Fic: Eris and Aurora, 3/6. (Kara/Lee, Adama. This part rated M)
Title: Eris and Aurora, 3/6
Length: 5400 words, roughly, this part. Please note, part 3 was so long I'm now making it two seperate chapters.
Rating: M for language and concepts in this part.
Characters: Kara/Lee, Adama.
Notes: AU, begins during the mini-series. Occasional backstory flashbacks. No spoilers for anything beyond the episode 33 at this point. Unbeta'd. Naturally, characters and concepts are property of RDM / SciFi / Larson. Apologies to those who were expecting pilot!sex; it's getting its own seperate chapter now, hopefully up in a day or so.
Summary: It didn't make sense to claw holes in him and defend him at the same time, but that's the way they'd always been. And that familiarity was suddenly more logical than everything else since the end of the world.
Part one is here
Part two is here
-2 years, 8 months
He would have thought she'd be drunk by now; it was the day she'd been supposed to get married, if Zak had lived, if Zak hadn't called things off so abruptly. Lee had been prepared for that eventuality with a thermos of coffee and some water and a few other useful items. He was also prepared for the possibility - unlikely though it seemed, knowing Kara - of tearful grief, though he thought it was more likely that she'd be angry, volatile, that he'd come away with bruises on his skin as well as his heart. But this, this drawn and empty Kara, he had no strategy to cope with. He didn't even know where to start.
Lee sat down near her on the grass; they were on a hilltop half-a-mile from the Academy hangars, and the whine of Viper engines in atmospheric launch carried to them on the wind. Kara was apparently deaf, both to them and to him, but one look at the unopened bottle beside her warned him that alcohol was not what drowned out the noise. He felt his own mouth open, close, open again, no words coming out because he couldn't find the ones that made sense.
It was Kara who broke the silence after about five minutes. "Remembered this place, huh?"
Her voice was scratchy with disuse. Hadn't she spoken in days? She looked like she hadn't slept, either. "Zak used to bring me here, too," he agreed. "When he came to visit while I was in flight school, he used to spend days parked here, watching the vipers take off, watch maneuvers. When classes were over, I'd come out to meet him, bring my books if I had to study. He'd sit there, asking endless questions about flying fighters, how to do it, what it was like. There wasn't anything about Vipers or flying them that he didn't want to know."
She sat in silence, her face tilted his way if not her eyes, listening; he couldn't tell what she was thinking, so he kept going, kept filling up the silence with memories of Zak. "As a kid, it was all he wanted. I mean - I was the same, but it wasn't all there was to the world, either. I wanted to know about why we had Vipers and Battlestars, about the Cylons, about the past. I wanted to understand them as much as I wanted to fly the ships; but Zak... Zak just wanted wings. More than anything else, I think."
"More than anything," she agreed.
The sky was darkening, turning violet at the highest arc, an aura of flame colors painted over the distant hills. The blushing light fired Kara's hair in tones of gold and copper where the wind stirred it, tinted her skin ruddy. She'd have been beautiful if she wasn't so broken; was beautiful anyway, he found himself thinking. But it hurt to see someone so vivid, so much larger than life, shrunk down so small.
The silence was too heavy. "Want some coffee?" he tried, reached for the knapsack he'd dumped behind him on the grass. The thermos felt warm even through the canvas, and that's when he noticed how cold the air was turning. "Will warm you up."
Kara chuckled, a raspy sound. "Nope. Nectar's better." She waved the bottle at him. "You figured I'd have a good head start on this already, didn't you?"
Lee felt himself shrug. "I would have been on the second bottle by now, but I flew CAP this morning before my leave ticked 'round."
"Then why the coffee?"
Figures she'd ask that. He'd expected her to be drunk, wanted her to be drunk, because then she'd have something, something between her and the grief. It would have been better than the raw emotion, for her. It hadn't been for him. "Sobering you up would have given me something to do."
"You need to do something?" The thin metal cap on the bottle tore away from the seal under the pressure of her fingers, and the wind carried the sharp scent right to him.
Lee extended the metal mugs he'd brought for the coffee, watched her pour a slug into each, and after she took one, he tilted the other straight down his throat, let it burn. Let the honest answer come. "I didn't know what else to do, how else I could help."
Kara tossed back her own shot, let the empty mug dangle from slack fingers. "I don't need help."
The twist of pain must have shown in his broken grin, because she looked away.
"But," she continued, staring off towards the hills, where faint engine sounds proclaimed the returning patrol, "thanks. For wanting to."
He extended the mug again, nodding. "Least I can do, Kara."
She poured a more generous dose for each of them, took a sip and then leaned back on her elbows, legs extended in the shaggy grass, her BDU's hanging off a frame that was visibly leaner than it had been a mere three months ago. Lee let his eyes trace her, appreciating what he saw. That wasn't new. But it had felt guilty before, to admire this woman whom his brother had adored. That wasn't how it felt now.
"I'm leaving the Academy" she said, a little later. The bottle was two-thirds empty, and his head was spinning, and stars were wheeling overhead, vipers cutting between them now and then in lines of silver fire.
"What?"
"Taking a posting."
It took a minute to sink in.
"That bastard" he hissed, clenched his hands around the mug to stop him hurling it. "He got them to give in?"
He'd known, of course, that his father's ire wouldn't end with the funeral. He'd known that all the favors the old man had left to call, he'd be calling them in to try and punish her, to get her drummed out of the fleet, or at least sent to a lousy posting, anything, anywhere that didn't carry the prestige of Sparta. He'd hoped it wouldn't be enough, that Kara's skills and Kara's fire and the inimitable glory of her flying would stop the rot from eating away at her career. He'd been so sure, with Colonel Trevis' support...
"Not exactly," Kara said, shrugged. "Trev's stood up to the pressure; he doesn't want me gone. But there's been... issues raised."
"Like what?" The snap in his voice wasn't aimed at her, but she hunched over her empty mug.
"Questions on whether or not I have the qualifications to instruct, seeing as I've only served one duty posting other than Sparta. Questioning whether I have the range of fleet experience... and some rumors."
It wasn't the first time. When Admiral Ngala's chief of staff had put Kara Thrace forward as a candidate for instructor after only one tour aboard the Kerberos, there'd been rumors, too. Relatively benign ones. Though they hadn't known each other then, Kara'd been infamous when they were both in Sparta's flight programme, and Lee himself had laughed at the idea of the sixty-year-old, shrewd Commander Tylney involed with the volatile twenty-three-going-on-fifteen Starbuck. Somehow he knew this wasn't quite like that.
"Rumors," he prompted, when she wasn't going to elaborate without it. She reached for the bottle.
