[bsg] distance enough
Title: Distance Enough
Spoilers: Very, very vague for up until the end of season 2. Set a year after that.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: PILOTS.
A/N: bantha_fodder prompted me tonight with an Anna Nalick song because I wanted to write Kara/Lee. Two hours and 3000 words later, this is the result and of course it's nothing like her prompt at all! I love school holidays.
*
Distance Enough
It takes Kara a full, careful year to cut Lee Adama out of her life, and less than a minute to let him back in.
It's the Cylons’ fault. As usual.
*
After two and a half years of fighting and fleeing, the unthinkable happens; the Galactica takes too many hits in a fire-fight and on the other side of two FTL jumps, can’t go any further. One swift, head spinning relocation later, and the Galactica is gone.
Adama takes command of the Pegasus within an hour, and later, Kara hears through the grapevine that Lee has been demoted to CAG. She is very careful not to ask questions, something she’d perfected over the months after New Caprica. It had been made easier, of course, by a jealous girlfriend and a lot of distance.
Now, though, the girlfriend is gone and Lee's her commanding officer again, and it’s a matter of hours, not days, until she sees him again. She sits alone in the Mess and tries not to look as out of place as she feels.
The Pegasus smells different - more polish, less sweat - and if the goose bumps constantly rising on her skin are any indication, it’s colder too.
She shivers, sipping coffee that is just a sludgy as that on the Galactica. Somehow that's comforting, she thinks, just as a crisp blue uniform stops in front of her and she doesn't have to look up to know who it is. She still almost spills her coffee.
"Hey," she says, and a small, fleeting smile crosses his face.
"Hey."
She stares at him a moment. Command has done good things for him, she decides.
He shifts slightly. "It's good to have you back, Starbuck," he says politely.
"Good to be back, sir," she says, and then the words spill out of somewhere before she can stop them, "I'm looking forward to saving your ass again on a regular basis."
There's a moment when he blinks, and she wants to crawl under the table and wishes herself anywhere else, even the Galactica, and then he actually smiles; the warm, amused smile she used to love putting on his face and for a moment she basks in the glow of it.
"Briefing's at ten," he says, his hand brushing her shoulder, and then he leaves before she can say anything more. Not that she'd know what to say.
There's too many empty spaces between them now, and sometimes she wishes she could see past them, to what it was like before Sam and Dee and New Caprica. Then she remembers there had always been spaces. Zak. Lee's rank. Her apparent inability to keep her foot out of her mouth. Baltar.
She still doesn't like thinking about that much. Instead, she thinks about the way Lee's mouth had fit around her callsign.
Kara traces her fingertips over the scratches of the tabletop.
Starbuck and Apollo never had any problems, and Starbuck has never shied away from a challenge.
It still takes a week for her to work up the courage to do anything at all.
*
She drops past his office in what she hopes is a casual manner, and leans against the hatch.
"Apollo," she says. "Rumour has it you're in danger of putting on those extra pounds again."
Her tone is light, a carefully produced replica of the casual teasing they'd once done, and it totally belies the way her hands are sweating behind her back.
He looks confused for a moment, then puts his pen down and leans back in his chair. There's a hint of a smile around his lips, and that's all that keeps her from running away.
"Where did you hear that?"
"I have my sources."
"Really."
"I can't divulge them. My sense of honour won't permit it."
He laughs, and she wants to grin wildly at him and bites it back.
"What did you have in mind, Starbuck?" he says finally, still looking amused, and she throws his boxing gloves at him.
"Ten minutes," she says, and goes down to the gym and stakes out the best ring.
He's there in seven.
He hits as hard as she remembers, and when her fist connects with his jaw, he spits on the floor with a hissed expletive.
She dances on her toes. "Alright there, Apollo?"
"Lucky punch."
"Wanna say that again?"
He gets the next punch in, high up on her left arm and the pain explodes down and up and everywhere. She bites back a few choice words and resolves to wipe the mocking smile off his mouth.
