fic: edges of intimacy
Author: theviolonist
Pairing: Kara/Lee
Wordcount: c. 5K
Summary: It starts with the vegetable shortage.
Spoilers for all of season 1 and 2, just to be sure. AU after Bastille Day.
Rating: R for language and sex
Notes: And - much thanks to my beta, callmeonetrack, without whom this fic probably wouldn't be half of what it is. Thanks for being ruthless, love!
i.
It starts with the vegetable shortage.
The Galactica isn't spared the hunger but it only witnesses the civil unrest from afar. They're a military ship; people are used to gritting their teeth and shutting the frak up. Thank the gods, that's all Kara has to say about it, because if she has to hear another nugget complain she's going to deck someone, and another week in the brig isn't really in her plans right now.
Lee looks up at her when she walks into the mess hall; his face lights up a little when he sees her.
"Whatcha doing?" she asks, trying to ignore the hunger that's digging into her stomach. She sits next to him, her elbows on the table.
He sighs, leaning his shoulder into hers. "Trying to organize rationing. It's a frakking nightmare."
"Yeah, well. Not the apocalypse for nothing, right?"
He shoots her a small smile. "I guess. Wanna help?"
She twirls her fork between her fingers. "I'd rather eat soap." Then she remembers that it's not going to be long before there's a shortage of that, too, and it's not as funny anymore.
Lee slides a stack of paperwork across the table. "Get to work, Lieutenant."
ii.
The food problem is temporarily solved thanks to Racetrack and Skulls, of all people: they find a planet with enough resources to stock the ships with enough food for a few months, and the fleet still has the water from the moon Boomer and Crashdown found. They're starting to lack pretty much every other imaginable essential, though. Commander Adama’s more and more frequent inspirational speeches cover that... for a time.
Lee knows they're entering the hard phase, and if he were his father he'd talk about sticking together in hard times and cohesion and all that crap, but the truth is he's not his father and the lack of shaving cream makes him want to punch someone. He hasn’t had a drink or a smoke in nearly two months. Kara trades her winnings at triad against what she needs, but Lee doesn’t join the nightly games. He hasn’t forgotten her words; they still echo in his head sometimes. You’re the CAG, we’re not friends. So he keeps his distance, and he keeps his mouth shut about the things he might need.
He looks at her mechanically in the bunks, the way her towel makes a crease against her skin that lets him see the dip of her back. It drops and she flings a bra over her head, unbothered, a true military chick. Lee looks away, trying not to blush.
The truth is, if it were only that, it would be fine: he hasn’t gotten laid in forever and a bit of sexual frustration is to be expected, even if it’s a bit uncomfortable that it’s over a friend. But he also notices the circles under her eyes when she does three CAP rotations in a row because a pilot is down, the way she won’t complain about anything but sometimes sags against him a little at the funerals, her loud, triumphant laugh when she wins at triad, the way she twists a strand of hair between her fingers when she’s trying to remember something. That’s more worrying.
"Cigar?" he hears above him.
He looks up: Kara's there in all her glory, black bra and regulation pants, her wet hair pushed back, handing him a cigar. He takes it warily.
"Not that I mind, but what did I do to deserve that?"
She shrugs. "Can’t a friend give her CAG a congratulatory cigar?"
She sounds a little nervous, like she's not sure what he's going to answer, and he remembers suddenly that she never takes anything for granted. Lee takes the cigar and lets her light the cigar for him. Her thumb grazes his cheek when she curves her hand around the flame, but she moves away before he can lean into the touch.
“What d’you have to congratulate me for?” he asks as he releases a puff of smoke. Gods, it feels heavenly.
She shrugs. A little smile quirks the corner of her mouth and he tries not to read surviving in it, but it’s hard.
iii.
There's a wave of suicides aboard the civvie ships after a particularly violent Cylon attack. They've had their share of casualties since the original attack, both murder and suicide, but they were sparse, isolated incidents. This is new. Kara watches the President's face tighten as she hears the news during her visit on the Galactica, standing on the hangar deck with Billy behind her, probably thinking about her frakking whiteboard.
They don't talk about it between themselves, especially not between pilots (it's a well-known fact that the knuckledraggers are just a bunch of gossips), but it's hard not to notice that they're walking on eggshells around each other for the next few weeks.
Lee runs up to her one morning during her jog. There's a bead of sweat on his neck, running along one of the protruding veins. Kara pretends to herself that she doesn't want to lick it off.
"What do you think?"
"About what?"
"The suicides."
Of course Lee wants to talk about it. Kara blinks, annoyed.
Her jaw clenches; she starts running faster. “I don’t.”
“Come on, Kara. You have an opinion about everything, I’m sure this isn’t an exception.”
“You want a position paper, Lee? Five thousand words about how I feel about those idiots throwing themselves out airlocks?” Kara rolls her eyes. “Sure, I’ll get right on it after I finish teaching the nuggets how to draw enemy fire to their sorry asses instead of all those civvie ships out there.”
She grinds her teeth, to keep the words in, but it’s already too late. Lee’s staring at her, all drop-mouthed and raised eyebrows.
“Whoa, Kara, maybe we should talk--”
She stops, hands on her hips. “Look, Lee, I know you fancy yourself a humanitarian and all that, and it’s great, it really is, but maybe I just don’t have time have time to worry about the people - the people I put my life on the line for every day - blowing their frakking brains, okay?”
She’s practically yelling now, and Kara inhales deeply and takes a step back, wondering where the hell that came from. Lee recoils to and he stares at her hard, a hurt expression in his eyes for about half a second, before it’s all steely CAG face and rigid jaw again. Frak him.
“Make a hole,” she barks at a couple of deckhands, and she runs away, breathing hard until she can't feel his eyes boring into her back anymore.
iv.
Joker, one of the pilots, blows a bullet through his skull during lunch break the day after his partner dies. It makes a frakking mess in his bunk. It was a prime location, biggest locker, closest to the head, but none of her fellow pilots take it over, even after they clean the blood spatters off the bulkhead. Kara might’ve expected as much of the nuggets, but Joker and Scorcher are on their third tour already. Still, they whisper about bad luck when they think Kara can’t hear, so after midday CAP, when most of them are off shift napping in their racks, she throws the locker door open with a clang and dumps her stuff inside. Throws her pillow on the mattress and plops down on it, her elbows crossed behind her head, getting comfortable.
She doesn't sleep for the first three days anyway. She tosses and turns and curses everyone she can think of, but the stench of death is still too overwhelming to sleep. Lee glances at her during the pre-flight briefs, clearly worried. She ducks her head.
v.