"Apparently, I'm Trev's lover. Apparently, that's the only reason he's kept me on here. Apparently" and her voice hissed and broke until she gulped nectar straight out of the flask, "apparently that's why Zak Adama ended his relationship with me, because he found out I was frakking my boss."
Lee wrenched the bottle out of her grasp, swigged it himself until there was little more than an inch left in the bottom. "He's asked you to resign?" he tried eventually, handed her the remainder of the nectar.
She stared down the bottle's throat, then upended it into her mouth, swallowed. He could see the dampness shine on her lip. "No. I offered."
He shook his head, kept shaking it. Couldn't believe she was giving in. "No," he insisted, "you don't let him win. Kara -"
She turned to him then, her face lit up with moonlight and frustration. "You don't get it, Lee. I don't want to be here. I don't want to frakking be here alo-"
His arms went around her before the word could ring in the air, her face tucked into his neck, her fingers relaxing the fists that had been her reflex response and then closing just as tightly in the front of his jacket. Her hair feathered across his cheek and he felt the tears then, seeping down under the edge of his collar. Her chest heaved, and he held her tighter and kissed her hair and rubbed a hand up and down her spine until it stopped.
"Aurora," Kara said when she could speak again, withdrawing from him as far as his arm around her shoulders allowed. "Rhys Marrol's ship; I'm posted there as his lead pilot."
"Scout ship - Kara, you'll be so isolated, you shouldn't -"
"No, Lee. That's exactly what I need. I need to get away from here and... be the lone wolf, again. Remember how."
"You don't have to be alone, Kara. You might have lost Zak, but you don't have to lose me, too." It felt so important that she understand that he wasn't going anywhere, that he didn't blame her. It was necessary, as necessary as air, or water, that she realise that he, that Lee Adama had not cast her aside. Would not.
She shook her head, wriggled herself further out of his grasp, rolled the empty nectar bottle through the night-black grass. "You're his brother, Lee. You would have been my brother today. If I have to face that fact for the rest of my life -" she stopped. Shook her head again, her face shadowed so he couldn't see anything of it but a pair of too-wide, too-shiny eyes. "Besides, you're posted on a Battlestar, and thanks to ... circumstances, it'll be ten years before I get that privilege. I'd still have to be on my own, Lee. Distance wouldn't make any frakking difference to that."
"We could resign" he offered before thinking, voicing the idea that had only recently dawned on him, the one that seemed like the answer to everything to do with the fleet and his father and the shadow that hung over both of them. "Always work for flyers with fleet training. Aerospace are always looking for test pilots."
Kara stared at him. "Leave the fleet." Her head moved sideways as though she were about to shake it again, and froze there."You're serious?" When he nodded, she exploded, leaped up and hurled the empty bottle viciously down the slope. "No. No frakking way, Lee. I'm leaving Sparta for my own reasons, but I'll be damned if I let your old man take the fleet away from me too."
He could understand that concept. "Okay. Okay - you don't want to leave. I get it." He fidgeted with the knapsack, the not-quite hot thermos of coffee, and sighed, reached into the bottom of the bag for his weapon of last resort. The bottle was square, full of ambrosia that the moonlight turned ghostly gray in the glass. He twisted the cap off almost viciously, wondering why it suddenly hurt that his father was part of her decisions at all. Or maybe what hurt was that she didn't even seem to hear his thoughtless use of 'we'.
"No, you don't get it, Lee. You don't get it at all. You don't get what this job means to me. Do you know, I haven't been up there since..." she broke off, snatched the bottle out of his grip and took a generous slug straight out. "They wouldn't let me up. Trev revoked my flight status. I've had to... sit here for three months, and deal with this whole thing, over and over, in my head. If I could fly, I could forget it, for a while."
He watched as she downed another mouthful. "Forget Zak?" It wasn't meant to be cruel.
She froze, then lifted the ambrosia to her mouth again. "I'll never forget Zak," she hissed over the burn that had to be in her throat.
"What happened, Kara?"
It was the question he'd wanted to ask for months now, wanted to know. Needed to know, if he was ever going to deal with why he had never thought of his brother's girl as his future sister. It was a question she didn't want to answer, if the way she drained a third of the bottle before she lowered it was any indication.
"Kara?" Lee pried the bottle from her grip when she sat abruptly on the grass, her knees tucked up like a kid's against her chest. "What happened with Zak?"
"It would... would have hurt" she said eventually, her voice with unaccustomed tremolo, too soft to be hers. "It would have eaten him up, you know, watching me fly when he couldn't do it himself."
"Zak knew he wouldn't pass?"
She didn't answer.
Lee took a long pull at the bottle, not sure if the hot feeling in him was alcohol or anger or hope. "Zak knew he didn't have the chops, didn't he, Kara? Did he blame you?"
The mop of moon-whitened hair shook slowly. "No. But he couldn't have handled it, all the same, that all he ever wanted was to fly, but that he'd never be good enough for the old man. That he'd never be -"
"Good enough for you," Lee finished when she stopped, mid-sentence.
"That didn't matter to me," she flared, snatched the ambrosia out of his grasp.
"I know that," he flared back, insistent, "because I know YOU. He knew you, too, Kara," he heard himself insisting. " He loved you. But I guess he just loved flying more."
"Right", she said, but the tone was so sardonic; he wished he could see her face, to see what the frak she meant. But she stood, wavered on her feet, held the bottle out of his reach when he rose quickly to steady her. "That's only logical, after all."
She took the bottle with her when she left.
---
+ 6 days, or 200 FTL jumps.
Most of the pilots hadn't even made it out of the ready room this time, Racetrack realised, simply landed in the first seats they could reach after they hauled their bruised and exhausted bodies out of cockpits, and stayed in them. Only CAG was still standing, his features fuzzy with stubble - or was that just her vision blurring? - as he leaned against the podium.
"I don't have anything new to say," he said eventually after going through about half the list of things he had been saying for days. "But you're all going above and beyond, here. I... well done. And" the pause was long enough for the raptor ECO to follow his line of sight and discover she'd been wrong, that Starbuck was also still standing, leaning against the hatchway, staring back. "And be careful out there."
Starbuck smiled, but it was a dimmer wattage than usual. "Twenty minutes, people," she agreed, her voice rough. Quite a few of the occupants of the ready room didn't even move.
Racetrack wasn't even sure exactly how it occurred, but with twenty minutes and no particular place she had to be right then, she found herself drawn to the way the two captains, now leaning easily against the duty board, were smiling. She didn't know either of them, the new CAG nor the lead of Bravo squadron who was sort of a D-CAG by default. But she'd had no idea that they knew each other. Refugees from different ships, their flight suits still marked with patches from other battlegroups, they looked like old friends. Maybe it was fatigue that loosened her tongue, but she was surprised when she heard herself speak. "You two look cozy."
