[bsg] places to stand
Title: Places To Stand
Rating: R
Spoilers: None
Summary: He knew the exact day Kara gave up on being rescued, because she cornered him in the Raptor, pushed him up against the wall and kissed him. Kara/Lee
A/N: Christmas present for wisteria_'s request, for she is dear to my heart! Thanks to, uh, many people - imry, for being an awesome sounding board (and also rawles, who is WISE!), alanna for her character arcs, and pen, as usual.
*
Places To Stand
*
He knew the exact day Kara gave up on being rescued, because she cornered him in the Raptor, pushed him up against the wall and kissed him. Kissed him hard and for so long that by the time she pulled away, he was dazed and she was flushed, her lips a deep red colour, and he could taste her; actually taste her, after years of dreaming about it.
“Lee,” she almost gasped, her hands clawing at his shoulders. He had her tanks up over her head two seconds later.
Later, he was surprised they lasted three whole weeks.
*
It was supposed to have been a simple, risk free recon mission; a quick jump ahead of the Fleet to check out a military base on a moon. It was a small base, one the Commander had forgotten about, and it was unlikely the Cylons were patrolling the area.
It was Lee’s idea, and so he had headed up the mission, but he had needed another pilot with him. Kara had volunteered, telling the Commander that she needed the practice piloting a Raptor.
His father had snorted with laughter at her using that as an excuse, but he’d agreed to her going. It was only supposed to take them two hours, three tops and everything was going like clockwork until they jumped back to the Galactica to find nothing but empty space littered with shrapnel. Pieces of metal bounced off the roof and the windows with ominous plinks, and Kara swore as she managed to manoeuvre the Raptor around something that looked suspiciously like a Viper wing.
They didn’t waste words talking about what had happened. That much was clear, and Kara pulled the Raptor away from the worst of the wreckage.
“Do you think - ” he started, and he knew she could hear the panic in his voice.
“They’re alive,” she answered swiftly. “Not enough debris.”
He rubbed his hand over his face and she slumped slightly in her seat.
“What do we do now?” Kara said, and the words shook a little.
Lee stared out the window, his mind grasping out for anything. Nothing came.
“I have no idea.”
*
They stayed there, waiting for something to happen for over twenty hours and Lee watched Kara watch the empty space where the Galactica should have been for at least ten of them.
Rubble drifted past and he found himself trying to identify parts of the wreckage, which he knew was morbid but he couldn’t help himself. When he realised the ‘PER’ left on one piece of metal meant Hyper was gone, he stopped looking out the window. Kara didn’t.
He went to sleep at some point, and it was about five hours later when he woke up and she was in exactly the same position.
“We need to make some decisions,” she said, not turning around, and he wondered how she knew he was awake. “We’ve got enough fuel for one jump. That’s it.”
He nodded. Kara shifted and got up slowly, wincing with pain as she straightened. Stretched, and then came over to where he was sitting and sat down, resting her head against the wall, stretching her legs out.
“Do we have emergency co-ordinates?”
“No.”
She didn’t look surprised. “We can’t wait here much longer. We’re running out of oxygen and we’re sitting ducks. They’re not going to come back for us.”
It felt like the words hung in the air. Panic clawed at his throat, but he knew she was right. The Galatica couldn’t risk it.
He swallowed hard.
“Kobol,” he said, and she blinked. “Kobol. We jump to Kobol. It’s the one place they might look for us.”
“Kobol,” she echoed, and then nodded. They stared at each other for a long moment, and Kara shut her eyes for a moment, clenched her jaw. Then she got up. “Plot it.”
“It’s already in the memory,” he said. “It won’t take long.”
*
They had been on Kobol six days when Kara picked up two ration bars and a bottle of water and disappeared before the sky was bright. Lee knew better than to go after her. Kara never broke down in front of other people, and Lee knew better than to force that point when he'd lain beside her for five nights, listening to her toss and turn and not sleep.
He spent the day working out rations for ammunition and matches, and very carefully refusing to think about the life they'd been left with thanks to the Cylons and their impeccable timing. Lee knew he'd have to deal with it eventually but it felt he was choking whenever he thought about not seeing his father again. Never standing in front of a room full of pilots and stumbling his way through another speech. Never drinking coffee, even the awful stuff served in the Galactica's mess. Never flying.
Kara reappeared at twilight, just as he knew she would. Even Kara wasn't reckless enough to wander around a strange planet at night with no light and nothing but a hand gun.
She met his gaze steadily and her eyes were clear, her chin lifted high. Whatever demons she'd fought by herself, there was no sign of them on her now.
"Right, Apollo," she said. "What's for dinner?”
*
Within two weeks, they'd sorted themselves into something like a routine. They settled the Raptor near the entrance of the Tomb of Athena, and spent a good three hours going over every memory they had of the survival courses the Academy had put them through years ago. The pool of knowledge they had was enough that they'd make it though a couple of months. Longer, if they could track down and then cultivate a couple of plants that gave them the best mix of nutrients. If winter wasn’t too severe. If the Cylons didn’t come.
Kara handled most of the hunting; much as it pained Lee to admit it, she was a better shot than him and with every bullet a precious commodity, it made sense to leave her in charge of bringing in meat. It turned out that she had patience he didn't expect of her, spending hours perched in trees watching for animals large enough to warrant risking a shot.
Lee spent his time making things - customising the back of the Raptor as a kind of sleeping area, building animal traps for when bullets got too precious to waste, out of scraps of metal and wire and branches stripped bare of leaves. After five or so failed attempts, he caught a deer on day seventeen, and cut its throat and brought it home to Kara, who beamed at him like it was his greatest accomplishment to date.
That smile of hers, brilliant and - if it had been from any other woman - adoring, crept into his thoughts a lot more than what would have been considered normal. More than was wise, certainly, given how it was getting harder and harder to ignore the pull she had on him. With everything on the Galactica able to distract him from her, he'd survived two years in her presence, but eighteen days on a planet had sapped almost all the resistance he'd ever had.
She was his world now, and she was inescapable, which was somewhere in between torment and pleasure; rolling over in the morning to find her fast asleep, hand tucked under her cheek less than a meter away from him; watching her do the best she could getting the mud out of her hair in a stream, slicking the strands back against her scalp when she was done, and letting it dry in the sunlight; the feel of her head resting against his shoulder as they sat in silence, watching the sun set from a ridge high up on a hill. The way her breath caught, ever so slightly, when he leaned over her to grab his water bottle, his arm brushing the skin of her shoulder.
It was day twenty when Lee realised he'd stopped thinking in terms of 'if'.
*
It was dusk when she cornered him on day twenty-one, and Lee wasn’t surprised when she kissed him, tugged off his clothes, pulled him down with her onto the makeshift bed.
He wasn’t even surprised at how good it was, the slow drag of skin on skin, the taste of her sweat as she whimpered underneath him and tightened her legs around his hips and pulled him closer. The sting of pain as she bit into his neck, not quite muffling her cry as she fell apart around him.