Someone steals the deck of cards and all of a sudden they can't play triad. Lee watches Kara go from white to red when she discovers, and yells herself hoarse.
He grabs a bottle of ambrosia and follows her back to the bunks after she storms out, flashing his table an apologetic smile. They just nod at him, clearly used to the push and pull of Starbuck and Apollo. Lee isn't sure how he feels about that.
He sets the bottle next to her, and it hits him how much a half-full bottle is worth these days, how many people would actually fight him to have it.
"Who’d you think did it?" he asks when he can't figure out a way to start the conversation.
"Who the frak cares," she says angrily, grabbing the bottle and taking a furious swig. "If I get a hold of them they're not going to make it out in one piece."
He laughs, hollow. "Didn't know you were so passionate about triad," he says.
She deflates, her head rolling on her shoulder until it hits the wall. "Yeah, well," she says. "It's not like there's much to do for fun around here these days."
Her eyes are half-closed and he can see the veins on her eyelids, like a tiny network of rivers. It’s what he imagines Earth would look like, when he dares to imagine it. Seeing her vulnerable makes him want to do something stupid like hold her, so he sits down on the bed and settles next to her, their hips pressed together. He can feel the heat of her skin through her tanks, distracting as always.
He catches her smirking suddenly, the familiar insolence back in her demeanor. Electricity mixed with apprehension tingle at the end of his spine. "There's still frakking," she says casually.
"What?" he splutters.
She bumps him with her hip, surprisingly gentle for her. "For fun. There's still frakking."
He laughs nervously. He can't remember the last time he got laid. Back on Caprica, that's for sure, but even then he'd been busy with work and still recovering from Gianne, so it'd been a bit of a dry spell. "I guess."
She's serious again in the space of a second. She drives him crazy, always pulling one-eightys on him when he least expects her to.
"We're not going to make it, you know," she says brusquely, bringing the bottle to her lips again.
"What?" He hates feeling like he’s a step behind her.
"To Earth, if we ever find it." Figures, that she would talk about Earth just when he’s thinking she wears the desire for it on her frakking face. She takes a breath next to him, and he startles out of it. She doesn’t notice. "We’re never gonna have those bright, shiny futures on Earth. We’re not. Because we go out, over and over again, until some day some metal motherfrakker is gonna catch us on a bad day and just blow us away."
Lee thinks about arguing with her, trying to persuade her that they're going to make it alive. Instead he says, "Bright, shiny futures are overrated anyway.”
She's silent for a moment, her elbows resting on her knees, her face half obscured by the shadows. He looks at her from the corner of his eye. He knows she doesn’t want to be protected, but he wants to, he can’t help it.
"And now we can't even play frakking triad," she mumbles after a few minutes.
There's nothing else to do, so he bursts out laughing. Her head whips towards him, surprise flashing briefly on her face, then she joins in. By the time the laughter stops she's leaning heavily on him, and they’re too close for comfort and he can feel her breath on his lips and really, damn him for not being able to think when she's looking at him like that, her mouth quirked in a grin and her face framed by messy bangs.
Something sizzles between them, elastic electricity stretching between their bodies. Lee feels her chest heaving; her breasts graze against his arm and they both startle almost guiltily. They don't stop looking at each other, though; maybe the end of the worlds really is all it takes to bring Lee Adama and Kara Thrace together. It would figure.
She leans in, or maybe he does -
The door bangs open, and Boomer walks into the room. Kara jumps to her feet, busying herself with something in her locker. If Lee didn't know her so well, he would swear her cheeks were flushed.
"Am I interrupting something?" Boomer asks with a shit-eating grin, looking for all the world like she’s got her gossip for the week.
"Frak off," Kara says.
Boomer laughs. "Maybe you ought to relieve all that tension, Apollo," she flings at him. "Starbuck there obviously needs it."
Lee blushes. It makes Boomer crow with laughter. She collects her towel and exits the room.
“Frakking bitch,” Kara mutters when the door closes behind her, but it’s half-hearted and Lee can see a smile tugging at her mouth where she’s hidden behind the metal frame of the locker.
“So, what are you going to do about the game?” he asks when the silence gets too heavy and starts filling his brain with images he can’t deal with (her against the hatch, panting and flushed, her chest heaving -), like every time he finds himself in proximity of both her and alcohol.
She ducks from behind the locker with a predatory grin. Lee swallows. “Hunt the bastard down.”
Kara takes the bottle of ambrosia from the bed and presents it to him but he shakes his head. He watches her: she raises the bottle to her lips and drinks, her head tipped back. He can’t help but let his eyes slide on the curve of her jaw, the way she swallows. She looks down at him.
He’s not religious, but right now he’s thinking about the universe and hoping it will tip a little in his favor, for once.
The universe is a frakking tease, though, and Kara’s no better, so of course that’s when the alarm starts, blaring shrilly in their ears. Gaeta’s voice rings through the speakers.
“Action stations, action stations! Set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill. I say again, action stations, set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill.”
They’ve heard it so many times in the past few weeks that they’re reaching for their flight suits without even thinking. Their hands bump and a flash of heat courses up Lee’s arm, drawing a small shiver out of him. This is not the end of it, that’s for sure.
Starbuck and Apollo destroy two baseships by themselves that night; the next day the deck of cards is back in its place, and Lee pretends not to notice Chopper’s black eye during the pre-flight brief.
vi.
Sometimes Kara thinks wherever the frakking toasters are hiding, they must be laughing their asses off. There’s been three riots this week alone and the number of civilian casualties is climbing at an alarming rate. Of course they can’t send marines without the civvies crying at martial law and the civilian police is a bunch of do-nothings who have about as much authority as Lee when he tells the pilots that fraternizing is forbidden. (Of course, it doesn’t help that they all clearly think he and Kara are frakking like rabbits every chance they get).
Kara isn’t one to care about politics, but this is just ridiculous. She didn’t survive to see humanity die out because humans aren’t smart enough to understand that the apocalypse is a shit time for civil war.
She grabs a pair of tanks and heads for the hangar deck. Maybe she won’t feel that frakking pissed off after a little greasy work on her bird.
It works a charm for a while, and she’s coating a minuscule leak in her gas tank (thank the gods she noticed it) when she hears Cally. “They have a point, though. I mean, it’s not like the system’s fair or anything, we all know the pilots get supplies before everyone else.”
Kara grinds her teeth and reminds herself that as a flight instructor, she can’t afford a trip to the brig. Not to mention she bet Lee two good pairs of socks she wouldn’t end up there again this week, and she’s not losing them over a fight with a stupid knuckledragger.