"Nice," she says. "Is that the best you've got?"
The smile he gives her wipes three years of history away and she grins at him before jerking back as his arm swings at her in a textbook upper-cut.
Just like that, it all clicks back into place. They have lunch together the next day, dinner the day after that and later, she thinks it was funny their friendship could be put back on track by a couple of punches. Then she decides that's probably them all over.
*
One morning, he wakes her obnoxiously early.
"Up all day with the rising sun!" he crows gleefully once her eyes blink open, and her face must be murderous because his smile only gets wider.
"Morning, Starbuck," he says, and she groans, pulls a pillow over her face. "You're helping me work off those extra pounds, remember?"
"I hate you."
"You're just scared I'll kick your ass all over this ship."
She sits up straight in bed and swings her legs over the side. "Say that again?"
He leans back against her locker. "I'm going to kick your ass all over this ship?"
"Frak you."
"Gonna run all day till the running's done!"
"Apollo may be the god of music," she says scathingly as she ties her shoes. "But you missed out on all of that talent."
He laughs. "I think you've made a pretty speedy assessment there," he says. "Maybe you'll change your mind after I've sung for you for the next, say, hour."
*
His fist smacks into her gut so hard she can't breathe for a moment, and she drops to her knees. "Frak!"
"Alright there, Starbuck?" he asks cheerfully, stepping neatly around her and not offering her a hand up.
"Bastard," she gasps.
"Takes one to know one!"
"You want me to give you a black eye?"
"I'd like to see you try."
The next day, he has a pool of violet and blue under his left eye, and she smiles at him all through his briefing.
*
She's on a self imposed ten minute break from a morning of planning in the CIC when Lee interrupts her.
"That won't work," he says.
Kara turns around from her very interesting discussion of certain black market items with Gaeta. "What? Where?" she asks, but before he points it out, she sees it, the flaw in the plan they've been working on for the whole morning.
"Frak," she says under her breath, and sends a quick look around to see if anyone heard her. Lee grins into his coffee cup, and she transfers her glare from him to the Vipers. "Why didn't - "
"Because it wasn't obvious - the - "
"Yeah, I know."
They stare at the board for a while. "You know," he starts, putting his mug down and leaning forward. "If we moved - "
"Actually, that could work. But only if - "
"But that would leave the - "
"Not if we - " He reaches out and sweeps the Vipers in through the left, to just behind the asteroid belt.
"Exactly," she says gleefully. "They won't know what's coming."
Lee grins at her, then extends his hand, slapping the other over his heart.
"Excellent plan, Thrace," he says, and it's almost a perfect imitation of the pomp and ceremony of McAllister, a lecturer they'd shared back at the Academy.
Kara places her hand in his, mimics his posture.
"It was an honour working with you, sir," she deadpans and finishes it off by giving him a sharp salute. Lee stares at her a moment longer and she counts, one-two-three-four, and then his face cracks up and by the time she thinks five they're both laughing, laughing like they haven't done in years, and every time she catches his eye she laughs harder.
Finally, Tigh coughs loudly and Kara wipes the tears from her eyes and tries to breathe. Then she looks around, to find half the CIC is staring at them in total confusion. Gaeta's lips are twitching helplessly.
Dee looks less than amused.
That alone almost starts her off again.
*
For a while, it's perfect.
They run together in the morning, eat lunch together when they're both off shift at the same time. She drops off his laundry one day when he falls asleep at his desk and misses the page. He teases her about her hair. She mocks him about his weight.
One day, they wrangle a session in the Pegasus sims, and blow Cylons out of the sky for an hour, so successfully they reset the highest scores for two of the runs by several hundred points.
Kat looks so annoyed at that that within two weeks, Starbuck and Apollo - or Apollo and Starbuck, depending on who won the rights to enter the names - replace all the previous high scores on every course the sims have to offer.
Kara smiles happily into Kat's scowl for a week, and challenges Apollo to one-on-one instead.
