something. There’s so much we’ve survived. We’ve survived wars; we’ve survived Cylons and dogfights. But there’s a limit. There has to be. We aren’t machines and we have limits. Sometimes I think you’re my limit. Whatever else I’ve survived, I don’t think I’ll survive you. I don’t think we’ll survive each other.”
She felt his head shake as he tried to speak, “Don’t-”
Her fingers dug a little more persistently into his back. “I know you think it’s possible. I know you think the Gods should bow to the way you want things to be. Gods, I know that if you could, you’d wrest their will, maybe even mine, to yours until they aligned just so and you had things your way.” She stopped and moved to his front, dropping to her knees so slowly that her thighs ached. She spoke against his belly, not quite finished with her descent. “Maybe it wouldn’t even be so bad,” she said in a small voice as her knees hit the floor. She contemplated him for a long moment. He was hard and ready and trying desperately not to lean in. She rewarded his restraint, skimming a full lower lip over the head of his cock as spoke her final piece, “But you can’t, Lee. You can’t and I won’t.”
But that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t give him what little she could.
*****
Lee clenched his fists as Kara’s tongue traced a punishing route along the underside of his cock, flicking at water that still clung to him. He closed his eyes and tried to pinpoint the place where the heat of her tongue pressed and lapped against him, but it was pointless. As always, he was incapable of feeling the finer things, instead overwhelmed but just the mere sensation of her - by no means a precise feeling, but exacting all the same. It was like a wall of heat, forcing against him and catching him off guard. Gods knew it was only her mouth that wrapped around him, only her fingertips that glanced across the back of his thighs, but it was a feeling akin to being body slammed in a rough match of Pyramid.
Somewhere in his head, his higher brain functions kicked over. He’d never settle. Never. And maybe she’d never give more but he’d take what she did give and if he took enough maybe one day he’d wake up and be surprised to find that it was enough. He doubted it, but it was all he had to go on.
Her tongue did something and Lee’s knees buckled. Frak, it was impossible to maintain righteous indignation with her on her knees and that mouth actually doing some good for a change. Gods, he was easy. What had she called Sam? A “little whore”? He slid his hand through her hair and gripped, pulling her back and tilting her face up, knowing damn well he was probably hurting her. “You think a blow job is going to make this better, Kara?”
“I don’t know, Lee. A little while ago you seemed to think a good lay would do the job.”
Lee winced, wishing he’d never taken her mouth away because now she was talking and why could she never just frakking give? Just an inch. Half an inch. A hair’s breadth. He threw aside the idea of feeding himself back into her mouth and reached down to drag her forcefully to her feet before throwing her to the bed none too gently.
Sex wouldn’t make things better, he knew that, but if he did it well enough, it might stem the spew of vitriol from her mouth for just a few seconds.
It was his own fault; he’d left that bathroom with every intent of seducing her. He knew that much about her weaknesses. She liked his body. Always had. She’d liked a lot of bodies in her time but he knew his held a special sway over her. In the intimacy of their home Lee had hoped that just playing on the one thing she’d always appreciated and - it seemed - had started to crave again would be enough to keep her close in a physical sense. All joking aside, if he’d suspected for a second that she’d go and frak Anders he might have tied her to the bed and vented the Cylon frakker for just breathing the same air as Kara. He could do that now. Sam had surrendered the playing field and as the man living with Kara he had the right to be possessive.
Not that she’d agree.
And not that it would do him any good, because it wouldn’t take long before he caught Helo watching her shower or a Cylon boasting about fathering her children or whatever the frak she’d dreamed up to punish him.
Kara shuffled up onto the bed, resting on her elbows as she sneered at him, “I guess we won’t bother then?”
Like frak they wouldn’t. She’d started it and he wasn’t going to let her punish him purely because he wasn’t satisfied with just her mouth. He knelt on the mattress, not bothering to turn from her, instead taking a position between her sprawled legs, smack in the center of her field of vision. He was hard and ready and he wasn’t going to let her shy from that. After all, she’d been the one to work him into a state.
He reached for one sock-clad foot as she spoke, “And if I’d been in the shower with Helo? Would we be doing this?”
Gods help him but, yeah, he was frakking sure of it. He didn’t bother to take the thick socks from her feet, didn’t even really care that she still wore panties and a C-Bucs shirt (a dig at him, he had no doubt). He dragged her first by the foot, then hooked his hands behind her knees and pulled her further until he was kneeling fully between her thighs. “I see this for what it is, Kara. Took some time, but I think I do. You’re so bent on this idea that you’re going to hurt me that you’ll force things until you’ve proven yourself right.” He might have stripped her off, but as she simply fell back onto the mattress, her body easing, he knew that she was just too fragile to bare her body to him. And what did it matter? Fully-clothed or naked, Lee was beginning to think that he knew her.
She could keep her clothes; he decided as he lifted her hips and hooked a finger into the crotch of her panties, they weren’t going to keep him from her.
The fabric of her panties was warm and wet; he pressed his knuckle a little closer to her and felt a slick heat that shot up into his shoulders and through his chest. The knowledge that, at the very least, her body wanted him yet again was enough to fortify him. “I need your help, Kara. Quit playing like a frakking rag doll.”