Cally promptly shuts her gob when Kara gets out from under her engine anyway, looking a mix of guilty and defiant. Kara glares at her and asks her to fix a nonexistent flaw for good measure.
She walks to Lee’s office without even thinking about it. He’s at his desk, doing paperwork. Again.
She leans against the doorframe, smiling. “You ought to tell the Chief to make his knuckledraggers work harder, you know,” she says after a while of watching him work, a deep wrinkle digging between his brows when he encounters a particularly difficult problem.
He looks up, surprised, and smiles when he sees her there. He wrinkles his nose. “God, you’re filthy,” he says.
She touches her face, almost surprised when her palm comes back smeared in grease. “Whatever.”
“Anyway, why do you want me to torture them even more? Aren’t you keeping them busy enough with all those wounded birds you keep driving into the deck?”
Kara snorts. “Can’t be that busy if they have time to slander us pilots.”
Lee doesn’t even look surprised. Maybe it’s worse than Kara thought. He sighs. “You know I can’t stop them from talking, Kara. Or listening to the wireless.”
She shrugs. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you end up dealing with a frakkin’ mutiny,” she says. She intends for it to be playful, but it comes out serious, and it occurs to her how real the possibility is. Looks like her momma was right, after all: it’s a frakked-up world, and people are bastards.
Lee gives her a wry grin. “Good ol’ Starbuck,” he says, “always looking on the bright side of things. You’re a regular ray of sunshine.”
She takes a step forward, chuckling. He shrieks when her hand shoots off and she smears grease on his nose, his cheek, his jaw. By the time she pulls away his face is half-black and they’re both panting with laughter.
She grins at him, salutes. “Captain,” she says, and leaves the room. She’s relatively sure he’s staring at her ass as she goes, so she adds a little sashay to her hips, just for the hell of it.
vii.
The President dies.
As with any other death since the attack, though, there’s no time to grieve. The fleet wants a democratic government, and the choices for a leader are thin and almost all ill-advised. Martial law is out of the question. Lee isn’t convinced it would solve anything, anyway.
He’s always been a believer-- not in the gods, but in humanity, or what’s left of it. They hadn’t gotten around to those elections he’d promised Zarek and Laura had no vice-president, so Lee steps in to bridge the gap in the Quorum. It’s not a glamorous job but then, glamour these days is nothing but a vague souvenir.
It’s effective for awhile - the Galactica has always held sway over the fleet, and for a while it seems like the crisis might be dying down, like people suddenly understand that tearing each other apart isn’t the best option smack in the middle of an apocalypse.
But then it starts up again, and this time they just can’t contain it - and then it’s complaint after complaint, people calling for elections, Zarek raising whatever new hell he’s designed, murders and muggings and black market bullets being shot all over the ships. They come close to losing Cloud Nine after a terrorist attack disables their FTL drive and when they get the news that the ship’s survived there’s a sort of stunned silence in the CIC.
Lee marches back to the bunks almost mechanically. Kara’s there, cleaning her gun with her legs propped on the table.
“You alright?” she asks when she glances up at him.
He’s not sure he can answer with the affirmative, so he just hums, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Gods, he’s tired.
She looks like she wants to stand up and hug him, and it strikes him, both the reminder that she can be tender and the sudden need to have her body pressed against him, compact and warm and comforting.
He waits. She doesn’t hug him, but she does stand up. There’s a hand on his shoulder, so quick he isn’t sure he didn’t imagine it, then she reaches her other hand to him. “Come on, there’s a game of triad going on at the mess, and I need to kick Kat’s ass. That girl needs to understand she doesn’t want to mess with Starbuck.”
He gives her a small smile. “Yeah,” he says, and he takes her hand.
viii.
It builds up slowly, in furtive looks and borrowed touches and late nights spent working on rosters in Lee’s office, laughing more with exhaustion than at Kara’s crass jokes. They don’t do anything to stop it. For once, it seems like everything’s in alignment: not the stars of the fates or anything like that, just them. In the right place at the right time, as ironic as that sounds.
So Lee isn’t really that surprised when Kara climbs into his rack one night, her face closed, determined, and straddles him. He startles anyway.
“Kara, I -”
“Shut up,” she says, and she kisses him.
He can’t say this is how he’d imagined it, or even how he wanted it but then, what is these days? She slips her tanks over her head. He reaches for her arms, her face, revels on her breath on his skin, because she’s oxygen, always has been. His hands tangle in her hair. She shivers.
“Shut up, sir,” she repeats, softer. Her jaw is clenched.
He does his best to unclench it when she kisses him again, rises to meet her halfway, their chests touching. She might be calling the shots, it doesn’t mean he’s just going to lie there and watch it happen. She groans when he slips his tongue in, and he smirks against her mouth, satisfied. His hands are touching her, her skin, his thumbs at the edge of her breasts. He can’t breathe.
They’re always going to be like this, Lee thinks, and any other time he would regret that, but right now he just can’t. Right now the universe stops at the edge of her body, her strong shoulders pressing him against the wall, her hips writhing against his groin, the sharp edge of her jaw mashing against his cheek. Right now she’s everything he ever knew and will ever know, and it’s terrifying but he can’t get enough of it, can’t even pull away to take a breath.
The loud noise of something outside makes her close the curtains brusquely and suddenly he can’t see much of her, only feel her, the shape of her against his body. She releases him to take her pants off and he misses her immediately, urgently, like a limb.
He grabs her waist and brings her back to him, digging his fingers in the flesh of her hips when she resists. He takes her chin in his hand to bring her mouth close - there’s a second where they’re just looking at each other, where she’s hovering over him, her eyes burning and vulnerable, and he’s looking up at her, and - but then their mouths crash together and it doesn’t matter anymore.
He undresses frantically and she does too and it’s not long before she’s sliding onto him, her legs splayed wide over his lap. His mouth hangs open for a moment, a desperate sound stuck in the back of his throat. His hands creep up her back.
“Kara -” he chokes out.
“Move,” she says, grinding her teeth, authoritative as ever.
He bites off a quick laugh and obeys, thrusting up into her. Within minutes (he would be ashamed about how long it doesn’t last but she’s just as desperate as him) she’s unraveled, her throat open as he licks and bites and kisses the skin there.
He’s careful that she come first, and after she does, shuddering silently and slumping a little between his arms, it only takes a couple more thrusts before he follows with a choked-off moan.
She rolls off him, wiping her face with her hand. He wants to kiss the remaining sweat from her temples, but he isn’t sure he’s allowed.
She laughs, raucous. “Gods, I needed that.” Her voice is wrecked; he feels proud and a little nauseous.
