Oneshot - Kepéla (3/3)
She yells that he's a magnificent bastard as he climbs down out of his Viper, and it's one of maybe five compliments she's ever bestowed upon him, so he just takes it, and the proffered bottle and hug from Cally, making her repeat the part where she says he was better than her. Well, maybe that's not what she says, but it's what he'll tell people she said tonight over the Triad table.
There's a grin on his face and the sound of cheers and claps and people being so damn glad to have something to celebrate for once is so overwhelming that for a moment he can't think of a time when things were better than this.
"You deserve this.” She declares, holding out the cigar for him to take. He does. He chews off the end and lights it as obnoxiously as he knows how, rubbing it in just for fun. She smiles. He smiles. He thinks his face might break.
He lets himself in the door of her apartment in Delphi, he's whistling a little and his feet beat a rhythmical dance as he trips down the stairs into her living room. It feels good to be back on Caprica, even if only for a few weeks. Kara's temporary assignment to Picon finished a week ago and in the fall she'll go back to being flight-instructor, he's on leave awaiting reassignment, and they have the whole glorious summer stretched out in front of them like a cat in a patch of early afternoon sunlight. He hasn't felt this good in a while.
So of course this would be the day he comes back to find her huddled up on the couch sobbing into her cushion like actually making noise would be a sin.
He lays a hand on her shoulder and she flinches into action. Her eyes are red and raw, she has been crying for some time.
He sits on the couch next to her, thumb rubbing mindless patterns against the cotton of her shirt. He won't ask.
Glassy eyes meet his in a silent question. He smiles at her and she burrows into him, face hiding in his chest, seemingly tiny hands grasping his shirt at his sides.
“My mother died today.” She tells him, blankly.
“Kara...” He trails off, words a useless attempt at comfort in a situation like this. His palm is flat against her back, holding her loosely to him where she's curled herself into his chest. His shirt is damp, and his leg is going numb.
There's a bottle of wine on the coffee table he thinks wasn't there when he went out earlier. There's a sobbing woman in his arms.
“You want to know the last thing she ever said to me?” She asks, he's not sure he does.
“She said I was the harbinger of death.” She's sitting up and wiping her eyes. She makes a noise that might almost be a laugh and shrugs as though it didn't matter.
Their eyes meet as she drains her glass of its contents. He wishes he were more help.
They don't speak about it again, but late that night through the thin walls of their adjacent bedrooms, he hears her say a prayer for the mother she had never been good enough for.
“Do you remember it?” She twists around to face him, her fingertips lingering on the surface of the snapshot she keeps in her locker. She spends a lot of time looking at that picture, a lot of time touching it. He didn't even know she had a copy, he meant to ask her how she did, but then he figured that she must have taken it from among Zak's things after he died, and that's not something he ever wants to talk about.
“That picture being taken?” He stops towelling his hair to stare at her from the other side of the bunk room. It seems a strange question to ask, it wasn't that long ago, and it was his camera that had taken it. Hijacked by Helo in the middle of what could have been an incredibly awkward moment.
Some days he really wishes that he had had the chance to see old Karl again, he liked the guy, and it had always seemed like somehow they understood each other. Once more he is reminded of just how many people they have lost, how many he has to be sorry for. It feels like a tonne weight just dropped onto his heart and he slumps onto his rack, suddenly unsteady.
She shrugs, and turns back, looks at the picture again.
“The feeling of grass beneath your feet.”
Two weeks later he'll lie on the beautifully cut and entirely fake lawn on cloud nine and try and get her to join him, and he won't understand why she doesn't want to remember what this feels like.
He meets Zak for dinner one night about a week after the day he came home to find Kara crying, he doesn't know how he does it, but he convinces his stubborn little brother to come and meet her in the bar afterwards.
It's somehow really important to him for Zak to not hate her, she's fast becoming his best friend, and once you understood about her and Helo and the way that their affection for each other is entirely platonic but also very strong, and that Kara's always expressed herself physically before verbally, well, there wasn't really anything for Zak to stay mad about.
He's explained all of this, and managed to get Zak to come and have a drink with them, he's feeling pretty proud of himself, actually.
But then Kara strolls in with Karl in tow and a smirk on her face and drops into the booth across from them, winking and taking her shot. He rolls his eyes, and dares a look at Zak.
This could go one of two ways.
Zak chuckles and downs his shot, winking right back as he sets the glass down on the table. Kara bares her teeth and runs her tongue along the edge of them.
He's not quite as proud of himself as he was five minutes ago.
He glances over at her as she takes a surreptitious sniff of her dress blues and swats at the shoulders to beat out the dust. He honestly wonders when she's ever gonna grow up.
“Don't you wanna wash those?” He prods, a gentle nudge in the right direction, he knows what she could be if she really tried.
“I did.” Is her terse reply as she slips the jacket off the hanger and onto her own shoulders.
“When?” He snorts. She's been in a funny mood all day long, up and then down and then up again, maybe a little teasing will do her some good.