Without question she propped back onto one elbow and reached down with her other hand to push Lee’s fingers away and hold her panties aside herself. Lee’s eyes fell and he marveled for a second at just how easy it was for her to offer her body in lieu of all the other things he wanted from her. But he was human and - frak, what a body. He took his cock in hand and slowly teased his head over her clit. Looking up just enough to catch the way her head rolled back as her breath hitched. He played for as long as he could tolerate it, long enough to see Kara’s nipples bead beneath the t-shirt and her knees spread wider still, allowing him a view he’d relish for the rest of his life. When he reached the limits of a mere mortal, he used one hand to urge her closer and the other to guide himself into her.
Lee had to remind himself that it had only been a couple of hours since he’d last been inside of her, because damned if it didn’t feel like he’d been waiting for that moment all his life. At first it was uneasy and tight, painfully so. But as Kara wrapped her legs around his waist and sat up, encircling his neck with her arms and bringing her torso flush with his, the tension eased into something amazingly right. His thighs ached a little, beneath Kara he was still sitting back on his haunches, but with her wrapped around him he was able to lift and shift her as the worst of his cramps came and subsided, setting a neat rhythm as she began to buck against and ride him.
Her arms wrapped more tightly around his neck, her breasts pressing against his chest, as his fingers dug into her hips and her breath was coming fast and hot in his ear, signaling that she was really frakking close. Lee reached up with one hand and grabbed at a wrist, pulling her arms from his neck and shoulders and sitting back a little. Her face turned to the side and he shook his head, “I want to see you,” he said hoarsely, “I want to see you look at me.”
She shook her head and rode a little faster, determined that she wouldn’t look at him. Fine. Lee drew his own thumb into his mouth before dropping to between their bodies and zeroing in on Kara’s clit, pressing against her hard.
She made a noise caught somewhere between a hiss and gasp and snapped her eyes to his face. “That’s right, Kara, my face is right here.” This time she didn’t look away and he apologized by way of slowly rolling his thumb over her and easing the pressure of his touch. To her credit, she still didn’t look away. But to Lee’s annoyance she didn’t bother to hide the reluctance in her eyes and not even the intruding lust and - frak, he wasn’t going to name it if she couldn’t - whatever else he saw there didn’t ease the pain in knowing that no matter how actively she was participating, she wasn’t committing.
She came quickly and turned her face away instantly. Lee knew she had more mileage in her but suspected that she’d made it easy so that she could look away. So as she rocked out the last of her climax Lee began his, his eyes falling bitterly to the sharp line of her cheekbone as he shamelessly parodied his dead brother and ran his lips around the shell of her ear in an action designed to punish Kara as much as he himself had been punished just that moment.
*****
Years of military experience told him that it was a mistake. That she had no stake in what had happened and no real need to know. Instinct told him that what tenuous hold he had managed to cultivate would be lost if he broke her faith by excluding her from these final few moments.
Time was short and the Admiral wasted none on knocking, merely opening the hatch to his son’s quarters and stepping inside.
They weren’t asleep, merely lying side by side on the bed, obviously in the wake of a very private act. Kara wasn’t naked, but may as well have been because Lee was and the rumpled bedclothes told the Admiral all that he needed to know. And even if they hadn’t, the shocked stiffening of Kara’s spine supplied all the information he needed. Lee reached for a sheet in a half-assed display of modesty. Clearly not concerned that he’d been caught fraternizing by a superior officer, or even his own father, he seemed more concerned about how Kara would react.
“It was open,” Bill explained briskly, bringing his mind back onto the business at hand, in part because time was running short and also in part because he didn’t need to know what had just happened.
Lee pinched the bridge of his nose and turned to Kara, “Helo didn’t lock it.”
“How the frak could he?” she muttered as she rolled from the bed and pulled on a set of fatigues. “They don’t lock from outside… which is where you sent him.”
Bill didn’t have time for them to start. “As much as I’d love to mediate round thirty-six of this saga, children,” his voice dripped with uncharacteristic sarcasm, perhaps indicative of how stressed he was, “Bigger things bring me here.”
Kara fastened her pants and straightened, “What?”
“There’s been an incident in the brig.”
Kara’s face blanked.
“It’s Corporal Cutter.”
*****
There was a joke that ran along the lines of: The reason that Lee Adama hated marines so much was because Kara Thrace liked them so much.
When Lee stepped into the brig and none of his standard hostility towards marines was there, Cutter knew he was well and truly frakked. He must be dying if Lee Adama had spared him the hot glances and clipped tones.
Starbuck came into view too and the proximity of her sock-clad feet reminded him that he was lying on the floor, some feet from the unconscious body of the Cylon. He wasn’t clear on the details, only that he’d gone in there to set the record straight, told the Cylon that there was no baby and then…
Cold. He was really frakking cold. Except for his spine. That was hot. Kara dropped to her knees beside him and he smiled, “Probably I should have taken you up on that offer to hit the rack the other night, huh?” Gods, was that his voice? It sounded so quiet.
A jerking in his arm suggested that she’d taken his hand and was gripping at his fingers, as he looked up at her he noticed that her breathing was unsteady - had she run all the way just to see him?
She gave a weak smile and nodded, “Pull through this and you can have a redux.”
And on that promising note, everything dulled.
*****
Kara felt Cutter’s fingers loosen in hers and… “What’s his first name?”