Starbuck seemed to stiffen a little, and her eyes went flat, but Apollo let his features stretch in a tired grin. "Starbuck and I were at the Academy together, lieutenant."
"Really?" it was an unfamiliar voice, from her left: one of the ex-Aurora wing, a tall, lanky jokester with the unlikeliest callsign. Fatty? or something. "Buck's never been big on history, CAG. What was she like as a nugget?"
"Infamous" CAG answered promptly, and Starbuck's grin reappeared.
"I think the word you're looking for, Apollo, is 'notorious'."
"Well, if there's a word for the biggest troublemaker that ever graduated from Sparta, that's the word I'd pick for you."
she made a sound like half a laugh. "You didn't know me that well."
"I didn't need to. Everybody knew about Starbuck."
By this stage, more than half the pilots still slumped in their seats were listening, leaning towards the captains, amused by the back and forth. Sleep wasn't possible unless waking was impossible and since they only had seventeen minutes left, this was a better way to spend it than thinking. She added her mite to the chorus of inquiry. "She was a problem child, sir?"
Apollo turned a look that was part amusement, part mischief on his friend, and Starbuck visibly rolled her eyes, lifted a hand in mock carelessness. "Go on, at least this way I'll get to hear what crap you're feeding these kids, Lee."
"Truth straight from the scrolls, Kara!" he objected, chuckled, turned back to the pilots; the thread of humor was a spark of energy in all of them. It started between the two captains, ran through the room. "Captain Thrace, back when she was 'cadet' Thrace, had a history of student pranks. Everyone knew it was her, but she never got caught, and nobody could ever prove it. But she'd be there, watching from the sidelines with everyone else when the target got tagged, and the grin on your face, Kara," he tilted his chin back towarsd her, "I don't think anyone ever thought you weren't directly responsible."
Starbuck constructed an expression of artful innocence, lifted her hands helplessly. Apollo grinned. "One time," he went on, playing to the crowd, "she and her unknown cohorts dismantled a visiting Colonel's shuttle, and rebuilt it, full working order and ready to fly ... inside the Gymnasium."
The laughter was genuine. Gymnasiums didn't have doors big enough to fly shuttles through.
Starbuck grinned. "That was fun. They had to pull it apart again to take it outside. It took two days."
"What I never figured out," CAG remarked, "was how it only took you and your minions one night to put it there."
"Genius."
"Modesty, too."
She just grinned.
"What else did you do, Boss?" A raptor pilot called out; was it Brough? Wingclip, anyway, his callsign was. Heads swivelled back to the duty board, and Starbuck shook her head.
"Me? I did nothing."
"How about the footprint thing, Starbuck?" Apollo's elbow nudged hers.
Her face broke, laughter spilling out into the room. "Oh Gods, I'd almost forgotten that..."
"It was classic," Apollo said, shaking his head in astonished memory, his mouth jerking at the corners to restrain a smile. "One morning at Reveille, there were these huge black cardboard footprints, trailing up the side of the Lykourgia; all ten floors, these meter-long footprints walking right up the building. Commander Ephors came out for morning jerks with the rest of the officers, took one look at these tracks, and announced 'Those footprints have to come down!'."
Starbuck was laughing into her hand, her shoulders shaking violently. Apollo was getting into the tale now, his hands on his hips in imitation of the long-ago CO of Picon's Academy. "So we all went on training, and at sunset we went back for evening roll-call, and the quadrangle lights went on, and there's these footprints. Turned back the other way, walking down."
The image hit all the occupants of the ready room at about the same time, and the laughter was uproarious. Captain Adama was no exception. "And Commander Ephors got up to call the companies, caught sight of it and just... just..." Shaking his head, he motioned at the giggling Starbuck, who had tears in her eyes, to continue.
"Nearly pissed himself, I swear. As it was, the whole school cracked up." It took a few minutes before anyone could talk enough to ask, but it didn't do them any good. "How it was done is a trade secret, boys and girls," she grinned at them.
"It's a pity he wasn't still there when you went back, Starbuck" Apollo commented. "I'm sure he would have liked to know."
"If he'd still been there, I'd never have been invited back, and you know it." She grinned. "Ephors might have had a good sense of humor, but he figured I was a bad influence."
"Yeah, I think he might have balked at you training up whole new classes of Starbucks to plague future commanders..." The thought obviously amused the CAG, but Starbuck closed down a little.
"You were a teacher at Sparta?" the lanky viper pilot, Tubby - yes, Tubby! - said, his eyes bright with interest as he looked at his former boss. "But you're only twenty-seven..."
Starbuck shrugged. Apollo, obviously chastened, shot her an apologetic glance. "Captain Thrace didn't just have a history of good pranks, Wayre. She also graduated with the highest flight rating in more than twenty-nine years."
"And the lowest scores in Political Science," she rolled her eyes. "Nobody wanted my company for long on a battlestar, Tubby. I think they assigned me to Sparta because they figured I'd be less difficult to deal with outside cramped quarters."
"Then how'd'ya end up on the 'Rora?" another transfer pilot inquired.
Apollo was looking at her, his expression pained, and Starbuck's mouth twisted, but then she grinned, and her eyes danced. "Oh, that part was simple. Colonel Marrol lost a bet."
"Now that," Tubby remarked, laughing "I can very well believe. Do you ever frakkin' lose at the triad table, Buck?"
"Sure I do, Tubby" she replied, and started to follow the CAG out of the room. The rest of her reply floated back in her wake. "Just not to you."
---
+ 6 days 12 hours, or 230 FTL jumps
"Casualty report, sir."
"At ease, Captain." His son looked worn, his skin pale under the lights, as tired as any of them. "How are you holding up, Lee?"
"Better than my Viper," Lee muttered. "I think most of the pilots are hitting the wall now, or will be soon."
"I'm considering boosting essential personnel with stimulants. How do you think they'll handle that?"
Commander Adama wondered why the thought made Lee look more worried, just for a moment; the younger man shrugged. "Bad for pilots. Hyperactivity sets back reaction time, not enhances it."
"Exhaustion doesn't make them react any more quickly either, though. I'll talk to Cottle in a jump or two... if it's necessary."
"If it's necessary", the new CAG echoed, rubbed at his eyes. "Sorry Dad. Casualties haven't increased in a few jumps, I think the panic reaction's wearing down at about the same rate as our reflexes. It'd be hard to keep their morale up if it weren't -"
Abruptly Lee stopped speaking, and Adama looked up from the clipboarded note on Viper attrition to see his son's face hardening. "By your tone and expression, I gather you were going to say "if it weren't for Captain Thrace."
Lee didn't respond.
"I'm well aware of her skills, son. I've read the reports. And before... when I first heard about her from Zak, I made inquiries. She's a superb pilot."