What did surprise him was how Kara clung to him after their heartbeats had slowed, the sweat drying on their skin - how she slept curving her body around his, arm thrown across him and head on his shoulder. It wasn’t what he expected of her, and when he woke up in the pale dawn sunlight, he tried to memorize the texture of her skin, the smell of her hair, the angles and lines that made her up, because he wasn’t sure how long it would be before this happened again.
She woke up slowly in the end, eyes blinking open and Lee waited for her body to stiffen, for her to roll off him and pick her clothes up from the floor, never glancing at him, but she surprised him again.
“Hey,” she said softly, and propped herself up a little, let her other hand drift down over his shoulder.
“Hey,” he replied, and thought we can do this now, and knew she was thinking it as well. She leaned in and kissed him, slow and sweet. It was another hour before they made it off the floor.
Things were a lot more bearable after that.
*
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Kara was still a bitch when she was tired and sometimes even without that as an excuse, and minus his coffee in the morning, Lee knew he could be snappy and practically unliveable. It was occasionally too much, adjusting to life together on top of day to day survival, worrying about where each meal would come from, and whether five days of solid rain would make the ground the Raptor was parked on unstable.
All the same, it was good; better than good, and Lee couldn’t stop watching her because he could now. Even when she was raging at him for being a thick headed, arrogant son of a bitch, even as he was snapping out a comeback and watching her hands clench into fists, she was still the most fascinating, adorable thing he’d ever seen. Not that he would have told her that. She would have hit him.
And every now and then, he caught her just watching him, with a small, almost silly grin on her face.
Two months crept past, which turned into three and then four; time lost meaning on Kobol, and there was only one night they were mad enough at each other to sleep separately, and they only managed half a night of that before Lee got sick of hearing her toss and turn in their bed, and got up from the floor and clambered in beside her, ignoring the way she kicked at him. He wrapped her up in his arms, and Kara gave up struggling within five seconds, dropped her head onto his shoulder. She was fast asleep within minutes.
The next morning, neither of them apologised but Lee made it up to her with his mouth and skin, and knew she was doing exactly the same.
*
There was something wrong, he decided, watching as she fussed over the campfire. Something had to be, because she’d been distracted all day. It was perhaps the second time she’d gone out with a gun and come back two bullets down with no kill, and while he knew that would be bothering her, there had to be something else.
She was staring into the fire now, biting at her lip and he wondered if she knew she was doing it.
“What is it?” he said finally. “What’s up?”
Kara sat so still for a minute he thought she hadn’t heard him, and he was about to repeat himself when she threw a stick into the fire and wrapped her arms around herself.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she told him, stumbling through the sentence like she’d forgotten how to speak, and for a second all he could do was blink at her.
“I - are you sure?”
“No. But - ” Kara picked at a seam of her tanks with one ragged fingernail, then looked up at him, her eyes blank. “I’m pretty sure. It’s been three months… ”
A child. His child. For less than three seconds a wave of joy unbelievably intense swamped him, and just as quickly came the flood of rationality accompanied by a slideshow of images he wished he could get out of his head. Something going wrong with the pregnancy; Kara screaming in labour; the baby not breathing; Kara pale and trembling and dying and him not being able to do a thing as she bled out from complications -
“Shit,” he breathed out.
For a long second she said nothing at all. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “My shots - they must have run out and - ”
She fell into silence again, and Lee looked over at her and she was very carefully not looking at him.
“Hey,” he told her. “It’s okay.”
“Yeah. You’ve really convinced me.” Kara got to her feet and brushed the dust off her clothes. “Look, I’m going to go catch something for dinner,” she told him, and picked up the makeshift fishing rod. “I’ll see you later.”
She turned, not in time to hide the stricken look on her face, but he couldn’t move, could barely breathe.
“Kara,” he said finally, when she reached the edge of the clearing. “It’s okay. This isn’t a disaster.”
She turned then, and there was a hollow, mocking look on her face. “Don’t kid yourself, Lee,” she said, and spun on her heel and disappeared into the trees.
He spent close to an hour watching the shadows creep across the grass towards him, trying to wrap his brain around the concept of a baby, and it wasn’t until the sun had almost disappeared behind the treetops that he realised he should find her, and fast, if he wanted her to speak to him ever again.
It didn’t take much to track her down, which made him kick himself because it meant she’d wanted to be found. She was fishing - or at least pretending - and she didn’t turn around when he approached her.
He sat down beside her anyway. “Hey,” he said, nudging her shoulder. “I’m sorry. It was just the shock...”
She shrugged. "What are we going to do?" she said, still not facing him.
"I don't know," he answered honestly. "But we'll figure it out. We've got time."
She looked at him then, and for the briefest of seconds there was panic in her eyes, and fear before she stamped them both down.
"Okay," she said calmly, after a moment. "Okay," but she didn't shake his arm off when he eased it around her, and he felt the shudder that ran through her body when he drew her head down enough to kiss her hair.
It had to be okay, he told himself. It had to be.
*
The weather got steadily colder, and with the approaching winter came visible evidence that Kara was pregnant; he could feel the slight rise in her skin now, and he often caught her with her hands splayed across her abdomen.
They didn’t speak of it much. Lee used up five of the last seven sheets of paper they had writing lists of all the things he had to do in the next four months, and tucked it away where Kara wouldn’t find it. It was too long, too huge, too impossible, and he wondered if she had her own list hidden somewhere.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she said one night, when she was sitting in between his legs watching the fire.
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “What part?”
“All of it,” she said. “I don’t think - I was never intending to be a mother. Ever.” He rested his chin on her shoulder, wrapped his arms around her stomach and let his hands rest against her skin. “If this had happened on Galactica, I would have got rid of it,” she said softly. “I - I’m sorry, Lee, but I would have.”
“It’s okay.” Her hair smelled of rainwater and dirt. “I understand.”
“Do you?”
“As much as you’ll let me,” he replied.
She half turned, threw her legs over his thigh and rested her head under his chin. He knew she was listening to his heartbeat. “I’m sorry,” she said so softly he barely caught it.
He didn’t answer.
*
He found her one morning, hunched over just outside the Raptor, her fingers curled around her stomach. She looked up when he approached, and her eyes were strange, almost dead.
“I felt it,” she said. He took two steps forward, went to touch her abdomen and she flinched away from him. “Frak,” she whispered. “I’m pregnant.”
“You’ve known that for ages,” he pointed out reasonably. “Why is it different now?”
“Because I can feel it, Lee!” she said, standing up and he’d never seen such terror in her eyes before. “It’s alive, and it’s growing, and I can’t -” She cut herself off, sucked in a deep breath.
“Can’t what?”
She shrugged, and he decided he was probably better off not knowing the end of that sentence. “Kara. We’ve been through this. We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she said, her cheeks flushed, voice trembling. “You’re not the one who has to live with this thing inside them for frakking months, and then give birth in a frakking Raptor with no help. I suppose you think you’ve done enough already.”
“How can you say that? Frak, I’m working my ass off trying - “
“I don’t want this baby!”
He swallowed. She looked at the ground, then clenched her jaw and looked up.
“Too bad,” he said softly. “You’re having it. We’re having it. Deal with it.”
“Frak you,” she spat, and left him standing there.