There were some mutters, nothing conclusive. She didn’t know his name, his real name, and it seemed that no one else did either. “What is his frakking name!?” she screeched, a little desperately.
“Adam,” the Admiral spoke gently from the doorway, “It was Adam. He was from Caprica.”
Adam Cutter. Adam Cutter from Caprica.
Kara picked up his hand a little more firmly and shuffled closer on her knees. Somewhere through the fog of a grief that she couldn’t quite justify - not since she’d only really known him a handful of weeks - she felt Lee’s hand fall heavily on her shoulder. “What can I do?” he asked.
It was a good question. Caught between a man who had died because of her and a man who surely would die because of her, there was really only one answer. “Leave. Just leave.”
Lee’s hand dropped away and she took it to mean that he’d heard the truth and need in her voice. Then she did the only thing that she could think to do.
One, two, three, four…
She started to count the dead man’s eyelashes .
Author: becisvolatile
Part: 16/?
Rating: NC-17
Pairings/Characters: Lee/Kara, Bill, Helo, Sharon, Sam, Leoben.
Word Count: 6600+
Category: Novella
Genre: Romance, Angst, Action with Romance, PWP, Drama
Archiving: The Fallout Shelter, Apollo/Starbuck Fan Fic, Beyond Insane all others please ask
Warnings: Language, violence, sexual content,
Spoilers: Up to and including S3
Summary: A Tauron poet had once contemplated intimacy and concluded that all it really required was that you could count your lover’s eyelashes.
Beta: Angylinni stars in her recurring role as patron saint of Bec and beta.
A/N: Yes. I know. Where the frak have I been? I promise the next one won't take so long.
Previous Chapters:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
A Tauron poet had once contemplated intimacy and concluded that all it really required was that you could count your lover’s eyelashes. In context and spirit, the passage had probably been a little more figurative, but Kara had liked the literal implication that with just a little concentration, intimacy was achievable.
The night after their wedding Kara had concluded that Sam had forty-eight eyelashes on the top lid of his right eye, fifty-nine on the top lid of his left. The lack of symmetry had bothered her so much that she could never bring herself to count the lashes along the lower lids.
On the most desperate of days during her captivity, she’d tried to count Leoben’s. Her mind still eased, just a little, when she remembered that the sun glancing off his pale lashes had made them impossible to count. No matter how hard she tried.
And Lee? Gods… Lee. Kara’s lips twisted, not a smile… more a sick acknowledgement of just how frakked that night had been. A blink. A single blink and her mind had been made. They’d been out in that field, Lee falling into sleep beneath her… not of his own will. Gods knew she’d felt him fighting the exhaustion and liquor for hours. Frak, maybe he’d seen it coming, but eventually he’d slept and she’d waited less than a minute to let her eyes strain against the dark and start counting. She couldn’t seem to make it into double digits. He’d move, or shift. Head to the side. A catch in his chest that stole her attention and finally with the fluttering of eyelashes, a blink that he’ll never remember, she knew that the time wasn’t right.
“Kara, I didn’t stay back so that we could stare at the wall.” Sam’s voice rushed at her like a warm breeze as his hand slid over her wrist. The debrief was done and everyone had cleared out. Everyone but Sam and, if Kara hadn’t been looking for a reason to avoid Lee, she might have mustered some annoyance at being cornered in the Ready Room.
Again.
Her eyes dropped to the space where his thumb brushed back and forward over her wrist and she had to remind herself of the fact that he didn’t have an even number of eyelashes. She shook him off. “Then why did you ask?”
Sam came up to stand beside Kara, where he’d found her frowning over some post-engagement statistics. She knew that quiet. The silence that fell when he searched her face and didn’t find the answers he was after. She left him to it. The sooner he left, the sooner she’d have to go and face Lee and that wasn’t something she was sure she could stomach. Not right after the Cylons… not even after what had happened between them.
“Is it mine?” Sam finally spoke.
Kara’s brow lifted as she turned to him with a question on her lips. But she didn’t really get as far as asking what he meant, because she wasn’t that stupid and Sam’s face was just too frakking easy to read. “Oh. Whoa. Wait.” Kara shuffled a few steps away and turned back to look at Sam, having put a safe distance between them, “Uhm… yours? You mean… like… ‘it’?” She gestured at her belly. “This ‘it’?”
She started to shake her head before Sam could even reply. “You have some serious faulty wiring, Sam. I promise you there is no ‘it’, yours or otherwise.”
Kara took a few more steps back and felt an involuntary grimace sweep across her face. If Anders had been misinformed, she was willing to bet that she herself was the source of the vicious little rumor. “Who knows?”
Sam’s eyes moved to the floor and Kara had to stifle a groan.
Everyone. Everyone knew and… oh, but didn’t that just make perfect sense?
Lee’s declarations of unending support. “Come on Sam. I’m being straight with you here, no kid. Return the favor.”
“It’s been spread pretty far and wide, Kara. Lots of speculation laced in but the loudest whispers are saying-”
“Cylon,” Kara cut in, “They think it’s a frakkin’ baby toaster.”
Sam held his hands wide and gave her a sad little smile. “There was a second there where it could have been, but then maybe your Gods aren’t that cruel.” The fleeting hope on Sam’s face told her that maybe he hoped they were.
Kara quashed the desire to reach out and touch him. Her sympathy at this juncture would be a lie. Sam didn’t need or want it. She pulled in a slow breath before finally asking, “Where did you hear it?”