"She's a good leader," Lee countered.
"She has charisma," Adama hedged, then sighed. "We don't have time to discuss her qualities, or her failings, Captain. Part of the reason I called you here was to remind you that you need to maintain command, Lee. No matter the circumstances of your ... association with Thrace, she's your direct subordinate, not your friend. Not under these circumstances. You need to remain professional."
Lee glared at him. "Like you did?"
"What?" He couldn't help snapping. "What do you mean?"
"It was pretty damn professional, that hatchet-job you did on her career, Dad. Rumors and all, I was impressed." Lee's eyes were icy.
"We don't have time for this." Adama stood, feeling frustration push back the tide of fatigue; unfortunately, it would only come back again, higher and harder. "I made my choices with regards to Captain Thrace because her behavior was unprofessional; I responded in kind. She shouldn't have been allowed to remain in the fleet, but she has, and now I have to deal with her. And so do you. And both of us," he said, letting temper emphasise the words, "are going to be strictly professional."
Lee's infintessimal headshake didn't hide the way his son's jaw clenched, biting back fury. "Will that be all, Commander?"
"Dismissed, Captain." The CAG was nearly at the door when he remembered that in eight minutes, Lee would be out there again, and there might be no second chances. "Lee -"
Apollo paused but didn't turn.
"Be careful out there, son."
The set of the younger man's shoulders loosened, and he turned, smiled; it was not the full smile he remembered from happier days, but echoed in it was his mother's smile. And Zak's. "I will, Dad."
---
+6 days, 22 hours
The aching in every limb - two hundred-forty-odd hard landings worth of bruises and impact shock - should have made her tired, but the stimulants, the stimulants were crawling in her blood and arcing little sparks under her skin. Hypersensitized and close to fury, Starbuck hissed air and water in through her teeth and tried to let the shower drain some of her tension away.
Until her body came down, she wouldn't be able to shut her mind down, either. And right now, she didn't want to think.
Lee had been in the ready room as she'd passed it on her way to the head; he'd been wiping dead pilots off the duty board and replacing them with the names of her former shipmates, and she knew she should go in there and explain to him not to pair up Tubby and Pacer on patrol, because they'd burn way too much fuel in their private little pissing contests. She knew, too, she should apologize for her insubordination, out there, when they'd destroyed that ship.
Not yet. He wasn't ready to hear it, and she wasn't sure he would be for a while longer, not if the last ten hours or so had been anything to judge by.
Sliding back into the easy camaraderie of four years ago, another life, had made the transfer to Galactica feel a little like coming home, but for the last dozen or so jumps and the moments of downtime snatched between them, Lee had turned the temperature way the frak down, and she hadn't known why. It had eaten at her for hours, his sudden distance, which had made it so frakking easy to turn on him when just as abruptly, he'd tried to appeal to her as a friend again, to get her to take the frakking stims.
And men call us the indecisive sex. Bastard.
It hadn't been much of a blow-up. No exchange of fists - they were both too sore for that, if her own body was any indication. And of course, they'd laughed it off. Because it had been funny, too funny, funny enough to frakking cry over, under the circumstances. But the look in his face, when she'd said, unthinkingly honest: 'we're not friends, you're the CAG had not been funny at all.
None of it made sense. She might be awake, might be able to feel life coursing a little too fast in every vein, but her mind was stuck in tired, too-insistent loops.
Kara turned the water up a little harder and hotter, hissed as it pounded against bruised skin. "Frakking cylons."
"Copy that," she heard him say, not even needing to turn to know it was Lee. "That's about the size of it."
"Glad you agree, Captain," She leaned her folded forearms against the tiled wall, let the hot water stream down on the back of her head, her neck. She didn't want to deal with Adamas right now, not when her skin felt thin as cobwebs and the strength in her muscles was an illusion.
His shower turned on, the one next to hers, and she heard him let out a breath in frustration. "Don't do that, Kara."
"Do what, sir?" Leaving her tongue on automatic was going to make him mad, but it was easier than thinking about the things she really wanted to say.
"It's just us in here," he snarled at her, flung a hand at the rest of the vacant room. "You don't have to play soldiers right now."
"Lords of frakking Kobol" she snapped back, without a hint of regret for the irreverence of it, "make up your mind, Adama. I've already got frakking whiplash from bouncing your viper on the deck. You've been pulling rank on me for what feels like days, only I wouldn't have a frakking clue how long it's been. Then you pull that little chummy episode in the hangar bay, follow it up with 'Captain Thrace' or 'Starbuck' ever since. Now you walk in here and all of a sudden, I'm Kara?" His eyes slid guiltily away, and she sent hers up to the condensation-dotted ceiling.
"We had a job to do," he offered, but it sounded weak; she turned in the water to glare at him again. "Frak, Kara - all of a sudden I'm your boss, and I'm supposed to maintain command, but... its you, and it's me, and I forget."
"Maintain command, huh?" She narrowed her gaze, saw his jaw work. "I suppose the little pep talk concluded with instructions to keep things strictly professional, too, didn't it?"
Lee's face went white. "How the frak did you know?"
Kara drew in a shuddering breath, reminding herself - or trying to - that Lee wasn't who she should be angry at. "Let me put it simply, Apollo. You're not the first of your family who got served with that little slice of hypocrisy. I've heard it before."
"Which obviously means it didn't work so well on Zak," Lee rubbed his face, stripped water from his eyes. "I'm sorry, Kara."
"Zak wasn't fighting a frakking war at the time." It didn't make sense to claw holes in him and defend him at the same time, but that's the way they'd always been. And that familiarity was suddenly more logical than everything else since the end of the world.
"And he wasn't your immediate superior, either." He went back to his ablutions, but the way he shifted uneasily under the water told her that he wasn't finished. "It threw me off, what you said in the hangar deck," Lee continued eventually. "About not being friends."
"You needed to remember that," she shrugged. "When it's an order, give me a frakking order, Lee."
"Yes, sir" he snapped, but threw her the hint of a grin. "But that wasn't what I meant."
"Then what did you mean?"
He hesitated, reached over and shut off his water, turned away to grab his towel. She frowned at his naked back until he sighed. "I meant that it threw me because that's what the old man told me. That I wasn't your friend, I was your boss."
She really didn't want to agree with Commander Adama. "That's probably how he'd prefer it to stay."
"It's not what I want, though."
She shut off her own shower, thought about that. Remembered that it hadn't been an order that made her pull the trigger on the Olympic Carrier but the instinct, inescapable in her tired and overstimulated head, to stick with Lee. "No," she agreed, finally. "Me either." Turning away from the faucets, she found a towel being proffered, smiled as she took it. "So what do you want, Lee?"
His answer spun her down in a dizzy mental spiral, her heart rising contrarily to her throat.