*
She didn’t deal.
It was like she was trying to forget the existence of her pregnancy at all, and he couldn’t understand how she managed it, because it was almost all he could think about. He kept stubbornly preparing, skinning the larger animals to make blankets and makeshift coats, setting aside what food wasn’t perishable, tried to insulate the Raptor as much as he could against the weather.
Whenever he tried mentioning plans for the coming months, Kara shut down.
In the end, he didn’t even have to say anything to make it happen. She’d be laughing with him, or teasing him about the way he’d burnt their dinner the night before, and his gaze would slip involuntarily down her body. By the time he’d looked back up, her face would have changed, tightened, and most of the time she made some excuse to leave for an hour or so.
He gave up trying. Knew he shouldn’t, but when he didn’t mention the baby, she was just Kara - the woman he’d fallen in love with years before, funny and hot-headed and awkwardly sweet. It was everything he wanted and he found himself actually glad they were stranded, because he could live like this, next to her, forever.
It was also the easy way out, but waking up to a Kara who smiled at him was worth the frustration of watching her steadily disregard the baby. His child.
Just.
Every morning that he rolled over to an empty bed, hearing the wind whistle around the Raptor, knowing she’d gone hunting before the sky was light enough to see to the edge of the clearing, made him a little more frustrated, worried; a little more resentful.
The afternoon she came back from a day of hunting, looking worn out with a heavy animal draped around her shoulders, he finally lost it.
"What the frak are you THINKING?" he yelled, wrenching the deer off her back and throwing it onto the ground.
She glared at him, stripping off her jacket and dropping it at her feet. "I'm not going to break," she told him tightly, turning from him to inspect her kill and he grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back to him.
"You're frakking pregnant, Kara. Do you want to lose this baby?"
She didn't look at him, and after a terrible moment of silence, he let go of her so suddenly she stumbled back a step. "It's mine too," he told her, so angry he could barely get the words out. "I have some right in this, Kara. Stop acting like a child."
He saw her fists clench. "Go to hell, Apollo," she said, and pushed past him into the Raptor.
It was a full day before she'd be anywhere near him, let alone talk to him, which was a good thing because he couldn't even look at her without clenching his hands into fists. He didn't apologise. Not this time, because he'd meant everything he'd said.
Kara didn't apologise either. He would have been stunned if she had, but Kara had never been one for speeches, for eloquently phrased admissions of guilt and requests for forgiveness. She knew more than most how little they meant, and she went one better.
Lee never worked out what part of what he’d said had struck her, but something had, because after that afternoon, she didn’t take as many risks. She didn’t push herself, carry anything too heavy for her, run in the evening. Started eating far more than she had been, resting in the late afternoon where she’d previously have been building something, or fetching water to boil.
They still didn’t talk about it, though, and he had to assume that her acceptance of the baby had not changed her feelings about it. He felt the worst at night, when they were lying tangled, her back pressed against his chest; when she was so deeply asleep he could risk sliding his hand over her side to rest on her abdomen.
He could listen to her breathing and pretend that this was what she wanted, and he was glad they weren’t on Galactica, because then there would be none of this. No Kara; no relationship, frakked up as it was.
No baby, because Kara would have seen to that.
When his hands tightened slightly on her stomach, Kara murmured in protest before she snuggled back into him, and Lee wondered whether the gods would honour his thanks for something that was causing her so much anguish.
*
It was when he was standing in the middle of the Raptor, trying to work out the logistics of where a crib would fit in already cramped quarters, that Lee realised just how bleak the future of their child would be.
A lot of his dreams had gone with the Colonies; junior pyramid league, ball games in the park. Taking his kid up in a Viper for the first time. Scaring his daughter’s first boyfriend. Grounding his son for sneaking out to a party. Holidays on the Aegean Peninsular. Driving lessons.
Even on the Galactica, there would have been toys. Books. Playmates, maybe, on other ships. Adopted aunts and uncles. Advice, help, a doting grandfather. Lee couldn’t even promise his child their own bedroom.
He hoped it was a boy. After all, he’d been a boy and he’d had a younger brother. Surely that meant he’d be able to work some things out, and a boy could be happy climbing trees and throwing rocks at things and fishing. While Kara’s prowess as a seamstress extended to sewing furs together by poking holes and pulling through some string they’d found in the back of the Raptor, he was pretty sure fancy dresses or doll clothes would be beyond her.
Then an image of Kara playing with a doll in a pink frilly dress popped into his mind and he laughed.
Kara looked over from where she was sprawled in the pilot seat, one foot resting on the controls, her lap full of furs. “What?”
“Did you ever play with dolls?”
She snorted. “No. My aunt gave me one once and I used it for target practice.”
He crossed the room, bent his head and kissed her, and when he pulled back she was flushed and smiling. “What was that for?”
“No reason,” he said, and wandered out into the sunlight.
*
“You know, eventually we’re going to have to talk about this?”
“Not now!”
“Fine!” he yelled back, and listened to the sounds of her stomping away into the trees.
She was impossible, he thought. Frakking women and their frakking hormones, and frakking Kara and her inability to talk about anything. He’d thought she was finally accepting enough to listen to him; he’d seen her rubbing her hand in slow circles across her stomach the day before, and the look on her face had given him hope - but apparently not.
The cot or cradle type thing he was trying to make was slowly taking shape, and he let out some of his frustration bashing bits of wire into the wood; they’d had a grand total of five nails, and Lee wasn’t wasting them. It was much later when he looked up to see her resting against the door, watching him.
“Hi,” she said, and he stared at her for a second, then went back to his work. He heard her sigh.
“Okay,” she said, and dropped onto the floor next to him, pulled her knees up to her chest. “What do you want to talk about?”
She said the word ‘talk’ as if it was slightly distasteful, but she was trying and he couldn’t let it go.
He put down the hammer, rocked back on his heels and settled against the wall opposite her, stretched his feet out. “Get comfy,” he said, and Kara rolled her eyes, but shifted slightly, leaning her head back against the wall.
“So, talk,” she said, and he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “You have a list?”
“Hey, I might not get you this compliant ever again.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he unfolded the paper, cleared his throat. “Number one - winter is coming.”
“Thank you, Lee, for telling me something I don’t know.”
“Are you going to let me do this talking thing? It means I have to get a word in.”
Kara glared. “Fine.”
“Thank you. Okay, we don’t know how long or how severe this winter is going to be, although I’m pretty sure it doesn’t snow here - and you’re probably going to be due when it’s the coldest.”
“I know,” she said, and she was still looking at him, eyes steady.
"I don't think this is a good place to stay. We’re in a valley here, which means it’s only going to get colder when we’re in shadow. We’re also not protected from wind, and we have no idea where the runoff will be in this area if we get a torrential downpour.”
She nodded.
“I’ve been checking the area out; there’s a place about a click from here, where we’d get the sun in the morning and there’s a windbreak to the east. I think we need to consider it.”
Kara tugged at her lip with her teeth. “You’re right,” she said finally. “You are, it’s just - I don’t want to leave here.”
He knew why. Moving from the tomb meant giving up hope, deciding they were in fact, stuck here forever, and even after six months, it was hard.