*****
“Dee?” Helo couldn’t believe his ears.
Sharon shrugged, “I heard her.”
“Look, I don’t like the woman, but even I don’t think she’d sink to that. It’s just vicious. She has a well developed survival instinct, if nothing else.”
Sharon continued to nudge Hera’s toy blocks into a corner with her foot as she spoke to her husband. “Be that as it may, she was holding court in the head, whispering about how much Lee was suffering, tied to a woman about to have a Cylon.”
“Could you have heard it wrong?” Helo picked up a bottle of water, but pursed his lips just shy of taking a sip. If it was true, they were all in trouble and if it wasn’t true… then Dee was in trouble.
“Maybe.” Having cleared away all of Hera’s toys, Sharon dropped down onto the sofa beside Helo. “She stopped talking as I got there, so it’s possible.”
Helo groaned a little and shifted on the sofa to drop his head to his wife’s lap. “But not probable. You think it’s true?”
“That Kara’s going to have Leoben’s baby?”
He shrugged a little; he didn’t picture Kara handling something like that well. Surely she’d have given some sort of sign? Maybe her problems with sex were a big frakking sign and he’d just missed it. “I have to talk to her before Gaeta gives her some hand knitted booties in the mess and she tries to airlock his ass. If it’s true well… I’ll be planning a baby shower. The first function Kara’s ever attended where she won’t be drinking me under the table. If it isn’t? Better she know what’s going around.”
*****
Cutter kicked back in the small annex of the brig and listened. The Leoben had been calling out since he’d started duty and though he was only an hour into his watch, he’d found out during the change of watch that the Cylon had been quite vocal since Kara had left.
Cutter picked up a small ball and started to bounce it against the wall. He couldn’t figure out what it was that pissed him off so much about the situation. He caught the ball in one hand and clenched his jaw as the Cylon called for him.
It didn’t sit right that the Cylon could sit back in his cell with a victorious smile ghosting across his face. False or not, Cutter didn’t want to concede any victory to the enemy -especially not when it came at a cost to Starbuck. He knew she could look after herself, would probably twist his nuts clear off if she thought he was concerned about her. But he was. The short time he’d spent in her company had confirmed that she was one of the rare good guys. A bitch with balls and a mouth to make a grown man wince - but still good. She still flinched when Adama hurt. Still shook with the effort of containing her own tears when she left Lee’s side.
And not once had she ever taken his chair.
Cutter stood and let his chair slide back, it grated through the brig but he didn’t mind. He was going to take the smile of the Cylon’s face - the least he could do was let the frakker know he was coming.
*****
By the time she’d made it back to their quarters Kara had resolved that she did not, in fact, want to count Lee’s eyelashes. She wanted to pull each and every single mother-frakking one from his face.
Frakker. She ground her teeth a little as she shouldered her way into the empty room. He’d thought she was pregnant and now that the shock was wearing off she finally got it. Lee loved her. Like… really.
Oh…oh…oh.
That was going to be a problem, because it was one thing for him to say it, ad nauseam. But it was something else entirely for him to mean it.
Gods, what if Lee had managed to count her eyelashes?
Funny, she thought as she kicked off her flight suit and stomped towards the shower shedding clothes, that he’d say it and say it… but it took something stupid - something unwitting like Lee believing the biggest load of crap to circulate since that thing about her going down on Racetrack in the head - for her to actually buy it for a second.
Frak, were they ever going to get it right? Kara turned the shower on and waited for the water to warm before stepping underneath the spray. She grinned up into the hot water. Of course they weren’t. They didn’t do right. They did right now and right here and right when I frakking say so. But maybe just hours ago Lee had come so close to right that… what? She grabbed at a pot of dried algae by-product. Was everything they used these days made of frakking algae? She scrubbed the scentless substance over her shoulders and fell a little deeper into thought.
That thing… after the oh-my-frakking-Gods sex? That wasn’t love. They were uteral contractions interrupting her brain functions and if the klaxon hadn’t sounded when it had she might’ve frakked things right up and professed her love for him. Love that, realistically, she could never back up. Not with Earth still out of reach and Cylons clinging to the bulkheads in plain sight. Oh, Lee wanted her. He even wanted her burdens and she could manage that… but frak, she thought she’d be sharing a secret or two with him. But to Lee it had been so much more. He’d been willing to claim a child. Not his child. Not a human child. A baby toaster.
And she didn’t doubt for a second that he’d have done it. She could see it with sickening clarity. She’d be unstable, she’d frakking lose her shit every second she thought about it growing inside of her and Lee? Lee would hold her and cover for her and make jokes in the mess about Starbuck’s cravings and whatever expectant fathers were meant to talk about. What was in it for him? There was no gain in that. Just loss and… frak, she was big enough to admit that pregnant and trapped, she’d do nothing but make him miserable.
He was robbing her of choice because how could she say no to commitment like that? How could she walk from him when finally she had proof that he might just follow her?
“You’re thinking. You’re wet and glistening and naked… and thinking.” Helo propped a shoulder against the frosted glass of the small bathroom and filled the small space with his bulk. “The wet, glistening and naked are always good. But the thinking never bodes well. Not with you.”
Kara snorted and cut off the water. “Towel.”