She risks a look through the curtains, ascertaining that there’s no one in the bunks but them, and then opens them wide. She stands up and starts dressing, stretching as she goes. He would like to hold her, just for a moment, and maybe one day she’ll let him, but today is not that day. She shoots him a look when he doesn’t move.
She sits back next to him, her elbows on her knees. He leans in to kiss her. She doesn’t pull back, opens her mouth to kiss him back, slow and deep. She hums into it.
“Well, that makes things more complicated,” she mumbles, but it sounds almost affectionate.
He sits up and against the wall, a hand lingering at the small of her back. She leans into the touch.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
ix.
A group of religious extremists blows up the Astral Queen. Roslin isn’t there anymore to tell the families that throwing the culprits through the airlock may not be the best solution, so it’s exactly what they do. By that time the military has given up in anything but name; they’re just sort of hovering near the sidelines waiting for everything to calm down and looking away when it doesn’t.
The fleet continues jumping back and forth and Adama fences every time someone asks him if they’re getting closer to Earth, because they’re not. Of course they’re not. Adama tells Kara the truth one night and it takes all her self-control and her respect for him not to deck him. He lied to her. He’s no better than all the others.
(That’s what they all do, she thinks that night as she lies in her bed, Lee snoring softly next to her, his face mashed in her collarbone. They lie. They fool themselves into thinking they’re going to survive when the truth is that they made a mistake and it’s come back to bit them in the ass.)
Billy stops updating the President’s whiteboard when the count drops to 35,000. Its use as a morale-booster is pretty much null and void, anyway.
x.
Laura once told Lee that despite the worlds ending, the only thing she could think about was her cancer. Sometimes Lee looks at Kara and he thinks he understands.
He knows - thinks, hopes - she loves him, but it's never easy. It's never going to be easy, and some days Lee stops to wonder if he shouldn't have chosen something -someone- more comfortable, because there are days when it feels like adding one injury to another.
They don’t talk about it. She looks at him across the rec room and leaves, expecting him to follow her. He does, most of the time.
When they frak it’s almost always hurried, filled with urgency. The truth is, from the moment they met they couldn’t stop touching. It’s like thirst, except worse, because it drives them crazy and they both hate depending on someone else for survival but that’s what they’re doing. Surviving - together.
They emerge from these encounters with cuts and bruises, and he tries not to think about the time she said to him, drunk, that she never let men mark her. She marks him too - there’s the scratches on his back, peeking out of his tank tops just enough, and there’s the way no woman ever seems to get too close anymore, as though he was branded Property of Stabuck.
They abuse each other for weeks until one evening he walks into the recroom and she waves him over.
“Lieutenant,” he says, towering above her, not sure whether or not to sit with her. The players - a few pilots and Cally, who’s actually gotten pretty good at triad since the attack - salute lazily. He nods at them.
Kara smiles up at him, and he feels the familiar buzz course through his skin. She’s intoxicating, she always was.
“Captain,” she replies, a smile stretching on her mouth. She doesn’t salute. “Wanna join?”
He gives a short laugh. “Wouldn’t want you to cheat me out of the few cubits I have left, Starbuck,” he says, but he sits anyway.
She gives him a slanted look, mockingly offended. “Hey, I win fair and square.”
He snorts. “Right,” he says, and lets her punch him in the bicep, not as hard as she could but hard enough to hurt.
Cally gives them an amused look. “So, Starbuck, you’re gonna play or what?”
Lee watches in fascination as Kara wrenches her eyes from his - she probably hadn’t realized she was staring - and smirks at Cally. “You won’t be so impatient when I’ll wipe you out, little girl,” she says.
Lee tunes the voices out to watch her play, her hands as she deals expertly after winning yet another hand (does she really never cheat? No one can be that lucky), her big, booming laugh when she swipes her winning to her heart, her pursed mouth as she blows smoke out in perfect circles. Sometimes the way she’s got him hooked irritates him beyond belief.
He starts when she leans her knee into his. She shoots him a brief look from under her eyelashes and he’s surprised at the worry in them. He presses back. Cally raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything, for once.
After that it gets - well, not easy, but easier. They have conversations that feel like real conversations instead of constant efforts to avoid real topics, and even though it ends more often than not with them throwing punches until they’re horizontal, Lee can’t help but feel like it’s progress.
He tells her he loves her on a Monday afternoon, the post-CAP exhaustion settling deep in his bones. It's not a conscious decision but he means it when he says it and he doesn’t regret not waiting for a better moment. Because there aren’t any. Because this is probably the only future they're going to have.
She doesn't say it back, but she doesn't pretend not to have heard, tilting her head into his for a second, as if to say, okay. It’s enough - for now, at least.
xi.
Despite everything, and for all the things she says, Kara still believes. She doesn’t know why, or how, and she doesn’t talk about it. She just believes - it’s tenuous but it’s there, and she clings to it like a lifeline.
One day while they’re eating at mess, heads bowed, it occurs to her that it might be because of them. All of them: Racetrack and Hotdog and Kat and Boomer and the Chief and the knuckledraggers and Adama and those faces on the memorial wall. And Lee, most of all.
Hang in there, she tells herself. She does.
She takes every scrap of hope she’s given, every lead, and she chases it frantically. She doesn’t know if there’s an Earth out there, but if there is, she’s damn well gonna find it.
Knowing that Lee will be there to find it with her reassures her more than she wants to admit. She can't say it - she won't -, so she tries to show him instead, in the useless kisses that lead nowhere and that she never had patience for before, on his eyelids, his arms, his hips, rubbing them into his skin like healing balm. He takes them for what they are.
They're still Starbuck and Apollo and they wouldn't be who they are without the thrill of the chase, so there are hurried fraks and shouting matches that send adrenalin running in their veins. It makes everything that's going on easier, anyway. When they ache with desire they're each other's center of gravity, and the whole universe could very well implode, they probably wouldn't notice.
They’ve barely come down from an orgasm one afternoon, pressed closed together and sweaty on the table, when they hear a salvo of gunshots in the corridor. They jump to their feet and grab their sidearms within seconds. The symmetry of their movements is even more jarring now that they're frakking. They were always good at it, flying and fighting and even dancing, the few times they were drunk enough to hover that close to intimacy, but this is different. Good.
Kara nods sharply to tell him to go in recon, but he gets closer and kisses her, quick and hard. They’re beyond insane all right, but for once it’s not just her throwing herself at whatever is waiting behind that door. He’s got her back.
“So what’s the plan, Starbuck?” he asks when she pulls away, panting.
He knows the answer to his question. She doesn’t disappoint. “Fight them ‘til we can’t.”