"I want to know if you're still with Zak."
---
Fin, part3.
Length: 5400 words, roughly, this part. Please note, part 3 was so long I'm now making it two seperate chapters.
Rating: M for language and concepts in this part.
Characters: Kara/Lee, Adama.
Notes: AU, begins during the mini-series. Occasional backstory flashbacks. No spoilers for anything beyond the episode 33 at this point. Unbeta'd. Naturally, characters and concepts are property of RDM / SciFi / Larson. Apologies to those who were expecting pilot!sex; it's getting its own seperate chapter now, hopefully up in a day or so.
Summary: It didn't make sense to claw holes in him and defend him at the same time, but that's the way they'd always been. And that familiarity was suddenly more logical than everything else since the end of the world.
Part one is here
Part two is here
-2 years, 8 months
He would have thought she'd be drunk by now; it was the day she'd been supposed to get married, if Zak had lived, if Zak hadn't called things off so abruptly. Lee had been prepared for that eventuality with a thermos of coffee and some water and a few other useful items. He was also prepared for the possibility - unlikely though it seemed, knowing Kara - of tearful grief, though he thought it was more likely that she'd be angry, volatile, that he'd come away with bruises on his skin as well as his heart. But this, this drawn and empty Kara, he had no strategy to cope with. He didn't even know where to start.
Lee sat down near her on the grass; they were on a hilltop half-a-mile from the Academy hangars, and the whine of Viper engines in atmospheric launch carried to them on the wind. Kara was apparently deaf, both to them and to him, but one look at the unopened bottle beside her warned him that alcohol was not what drowned out the noise. He felt his own mouth open, close, open again, no words coming out because he couldn't find the ones that made sense.
It was Kara who broke the silence after about five minutes. "Remembered this place, huh?"
Her voice was scratchy with disuse. Hadn't she spoken in days? She looked like she hadn't slept, either. "Zak used to bring me here, too," he agreed. "When he came to visit while I was in flight school, he used to spend days parked here, watching the vipers take off, watch maneuvers. When classes were over, I'd come out to meet him, bring my books if I had to study. He'd sit there, asking endless questions about flying fighters, how to do it, what it was like. There wasn't anything about Vipers or flying them that he didn't want to know."
She sat in silence, her face tilted his way if not her eyes, listening; he couldn't tell what she was thinking, so he kept going, kept filling up the silence with memories of Zak. "As a kid, it was all he wanted. I mean - I was the same, but it wasn't all there was to the world, either. I wanted to know about why we had Vipers and Battlestars, about the Cylons, about the past. I wanted to understand them as much as I wanted to fly the ships; but Zak... Zak just wanted wings. More than anything else, I think."
"More than anything," she agreed.
The sky was darkening, turning violet at the highest arc, an aura of flame colors painted over the distant hills. The blushing light fired Kara's hair in tones of gold and copper where the wind stirred it, tinted her skin ruddy. She'd have been beautiful if she wasn't so broken; was beautiful anyway, he found himself thinking. But it hurt to see someone so vivid, so much larger than life, shrunk down so small.
The silence was too heavy. "Want some coffee?" he tried, reached for the knapsack he'd dumped behind him on the grass. The thermos felt warm even through the canvas, and that's when he noticed how cold the air was turning. "Will warm you up."
Kara chuckled, a raspy sound. "Nope. Nectar's better." She waved the bottle at him. "You figured I'd have a good head start on this already, didn't you?"
Lee felt himself shrug. "I would have been on the second bottle by now, but I flew CAP this morning before my leave ticked 'round."
"Then why the coffee?"
Figures she'd ask that. He'd expected her to be drunk, wanted her to be drunk, because then she'd have something, something between her and the grief. It would have been better than the raw emotion, for her. It hadn't been for him. "Sobering you up would have given me something to do."
"You need to do something?" The thin metal cap on the bottle tore away from the seal under the pressure of her fingers, and the wind carried the sharp scent right to him.
Lee extended the metal mugs he'd brought for the coffee, watched her pour a slug into each, and after she took one, he tilted the other straight down his throat, let it burn. Let the honest answer come. "I didn't know what else to do, how else I could help."
Kara tossed back her own shot, let the empty mug dangle from slack fingers. "I don't need help."
The twist of pain must have shown in his broken grin, because she looked away.
"But," she continued, staring off towards the hills, where faint engine sounds proclaimed the returning patrol, "thanks. For wanting to."
He extended the mug again, nodding. "Least I can do, Kara."
She poured a more generous dose for each of them, took a sip and then leaned back on her elbows, legs extended in the shaggy grass, her BDU's hanging off a frame that was visibly leaner than it had been a mere three months ago. Lee let his eyes trace her, appreciating what he saw. That wasn't new. But it had felt guilty before, to admire this woman whom his brother had adored. That wasn't how it felt now.
"I'm leaving the Academy" she said, a little later. The bottle was two-thirds empty, and his head was spinning, and stars were wheeling overhead, vipers cutting between them now and then in lines of silver fire.
"What?"
"Taking a posting."
It took a minute to sink in.
"That bastard" he hissed, clenched his hands around the mug to stop him hurling it. "He got them to give in?"
He'd known, of course, that his father's ire wouldn't end with the funeral. He'd known that all the favors the old man had left to call, he'd be calling them in to try and punish her, to get her drummed out of the fleet, or at least sent to a lousy posting, anything, anywhere that didn't carry the prestige of Sparta. He'd hoped it wouldn't be enough, that Kara's skills and Kara's fire and the inimitable glory of her flying would stop the rot from eating away at her career. He'd been so sure, with Colonel Trevis' support...
"Not exactly," Kara said, shrugged. "Trev's stood up to the pressure; he doesn't want me gone. But there's been... issues raised."
"Like what?" The snap in his voice wasn't aimed at her, but she hunched over her empty mug.
"Questions on whether or not I have the qualifications to instruct, seeing as I've only served one duty posting other than Sparta. Questioning whether I have the range of fleet experience... and some rumors."
It wasn't the first time. When Admiral Ngala's chief of staff had put Kara Thrace forward as a candidate for instructor after only one tour aboard the Kerberos, there'd been rumors, too. Relatively benign ones. Though they hadn't known each other then, Kara'd been infamous when they were both in Sparta's flight programme, and Lee himself had laughed at the idea of the sixty-year-old, shrewd Commander Tylney involed with the volatile twenty-three-going-on-fifteen Starbuck. Somehow he knew this wasn't quite like that.
"Rumors," he prompted, when she wasn't going to elaborate without it. She reached for the bottle.
"Apparently, I'm Trev's lover. Apparently, that's the only reason he's kept me on here. Apparently" and her voice hissed and broke until she gulped nectar straight out of the flask, "apparently that's why Zak Adama ended his relationship with me, because he found out I was frakking my boss."