Helo picked up a towel but made no move to swing it over the shower door. Instead he allowed himself a very slow appraisal of Kara’s body. His eyes slowed over her belly and Kara rolled her eyes. “No, I’m not.”
His eyebrow shifted, “You sure?”
“Yup.”
“How sure?”
Kara pointed to a faint mark on her right shoulder; it looked like a small insect bite. “Cottle stuck me with a contraceptive device, before that all the regular tests came back clean.”
“Okay.”
Kara crossed her arms over her chest, making some token gesture to suggest she was cold. Helo had seen the package many times, but somehow it didn’t feel like it had back then, when they’d both had less weighing them down and that stupid grin and the sheer size of him was enough to have her shrugging off her reservations and having a little fun with him. “Can I have my towel?”
Helo’s grin grew a little as he leaned more heavily against the glass. “When I’m ready.”
“I promise you,” Lee’s voice cut through the dissipating steam of the bathroom, “That you are more than ready .”
If it was possible, in such a small space, Helo jumped a foot clear into the air and lobbed the towel over the glass with such force that Kara nearly missed it entirely. She caught just the edge, narrowly saving it from hitting the wet tiles and buried her grin in the fabric. She tried not to giggle, but as Helo edged to the side and Lee shouldered past him, she couldn’t help but find amusement in the way that Lee’s shorter frame seemed to dwarf Helo with sheer annoyance. “I like you, Agathon, but I will airlock you, am I understood?”
“Yes sir.”
“Leave.”
Kara’s giggle turned into a snort and then faded quickly when she realized Lee had turned on her and Helo had vacated their quarters. “What the frak was that?”
“I was having a shower.”
“And Helo’s presence was required? Frak it, Kara, I just… Gods you drive me insane. You know that, right?” He passed a hand over his face.
“Nothing happened.” Gods, she was surprised at how frakking whiny and defensive she sounded. “He was here looking out for me.”
“Yeah, I did happen to catch the looking.”
“It was nothing. Just… really old times. Like, ancient times, Lee, and I don’t need to justify this to you.”
Lee pulled a face and nodded. It was his ‘Lee gets it face’, which was a load of crap because he only used that face when he wanted to make some derisive comment. He used the face to let her know that the only thing he ‘got’ was that she was full of shit. He started to wander out of the bathroom, but turned back as if something had just occurred to him. “Out of curiosity, what is it you just washed from your body?”
Kara’s lips formed a stiff line.
Lee smiled, “Yeah. Me. So I’m thinking that maybe you do need to justify it. Okay?” He stepped from the bathroom leaving Kara fuming in his wake.
Frak you too, she thought as she followed him into their room. “Didn’t I put you on CAP?” she muttered as she passed him on her way to the wardrobe.
“I swapped.”
“I didn’t approve that,” Kara noted a little churlishly as she pulled on her panties.
“Yeah, well, I’m frakking the CAG; I figured it gave me a little wiggle room.” Lee dropped himself down onto the bed and propped himself up on his elbows to watch Kara wander around the room pulling on a shirt and an oversized pair of socks but not much else. “Also, for the record, I plan on frakking you solidly into tomorrow too, so you might want to rethink the panties. You won’t be needing them.”
Kara paused where she was standing. Lee was, and had been, many things, but he’d never been blatant or crass. That was usually her job. She narrowed her eyes in his direction, trying to convey irritation she didn’t feel because damned if her body hadn’t kicked into overdrive with his words. Being frakked into tomorrow didn’t sound all that terrible. Just complicated. She was still reeling from the idea of just how far Lee was willing to go to back up his insane declarations of love, frakking him now would just compound things and make him think that he really was going to have things his way, finally.
Hunh. His way. What had she done to him? How badly had she - had the war - frakked up the pride of the fleet if he really was willing to play second string to her and claim the mongrel Cylon runt of a woman who was half spare parts and all screwed in the head. That wasn’t love, it was grounds for being scheduled.
From where he was half draped across the end of the bed, Lee threw up his hands. “You’re thinking so loud I can practically hear it, Kara. So just… tell me what a dick I am and we can move on. I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now. That’s what Helo was here for, right? Shoot the breeze, stare at your rack and share scuttlebutt?”
Kara sneered a little at his back as she mounted the bed near the pillows and kicked her way beneath the covers. “He was going to scrub my back too. Before you interrupted us.”
Lee didn’t even bother to turn back to her as he yanked the zipper on his flight suit down.
Fine, he wanted to discuss it? How about they start with what had been wrong with Lee’s assumption that she was pregnant. “You thought I’d frakked Leoben? A Cylon?”
Lee stood and dragged his flight suit down, leaving him in shorts and tanks. Kara’s eyes fell to the watermarks forming a neat oval on his lower back, marking where sweat had been and dried. He didn’t look back at her, but to his credit he had the good grace not to point out that she’d been doing just that with Sam. “I knew it,” he muttered as he hauled his tanks over his head.
“Knew what?” Kara tried not to drool as he casually stepped out of his shorts and moved towards the shower.
“I knew, even when I was running here to just frakking be with you, that there would be a way that you would turn this against me. Clearly, I can’t do the right thing with you. But stupid me, stupid frakking Lee, thinks that maybe if you’re not pregnant that things might just be a little more clear cut. I’ll never learn, right? So have it out, Kara. Yell, throw a couple punches, break something, I’ll be in the shower. Hell, call Sam for a quick frak to spite me. Just let me know when you’re done.”