He kicks the hatch open, launching into open fire.
Pairing: Kara/Lee
Wordcount: c. 5K
Summary: It starts with the vegetable shortage.
Spoilers for all of season 1 and 2, just to be sure. AU after Bastille Day.
Rating: R for language and sex
Notes: And - much thanks to my beta, callmeonetrack, without whom this fic probably wouldn't be half of what it is. Thanks for being ruthless, love!
i.
It starts with the vegetable shortage.
The Galactica isn't spared the hunger but it only witnesses the civil unrest from afar. They're a military ship; people are used to gritting their teeth and shutting the frak up. Thank the gods, that's all Kara has to say about it, because if she has to hear another nugget complain she's going to deck someone, and another week in the brig isn't really in her plans right now.
Lee looks up at her when she walks into the mess hall; his face lights up a little when he sees her.
"Whatcha doing?" she asks, trying to ignore the hunger that's digging into her stomach. She sits next to him, her elbows on the table.
He sighs, leaning his shoulder into hers. "Trying to organize rationing. It's a frakking nightmare."
"Yeah, well. Not the apocalypse for nothing, right?"
He shoots her a small smile. "I guess. Wanna help?"
She twirls her fork between her fingers. "I'd rather eat soap." Then she remembers that it's not going to be long before there's a shortage of that, too, and it's not as funny anymore.
Lee slides a stack of paperwork across the table. "Get to work, Lieutenant."
ii.
The food problem is temporarily solved thanks to Racetrack and Skulls, of all people: they find a planet with enough resources to stock the ships with enough food for a few months, and the fleet still has the water from the moon Boomer and Crashdown found. They're starting to lack pretty much every other imaginable essential, though. Commander Adama’s more and more frequent inspirational speeches cover that... for a time.
Lee knows they're entering the hard phase, and if he were his father he'd talk about sticking together in hard times and cohesion and all that crap, but the truth is he's not his father and the lack of shaving cream makes him want to punch someone. He hasn’t had a drink or a smoke in nearly two months. Kara trades her winnings at triad against what she needs, but Lee doesn’t join the nightly games. He hasn’t forgotten her words; they still echo in his head sometimes. You’re the CAG, we’re not friends. So he keeps his distance, and he keeps his mouth shut about the things he might need.
He looks at her mechanically in the bunks, the way her towel makes a crease against her skin that lets him see the dip of her back. It drops and she flings a bra over her head, unbothered, a true military chick. Lee looks away, trying not to blush.
The truth is, if it were only that, it would be fine: he hasn’t gotten laid in forever and a bit of sexual frustration is to be expected, even if it’s a bit uncomfortable that it’s over a friend. But he also notices the circles under her eyes when she does three CAP rotations in a row because a pilot is down, the way she won’t complain about anything but sometimes sags against him a little at the funerals, her loud, triumphant laugh when she wins at triad, the way she twists a strand of hair between her fingers when she’s trying to remember something. That’s more worrying.
"Cigar?" he hears above him.
He looks up: Kara's there in all her glory, black bra and regulation pants, her wet hair pushed back, handing him a cigar. He takes it warily.
"Not that I mind, but what did I do to deserve that?"
She shrugs. "Can’t a friend give her CAG a congratulatory cigar?"
She sounds a little nervous, like she's not sure what he's going to answer, and he remembers suddenly that she never takes anything for granted. Lee takes the cigar and lets her light the cigar for him. Her thumb grazes his cheek when she curves her hand around the flame, but she moves away before he can lean into the touch.
“What d’you have to congratulate me for?” he asks as he releases a puff of smoke. Gods, it feels heavenly.
She shrugs. A little smile quirks the corner of her mouth and he tries not to read surviving in it, but it’s hard.
iii.
There's a wave of suicides aboard the civvie ships after a particularly violent Cylon attack. They've had their share of casualties since the original attack, both murder and suicide, but they were sparse, isolated incidents. This is new. Kara watches the President's face tighten as she hears the news during her visit on the Galactica, standing on the hangar deck with Billy behind her, probably thinking about her frakking whiteboard.
They don't talk about it between themselves, especially not between pilots (it's a well-known fact that the knuckledraggers are just a bunch of gossips), but it's hard not to notice that they're walking on eggshells around each other for the next few weeks.
Lee runs up to her one morning during her jog. There's a bead of sweat on his neck, running along one of the protruding veins. Kara pretends to herself that she doesn't want to lick it off.
"What do you think?"
"About what?"
"The suicides."
Of course Lee wants to talk about it. Kara blinks, annoyed.
Her jaw clenches; she starts running faster. “I don’t.”
“Come on, Kara. You have an opinion about everything, I’m sure this isn’t an exception.”
“You want a position paper, Lee? Five thousand words about how I feel about those idiots throwing themselves out airlocks?” Kara rolls her eyes. “Sure, I’ll get right on it after I finish teaching the nuggets how to draw enemy fire to their sorry asses instead of all those civvie ships out there.”
She grinds her teeth, to keep the words in, but it’s already too late. Lee’s staring at her, all drop-mouthed and raised eyebrows.
“Whoa, Kara, maybe we should talk--”
She stops, hands on her hips. “Look, Lee, I know you fancy yourself a humanitarian and all that, and it’s great, it really is, but maybe I just don’t have time have time to worry about the people - the people I put my life on the line for every day - blowing their frakking brains, okay?”
She’s practically yelling now, and Kara inhales deeply and takes a step back, wondering where the hell that came from. Lee recoils to and he stares at her hard, a hurt expression in his eyes for about half a second, before it’s all steely CAG face and rigid jaw again. Frak him.
“Make a hole,” she barks at a couple of deckhands, and she runs away, breathing hard until she can't feel his eyes boring into her back anymore.
iv.
Joker, one of the pilots, blows a bullet through his skull during lunch break the day after his partner dies. It makes a frakking mess in his bunk. It was a prime location, biggest locker, closest to the head, but none of her fellow pilots take it over, even after they clean the blood spatters off the bulkhead. Kara might’ve expected as much of the nuggets, but Joker and Scorcher are on their third tour already. Still, they whisper about bad luck when they think Kara can’t hear, so after midday CAP, when most of them are off shift napping in their racks, she throws the locker door open with a clang and dumps her stuff inside. Throws her pillow on the mattress and plops down on it, her elbows crossed behind her head, getting comfortable.
She doesn't sleep for the first three days anyway. She tosses and turns and curses everyone she can think of, but the stench of death is still too overwhelming to sleep. Lee glances at her during the pre-flight briefs, clearly worried. She ducks her head.
v.
