BSG fic: Dried Out: the Drunk Tank remix
Title: Dried Out: the Drunk Tank Remix
Pairing: Laura/Kara
Rating: PG
Warnings: discussions of alcohol abuse and illness
Original Story: Drunk Tank, by
astreamofstars
It doesn’t take long to drive across Caprica City at this hour, when the morning starts to crawl down from the north. It’s still dark enough to make Kara flinch at each of the seven taxicabs that whip by them. Laura follows the eighth down Oasis Drive for a tense five and a half minutes until snapping her turn signal on. They’re three intersections short of her usual route, but this way she can drive past her Maglev stop.
Kara’s eyes stay fixed to the dashboard, but Laura assumes she takes the point.
She pulls into the garage and waits for the automated door to slide down before stepping out of the car. Kara doesn’t try to bolt, though; she follows Laura’s lead by a second until walking just over the threshold and stopping in her tracks.
There are a lot of things Kara likes to break, but charged silence isn’t one of them, so Laura gives. “Take a frakking shower.”
Kara wants to bristle, Laura can tell, but she’s too tired to do more than toss her black top onto the carpet and bump her shoulder into the wall hard when she starts in on her jeans.
Laura listens to the water run for thirty seconds before allowing herself to lean over the counter and scrub her eyes.
She isn’t one to moralize about recreational activities. She and Kara had met three drinks deep in an Aerilon bar that wasn’t either of their styles, but the whiskey had been good and the music better, and when Kara held out her hand, Laura forgot for a moment that she hadn’t danced since the accident. And now -
Laura needs a task.
Kara has spent enough nights here to know where to look for mouthwash and clean towels but not quite enough for her to have forgotten a full change of clothes, so Laura leaves gray drawstring pants and a soft gym top on the bed, then sits down at her desk to give the governor’s chief of staff notice that she’s taking the day.
The water goes silent. She gives Kara another two minutes of privacy before heading back into the bedroom. Kara sits on the edge of the bed, hands clasped and dropped between her knees.
“We’ll do this in the morning.”
She waits for Kara to quirk an eyebrow at the window and inform her that it is the morning, but Kara lets the light invade without comment, so they crawl into bed in silence.
Kara usually sleeps as intently as she does everything else, leaving Laura to stir and sigh in privacy, but this time she tosses and turns as she dries out.
Neither of them feels particularly rested five hours later.
Laura sets a bottle of milk on the table and pours out two cups of coffee, because Kara isn’t going to ask and she isn’t about to offer.
Kara turns her spoon over three times before speaking. “Aren’t you going to ask what I thought I was doing?”
“I don’t care what you were doing,” Laura bites out, and steels herself against regretting it. “You clearly know you can call me. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t do so two hours earlier.”
“A few guys from my class at the Academy are on leave. They live a little ways out of town, closer to the base.”
Vanity pricks at her, almost comforting in its pettiness: Kara hadn’t wanted to be seen with her. Viper pilots date younger men, not older women.
Kara doesn’t see her wince. “I usually crash with Helo, but I lost him somewhere in the bar and I just…had to get out of there.”
“There are no cabs out by the base?”
Kara looks down, but her coffee cup stubbornly keeps its secrets. “They have to ask where you want to go, and I didn’t know what to tell them.”
Laura arches her eyebrows.
“I couldn’t decide where to go. I didn’t want to be at home alone.”
“Do you care to explain why?”
“My mom’s sick.” Kara flips her spoon one more time. “Cancer.”
Cancer. Laura tastes the word as Kara spits it out, remembers hospitals with their buckets full of pills and hating herself for wondering when her mother would give in.
Give in. She’d really thought like that.
“I don’t even think she was going to tell me. She got pissed at me for coming over and frakkin’ catching her. Chewed me out the way she always does. Gods, she’s such a bitch.”
Kara bites her lip in immediate regret. Laura shakes her head. “Oh, I believe you. And cancer is no reason to start lying to ourselves.”
“Sounds like you know.”
“I wish that I didn’t.” It’s Laura’s turn to stall, blowing into her coffee and slipping away from Kara’s gaze, just for a restorative second or two. “My mother. It was a long time ago.” Nearly six years, not long enough to forget how Cheryl’s voice had cracked over almost those same words. Mom’s sick. Cancer.
These things run in families, they rip through communities. It’s silly to think it’s about her, and yet she’s lived with these patterns spiraling around her with the force of the gods themselves.
One day Laura herself will be sick, she’s sure, but she doesn’t anticipate being anyone else’s problem by then.
“So that’s why I went out and got shitfaced. I didn’t know what else to do. Still don’t know what the hell to do.”
There’s nothing she can do, at least, nothing that will make any appreciable difference in the outcome, but Kara hardly needs to hear that. “I’ll call Veteran’s Outreach first thing at work next week.”
Skepticism clears Kara’s eyes. “The frak are they -“
“Their job. They will pick her up for appointments at the VMC, they will deliver her prescriptions, they will check her apartment once in a while to make sure it’s clean. That’s their job.”
“Kind of feels like it should be my job.”
Laura shakes her head. “Your job is to do what you can.”
“Even if that’s nothing?”
“We both know it won’t be. And while you’re figuring that out, I’ll make sure she gets to the top of their list.”
Kara nods. “Well, Laura Rosliiiiin,” she sings as the moment passes, “using a position of public trust to pull strings for your hot young frak-up of a girlfriend. What will you say when word gets around the break room?”
“’Your jealousy is unseemly, Cassius’?”
“That Cassius, he’s got some problems.”
“He’s a liability, I’ve always said.” She puts on her glasses and pushes up and away from the table. “In the meantime, I am going to make breakfast, and my hot young frak-up of a girlfriend is going to think of a way to make it up to me.”
She decides on a full Picon breakfast, for Kara’s hangover and for the excuse to hide her face as she rummages for ingredients.
As the oil starts to hiss, Kara slips her arms around Laura’s waist. “Thank you,” she says, quick and low. “And I’m sorry.”
Laura leans back, just a little, enough to tip their heads together for a brief moment. “So am I.”