Gods, he sounded tired. Maybe even a little disappointed. Kara frowned, burrowing a little deeper into the bed that they’d vacated not two hours earlier, and for a few seconds tried to see things his way.
They’d frakked. It had been… Gods, it had been beyond amazing… and then what? Cylons, flight, fighting. Doing what they were made for. Some time after that he’d been told that she wasn’t really pregnant, but who knew that? Half the Battlestar was convinced that she was, but only three people - five if you counted Helo and, by extension, Sharon - knew the truth of it. Cottle might have told Lee, but hadn’t Trucker taken a hit during the attack? No, Cottle would have been seeing to the injured first. That left Cutter and the Admiral. She almost felt sorry for the Old Man, stuck as he was between them. It must be tough shit when your one time almost daughter-in-law is frakking her way through your sons and leaving them dead and worse in her wake. Really, she was amazed he hadn’t airlocked her long before. So he’d done it. He’d been the one to pull Lee’s head from his ass and force his own son to realize that she wasn’t knocked up. Just frakking, albeit indirectly, with his head once more. And what had he done? Ran. For her. Hadn’t he said that? He’d come to be with her, thinking that maybe a little of life’s debris had been cleared from their relationship only to find her naked with another man. Admittedly, even Lee couldn’t really find anything untoward in her being with Helo. But that hadn’t mattered because she’d done nothing but bitch at him and tear into him for thinking she’d slept with Leoben which, frankly, she was pretty sure actually had happened. She just wasn’t clear how, or on whose terms, the supposed coupling had taken place.
That didn’t mean she owed him anything, she reminded herself as she moved onto her back. Frak, she could have a change of heart and purpose and a blinding moment of discovery at the realization of her fate… but could she just once admit that maybe Lee was in the right?
Not without being damn near mortally wounded by it.
In the bathroom Lee cut the shower and there was a moment of silence as he listened for a clue as to what she might be up to before she heard the rustle of him dragging a towel over his head. Clearly he’d decided that she was not, in fact, banging her husband against the bulkheads. That deviant part in her mind, the part that she could never contain, warred with itself, pissed that she’d missed an opportunity to frak things up and pleased that she hadn’t done exactly as Lee had predicted.
She sat up in the bed and watched Lee step back into the room, still toweling his hair and dripping water onto the floor. That alone told her that he wasn’t as ambivalent as he seemed. It was too calculated, too choreographed. His hair was dry but he still held that one arm over his head, displaying the neat group of muscles in his arm to their full advantage. Droplets of water ran from his chest and over his flat stomach, drawing her eye to the heavy swing of his cock and the flex of his thick quads.
Lee was playing his final card. But the thing that really struck Kara was that he didn’t even know it. He thought he was playing on her drive for sex, but what Kara read was something too much like her own doubts about her right to be with the man standing just feet away. Who was she to lay any claim to him when all she could offer was trouble?
There on his face Kara could read something startlingly similar. Who was he to offer anything more than a few easy fraks?
It was there, impulse and necessity converging to stop her mind and just propel her forward and out off the bed. The shock on Lee’s face was almost insulting, but she hardly registered it as she reached up and pulled the towel from his fingers and swept it once across his chest, then up and around his shoulders as she started to dry his body. Her mind searched for another instance where she’d been this tender with his body, but even New Caprica had been borne of an urgency that ate away at the sort of gentle desire to just touch that she felt then and there.
Kara was trying to say sorry without ever really saying it, or even acknowledging what there was to apologize for. She knew that if she started cataloguing her sins she’d drown in them, or remember Lee’s own transgressions, and she was so tired of that. Pitting sin against sin and seeing who outweighed who. It didn’t help them and it sure as frak didn’t absolve them. They had both been so consistently wrong that neither had a foot to stand on when it came to moral high grounds.
Kara stalked around Lee and lowered the towel to pass it over his ass and smiled gently as the tight flex of muscles belied his frustration at her ministrations. She’d diligently avoided any of Lee’s ‘hot spots’ and with reason, she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. She dropped the towel and raked her fingertips across one shoulder and down diagonally over the ridge of his spine and the curve of his ass. He made a noise low in his throat, a bizarre mix of frustration, need and confusion.
“I know,” she murmured as she dropped a kiss to his shoulder blade and stepped with him, keeping to his back, when he tried to face her. “We’re strong, Lee. So strong. Even when we don’t feel it, when we can’t see it, it’s there because we’re still here and that has to count for something. There’s so much we’ve survived. We’ve survived wars; we’ve survived Cylons and dogfights. But there’s a limit. There has to be. We aren’t machines and we have limits. Sometimes I think you’re my limit. Whatever else I’ve survived, I don’t think I’ll survive you. I don’t think we’ll survive each other.”
She felt his head shake as he tried to speak, “Don’t-”
Her fingers dug a little more persistently into his back. “I know you think it’s possible. I know you think the Gods should bow to the way you want things to be. Gods, I know that if you could, you’d wrest their will, maybe even mine, to yours until they aligned just so and you had things your way.” She stopped and moved to his front, dropping to her knees so slowly that her thighs ached. She spoke against his belly, not quite finished with her descent. “Maybe it wouldn’t even be so bad,” she said in a small voice as her knees hit the floor. She contemplated him for a long moment. He was hard and ready and trying desperately not to lean in. She rewarded his restraint, skimming a full lower lip over the head of his cock as spoke her final piece, “But you can’t, Lee. You can’t and I won’t.”