“We can wait a bit longer,” he told her, and she nodded. “Another month. Then we have to move.”
“Okay.” She stretched out her feet, nudged his knee with her boot. “Lee, I - ” she started in a small voice, then trailed away, grimacing.
He grinned. “Yeah, I know you love me.”
“I do not!”
“You do too. You’ve said it. I remember it distinctly.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
He laughed and she grinned, and he thought for almost the first time since she’d told him she was pregnant that things just might be okay after all. “So, number two,” he started, and ignored the way she thunked her head back into the wall. “Our water supply - ow! Kara!”
“Shut up!” she said, and he glared at her.
“I have more things to - "
“No, shut up.” Her body had tensed all over, he noticed, and he was about to open his mouth to say something when she kicked him again, lightly this time. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.
Then he heard it too; the hum of an approaching engine, and he got to his feet, dragged her out of the Raptor before she had time to protest, pulled her into the deepest tree cover. The sound got closer and closer and he felt Kara’s body press against his. They stood frozen, waiting, and Lee knew if he turned he’d see Kara’s lips moving in frantic, silent prayer.
Then a Raptor drifted down out of the sky, settling gently next to the Tomb.
“Oh my gods,” he heard Kara whisper behind him, as the hatch sprung opened. “Oh my gods. Lee!”
Lee moved forwards slowly, just as the third person stepped out of the Raptor, and then he couldn’t help the noise of shock he made. He saw one of the marines swivel in their direction out of his peripheral vision, heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being cocked, but the next moments were a blur of the sound of running feet, someone saying ‘oh my gods’, Kara screaming at someone not to shoot - and then there was total, absolute silence.
Lee heard someone's gun drop to the ground, but his father hadn't moved; he was standing as still as a statue in the middle of the clearing, his face white, almost shaking, staring at the two of them.
"Lee," he said, as though he couldn't believe his eyes, and then took one hesitant step forward. "Son."
"Dad," Lee said. "Uh. Hi."
Kara let out almost a hysterical burble of laughter behind him, and he knew what she was feeling; it was surreal, like waking up in a dream to find it reality and he almost pinched himself because this couldn't be happening.
"Gods," his father breathed out. "We thought we'd lost you."
He reached out a tentative hand, and Lee saw the extra grey in his father's hair, the lines on his forehead that weren't there six months before, and crossed the distance between them, let his father pull him close.
Kara was still standing hesitantly behind him, and Adama reached out for her, one arm still crooked around Lee's neck. She slid into his side, and Adama tugged them against him and didn't let them go for minutes.
"I've missed you both so much," his father said finally, loosening his grip, his eyes slightly wet and then he eyed Kara's stomach and grinned. His hands were still shaking. "I see you haven't wasted much time."
Kara blushed and Lee, for once, had nothing to say.
"Come on," his father said. "Let’s get you home."
*
The Galactica hadn’t changed. After the warm wet dripping of Kobol, it was cold and colourless and it had scars, of course; new cracks in the armour, faces missing, new rations in place but there was the same hum in the air, the same vibration underfoot, the same mineral tang in the water. The same tasteless food in the Mess. Bitter, over roasted coffee.
They spent their first night back sitting on their bed - the Commander had done some very quick work in arranging that - and listening to the report on the last six months. After an hour of question and answers, Kara yawned, leaning forward and resting her head on Lee’s shoulder and his father looked at them both and smiled, just smiled, and left them alone after dropping a light kiss on Kara’s forehead and squeezing Lee’s shoulder.
“Get some rest,” his father said, as he pulled the hatch shut behind him. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
*
Lee woke up by himself; the bed was cold beside him, and he knew where he’d find her. He skipped breakfast - too many eyes watching, too many questions he was too tired to answer - and went around to the back entrance of the hangar bay. Sure enough, there she was, and he watched as Kara dragged her hand gently along the wing of her Viper, said something to Tyrol which made the man laugh. Cally was hovering at Kara’s elbow, a grin plastered across her face, and the only thing wrong with the picture was the way Kara’s tanks pulled across her abdomen.
He left before they spotted him, but he couldn’t stop the image from burning in the back of his mind; her hair, shining in the light, the soft swell of her stomach, the gentleness in the way she touched her Viper.
She had a choice now, and that terrified him.
Kara came to find him just as he was finishing his lunch, and slid in across the table from him with her tray. Her fingernails were dirty with grease.
“You’re seeing Doc Cottle,” he said, without preamble, and the bright smile fell from her face. “In an hour.”
“Right,” she said, poking at her plate and he ate his last couple of bites in silence, got up from the table.
“I’ve got a meeting,” he said, knowing this was the worst time to be sounding curt, but panic was churning in his gut and he was a heartbeat away from dropping to his knees and begging her to keep it. “Don’t miss your appointment.”
“Okay,” she said, after a pause, sounding slightly hurt and he swallowed, leaned over the table and brushed a kiss on her forehead.
“Love you,” he said softly, and then stepped away before he said anymore.
He spent the afternoon in meetings. He’d be re-instated as CAG as soon as possible and there was a lot he had to know, and by the time he made it back to his quarters - their quarters, he corrected himself - it was late. She wasn’t there and hadn’t been back, because the room was exactly as he’d left it.
Frak, he thought, and took off his boots, sat down on the bed and pulled the first folder of reports towards him. He tried to concentrate but the words danced in front of him, and he waited and waited and watched the minute hand tick around on the clock until it was an hour into the graveyard shift.
Finally, the hatch pushed open and Kara stepped into the room. Her face was pale. “Hey,” he said, and she gave him a smile.
“You didn’t have to wait up,” she said, bending over to untie her boots. “I know you’re tired.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he told her, putting aside his book. “Where have you been?”
She didn’t answer, and shrugged out of her jacket and left it hanging over the back of a chair.
“What did he say?” Lee asked, when he realised she wasn’t going to broach the subject herself. Kara sat down carefully on the side of the bed, just out of his reach, and knotted her fingers together.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Fine. I’m healthy.” He nodded, and she fidgeted. “Doc Cottle, he - he gave me some options.”
Options. He swallowed, watched her profile in the light, but she had her Starbuck face on and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. The silence stretched on and on, and then she turned to him. “I can’t do it.”
The bottom dropped out of his world. “You can’t?” he said, knowing he sounded desperate, and her face changed, softened.
“No,” she said, putting her hand over his. “I mean I can’t - I can’t get rid of it.” Kara shrugged, gave him a wry grin. “All those months of wishing I could, and now I can and I just - can’t.”
He turned her hand over and laced his fingers through hers. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Kara tightened her hand around his and looked away, stared at the wall. “I think I’ve been sure for a while.”
“Good,” he said simply, and she seemed to hesitate, then moved up the bed and pressed herself into his side. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulled her closer.
“You’ll have to help me,” Kara said into the collar of his jacket, so softly he nearly missed it. “Are you - is that okay?”
“Of course,” he said, and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
She relaxed into him, and after a moment he very carefully slid his hand down over the swell of her stomach, spread his fingers out over her skin, under her tanks.
She let him.