Lee wrenched the bottle out of her grasp, swigged it himself until there was little more than an inch left in the bottom. "He's asked you to resign?" he tried eventually, handed her the remainder of the nectar.
She stared down the bottle's throat, then upended it into her mouth, swallowed. He could see the dampness shine on her lip. "No. I offered."
He shook his head, kept shaking it. Couldn't believe she was giving in. "No," he insisted, "you don't let him win. Kara -"
She turned to him then, her face lit up with moonlight and frustration. "You don't get it, Lee. I don't want to be here. I don't want to frakking be here alo-"
His arms went around her before the word could ring in the air, her face tucked into his neck, her fingers relaxing the fists that had been her reflex response and then closing just as tightly in the front of his jacket. Her hair feathered across his cheek and he felt the tears then, seeping down under the edge of his collar. Her chest heaved, and he held her tighter and kissed her hair and rubbed a hand up and down her spine until it stopped.
"Aurora," Kara said when she could speak again, withdrawing from him as far as his arm around her shoulders allowed. "Rhys Marrol's ship; I'm posted there as his lead pilot."
"Scout ship - Kara, you'll be so isolated, you shouldn't -"
"No, Lee. That's exactly what I need. I need to get away from here and... be the lone wolf, again. Remember how."
"You don't have to be alone, Kara. You might have lost Zak, but you don't have to lose me, too." It felt so important that she understand that he wasn't going anywhere, that he didn't blame her. It was necessary, as necessary as air, or water, that she realise that he, that Lee Adama had not cast her aside. Would not.
She shook her head, wriggled herself further out of his grasp, rolled the empty nectar bottle through the night-black grass. "You're his brother, Lee. You would have been my brother today. If I have to face that fact for the rest of my life -" she stopped. Shook her head again, her face shadowed so he couldn't see anything of it but a pair of too-wide, too-shiny eyes. "Besides, you're posted on a Battlestar, and thanks to ... circumstances, it'll be ten years before I get that privilege. I'd still have to be on my own, Lee. Distance wouldn't make any frakking difference to that."
"We could resign" he offered before thinking, voicing the idea that had only recently dawned on him, the one that seemed like the answer to everything to do with the fleet and his father and the shadow that hung over both of them. "Always work for flyers with fleet training. Aerospace are always looking for test pilots."
Kara stared at him. "Leave the fleet." Her head moved sideways as though she were about to shake it again, and froze there."You're serious?" When he nodded, she exploded, leaped up and hurled the empty bottle viciously down the slope. "No. No frakking way, Lee. I'm leaving Sparta for my own reasons, but I'll be damned if I let your old man take the fleet away from me too."
He could understand that concept. "Okay. Okay - you don't want to leave. I get it." He fidgeted with the knapsack, the not-quite hot thermos of coffee, and sighed, reached into the bottom of the bag for his weapon of last resort. The bottle was square, full of ambrosia that the moonlight turned ghostly gray in the glass. He twisted the cap off almost viciously, wondering why it suddenly hurt that his father was part of her decisions at all. Or maybe what hurt was that she didn't even seem to hear his thoughtless use of 'we'.
"No, you don't get it, Lee. You don't get it at all. You don't get what this job means to me. Do you know, I haven't been up there since..." she broke off, snatched the bottle out of his grip and took a generous slug straight out. "They wouldn't let me up. Trev revoked my flight status. I've had to... sit here for three months, and deal with this whole thing, over and over, in my head. If I could fly, I could forget it, for a while."
He watched as she downed another mouthful. "Forget Zak?" It wasn't meant to be cruel.
She froze, then lifted the ambrosia to her mouth again. "I'll never forget Zak," she hissed over the burn that had to be in her throat.
"What happened, Kara?"
It was the question he'd wanted to ask for months now, wanted to know. Needed to know, if he was ever going to deal with why he had never thought of his brother's girl as his future sister. It was a question she didn't want to answer, if the way she drained a third of the bottle before she lowered it was any indication.
"Kara?" Lee pried the bottle from her grip when she sat abruptly on the grass, her knees tucked up like a kid's against her chest. "What happened with Zak?"
"It would... would have hurt" she said eventually, her voice with unaccustomed tremolo, too soft to be hers. "It would have eaten him up, you know, watching me fly when he couldn't do it himself."
"Zak knew he wouldn't pass?"
She didn't answer.
Lee took a long pull at the bottle, not sure if the hot feeling in him was alcohol or anger or hope. "Zak knew he didn't have the chops, didn't he, Kara? Did he blame you?"
The mop of moon-whitened hair shook slowly. "No. But he couldn't have handled it, all the same, that all he ever wanted was to fly, but that he'd never be good enough for the old man. That he'd never be -"
"Good enough for you," Lee finished when she stopped, mid-sentence.
"That didn't matter to me," she flared, snatched the ambrosia out of his grasp.
"I know that," he flared back, insistent, "because I know YOU. He knew you, too, Kara," he heard himself insisting. " He loved you. But I guess he just loved flying more."
"Right", she said, but the tone was so sardonic; he wished he could see her face, to see what the frak she meant. But she stood, wavered on her feet, held the bottle out of his reach when he rose quickly to steady her. "That's only logical, after all."
She took the bottle with her when she left.
---
+ 6 days, or 200 FTL jumps.
Most of the pilots hadn't even made it out of the ready room this time, Racetrack realised, simply landed in the first seats they could reach after they hauled their bruised and exhausted bodies out of cockpits, and stayed in them. Only CAG was still standing, his features fuzzy with stubble - or was that just her vision blurring? - as he leaned against the podium.
"I don't have anything new to say," he said eventually after going through about half the list of things he had been saying for days. "But you're all going above and beyond, here. I... well done. And" the pause was long enough for the raptor ECO to follow his line of sight and discover she'd been wrong, that Starbuck was also still standing, leaning against the hatchway, staring back. "And be careful out there."
Starbuck smiled, but it was a dimmer wattage than usual. "Twenty minutes, people," she agreed, her voice rough. Quite a few of the occupants of the ready room didn't even move.
Racetrack wasn't even sure exactly how it occurred, but with twenty minutes and no particular place she had to be right then, she found herself drawn to the way the two captains, now leaning easily against the duty board, were smiling. She didn't know either of them, the new CAG nor the lead of Bravo squadron who was sort of a D-CAG by default. But she'd had no idea that they knew each other. Refugees from different ships, their flight suits still marked with patches from other battlegroups, they looked like old friends. Maybe it was fatigue that loosened her tongue, but she was surprised when she heard herself speak. "You two look cozy."
Starbuck seemed to stiffen a little, and her eyes went flat, but Apollo let his features stretch in a tired grin. "Starbuck and I were at the Academy together, lieutenant."