Someone steals the deck of cards and all of a sudden they can't play triad. Lee watches Kara go from white to red when she discovers, and yells herself hoarse.
He grabs a bottle of ambrosia and follows her back to the bunks after she storms out, flashing his table an apologetic smile. They just nod at him, clearly used to the push and pull of Starbuck and Apollo. Lee isn't sure how he feels about that.
He sets the bottle next to her, and it hits him how much a half-full bottle is worth these days, how many people would actually fight him to have it.
"Who’d you think did it?" he asks when he can't figure out a way to start the conversation.
"Who the frak cares," she says angrily, grabbing the bottle and taking a furious swig. "If I get a hold of them they're not going to make it out in one piece."
He laughs, hollow. "Didn't know you were so passionate about triad," he says.
She deflates, her head rolling on her shoulder until it hits the wall. "Yeah, well," she says. "It's not like there's much to do for fun around here these days."
Her eyes are half-closed and he can see the veins on her eyelids, like a tiny network of rivers. It’s what he imagines Earth would look like, when he dares to imagine it. Seeing her vulnerable makes him want to do something stupid like hold her, so he sits down on the bed and settles next to her, their hips pressed together. He can feel the heat of her skin through her tanks, distracting as always.
He catches her smirking suddenly, the familiar insolence back in her demeanor. Electricity mixed with apprehension tingle at the end of his spine. "There's still frakking," she says casually.
"What?" he splutters.
She bumps him with her hip, surprisingly gentle for her. "For fun. There's still frakking."
He laughs nervously. He can't remember the last time he got laid. Back on Caprica, that's for sure, but even then he'd been busy with work and still recovering from Gianne, so it'd been a bit of a dry spell. "I guess."
She's serious again in the space of a second. She drives him crazy, always pulling one-eightys on him when he least expects her to.
"We're not going to make it, you know," she says brusquely, bringing the bottle to her lips again.
"What?" He hates feeling like he’s a step behind her.
"To Earth, if we ever find it." Figures, that she would talk about Earth just when he’s thinking she wears the desire for it on her frakking face. She takes a breath next to him, and he startles out of it. She doesn’t notice. "We’re never gonna have those bright, shiny futures on Earth. We’re not. Because we go out, over and over again, until some day some metal motherfrakker is gonna catch us on a bad day and just blow us away."
Lee thinks about arguing with her, trying to persuade her that they're going to make it alive. Instead he says, "Bright, shiny futures are overrated anyway.”
She's silent for a moment, her elbows resting on her knees, her face half obscured by the shadows. He looks at her from the corner of his eye. He knows she doesn’t want to be protected, but he wants to, he can’t help it.
"And now we can't even play frakking triad," she mumbles after a few minutes.
There's nothing else to do, so he bursts out laughing. Her head whips towards him, surprise flashing briefly on her face, then she joins in. By the time the laughter stops she's leaning heavily on him, and they’re too close for comfort and he can feel her breath on his lips and really, damn him for not being able to think when she's looking at him like that, her mouth quirked in a grin and her face framed by messy bangs.
Something sizzles between them, elastic electricity stretching between their bodies. Lee feels her chest heaving; her breasts graze against his arm and they both startle almost guiltily. They don't stop looking at each other, though; maybe the end of the worlds really is all it takes to bring Lee Adama and Kara Thrace together. It would figure.
She leans in, or maybe he does -
The door bangs open, and Boomer walks into the room. Kara jumps to her feet, busying herself with something in her locker. If Lee didn't know her so well, he would swear her cheeks were flushed.
"Am I interrupting something?" Boomer asks with a shit-eating grin, looking for all the world like she’s got her gossip for the week.
"Frak off," Kara says.
Boomer laughs. "Maybe you ought to relieve all that tension, Apollo," she flings at him. "Starbuck there obviously needs it."
Lee blushes. It makes Boomer crow with laughter. She collects her towel and exits the room.
“Frakking bitch,” Kara mutters when the door closes behind her, but it’s half-hearted and Lee can see a smile tugging at her mouth where she’s hidden behind the metal frame of the locker.
“So, what are you going to do about the game?” he asks when the silence gets too heavy and starts filling his brain with images he can’t deal with (her against the hatch, panting and flushed, her chest heaving -), like every time he finds himself in proximity of both her and alcohol.
She ducks from behind the locker with a predatory grin. Lee swallows. “Hunt the bastard down.”
Kara takes the bottle of ambrosia from the bed and presents it to him but he shakes his head. He watches her: she raises the bottle to her lips and drinks, her head tipped back. He can’t help but let his eyes slide on the curve of her jaw, the way she swallows. She looks down at him.
He’s not religious, but right now he’s thinking about the universe and hoping it will tip a little in his favor, for once.
The universe is a frakking tease, though, and Kara’s no better, so of course that’s when the alarm starts, blaring shrilly in their ears. Gaeta’s voice rings through the speakers.
“Action stations, action stations! Set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill. I say again, action stations, set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill.”
They’ve heard it so many times in the past few weeks that they’re reaching for their flight suits without even thinking. Their hands bump and a flash of heat courses up Lee’s arm, drawing a small shiver out of him. This is not the end of it, that’s for sure.
Starbuck and Apollo destroy two baseships by themselves that night; the next day the deck of cards is back in its place, and Lee pretends not to notice Chopper’s black eye during the pre-flight brief.
vi.
Sometimes Kara thinks wherever the frakking toasters are hiding, they must be laughing their asses off. There’s been three riots this week alone and the number of civilian casualties is climbing at an alarming rate. Of course they can’t send marines without the civvies crying at martial law and the civilian police is a bunch of do-nothings who have about as much authority as Lee when he tells the pilots that fraternizing is forbidden. (Of course, it doesn’t help that they all clearly think he and Kara are frakking like rabbits every chance they get).
Kara isn’t one to care about politics, but this is just ridiculous. She didn’t survive to see humanity die out because humans aren’t smart enough to understand that the apocalypse is a shit time for civil war.
She grabs a pair of tanks and heads for the hangar deck. Maybe she won’t feel that frakking pissed off after a little greasy work on her bird.
It works a charm for a while, and she’s coating a minuscule leak in her gas tank (thank the gods she noticed it) when she hears Cally. “They have a point, though. I mean, it’s not like the system’s fair or anything, we all know the pilots get supplies before everyone else.”
Kara grinds her teeth and reminds herself that as a flight instructor, she can’t afford a trip to the brig. Not to mention she bet Lee two good pairs of socks she wouldn’t end up there again this week, and she’s not losing them over a fight with a stupid knuckledragger.