*
FIN.
Rating: R
Spoilers: None
Summary: He knew the exact day Kara gave up on being rescued, because she cornered him in the Raptor, pushed him up against the wall and kissed him. Kara/Lee
A/N: Christmas present for wisteria_'s request, for she is dear to my heart! Thanks to, uh, many people - imry, for being an awesome sounding board (and also rawles, who is WISE!), alanna for her character arcs, and pen, as usual.
*
Places To Stand
*
He knew the exact day Kara gave up on being rescued, because she cornered him in the Raptor, pushed him up against the wall and kissed him. Kissed him hard and for so long that by the time she pulled away, he was dazed and she was flushed, her lips a deep red colour, and he could taste her; actually taste her, after years of dreaming about it.
“Lee,” she almost gasped, her hands clawing at his shoulders. He had her tanks up over her head two seconds later.
Later, he was surprised they lasted three whole weeks.
*
It was supposed to have been a simple, risk free recon mission; a quick jump ahead of the Fleet to check out a military base on a moon. It was a small base, one the Commander had forgotten about, and it was unlikely the Cylons were patrolling the area.
It was Lee’s idea, and so he had headed up the mission, but he had needed another pilot with him. Kara had volunteered, telling the Commander that she needed the practice piloting a Raptor.
His father had snorted with laughter at her using that as an excuse, but he’d agreed to her going. It was only supposed to take them two hours, three tops and everything was going like clockwork until they jumped back to the Galactica to find nothing but empty space littered with shrapnel. Pieces of metal bounced off the roof and the windows with ominous plinks, and Kara swore as she managed to manoeuvre the Raptor around something that looked suspiciously like a Viper wing.
They didn’t waste words talking about what had happened. That much was clear, and Kara pulled the Raptor away from the worst of the wreckage.
“Do you think - ” he started, and he knew she could hear the panic in his voice.
“They’re alive,” she answered swiftly. “Not enough debris.”
He rubbed his hand over his face and she slumped slightly in her seat.
“What do we do now?” Kara said, and the words shook a little.
Lee stared out the window, his mind grasping out for anything. Nothing came.
“I have no idea.”
*
They stayed there, waiting for something to happen for over twenty hours and Lee watched Kara watch the empty space where the Galactica should have been for at least ten of them.
Rubble drifted past and he found himself trying to identify parts of the wreckage, which he knew was morbid but he couldn’t help himself. When he realised the ‘PER’ left on one piece of metal meant Hyper was gone, he stopped looking out the window. Kara didn’t.
He went to sleep at some point, and it was about five hours later when he woke up and she was in exactly the same position.
“We need to make some decisions,” she said, not turning around, and he wondered how she knew he was awake. “We’ve got enough fuel for one jump. That’s it.”
He nodded. Kara shifted and got up slowly, wincing with pain as she straightened. Stretched, and then came over to where he was sitting and sat down, resting her head against the wall, stretching her legs out.
“Do we have emergency co-ordinates?”
“No.”
She didn’t look surprised. “We can’t wait here much longer. We’re running out of oxygen and we’re sitting ducks. They’re not going to come back for us.”
It felt like the words hung in the air. Panic clawed at his throat, but he knew she was right. The Galatica couldn’t risk it.
He swallowed hard.
“Kobol,” he said, and she blinked. “Kobol. We jump to Kobol. It’s the one place they might look for us.”
“Kobol,” she echoed, and then nodded. They stared at each other for a long moment, and Kara shut her eyes for a moment, clenched her jaw. Then she got up. “Plot it.”
“It’s already in the memory,” he said. “It won’t take long.”
*
They had been on Kobol six days when Kara picked up two ration bars and a bottle of water and disappeared before the sky was bright. Lee knew better than to go after her. Kara never broke down in front of other people, and Lee knew better than to force that point when he'd lain beside her for five nights, listening to her toss and turn and not sleep.
He spent the day working out rations for ammunition and matches, and very carefully refusing to think about the life they'd been left with thanks to the Cylons and their impeccable timing. Lee knew he'd have to deal with it eventually but it felt he was choking whenever he thought about not seeing his father again. Never standing in front of a room full of pilots and stumbling his way through another speech. Never drinking coffee, even the awful stuff served in the Galactica's mess. Never flying.
Kara reappeared at twilight, just as he knew she would. Even Kara wasn't reckless enough to wander around a strange planet at night with no light and nothing but a hand gun.
She met his gaze steadily and her eyes were clear, her chin lifted high. Whatever demons she'd fought by herself, there was no sign of them on her now.
"Right, Apollo," she said. "What's for dinner?”
*
Within two weeks, they'd sorted themselves into something like a routine. They settled the Raptor near the entrance of the Tomb of Athena, and spent a good three hours going over every memory they had of the survival courses the Academy had put them through years ago. The pool of knowledge they had was enough that they'd make it though a couple of months. Longer, if they could track down and then cultivate a couple of plants that gave them the best mix of nutrients. If winter wasn’t too severe. If the Cylons didn’t come.
Kara handled most of the hunting; much as it pained Lee to admit it, she was a better shot than him and with every bullet a precious commodity, it made sense to leave her in charge of bringing in meat. It turned out that she had patience he didn't expect of her, spending hours perched in trees watching for animals large enough to warrant risking a shot.
Lee spent his time making things - customising the back of the Raptor as a kind of sleeping area, building animal traps for when bullets got too precious to waste, out of scraps of metal and wire and branches stripped bare of leaves. After five or so failed attempts, he caught a deer on day seventeen, and cut its throat and brought it home to Kara, who beamed at him like it was his greatest accomplishment to date.
That smile of hers, brilliant and - if it had been from any other woman - adoring, crept into his thoughts a lot more than what would have been considered normal. More than was wise, certainly, given how it was getting harder and harder to ignore the pull she had on him. With everything on the Galactica able to distract him from her, he'd survived two years in her presence, but eighteen days on a planet had sapped almost all the resistance he'd ever had.
She was his world now, and she was inescapable, which was somewhere in between torment and pleasure; rolling over in the morning to find her fast asleep, hand tucked under her cheek less than a meter away from him; watching her do the best she could getting the mud out of her hair in a stream, slicking the strands back against her scalp when she was done, and letting it dry in the sunlight; the feel of her head resting against his shoulder as they sat in silence, watching the sun set from a ridge high up on a hill. The way her breath caught, ever so slightly, when he leaned over her to grab his water bottle, his arm brushing the skin of her shoulder.
It was day twenty when Lee realised he'd stopped thinking in terms of 'if'.
*
It was dusk when she cornered him on day twenty-one, and Lee wasn’t surprised when she kissed him, tugged off his clothes, pulled him down with her onto the makeshift bed.
He wasn’t even surprised at how good it was, the slow drag of skin on skin, the taste of her sweat as she whimpered underneath him and tightened her legs around his hips and pulled him closer. The sting of pain as she bit into his neck, not quite muffling her cry as she fell apart around him.