They're Starbuck and Apollo again. Nothing more, and she ignores the tiny part of her that feels like something is missing and enjoys being with him, enjoys having her best friend back.
She should have known it wouldn't last.
*
It's somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth boxing match when they end up in a cinch, his arms tight around her body, her hands caught against his chest.
The smell of his sweat hasn't changed, and she panics, pushes him away hard.
He stumbles back a step, and stares at her. She counts, one-two-three-four, and wills the feelings to go away.
Her next punch is a vicious left hook that he blocks, and then he swings back just as hard. By the end of an hour, he's wearing her bruises and the left side of her face is a pounding ache in time with her pulse.
Frak, she thinks.
*
Apollo. Starbuck. Apollo. Starbuck.
She can handle it.
*
She dreams about him, and wakes up at an ungodly hour hot and flustered with the feel of his skin all over hers and his name slipping off her lips. Kara curses, glares up at the bunk above her and the kicks off the sheet.
She thinks about letting her hand slide down her stomach, under the waistband of her boxers - it would be so easy - and then she shakes her head hard and gets out of bed, grabs a towel and marches to the head. Tries to think about the cold metal under her bare feet, anything but 'Gods, Kara - ' and the explosion of sensation as he kissed her neck, the slope of her breast -
Not giving in, she thinks, not this time, as she tries to scrubs the feel of him off her skin. It doesn't work; it wasn't real to start with, and the cold water only reduces the buzz in her body to vaguely bearable levels.
By the fourth night in two weeks, it doesn't work at all.
It takes her a week of avoiding his eyes to realise he's doing the same thing to her.
*
They're back to stumbling around each other, tripping over each other, a never-ending game of tag where they can't get out of each other's spaces. She catches him staring at her in meetings, and can't help the awkward ripple of heat down her body. Then later, she can't tear her eyes away from the curve of his arm into shoulder and he sees her, and she glances away so quickly she doesn't see his reaction. Later wishes she had.
On the surface, she thinks things are fine. They run, tease, laugh exactly like they've been doing for a two months and a half but she can't shake the feeling that underneath, they've shifted again into deeper waters and she's sick of treading over all the things they never frakking say.
It's late one night, halfway through rotation six, and she sits down in the deserted ready room and writes out a careful list of all the reasons why they should just stay Starbuck and Apollo, nothing less and certainly nothing more.
It starts with You're my CAG again, remember? and finishes with Do we really want anyone to win the pool? and she's pretty sure she's understating a lot when she mentions Sam or Dee and where that mess got them all. Or when she doesn't mention anything about the way her body is always aware of him, the way her skin heats when he touches her, but she's spent the last three weeks - or maybe seven years - trying not to admit that, so she figures one more night won't make a difference.
Then she takes it to the head and rips it into pieces and flushes them away, and goes to find him while she thinks she has a chance of actually saying some of it in a coherent, understandable manner.
"Hey," he says when he sees her at the door, and his voice is warm and soft and a part of her traitorously wishes she could just plant herself in the chair opposite him and put her feet up and tease laughter out of him for the next hour.
"Look," she says, sitting down awkwardly across from him. "I think we need to talk about this - "
"Are you drunk?" he says abruptly, and her spine stiffens.
"Why would I be?"
"Normally you are when you want to talk about this. Us."
It stings, and more so because it's true, and she's so thankful that for once she's not riding on courage fuelled by ambrosia.
"Oh," she says. His eyes flick down at the table and she rushes on. "It's just - we're Starbuck and Apollo," she says, "And anything else seems to just - stuff us up."
She's not looking at his face, so she sees exactly the way his fingers close around his pencil, convulsively, white knuckle tight. She swallows.
"So what are you suggesting?"
"I don't know," she says helplessly. She's not good at the talking thing, and all her carefully thought out, logical points have fled from her.
"So you're running away? Again?"
"No - I just - "
"Have you ever considered the opposite alternative, Kara?" he says, and she hasn't heard her name from him for so long she'd almost forgotten how good he made it sound. Then her brain catches up to his meaning and her breath chokes slightly, deep in her lungs, like he'd hit her.