Cally promptly shuts her gob when Kara gets out from under her engine anyway, looking a mix of guilty and defiant. Kara glares at her and asks her to fix a nonexistent flaw for good measure.
She walks to Lee’s office without even thinking about it. He’s at his desk, doing paperwork. Again.
She leans against the doorframe, smiling. “You ought to tell the Chief to make his knuckledraggers work harder, you know,” she says after a while of watching him work, a deep wrinkle digging between his brows when he encounters a particularly difficult problem.
He looks up, surprised, and smiles when he sees her there. He wrinkles his nose. “God, you’re filthy,” he says.
She touches her face, almost surprised when her palm comes back smeared in grease. “Whatever.”
“Anyway, why do you want me to torture them even more? Aren’t you keeping them busy enough with all those wounded birds you keep driving into the deck?”
Kara snorts. “Can’t be that busy if they have time to slander us pilots.”
Lee doesn’t even look surprised. Maybe it’s worse than Kara thought. He sighs. “You know I can’t stop them from talking, Kara. Or listening to the wireless.”
She shrugs. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you end up dealing with a frakkin’ mutiny,” she says. She intends for it to be playful, but it comes out serious, and it occurs to her how real the possibility is. Looks like her momma was right, after all: it’s a frakked-up world, and people are bastards.
Lee gives her a wry grin. “Good ol’ Starbuck,” he says, “always looking on the bright side of things. You’re a regular ray of sunshine.”
She takes a step forward, chuckling. He shrieks when her hand shoots off and she smears grease on his nose, his cheek, his jaw. By the time she pulls away his face is half-black and they’re both panting with laughter.
She grins at him, salutes. “Captain,” she says, and leaves the room. She’s relatively sure he’s staring at her ass as she goes, so she adds a little sashay to her hips, just for the hell of it.
vii.
The President dies.
As with any other death since the attack, though, there’s no time to grieve. The fleet wants a democratic government, and the choices for a leader are thin and almost all ill-advised. Martial law is out of the question. Lee isn’t convinced it would solve anything, anyway.
He’s always been a believer-- not in the gods, but in humanity, or what’s left of it. They hadn’t gotten around to those elections he’d promised Zarek and Laura had no vice-president, so Lee steps in to bridge the gap in the Quorum. It’s not a glamorous job but then, glamour these days is nothing but a vague souvenir.
It’s effective for awhile - the Galactica has always held sway over the fleet, and for a while it seems like the crisis might be dying down, like people suddenly understand that tearing each other apart isn’t the best option smack in the middle of an apocalypse.
But then it starts up again, and this time they just can’t contain it - and then it’s complaint after complaint, people calling for elections, Zarek raising whatever new hell he’s designed, murders and muggings and black market bullets being shot all over the ships. They come close to losing Cloud Nine after a terrorist attack disables their FTL drive and when they get the news that the ship’s survived there’s a sort of stunned silence in the CIC.
Lee marches back to the bunks almost mechanically. Kara’s there, cleaning her gun with her legs propped on the table.
“You alright?” she asks when she glances up at him.
He’s not sure he can answer with the affirmative, so he just hums, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Gods, he’s tired.
She looks like she wants to stand up and hug him, and it strikes him, both the reminder that she can be tender and the sudden need to have her body pressed against him, compact and warm and comforting.
He waits. She doesn’t hug him, but she does stand up. There’s a hand on his shoulder, so quick he isn’t sure he didn’t imagine it, then she reaches her other hand to him. “Come on, there’s a game of triad going on at the mess, and I need to kick Kat’s ass. That girl needs to understand she doesn’t want to mess with Starbuck.”
He gives her a small smile. “Yeah,” he says, and he takes her hand.
viii.
It builds up slowly, in furtive looks and borrowed touches and late nights spent working on rosters in Lee’s office, laughing more with exhaustion than at Kara’s crass jokes. They don’t do anything to stop it. For once, it seems like everything’s in alignment: not the stars of the fates or anything like that, just them. In the right place at the right time, as ironic as that sounds.
So Lee isn’t really that surprised when Kara climbs into his rack one night, her face closed, determined, and straddles him. He startles anyway.
“Kara, I -”
“Shut up,” she says, and she kisses him.
He can’t say this is how he’d imagined it, or even how he wanted it but then, what is these days? She slips her tanks over her head. He reaches for her arms, her face, revels on her breath on his skin, because she’s oxygen, always has been. His hands tangle in her hair. She shivers.
“Shut up, sir,” she repeats, softer. Her jaw is clenched.
He does his best to unclench it when she kisses him again, rises to meet her halfway, their chests touching. She might be calling the shots, it doesn’t mean he’s just going to lie there and watch it happen. She groans when he slips his tongue in, and he smirks against her mouth, satisfied. His hands are touching her, her skin, his thumbs at the edge of her breasts. He can’t breathe.
They’re always going to be like this, Lee thinks, and any other time he would regret that, but right now he just can’t. Right now the universe stops at the edge of her body, her strong shoulders pressing him against the wall, her hips writhing against his groin, the sharp edge of her jaw mashing against his cheek. Right now she’s everything he ever knew and will ever know, and it’s terrifying but he can’t get enough of it, can’t even pull away to take a breath.
The loud noise of something outside makes her close the curtains brusquely and suddenly he can’t see much of her, only feel her, the shape of her against his body. She releases him to take her pants off and he misses her immediately, urgently, like a limb.
He grabs her waist and brings her back to him, digging his fingers in the flesh of her hips when she resists. He takes her chin in his hand to bring her mouth close - there’s a second where they’re just looking at each other, where she’s hovering over him, her eyes burning and vulnerable, and he’s looking up at her, and - but then their mouths crash together and it doesn’t matter anymore.
He undresses frantically and she does too and it’s not long before she’s sliding onto him, her legs splayed wide over his lap. His mouth hangs open for a moment, a desperate sound stuck in the back of his throat. His hands creep up her back.
“Kara -” he chokes out.
“Move,” she says, grinding her teeth, authoritative as ever.
He bites off a quick laugh and obeys, thrusting up into her. Within minutes (he would be ashamed about how long it doesn’t last but she’s just as desperate as him) she’s unraveled, her throat open as he licks and bites and kisses the skin there.
He’s careful that she come first, and after she does, shuddering silently and slumping a little between his arms, it only takes a couple more thrusts before he follows with a choked-off moan.
She rolls off him, wiping her face with her hand. He wants to kiss the remaining sweat from her temples, but he isn’t sure he’s allowed.
She laughs, raucous. “Gods, I needed that.” Her voice is wrecked; he feels proud and a little nauseous.