"Really?" it was an unfamiliar voice, from her left: one of the ex-Aurora wing, a tall, lanky jokester with the unlikeliest callsign. Fatty? or something. "Buck's never been big on history, CAG. What was she like as a nugget?"
"Infamous" CAG answered promptly, and Starbuck's grin reappeared.
"I think the word you're looking for, Apollo, is 'notorious'."
"Well, if there's a word for the biggest troublemaker that ever graduated from Sparta, that's the word I'd pick for you."
she made a sound like half a laugh. "You didn't know me that well."
"I didn't need to. Everybody knew about Starbuck."
By this stage, more than half the pilots still slumped in their seats were listening, leaning towards the captains, amused by the back and forth. Sleep wasn't possible unless waking was impossible and since they only had seventeen minutes left, this was a better way to spend it than thinking. She added her mite to the chorus of inquiry. "She was a problem child, sir?"
Apollo turned a look that was part amusement, part mischief on his friend, and Starbuck visibly rolled her eyes, lifted a hand in mock carelessness. "Go on, at least this way I'll get to hear what crap you're feeding these kids, Lee."
"Truth straight from the scrolls, Kara!" he objected, chuckled, turned back to the pilots; the thread of humor was a spark of energy in all of them. It started between the two captains, ran through the room. "Captain Thrace, back when she was 'cadet' Thrace, had a history of student pranks. Everyone knew it was her, but she never got caught, and nobody could ever prove it. But she'd be there, watching from the sidelines with everyone else when the target got tagged, and the grin on your face, Kara," he tilted his chin back towarsd her, "I don't think anyone ever thought you weren't directly responsible."
Starbuck constructed an expression of artful innocence, lifted her hands helplessly. Apollo grinned. "One time," he went on, playing to the crowd, "she and her unknown cohorts dismantled a visiting Colonel's shuttle, and rebuilt it, full working order and ready to fly ... inside the Gymnasium."
The laughter was genuine. Gymnasiums didn't have doors big enough to fly shuttles through.
Starbuck grinned. "That was fun. They had to pull it apart again to take it outside. It took two days."
"What I never figured out," CAG remarked, "was how it only took you and your minions one night to put it there."
"Genius."
"Modesty, too."
She just grinned.
"What else did you do, Boss?" A raptor pilot called out; was it Brough? Wingclip, anyway, his callsign was. Heads swivelled back to the duty board, and Starbuck shook her head.
"Me? I did nothing."
"How about the footprint thing, Starbuck?" Apollo's elbow nudged hers.
Her face broke, laughter spilling out into the room. "Oh Gods, I'd almost forgotten that..."
"It was classic," Apollo said, shaking his head in astonished memory, his mouth jerking at the corners to restrain a smile. "One morning at Reveille, there were these huge black cardboard footprints, trailing up the side of the Lykourgia; all ten floors, these meter-long footprints walking right up the building. Commander Ephors came out for morning jerks with the rest of the officers, took one look at these tracks, and announced 'Those footprints have to come down!'."
Starbuck was laughing into her hand, her shoulders shaking violently. Apollo was getting into the tale now, his hands on his hips in imitation of the long-ago CO of Picon's Academy. "So we all went on training, and at sunset we went back for evening roll-call, and the quadrangle lights went on, and there's these footprints. Turned back the other way, walking down."
The image hit all the occupants of the ready room at about the same time, and the laughter was uproarious. Captain Adama was no exception. "And Commander Ephors got up to call the companies, caught sight of it and just... just..." Shaking his head, he motioned at the giggling Starbuck, who had tears in her eyes, to continue.
"Nearly pissed himself, I swear. As it was, the whole school cracked up." It took a few minutes before anyone could talk enough to ask, but it didn't do them any good. "How it was done is a trade secret, boys and girls," she grinned at them.
"It's a pity he wasn't still there when you went back, Starbuck" Apollo commented. "I'm sure he would have liked to know."
"If he'd still been there, I'd never have been invited back, and you know it." She grinned. "Ephors might have had a good sense of humor, but he figured I was a bad influence."
"Yeah, I think he might have balked at you training up whole new classes of Starbucks to plague future commanders..." The thought obviously amused the CAG, but Starbuck closed down a little.
"You were a teacher at Sparta?" the lanky viper pilot, Tubby - yes, Tubby! - said, his eyes bright with interest as he looked at his former boss. "But you're only twenty-seven..."
Starbuck shrugged. Apollo, obviously chastened, shot her an apologetic glance. "Captain Thrace didn't just have a history of good pranks, Wayre. She also graduated with the highest flight rating in more than twenty-nine years."
"And the lowest scores in Political Science," she rolled her eyes. "Nobody wanted my company for long on a battlestar, Tubby. I think they assigned me to Sparta because they figured I'd be less difficult to deal with outside cramped quarters."
"Then how'd'ya end up on the 'Rora?" another transfer pilot inquired.
Apollo was looking at her, his expression pained, and Starbuck's mouth twisted, but then she grinned, and her eyes danced. "Oh, that part was simple. Colonel Marrol lost a bet."
"Now that," Tubby remarked, laughing "I can very well believe. Do you ever frakkin' lose at the triad table, Buck?"
"Sure I do, Tubby" she replied, and started to follow the CAG out of the room. The rest of her reply floated back in her wake. "Just not to you."
---
+ 6 days 12 hours, or 230 FTL jumps
"Casualty report, sir."
"At ease, Captain." His son looked worn, his skin pale under the lights, as tired as any of them. "How are you holding up, Lee?"
"Better than my Viper," Lee muttered. "I think most of the pilots are hitting the wall now, or will be soon."
"I'm considering boosting essential personnel with stimulants. How do you think they'll handle that?"
Commander Adama wondered why the thought made Lee look more worried, just for a moment; the younger man shrugged. "Bad for pilots. Hyperactivity sets back reaction time, not enhances it."
"Exhaustion doesn't make them react any more quickly either, though. I'll talk to Cottle in a jump or two... if it's necessary."
"If it's necessary", the new CAG echoed, rubbed at his eyes. "Sorry Dad. Casualties haven't increased in a few jumps, I think the panic reaction's wearing down at about the same rate as our reflexes. It'd be hard to keep their morale up if it weren't -"
Abruptly Lee stopped speaking, and Adama looked up from the clipboarded note on Viper attrition to see his son's face hardening. "By your tone and expression, I gather you were going to say "if it weren't for Captain Thrace."
Lee didn't respond.
"I'm well aware of her skills, son. I've read the reports. And before... when I first heard about her from Zak, I made inquiries. She's a superb pilot."
"She's a good leader," Lee countered.