He takes her silence for the assent it is. "If it doesn't work, then at least we know that, right?"
She still doesn't answer, and after a moment, his hand reaches out across the desk, and he catches her fingers in his. "Kara?"
Being with Zak was nothing like this; it was lighter, easier. There was no simmering promise in his eyes, no feeling of jumping off a cliff top and falling falling falling, faster and faster -
"What if we hate each other?" she says finally, and his fingers slide out of hers. She looks down, missing the contact already and listens to the sound of his chair scraping as he pushes it back, waits for the hatch to clang as he leaves.
Well done, Kara, she thinks bitterly, and then suddenly his hands are tight on her arms and he's hauling her to her feet.
"You're thinking too much," Lee says, and it's such a un-Lee-like thing to say that she half laughs for a second and then he is definitely in her personal space and there is no mistaking the intent in his eyes. She steps back, ends up pressed against the desk and realises that was probably his plan all along.
"Lee," she gets out, and sees his very self-satisfied smirk before he steps even closer and her eyes flutter closed. When his mouth covers hers, she waits for the kick in her stomach, waits for her brain to give her all the reasons why they shouldn't be doing this, why this can't possibly work. Why she doesn't deserve this, him, happiness at all.
Lee hums her name, his hands wrapping around her body, holding her close and Kara realises, slowly, before the feel of him takes away every other thought, that this feels right.
*
A month after that, she's laughing breathlessly as he pushes her back against the wall of his office and tugs frantically at her belt. Two months after that, they yell at each other until they're hoarse, and she spends the night trying not to cry herself to sleep. The next morning she goes to see him in his office, and stares at him through the hatch. He looks as tired and miserable as her, and she knows they'll be okay.
Still waits for him to come and apologise first.
Six months after that, she wakes up in his arms, and stares at his sleep ruffled hair and the faint creases in his forehead and tells him she loves him, soft and low so he won't wake up. He smiles, even in his sleep, and slings an arm around her waist.
"Starbuck," he murmurs, but he says it like Kara, and she realises that finally, they're now the same thing.
FIN
*
Spoilers: Very, very vague for up until the end of season 2. Set a year after that.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: PILOTS.
A/N: bantha_fodder prompted me tonight with an Anna Nalick song because I wanted to write Kara/Lee. Two hours and 3000 words later, this is the result and of course it's nothing like her prompt at all! I love school holidays.
*
Distance Enough
It takes Kara a full, careful year to cut Lee Adama out of her life, and less than a minute to let him back in.
It's the Cylons’ fault. As usual.
*
After two and a half years of fighting and fleeing, the unthinkable happens; the Galactica takes too many hits in a fire-fight and on the other side of two FTL jumps, can’t go any further. One swift, head spinning relocation later, and the Galactica is gone.
Adama takes command of the Pegasus within an hour, and later, Kara hears through the grapevine that Lee has been demoted to CAG. She is very careful not to ask questions, something she’d perfected over the months after New Caprica. It had been made easier, of course, by a jealous girlfriend and a lot of distance.
Now, though, the girlfriend is gone and Lee's her commanding officer again, and it’s a matter of hours, not days, until she sees him again. She sits alone in the Mess and tries not to look as out of place as she feels.
The Pegasus smells different - more polish, less sweat - and if the goose bumps constantly rising on her skin are any indication, it’s colder too.
She shivers, sipping coffee that is just a sludgy as that on the Galactica. Somehow that's comforting, she thinks, just as a crisp blue uniform stops in front of her and she doesn't have to look up to know who it is. She still almost spills her coffee.
"Hey," she says, and a small, fleeting smile crosses his face.
"Hey."
She stares at him a moment. Command has done good things for him, she decides.
He shifts slightly. "It's good to have you back, Starbuck," he says politely.
"Good to be back, sir," she says, and then the words spill out of somewhere before she can stop them, "I'm looking forward to saving your ass again on a regular basis."