What did surprise him was how Kara clung to him after their heartbeats had slowed, the sweat drying on their skin - how she slept curving her body around his, arm thrown across him and head on his shoulder. It wasn’t what he expected of her, and when he woke up in the pale dawn sunlight, he tried to memorize the texture of her skin, the smell of her hair, the angles and lines that made her up, because he wasn’t sure how long it would be before this happened again.
She woke up slowly in the end, eyes blinking open and Lee waited for her body to stiffen, for her to roll off him and pick her clothes up from the floor, never glancing at him, but she surprised him again.
“Hey,” she said softly, and propped herself up a little, let her other hand drift down over his shoulder.
“Hey,” he replied, and thought we can do this now, and knew she was thinking it as well. She leaned in and kissed him, slow and sweet. It was another hour before they made it off the floor.
Things were a lot more bearable after that.
*
It wasn’t perfect, of course. Kara was still a bitch when she was tired and sometimes even without that as an excuse, and minus his coffee in the morning, Lee knew he could be snappy and practically unliveable. It was occasionally too much, adjusting to life together on top of day to day survival, worrying about where each meal would come from, and whether five days of solid rain would make the ground the Raptor was parked on unstable.
All the same, it was good; better than good, and Lee couldn’t stop watching her because he could now. Even when she was raging at him for being a thick headed, arrogant son of a bitch, even as he was snapping out a comeback and watching her hands clench into fists, she was still the most fascinating, adorable thing he’d ever seen. Not that he would have told her that. She would have hit him.
And every now and then, he caught her just watching him, with a small, almost silly grin on her face.
Two months crept past, which turned into three and then four; time lost meaning on Kobol, and there was only one night they were mad enough at each other to sleep separately, and they only managed half a night of that before Lee got sick of hearing her toss and turn in their bed, and got up from the floor and clambered in beside her, ignoring the way she kicked at him. He wrapped her up in his arms, and Kara gave up struggling within five seconds, dropped her head onto his shoulder. She was fast asleep within minutes.
The next morning, neither of them apologised but Lee made it up to her with his mouth and skin, and knew she was doing exactly the same.
*
There was something wrong, he decided, watching as she fussed over the campfire. Something had to be, because she’d been distracted all day. It was perhaps the second time she’d gone out with a gun and come back two bullets down with no kill, and while he knew that would be bothering her, there had to be something else.
She was staring into the fire now, biting at her lip and he wondered if she knew she was doing it.
“What is it?” he said finally. “What’s up?”
Kara sat so still for a minute he thought she hadn’t heard him, and he was about to repeat himself when she threw a stick into the fire and wrapped her arms around herself.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she told him, stumbling through the sentence like she’d forgotten how to speak, and for a second all he could do was blink at her.
“I - are you sure?”
“No. But - ” Kara picked at a seam of her tanks with one ragged fingernail, then looked up at him, her eyes blank. “I’m pretty sure. It’s been three months… ”
A child. His child. For less than three seconds a wave of joy unbelievably intense swamped him, and just as quickly came the flood of rationality accompanied by a slideshow of images he wished he could get out of his head. Something going wrong with the pregnancy; Kara screaming in labour; the baby not breathing; Kara pale and trembling and dying and him not being able to do a thing as she bled out from complications -
“Shit,” he breathed out.
For a long second she said nothing at all. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “My shots - they must have run out and - ”
She fell into silence again, and Lee looked over at her and she was very carefully not looking at him.
“Hey,” he told her. “It’s okay.”
“Yeah. You’ve really convinced me.” Kara got to her feet and brushed the dust off her clothes. “Look, I’m going to go catch something for dinner,” she told him, and picked up the makeshift fishing rod. “I’ll see you later.”
She turned, not in time to hide the stricken look on her face, but he couldn’t move, could barely breathe.
“Kara,” he said finally, when she reached the edge of the clearing. “It’s okay. This isn’t a disaster.”
She turned then, and there was a hollow, mocking look on her face. “Don’t kid yourself, Lee,” she said, and spun on her heel and disappeared into the trees.
He spent close to an hour watching the shadows creep across the grass towards him, trying to wrap his brain around the concept of a baby, and it wasn’t until the sun had almost disappeared behind the treetops that he realised he should find her, and fast, if he wanted her to speak to him ever again.
It didn’t take much to track her down, which made him kick himself because it meant she’d wanted to be found. She was fishing - or at least pretending - and she didn’t turn around when he approached her.
He sat down beside her anyway. “Hey,” he said, nudging her shoulder. “I’m sorry. It was just the shock...”
She shrugged. "What are we going to do?" she said, still not facing him.
"I don't know," he answered honestly. "But we'll figure it out. We've got time."
She looked at him then, and for the briefest of seconds there was panic in her eyes, and fear before she stamped them both down.
"Okay," she said calmly, after a moment. "Okay," but she didn't shake his arm off when he eased it around her, and he felt the shudder that ran through her body when he drew her head down enough to kiss her hair.
It had to be okay, he told himself. It had to be.
*
The weather got steadily colder, and with the approaching winter came visible evidence that Kara was pregnant; he could feel the slight rise in her skin now, and he often caught her with her hands splayed across her abdomen.
They didn’t speak of it much. Lee used up five of the last seven sheets of paper they had writing lists of all the things he had to do in the next four months, and tucked it away where Kara wouldn’t find it. It was too long, too huge, too impossible, and he wondered if she had her own list hidden somewhere.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she said one night, when she was sitting in between his legs watching the fire.
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “What part?”
“All of it,” she said. “I don’t think - I was never intending to be a mother. Ever.” He rested his chin on her shoulder, wrapped his arms around her stomach and let his hands rest against her skin. “If this had happened on Galactica, I would have got rid of it,” she said softly. “I - I’m sorry, Lee, but I would have.”
“It’s okay.” Her hair smelled of rainwater and dirt. “I understand.”
“Do you?”
“As much as you’ll let me,” he replied.
She half turned, threw her legs over his thigh and rested her head under his chin. He knew she was listening to his heartbeat. “I’m sorry,” she said so softly he barely caught it.
He didn’t answer.
*
He found her one morning, hunched over just outside the Raptor, her fingers curled around her stomach. She looked up when he approached, and her eyes were strange, almost dead.
“I felt it,” she said. He took two steps forward, went to touch her abdomen and she flinched away from him. “Frak,” she whispered. “I’m pregnant.”
“You’ve known that for ages,” he pointed out reasonably. “Why is it different now?”
“Because I can feel it, Lee!” she said, standing up and he’d never seen such terror in her eyes before. “It’s alive, and it’s growing, and I can’t -” She cut herself off, sucked in a deep breath.
“Can’t what?”
She shrugged, and he decided he was probably better off not knowing the end of that sentence. “Kara. We’ve been through this. We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she said, her cheeks flushed, voice trembling. “You’re not the one who has to live with this thing inside them for frakking months, and then give birth in a frakking Raptor with no help. I suppose you think you’ve done enough already.”
“How can you say that? Frak, I’m working my ass off trying - “
“I don’t want this baby!”
He swallowed. She looked at the ground, then clenched her jaw and looked up.
“Too bad,” he said softly. “You’re having it. We’re having it. Deal with it.”
“Frak you,” she spat, and left him standing there.
*
She didn’t deal.