“You got a problem with my hygiene?” Her fists curl slightly, and uncurl again. She starts to fasten her buttons and then stops.
“You have hygiene?” He laughs as he dresses himself. If he's learned one thing from Kara Thrace, it's that if someone doesn't want to play with you, keep pushing at them until they have to. He means all this as a joke, they're blowing off steam, just like always.
But then he sees her entire body deflate like she's lost something she was clinging on to, and she walks to the door in controlled measures, jacket unbuttoned, hair an unruly wet mop.
“Hey, I clean up good sometimes alright.” She insists before she leaves, and it seems like she's angry. It occurs to him that he just missed something important. Like maybe they were having two entirely different conversations and he was too busy being kind of an ass to get it.
“Well let me know when it's one of those times.” He calls out, to no one in particular. Sometimes it's nice to feel like you've won, even if there's no one around to witness it, even if the competition were all just a figment in your head.
That night he sees her in a dress for the first time and he concedes that those times when she cleans up good are entirely self evident.
He strolls casually out the back door of the bar into the alley. Inside Zak and Karl and Rake and some other guys that form the main group of Kara and Zak's friends here are sitting across a table from each other, toasting his little brother's engagement to the mighty Starbuck.
Out here, in the dark and cool air of a particularly scummy back-alley, Kara is being pressed into a wall by the lips of some big-mouthed Major who had been eyeing her all night.
He sighs audibly, hoping that they'll notice. They don't. Her hands are greedy at his back, she's lost in a moment of sex and shame that he can't even begin to understand.
He grabs the guy by the shoulder and pushes him backwards away from her, tells him that her fiance is waiting for her inside and if he knows what's good for him he'll just get the hell out of here as soon as possible.
The major takes his advice. Kara won't meet his eyes. So he flops back against the wall next to her and sighs again.
This is the part of her he has never understood, can never get at. It's like a cycle with her, and he wishes she'd just get off it and let herself be happy already. He expressed that view to Helo once, after a picnic back on Picon. She had passed out early, Pyramid and Ambrosia and sunshine all getting a bit too much for her head as she lay in the soft grass and the sweet air of the early evening.
He had looked over at her, so soft and sweet-looking where she slept, and told Helo that he wished she could find a way to just be happy. Helo had narrowed his eyes in that way he did when he was trying to assess exactly how much Lee knew about Kara - answer, not a whole lot - and smiled, a really awful, sad smile, and told him not to count on it.
“Why do you always do that?” He's staring straight in front of them. She's by his side doing the same.
She shrugs, he can see it in the corner of his eye, sees her head dip and then rise and then fall back and come up straight again.
“It's the only thing I really know how to do.” She says. She believes it, he never will.
He grasps her elbow gently and leads her back inside. They silently agree never to talk about it.
“Why'd you do it Kara?” He stalking after her, and he's disgusted with the venom he hears in his own voice, disgusted with himself for not having the strength not to ask her. “Just tell me why.”
Gods he had tried so hard not to ask her, all day long he's been not asking her. Even when he approached her on the hangar deck just now, he had been not asking her. But his pride and his hurt and his desire to destroy her the way that she kept destroying him had been too much, and he'd pushed and picked and ripped at their equilibrium until everything good about them was gone, and now only anger remains.
“Because I'm a screw-up, Lee. Try to keep that in mind.” He thinks of that other conversation, so far away from him now that it seems almost like a dream, and he marvels at how much has changed, and exactly how much hasn't.
She walks away from him without looking back. He wishes with every particle inside of him that he were strong enough not to follow her.
“You and me.” She manages to slur out, her index finger tipped in the air in front of her, pulling her off balance so she leans into him just a little bit more. “Right here.” She continues, her smile spreading slowly across her drink-blissed face, “Right now.” She finishes with a flourish of her arms, ta da, and laughs like it is simultaneously the best and most ridiculous idea in all twelve colonies.
Maybe it is both of those things. Maybe it's neither. Maybe they're both far too drunk and Zak is sleeping not ten feet away on the couch where he has held her close and watched her cry, and maybe none of that matters.
“On the table?” He enquires, somewhere in the back of his head this is a joke, a way of highlighting the absurdity of what she's suggesting. But at the very forefront of his brain, it's really a question of practicality.
She giggles and looks more beautiful than he has ever seen her and leans across the table so that their face are almost touching.
“I daaare you.” She slurs, and giggles again. Is this funny? He's not so sure. And then she looks serious for a second, and corrects herself. “I double-dog dare you.” And she stands, proud of herself for presenting him with a challenge she is sure he can't pass up.
As if that was ever an option.
He presses her back into the table, the cotton of her t-shirt sliding up ever so slightly as she moves backwards, brushing mats and cutlery aside as she goes.
Their fingers touch first, his hand over hers. He gazes down at her, smiling up at him, and leans forward until their lips are only just joined.
Funny, how the idea that kept him from doing this the entire time that they were together on Picon even though it wasn't true, now that it is true doesn't even cross his mind.