But that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t give him what little she could.
*****
Lee clenched his fists as Kara’s tongue traced a punishing route along the underside of his cock, flicking at water that still clung to him. He closed his eyes and tried to pinpoint the place where the heat of her tongue pressed and lapped against him, but it was pointless. As always, he was incapable of feeling the finer things, instead overwhelmed but just the mere sensation of her - by no means a precise feeling, but exacting all the same. It was like a wall of heat, forcing against him and catching him off guard. Gods knew it was only her mouth that wrapped around him, only her fingertips that glanced across the back of his thighs, but it was a feeling akin to being body slammed in a rough match of Pyramid.
Somewhere in his head, his higher brain functions kicked over. He’d never settle. Never. And maybe she’d never give more but he’d take what she did give and if he took enough maybe one day he’d wake up and be surprised to find that it was enough. He doubted it, but it was all he had to go on.
Her tongue did something and Lee’s knees buckled. Frak, it was impossible to maintain righteous indignation with her on her knees and that mouth actually doing some good for a change. Gods, he was easy. What had she called Sam? A “little whore”? He slid his hand through her hair and gripped, pulling her back and tilting her face up, knowing damn well he was probably hurting her. “You think a blow job is going to make this better, Kara?”
“I don’t know, Lee. A little while ago you seemed to think a good lay would do the job.”
Lee winced, wishing he’d never taken her mouth away because now she was talking and why could she never just frakking give? Just an inch. Half an inch. A hair’s breadth. He threw aside the idea of feeding himself back into her mouth and reached down to drag her forcefully to her feet before throwing her to the bed none too gently.
Sex wouldn’t make things better, he knew that, but if he did it well enough, it might stem the spew of vitriol from her mouth for just a few seconds.
It was his own fault; he’d left that bathroom with every intent of seducing her. He knew that much about her weaknesses. She liked his body. Always had. She’d liked a lot of bodies in her time but he knew his held a special sway over her. In the intimacy of their home Lee had hoped that just playing on the one thing she’d always appreciated and - it seemed - had started to crave again would be enough to keep her close in a physical sense. All joking aside, if he’d suspected for a second that she’d go and frak Anders he might have tied her to the bed and vented the Cylon frakker for just breathing the same air as Kara. He could do that now. Sam had surrendered the playing field and as the man living with Kara he had the right to be possessive.
Not that she’d agree.
And not that it would do him any good, because it wouldn’t take long before he caught Helo watching her shower or a Cylon boasting about fathering her children or whatever the frak she’d dreamed up to punish him.
Kara shuffled up onto the bed, resting on her elbows as she sneered at him, “I guess we won’t bother then?”
Like frak they wouldn’t. She’d started it and he wasn’t going to let her punish him purely because he wasn’t satisfied with just her mouth. He knelt on the mattress, not bothering to turn from her, instead taking a position between her sprawled legs, smack in the center of her field of vision. He was hard and ready and he wasn’t going to let her shy from that. After all, she’d been the one to work him into a state.
He reached for one sock-clad foot as she spoke, “And if I’d been in the shower with Helo? Would we be doing this?”
Gods help him but, yeah, he was frakking sure of it. He didn’t bother to take the thick socks from her feet, didn’t even really care that she still wore panties and a C-Bucs shirt (a dig at him, he had no doubt). He dragged her first by the foot, then hooked his hands behind her knees and pulled her further until he was kneeling fully between her thighs. “I see this for what it is, Kara. Took some time, but I think I do. You’re so bent on this idea that you’re going to hurt me that you’ll force things until you’ve proven yourself right.” He might have stripped her off, but as she simply fell back onto the mattress, her body easing, he knew that she was just too fragile to bare her body to him. And what did it matter? Fully-clothed or naked, Lee was beginning to think that he knew her.
She could keep her clothes; he decided as he lifted her hips and hooked a finger into the crotch of her panties, they weren’t going to keep him from her.
The fabric of her panties was warm and wet; he pressed his knuckle a little closer to her and felt a slick heat that shot up into his shoulders and through his chest. The knowledge that, at the very least, her body wanted him yet again was enough to fortify him. “I need your help, Kara. Quit playing like a frakking rag doll.”
Without question she propped back onto one elbow and reached down with her other hand to push Lee’s fingers away and hold her panties aside herself. Lee’s eyes fell and he marveled for a second at just how easy it was for her to offer her body in lieu of all the other things he wanted from her. But he was human and - frak, what a body. He took his cock in hand and slowly teased his head over her clit. Looking up just enough to catch the way her head rolled back as her breath hitched. He played for as long as he could tolerate it, long enough to see Kara’s nipples bead beneath the t-shirt and her knees spread wider still, allowing him a view he’d relish for the rest of his life. When he reached the limits of a mere mortal, he used one hand to urge her closer and the other to guide himself into her.
Lee had to remind himself that it had only been a couple of hours since he’d last been inside of her, because damned if it didn’t feel like he’d been waiting for that moment all his life. At first it was uneasy and tight, painfully so. But as Kara wrapped her legs around his waist and sat up, encircling his neck with her arms and bringing her torso flush with his, the tension eased into something amazingly right. His thighs ached a little, beneath Kara he was still sitting back on his haunches, but with her wrapped around him he was able to lift and shift her as the worst of his cramps came and subsided, setting a neat rhythm as she began to buck against and ride him.