It was like she was trying to forget the existence of her pregnancy at all, and he couldn’t understand how she managed it, because it was almost all he could think about. He kept stubbornly preparing, skinning the larger animals to make blankets and makeshift coats, setting aside what food wasn’t perishable, tried to insulate the Raptor as much as he could against the weather.
Whenever he tried mentioning plans for the coming months, Kara shut down.
In the end, he didn’t even have to say anything to make it happen. She’d be laughing with him, or teasing him about the way he’d burnt their dinner the night before, and his gaze would slip involuntarily down her body. By the time he’d looked back up, her face would have changed, tightened, and most of the time she made some excuse to leave for an hour or so.
He gave up trying. Knew he shouldn’t, but when he didn’t mention the baby, she was just Kara - the woman he’d fallen in love with years before, funny and hot-headed and awkwardly sweet. It was everything he wanted and he found himself actually glad they were stranded, because he could live like this, next to her, forever.
It was also the easy way out, but waking up to a Kara who smiled at him was worth the frustration of watching her steadily disregard the baby. His child.
Just.
Every morning that he rolled over to an empty bed, hearing the wind whistle around the Raptor, knowing she’d gone hunting before the sky was light enough to see to the edge of the clearing, made him a little more frustrated, worried; a little more resentful.
The afternoon she came back from a day of hunting, looking worn out with a heavy animal draped around her shoulders, he finally lost it.
"What the frak are you THINKING?" he yelled, wrenching the deer off her back and throwing it onto the ground.
She glared at him, stripping off her jacket and dropping it at her feet. "I'm not going to break," she told him tightly, turning from him to inspect her kill and he grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back to him.
"You're frakking pregnant, Kara. Do you want to lose this baby?"
She didn't look at him, and after a terrible moment of silence, he let go of her so suddenly she stumbled back a step. "It's mine too," he told her, so angry he could barely get the words out. "I have some right in this, Kara. Stop acting like a child."
He saw her fists clench. "Go to hell, Apollo," she said, and pushed past him into the Raptor.
It was a full day before she'd be anywhere near him, let alone talk to him, which was a good thing because he couldn't even look at her without clenching his hands into fists. He didn't apologise. Not this time, because he'd meant everything he'd said.
Kara didn't apologise either. He would have been stunned if she had, but Kara had never been one for speeches, for eloquently phrased admissions of guilt and requests for forgiveness. She knew more than most how little they meant, and she went one better.
Lee never worked out what part of what he’d said had struck her, but something had, because after that afternoon, she didn’t take as many risks. She didn’t push herself, carry anything too heavy for her, run in the evening. Started eating far more than she had been, resting in the late afternoon where she’d previously have been building something, or fetching water to boil.
They still didn’t talk about it, though, and he had to assume that her acceptance of the baby had not changed her feelings about it. He felt the worst at night, when they were lying tangled, her back pressed against his chest; when she was so deeply asleep he could risk sliding his hand over her side to rest on her abdomen.
He could listen to her breathing and pretend that this was what she wanted, and he was glad they weren’t on Galactica, because then there would be none of this. No Kara; no relationship, frakked up as it was.
No baby, because Kara would have seen to that.
When his hands tightened slightly on her stomach, Kara murmured in protest before she snuggled back into him, and Lee wondered whether the gods would honour his thanks for something that was causing her so much anguish.
*
It was when he was standing in the middle of the Raptor, trying to work out the logistics of where a crib would fit in already cramped quarters, that Lee realised just how bleak the future of their child would be.
A lot of his dreams had gone with the Colonies; junior pyramid league, ball games in the park. Taking his kid up in a Viper for the first time. Scaring his daughter’s first boyfriend. Grounding his son for sneaking out to a party. Holidays on the Aegean Peninsular. Driving lessons.
Even on the Galactica, there would have been toys. Books. Playmates, maybe, on other ships. Adopted aunts and uncles. Advice, help, a doting grandfather. Lee couldn’t even promise his child their own bedroom.
He hoped it was a boy. After all, he’d been a boy and he’d had a younger brother. Surely that meant he’d be able to work some things out, and a boy could be happy climbing trees and throwing rocks at things and fishing. While Kara’s prowess as a seamstress extended to sewing furs together by poking holes and pulling through some string they’d found in the back of the Raptor, he was pretty sure fancy dresses or doll clothes would be beyond her.
Then an image of Kara playing with a doll in a pink frilly dress popped into his mind and he laughed.
Kara looked over from where she was sprawled in the pilot seat, one foot resting on the controls, her lap full of furs. “What?”
“Did you ever play with dolls?”
She snorted. “No. My aunt gave me one once and I used it for target practice.”
He crossed the room, bent his head and kissed her, and when he pulled back she was flushed and smiling. “What was that for?”
“No reason,” he said, and wandered out into the sunlight.
*
“You know, eventually we’re going to have to talk about this?”
“Not now!”
“Fine!” he yelled back, and listened to the sounds of her stomping away into the trees.
She was impossible, he thought. Frakking women and their frakking hormones, and frakking Kara and her inability to talk about anything. He’d thought she was finally accepting enough to listen to him; he’d seen her rubbing her hand in slow circles across her stomach the day before, and the look on her face had given him hope - but apparently not.
The cot or cradle type thing he was trying to make was slowly taking shape, and he let out some of his frustration bashing bits of wire into the wood; they’d had a grand total of five nails, and Lee wasn’t wasting them. It was much later when he looked up to see her resting against the door, watching him.
“Hi,” she said, and he stared at her for a second, then went back to his work. He heard her sigh.
“Okay,” she said, and dropped onto the floor next to him, pulled her knees up to her chest. “What do you want to talk about?”
She said the word ‘talk’ as if it was slightly distasteful, but she was trying and he couldn’t let it go.
He put down the hammer, rocked back on his heels and settled against the wall opposite her, stretched his feet out. “Get comfy,” he said, and Kara rolled her eyes, but shifted slightly, leaning her head back against the wall.
“So, talk,” she said, and he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “You have a list?”
“Hey, I might not get you this compliant ever again.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he unfolded the paper, cleared his throat. “Number one - winter is coming.”
“Thank you, Lee, for telling me something I don’t know.”
“Are you going to let me do this talking thing? It means I have to get a word in.”
Kara glared. “Fine.”
“Thank you. Okay, we don’t know how long or how severe this winter is going to be, although I’m pretty sure it doesn’t snow here - and you’re probably going to be due when it’s the coldest.”
“I know,” she said, and she was still looking at him, eyes steady.
"I don't think this is a good place to stay. We’re in a valley here, which means it’s only going to get colder when we’re in shadow. We’re also not protected from wind, and we have no idea where the runoff will be in this area if we get a torrential downpour.”
She nodded.
“I’ve been checking the area out; there’s a place about a click from here, where we’d get the sun in the morning and there’s a windbreak to the east. I think we need to consider it.”
Kara tugged at her lip with her teeth. “You’re right,” she said finally. “You are, it’s just - I don’t want to leave here.”
He knew why. Moving from the tomb meant giving up hope, deciding they were in fact, stuck here forever, and even after six months, it was hard.