That she belongs to Zak.
A glass breaks, their faces fall, Zak goes back to sleep. A black hole the size of a pin sets up home in his heart, and every time he looks at her as he gathers his belongings to leave it grows a little bit bigger.
They stand over Zak and say their goodbyes. He's leaving for the Atlantis in the morning, their farewell dinner was supposed to be something better than this.
His fingers grasp hers, and then he's gone.
A week later he gets a phone call, her quiet voice telling him that his brother is dead, and then the click of the empty comm line. Things were supposed to be better than this.
“The President says we're saving humanity, for some bright, shiny future. That you and I are never gonna see.” He wants to laugh, because what would Kara do if she was ever presented with a bright shiny future? Chances are she'd go out and pick a fight.
He wants to laugh, but this day is too long, too sad, and his heart too heavy. So he pours another drink. It's apparently the answer.
“Bright shiny futures are overrated anyway.” He tells her, and it seems profound, so they toast to it.
“That is why, we gotta get what we can. Right now.” He's certain that she means something by that, but he's drifting, somewhere, a long time ago, but not that long really. He's sitting across another table from her, in another world, having a conversation that feels a lot like this one and he can't put his finger on why.
“To getting what we can.” He raises his glass as she leans in, face suddenly serious.
I dare you.
“So why don't we?”
All of this has happened before. A kiss. A table. Something is broken. All of this will happen again.
It's the first time he's seen her since Zak died, the first time he's been in this apartment since the night he kissed her on the table that's lurking over his shoulder, in the corner of his eye where he just can't look.
“You're not coming?” She's curled on the couch in a beat up leather jacket. Her place looks like a bomb filled with paint and booze hit it, a cigar is smoking gently in a tin can ashtray on the table. She looks miserable, and happy. There's piano music coming from somewhere near the window, he never took her for a classical fan.
She's not coming to the funeral.
He should be shocked, but he's really just not. Somehow he knew. Her eyes crease and her lips jerk, she's trying to smile, she can't quite make it.
“Don't do funerals.” She explains, simply, looking always slightly to the side of him. She nods, like that should be enough. It's not. But he doesn't really have the right to push her about it.
“Have you been to work?” He asks, he caught up with Helo yesterday, wanted to find out if she was ok, he's been home a week and she hasn't answered his calls. Karl told him he'd been by to check on her and bring her food, but he's not sure she's left the apartment.
“They gave me leave. I'm going in tomorrow to check on some of the students, but most of them are going...” She trails off. He knows where they're going. Same place he is. Same place she's not. He should be shocked, but he's really just not. She shrugs again and walks into her bedroom, the door clicking quietly closed behind her.
He is dismissed.
He walks away feeling nothing in particular.
“How are things with you and Dee?” She asks tentatively, she's done talking about flying, she looks so small, so afraid, he barely recognises her anymore.
“Good.” His voice breaks slightly, he's not sure it's ok for him to say that he is actually kind of happy right now. But they've always been honest if nothing else, and he misses her. Misses telling her things. He corrects himself. “Better than good, best they've ever been.”
Her smile is weak, and she seems saddened, but when she says she's happy for him it's not a lie. He knows her lies. Knows them all. This is not one.
“It's funny, though,” she starts, he has the feeling that what she has to say isn't going to be even remotely funny, “after all we've been through, we are right back where we started. You're the CAG and I'm your hotshot problem pilot.”
He thinks about that, about the time before when he said those words, how false they were then, how unsatisfactory they are now.
She chuckles, and smiles and looks away from him, out into the space in front of her, her mind's eye.
“Guess that's all we'll ever be now, huh?” He wants to grab her and hold her and tell him that that has never been all that they were, tell her exactly what she means to him in so many different ways. Every cell in his body is aching to tell her that even if they aren't together in the way that she understands best, the only way in which she's ever been able to express herself with any kind of control, he will never love another being in any world in the same way, with the same force as the ways in which he loves her.
But it's too much, for both of them. They've hurt each other too much, and he lost the right to tell her those things when he chose to love his wife and to let her go.
So he just smiles and hopes to the gods that she knows.
He didn't expect her to come, he honestly didn't. She's standing on the other side of the grave, clasping his father's hand. Their eyes meet over his dead brother's coffin. There's no kind of understanding that passes between them, they're just two people looking at each other from either side of a mighty river. He tightens his arm around his mother's shoulder.
“I'm glad you came,” He croaks when he finally catches up to her. She's standing by the lake, eyes closed against the beating sun.
When she turns and looks at him, there's none of the usual warmth that lurks behind her eyes, some days he thinks only for him. There is only pain, and regret, and an unspoken hatred that mirrors his own.
“I owed him that much.” She tells him blankly, and then turns back to the water, eyes shut once more, another barrier between Kara Thrace and the world that despises her
He's filled with rage as he walks away. He doesn't even cast a glance back at her. He knows he'll never see her again.