Her arms wrapped more tightly around his neck, her breasts pressing against his chest, as his fingers dug into her hips and her breath was coming fast and hot in his ear, signaling that she was really frakking close. Lee reached up with one hand and grabbed at a wrist, pulling her arms from his neck and shoulders and sitting back a little. Her face turned to the side and he shook his head, “I want to see you,” he said hoarsely, “I want to see you look at me.”
She shook her head and rode a little faster, determined that she wouldn’t look at him. Fine. Lee drew his own thumb into his mouth before dropping to between their bodies and zeroing in on Kara’s clit, pressing against her hard.
She made a noise caught somewhere between a hiss and gasp and snapped her eyes to his face. “That’s right, Kara, my face is right here.” This time she didn’t look away and he apologized by way of slowly rolling his thumb over her and easing the pressure of his touch. To her credit, she still didn’t look away. But to Lee’s annoyance she didn’t bother to hide the reluctance in her eyes and not even the intruding lust and - frak, he wasn’t going to name it if she couldn’t - whatever else he saw there didn’t ease the pain in knowing that no matter how actively she was participating, she wasn’t committing.
She came quickly and turned her face away instantly. Lee knew she had more mileage in her but suspected that she’d made it easy so that she could look away. So as she rocked out the last of her climax Lee began his, his eyes falling bitterly to the sharp line of her cheekbone as he shamelessly parodied his dead brother and ran his lips around the shell of her ear in an action designed to punish Kara as much as he himself had been punished just that moment.
*****
Years of military experience told him that it was a mistake. That she had no stake in what had happened and no real need to know. Instinct told him that what tenuous hold he had managed to cultivate would be lost if he broke her faith by excluding her from these final few moments.
Time was short and the Admiral wasted none on knocking, merely opening the hatch to his son’s quarters and stepping inside.
They weren’t asleep, merely lying side by side on the bed, obviously in the wake of a very private act. Kara wasn’t naked, but may as well have been because Lee was and the rumpled bedclothes told the Admiral all that he needed to know. And even if they hadn’t, the shocked stiffening of Kara’s spine supplied all the information he needed. Lee reached for a sheet in a half-assed display of modesty. Clearly not concerned that he’d been caught fraternizing by a superior officer, or even his own father, he seemed more concerned about how Kara would react.
“It was open,” Bill explained briskly, bringing his mind back onto the business at hand, in part because time was running short and also in part because he didn’t need to know what had just happened.
Lee pinched the bridge of his nose and turned to Kara, “Helo didn’t lock it.”
“How the frak could he?” she muttered as she rolled from the bed and pulled on a set of fatigues. “They don’t lock from outside… which is where you sent him.”
Bill didn’t have time for them to start. “As much as I’d love to mediate round thirty-six of this saga, children,” his voice dripped with uncharacteristic sarcasm, perhaps indicative of how stressed he was, “Bigger things bring me here.”
Kara fastened her pants and straightened, “What?”
“There’s been an incident in the brig.”
Kara’s face blanked.
“It’s Corporal Cutter.”
*****
There was a joke that ran along the lines of: The reason that Lee Adama hated marines so much was because Kara Thrace liked them so much.
When Lee stepped into the brig and none of his standard hostility towards marines was there, Cutter knew he was well and truly frakked. He must be dying if Lee Adama had spared him the hot glances and clipped tones.
Starbuck came into view too and the proximity of her sock-clad feet reminded him that he was lying on the floor, some feet from the unconscious body of the Cylon. He wasn’t clear on the details, only that he’d gone in there to set the record straight, told the Cylon that there was no baby and then…
Cold. He was really frakking cold. Except for his spine. That was hot. Kara dropped to her knees beside him and he smiled, “Probably I should have taken you up on that offer to hit the rack the other night, huh?” Gods, was that his voice? It sounded so quiet.
A jerking in his arm suggested that she’d taken his hand and was gripping at his fingers, as he looked up at her he noticed that her breathing was unsteady - had she run all the way just to see him?
She gave a weak smile and nodded, “Pull through this and you can have a redux.”
And on that promising note, everything dulled.
*****
Kara felt Cutter’s fingers loosen in hers and… “What’s his first name?”
There were some mutters, nothing conclusive. She didn’t know his name, his real name, and it seemed that no one else did either. “What is his frakking name!?” she screeched, a little desperately.
“Adam,” the Admiral spoke gently from the doorway, “It was Adam. He was from Caprica.”
Adam Cutter. Adam Cutter from Caprica.
Kara picked up his hand a little more firmly and shuffled closer on her knees. Somewhere through the fog of a grief that she couldn’t quite justify - not since she’d only really known him a handful of weeks - she felt Lee’s hand fall heavily on her shoulder. “What can I do?” he asked.
It was a good question. Caught between a man who had died because of her and a man who surely would die because of her, there was really only one answer. “Leave. Just leave.”
Lee’s hand dropped away and she took it to mean that he’d heard the truth and need in her voice. Then she did the only thing that she could think to do.
One, two, three, four…
She started to count the dead man’s eyelashes .