"She has charisma," Adama hedged, then sighed. "We don't have time to discuss her qualities, or her failings, Captain. Part of the reason I called you here was to remind you that you need to maintain command, Lee. No matter the circumstances of your ... association with Thrace, she's your direct subordinate, not your friend. Not under these circumstances. You need to remain professional."
Lee glared at him. "Like you did?"
"What?" He couldn't help snapping. "What do you mean?"
"It was pretty damn professional, that hatchet-job you did on her career, Dad. Rumors and all, I was impressed." Lee's eyes were icy.
"We don't have time for this." Adama stood, feeling frustration push back the tide of fatigue; unfortunately, it would only come back again, higher and harder. "I made my choices with regards to Captain Thrace because her behavior was unprofessional; I responded in kind. She shouldn't have been allowed to remain in the fleet, but she has, and now I have to deal with her. And so do you. And both of us," he said, letting temper emphasise the words, "are going to be strictly professional."
Lee's infintessimal headshake didn't hide the way his son's jaw clenched, biting back fury. "Will that be all, Commander?"
"Dismissed, Captain." The CAG was nearly at the door when he remembered that in eight minutes, Lee would be out there again, and there might be no second chances. "Lee -"
Apollo paused but didn't turn.
"Be careful out there, son."
The set of the younger man's shoulders loosened, and he turned, smiled; it was not the full smile he remembered from happier days, but echoed in it was his mother's smile. And Zak's. "I will, Dad."
---
+6 days, 22 hours
The aching in every limb - two hundred-forty-odd hard landings worth of bruises and impact shock - should have made her tired, but the stimulants, the stimulants were crawling in her blood and arcing little sparks under her skin. Hypersensitized and close to fury, Starbuck hissed air and water in through her teeth and tried to let the shower drain some of her tension away.
Until her body came down, she wouldn't be able to shut her mind down, either. And right now, she didn't want to think.
Lee had been in the ready room as she'd passed it on her way to the head; he'd been wiping dead pilots off the duty board and replacing them with the names of her former shipmates, and she knew she should go in there and explain to him not to pair up Tubby and Pacer on patrol, because they'd burn way too much fuel in their private little pissing contests. She knew, too, she should apologize for her insubordination, out there, when they'd destroyed that ship.
Not yet. He wasn't ready to hear it, and she wasn't sure he would be for a while longer, not if the last ten hours or so had been anything to judge by.
Sliding back into the easy camaraderie of four years ago, another life, had made the transfer to Galactica feel a little like coming home, but for the last dozen or so jumps and the moments of downtime snatched between them, Lee had turned the temperature way the frak down, and she hadn't known why. It had eaten at her for hours, his sudden distance, which had made it so frakking easy to turn on him when just as abruptly, he'd tried to appeal to her as a friend again, to get her to take the frakking stims.
And men call us the indecisive sex. Bastard.
It hadn't been much of a blow-up. No exchange of fists - they were both too sore for that, if her own body was any indication. And of course, they'd laughed it off. Because it had been funny, too funny, funny enough to frakking cry over, under the circumstances. But the look in his face, when she'd said, unthinkingly honest: 'we're not friends, you're the CAG had not been funny at all.
None of it made sense. She might be awake, might be able to feel life coursing a little too fast in every vein, but her mind was stuck in tired, too-insistent loops.
Kara turned the water up a little harder and hotter, hissed as it pounded against bruised skin. "Frakking cylons."
"Copy that," she heard him say, not even needing to turn to know it was Lee. "That's about the size of it."
"Glad you agree, Captain," She leaned her folded forearms against the tiled wall, let the hot water stream down on the back of her head, her neck. She didn't want to deal with Adamas right now, not when her skin felt thin as cobwebs and the strength in her muscles was an illusion.
His shower turned on, the one next to hers, and she heard him let out a breath in frustration. "Don't do that, Kara."
"Do what, sir?" Leaving her tongue on automatic was going to make him mad, but it was easier than thinking about the things she really wanted to say.
"It's just us in here," he snarled at her, flung a hand at the rest of the vacant room. "You don't have to play soldiers right now."
"Lords of frakking Kobol" she snapped back, without a hint of regret for the irreverence of it, "make up your mind, Adama. I've already got frakking whiplash from bouncing your viper on the deck. You've been pulling rank on me for what feels like days, only I wouldn't have a frakking clue how long it's been. Then you pull that little chummy episode in the hangar bay, follow it up with 'Captain Thrace' or 'Starbuck' ever since. Now you walk in here and all of a sudden, I'm Kara?" His eyes slid guiltily away, and she sent hers up to the condensation-dotted ceiling.
"We had a job to do," he offered, but it sounded weak; she turned in the water to glare at him again. "Frak, Kara - all of a sudden I'm your boss, and I'm supposed to maintain command, but... its you, and it's me, and I forget."
"Maintain command, huh?" She narrowed her gaze, saw his jaw work. "I suppose the little pep talk concluded with instructions to keep things strictly professional, too, didn't it?"
Lee's face went white. "How the frak did you know?"
Kara drew in a shuddering breath, reminding herself - or trying to - that Lee wasn't who she should be angry at. "Let me put it simply, Apollo. You're not the first of your family who got served with that little slice of hypocrisy. I've heard it before."
"Which obviously means it didn't work so well on Zak," Lee rubbed his face, stripped water from his eyes. "I'm sorry, Kara."
"Zak wasn't fighting a frakking war at the time." It didn't make sense to claw holes in him and defend him at the same time, but that's the way they'd always been. And that familiarity was suddenly more logical than everything else since the end of the world.
"And he wasn't your immediate superior, either." He went back to his ablutions, but the way he shifted uneasily under the water told her that he wasn't finished. "It threw me off, what you said in the hangar deck," Lee continued eventually. "About not being friends."
"You needed to remember that," she shrugged. "When it's an order, give me a frakking order, Lee."
"Yes, sir" he snapped, but threw her the hint of a grin. "But that wasn't what I meant."
"Then what did you mean?"
He hesitated, reached over and shut off his water, turned away to grab his towel. She frowned at his naked back until he sighed. "I meant that it threw me because that's what the old man told me. That I wasn't your friend, I was your boss."
She really didn't want to agree with Commander Adama. "That's probably how he'd prefer it to stay."
"It's not what I want, though."
She shut off her own shower, thought about that. Remembered that it hadn't been an order that made her pull the trigger on the Olympic Carrier but the instinct, inescapable in her tired and overstimulated head, to stick with Lee. "No," she agreed, finally. "Me either." Turning away from the faucets, she found a towel being proffered, smiled as she took it. "So what do you want, Lee?"
His answer spun her down in a dizzy mental spiral, her heart rising contrarily to her throat.
"I want to know if you're still with Zak."
---
Fin, part3.