She risks a look through the curtains, ascertaining that there’s no one in the bunks but them, and then opens them wide. She stands up and starts dressing, stretching as she goes. He would like to hold her, just for a moment, and maybe one day she’ll let him, but today is not that day. She shoots him a look when he doesn’t move.
She sits back next to him, her elbows on her knees. He leans in to kiss her. She doesn’t pull back, opens her mouth to kiss him back, slow and deep. She hums into it.
“Well, that makes things more complicated,” she mumbles, but it sounds almost affectionate.
He sits up and against the wall, a hand lingering at the small of her back. She leans into the touch.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says.
ix.
A group of religious extremists blows up the Astral Queen. Roslin isn’t there anymore to tell the families that throwing the culprits through the airlock may not be the best solution, so it’s exactly what they do. By that time the military has given up in anything but name; they’re just sort of hovering near the sidelines waiting for everything to calm down and looking away when it doesn’t.
The fleet continues jumping back and forth and Adama fences every time someone asks him if they’re getting closer to Earth, because they’re not. Of course they’re not. Adama tells Kara the truth one night and it takes all her self-control and her respect for him not to deck him. He lied to her. He’s no better than all the others.
(That’s what they all do, she thinks that night as she lies in her bed, Lee snoring softly next to her, his face mashed in her collarbone. They lie. They fool themselves into thinking they’re going to survive when the truth is that they made a mistake and it’s come back to bit them in the ass.)
Billy stops updating the President’s whiteboard when the count drops to 35,000. Its use as a morale-booster is pretty much null and void, anyway.
x.
Laura once told Lee that despite the worlds ending, the only thing she could think about was her cancer. Sometimes Lee looks at Kara and he thinks he understands.
He knows - thinks, hopes - she loves him, but it's never easy. It's never going to be easy, and some days Lee stops to wonder if he shouldn't have chosen something -someone- more comfortable, because there are days when it feels like adding one injury to another.
They don’t talk about it. She looks at him across the rec room and leaves, expecting him to follow her. He does, most of the time.
When they frak it’s almost always hurried, filled with urgency. The truth is, from the moment they met they couldn’t stop touching. It’s like thirst, except worse, because it drives them crazy and they both hate depending on someone else for survival but that’s what they’re doing. Surviving - together.
They emerge from these encounters with cuts and bruises, and he tries not to think about the time she said to him, drunk, that she never let men mark her. She marks him too - there’s the scratches on his back, peeking out of his tank tops just enough, and there’s the way no woman ever seems to get too close anymore, as though he was branded Property of Stabuck.
They abuse each other for weeks until one evening he walks into the recroom and she waves him over.
“Lieutenant,” he says, towering above her, not sure whether or not to sit with her. The players - a few pilots and Cally, who’s actually gotten pretty good at triad since the attack - salute lazily. He nods at them.
Kara smiles up at him, and he feels the familiar buzz course through his skin. She’s intoxicating, she always was.
“Captain,” she replies, a smile stretching on her mouth. She doesn’t salute. “Wanna join?”
He gives a short laugh. “Wouldn’t want you to cheat me out of the few cubits I have left, Starbuck,” he says, but he sits anyway.
She gives him a slanted look, mockingly offended. “Hey, I win fair and square.”
He snorts. “Right,” he says, and lets her punch him in the bicep, not as hard as she could but hard enough to hurt.
Cally gives them an amused look. “So, Starbuck, you’re gonna play or what?”
Lee watches in fascination as Kara wrenches her eyes from his - she probably hadn’t realized she was staring - and smirks at Cally. “You won’t be so impatient when I’ll wipe you out, little girl,” she says.
Lee tunes the voices out to watch her play, her hands as she deals expertly after winning yet another hand (does she really never cheat? No one can be that lucky), her big, booming laugh when she swipes her winning to her heart, her pursed mouth as she blows smoke out in perfect circles. Sometimes the way she’s got him hooked irritates him beyond belief.
He starts when she leans her knee into his. She shoots him a brief look from under her eyelashes and he’s surprised at the worry in them. He presses back. Cally raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything, for once.
After that it gets - well, not easy, but easier. They have conversations that feel like real conversations instead of constant efforts to avoid real topics, and even though it ends more often than not with them throwing punches until they’re horizontal, Lee can’t help but feel like it’s progress.
He tells her he loves her on a Monday afternoon, the post-CAP exhaustion settling deep in his bones. It's not a conscious decision but he means it when he says it and he doesn’t regret not waiting for a better moment. Because there aren’t any. Because this is probably the only future they're going to have.
She doesn't say it back, but she doesn't pretend not to have heard, tilting her head into his for a second, as if to say, okay. It’s enough - for now, at least.
xi.
Despite everything, and for all the things she says, Kara still believes. She doesn’t know why, or how, and she doesn’t talk about it. She just believes - it’s tenuous but it’s there, and she clings to it like a lifeline.
One day while they’re eating at mess, heads bowed, it occurs to her that it might be because of them. All of them: Racetrack and Hotdog and Kat and Boomer and the Chief and the knuckledraggers and Adama and those faces on the memorial wall. And Lee, most of all.
Hang in there, she tells herself. She does.
She takes every scrap of hope she’s given, every lead, and she chases it frantically. She doesn’t know if there’s an Earth out there, but if there is, she’s damn well gonna find it.
Knowing that Lee will be there to find it with her reassures her more than she wants to admit. She can't say it - she won't -, so she tries to show him instead, in the useless kisses that lead nowhere and that she never had patience for before, on his eyelids, his arms, his hips, rubbing them into his skin like healing balm. He takes them for what they are.
They're still Starbuck and Apollo and they wouldn't be who they are without the thrill of the chase, so there are hurried fraks and shouting matches that send adrenalin running in their veins. It makes everything that's going on easier, anyway. When they ache with desire they're each other's center of gravity, and the whole universe could very well implode, they probably wouldn't notice.
They’ve barely come down from an orgasm one afternoon, pressed closed together and sweaty on the table, when they hear a salvo of gunshots in the corridor. They jump to their feet and grab their sidearms within seconds. The symmetry of their movements is even more jarring now that they're frakking. They were always good at it, flying and fighting and even dancing, the few times they were drunk enough to hover that close to intimacy, but this is different. Good.
Kara nods sharply to tell him to go in recon, but he gets closer and kisses her, quick and hard. They’re beyond insane all right, but for once it’s not just her throwing herself at whatever is waiting behind that door. He’s got her back.
“So what’s the plan, Starbuck?” he asks when she pulls away, panting.
He knows the answer to his question. She doesn’t disappoint. “Fight them ‘til we can’t.”
He kicks the hatch open, launching into open fire.