“We can wait a bit longer,” he told her, and she nodded. “Another month. Then we have to move.”
“Okay.” She stretched out her feet, nudged his knee with her boot. “Lee, I - ” she started in a small voice, then trailed away, grimacing.
He grinned. “Yeah, I know you love me.”
“I do not!”
“You do too. You’ve said it. I remember it distinctly.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
He laughed and she grinned, and he thought for almost the first time since she’d told him she was pregnant that things just might be okay after all. “So, number two,” he started, and ignored the way she thunked her head back into the wall. “Our water supply - ow! Kara!”
“Shut up!” she said, and he glared at her.
“I have more things to - "
“No, shut up.” Her body had tensed all over, he noticed, and he was about to open his mouth to say something when she kicked him again, lightly this time. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.
Then he heard it too; the hum of an approaching engine, and he got to his feet, dragged her out of the Raptor before she had time to protest, pulled her into the deepest tree cover. The sound got closer and closer and he felt Kara’s body press against his. They stood frozen, waiting, and Lee knew if he turned he’d see Kara’s lips moving in frantic, silent prayer.
Then a Raptor drifted down out of the sky, settling gently next to the Tomb.
“Oh my gods,” he heard Kara whisper behind him, as the hatch sprung opened. “Oh my gods. Lee!”
Lee moved forwards slowly, just as the third person stepped out of the Raptor, and then he couldn’t help the noise of shock he made. He saw one of the marines swivel in their direction out of his peripheral vision, heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being cocked, but the next moments were a blur of the sound of running feet, someone saying ‘oh my gods’, Kara screaming at someone not to shoot - and then there was total, absolute silence.
Lee heard someone's gun drop to the ground, but his father hadn't moved; he was standing as still as a statue in the middle of the clearing, his face white, almost shaking, staring at the two of them.
"Lee," he said, as though he couldn't believe his eyes, and then took one hesitant step forward. "Son."
"Dad," Lee said. "Uh. Hi."
Kara let out almost a hysterical burble of laughter behind him, and he knew what she was feeling; it was surreal, like waking up in a dream to find it reality and he almost pinched himself because this couldn't be happening.
"Gods," his father breathed out. "We thought we'd lost you."
He reached out a tentative hand, and Lee saw the extra grey in his father's hair, the lines on his forehead that weren't there six months before, and crossed the distance between them, let his father pull him close.
Kara was still standing hesitantly behind him, and Adama reached out for her, one arm still crooked around Lee's neck. She slid into his side, and Adama tugged them against him and didn't let them go for minutes.
"I've missed you both so much," his father said finally, loosening his grip, his eyes slightly wet and then he eyed Kara's stomach and grinned. His hands were still shaking. "I see you haven't wasted much time."
Kara blushed and Lee, for once, had nothing to say.
"Come on," his father said. "Let’s get you home."
*
The Galactica hadn’t changed. After the warm wet dripping of Kobol, it was cold and colourless and it had scars, of course; new cracks in the armour, faces missing, new rations in place but there was the same hum in the air, the same vibration underfoot, the same mineral tang in the water. The same tasteless food in the Mess. Bitter, over roasted coffee.
They spent their first night back sitting on their bed - the Commander had done some very quick work in arranging that - and listening to the report on the last six months. After an hour of question and answers, Kara yawned, leaning forward and resting her head on Lee’s shoulder and his father looked at them both and smiled, just smiled, and left them alone after dropping a light kiss on Kara’s forehead and squeezing Lee’s shoulder.
“Get some rest,” his father said, as he pulled the hatch shut behind him. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
*
Lee woke up by himself; the bed was cold beside him, and he knew where he’d find her. He skipped breakfast - too many eyes watching, too many questions he was too tired to answer - and went around to the back entrance of the hangar bay. Sure enough, there she was, and he watched as Kara dragged her hand gently along the wing of her Viper, said something to Tyrol which made the man laugh. Cally was hovering at Kara’s elbow, a grin plastered across her face, and the only thing wrong with the picture was the way Kara’s tanks pulled across her abdomen.
He left before they spotted him, but he couldn’t stop the image from burning in the back of his mind; her hair, shining in the light, the soft swell of her stomach, the gentleness in the way she touched her Viper.
She had a choice now, and that terrified him.
Kara came to find him just as he was finishing his lunch, and slid in across the table from him with her tray. Her fingernails were dirty with grease.
“You’re seeing Doc Cottle,” he said, without preamble, and the bright smile fell from her face. “In an hour.”
“Right,” she said, poking at her plate and he ate his last couple of bites in silence, got up from the table.
“I’ve got a meeting,” he said, knowing this was the worst time to be sounding curt, but panic was churning in his gut and he was a heartbeat away from dropping to his knees and begging her to keep it. “Don’t miss your appointment.”
“Okay,” she said, after a pause, sounding slightly hurt and he swallowed, leaned over the table and brushed a kiss on her forehead.
“Love you,” he said softly, and then stepped away before he said anymore.
He spent the afternoon in meetings. He’d be re-instated as CAG as soon as possible and there was a lot he had to know, and by the time he made it back to his quarters - their quarters, he corrected himself - it was late. She wasn’t there and hadn’t been back, because the room was exactly as he’d left it.
Frak, he thought, and took off his boots, sat down on the bed and pulled the first folder of reports towards him. He tried to concentrate but the words danced in front of him, and he waited and waited and watched the minute hand tick around on the clock until it was an hour into the graveyard shift.
Finally, the hatch pushed open and Kara stepped into the room. Her face was pale. “Hey,” he said, and she gave him a smile.
“You didn’t have to wait up,” she said, bending over to untie her boots. “I know you’re tired.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he told her, putting aside his book. “Where have you been?”
She didn’t answer, and shrugged out of her jacket and left it hanging over the back of a chair.
“What did he say?” Lee asked, when he realised she wasn’t going to broach the subject herself. Kara sat down carefully on the side of the bed, just out of his reach, and knotted her fingers together.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Fine. I’m healthy.” He nodded, and she fidgeted. “Doc Cottle, he - he gave me some options.”
Options. He swallowed, watched her profile in the light, but she had her Starbuck face on and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. The silence stretched on and on, and then she turned to him. “I can’t do it.”
The bottom dropped out of his world. “You can’t?” he said, knowing he sounded desperate, and her face changed, softened.
“No,” she said, putting her hand over his. “I mean I can’t - I can’t get rid of it.” Kara shrugged, gave him a wry grin. “All those months of wishing I could, and now I can and I just - can’t.”
He turned her hand over and laced his fingers through hers. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Kara tightened her hand around his and looked away, stared at the wall. “I think I’ve been sure for a while.”
“Good,” he said simply, and she seemed to hesitate, then moved up the bed and pressed herself into his side. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulled her closer.
“You’ll have to help me,” Kara said into the collar of his jacket, so softly he nearly missed it. “Are you - is that okay?”
“Of course,” he said, and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
She relaxed into him, and after a moment he very carefully slid his hand down over the swell of her stomach, spread his fingers out over her skin, under her tanks.
She let him.
*
FIN.