There's a moment when he blinks, and she wants to crawl under the table and wishes herself anywhere else, even the Galactica, and then he actually smiles; the warm, amused smile she used to love putting on his face and for a moment she basks in the glow of it.
"Briefing's at ten," he says, his hand brushing her shoulder, and then he leaves before she can say anything more. Not that she'd know what to say.
There's too many empty spaces between them now, and sometimes she wishes she could see past them, to what it was like before Sam and Dee and New Caprica. Then she remembers there had always been spaces. Zak. Lee's rank. Her apparent inability to keep her foot out of her mouth. Baltar.
She still doesn't like thinking about that much. Instead, she thinks about the way Lee's mouth had fit around her callsign.
Kara traces her fingertips over the scratches of the tabletop.
Starbuck and Apollo never had any problems, and Starbuck has never shied away from a challenge.
It still takes a week for her to work up the courage to do anything at all.
*
She drops past his office in what she hopes is a casual manner, and leans against the hatch.
"Apollo," she says. "Rumour has it you're in danger of putting on those extra pounds again."
Her tone is light, a carefully produced replica of the casual teasing they'd once done, and it totally belies the way her hands are sweating behind her back.
He looks confused for a moment, then puts his pen down and leans back in his chair. There's a hint of a smile around his lips, and that's all that keeps her from running away.
"Where did you hear that?"
"I have my sources."
"Really."
"I can't divulge them. My sense of honour won't permit it."
He laughs, and she wants to grin wildly at him and bites it back.
"What did you have in mind, Starbuck?" he says finally, still looking amused, and she throws his boxing gloves at him.
"Ten minutes," she says, and goes down to the gym and stakes out the best ring.
He's there in seven.
He hits as hard as she remembers, and when her fist connects with his jaw, he spits on the floor with a hissed expletive.
She dances on her toes. "Alright there, Apollo?"
"Lucky punch."
"Wanna say that again?"
He gets the next punch in, high up on her left arm and the pain explodes down and up and everywhere. She bites back a few choice words and resolves to wipe the mocking smile off his mouth.
"Nice," she says. "Is that the best you've got?"
The smile he gives her wipes three years of history away and she grins at him before jerking back as his arm swings at her in a textbook upper-cut.
Just like that, it all clicks back into place. They have lunch together the next day, dinner the day after that and later, she thinks it was funny their friendship could be put back on track by a couple of punches. Then she decides that's probably them all over.
*
One morning, he wakes her obnoxiously early.
"Up all day with the rising sun!" he crows gleefully once her eyes blink open, and her face must be murderous because his smile only gets wider.
"Morning, Starbuck," he says, and she groans, pulls a pillow over her face. "You're helping me work off those extra pounds, remember?"
"I hate you."
"You're just scared I'll kick your ass all over this ship."
She sits up straight in bed and swings her legs over the side. "Say that again?"
He leans back against her locker. "I'm going to kick your ass all over this ship?"
"Frak you."
"Gonna run all day till the running's done!"
"Apollo may be the god of music," she says scathingly as she ties her shoes. "But you missed out on all of that talent."
He laughs. "I think you've made a pretty speedy assessment there," he says. "Maybe you'll change your mind after I've sung for you for the next, say, hour."
*
His fist smacks into her gut so hard she can't breathe for a moment, and she drops to her knees. "Frak!"
"Alright there, Starbuck?" he asks cheerfully, stepping neatly around her and not offering her a hand up.
"Bastard," she gasps.
"Takes one to know one!"
"You want me to give you a black eye?"
"I'd like to see you try."
The next day, he has a pool of violet and blue under his left eye, and she smiles at him all through his briefing.
*
She's on a self imposed ten minute break from a morning of planning in the CIC when Lee interrupts her.
"That won't work," he says.
Kara turns around from her very interesting discussion of certain black market items with Gaeta. "What? Where?" she asks, but before he points it out, she sees it, the flaw in the plan they've been working on for the whole morning.
"Frak," she says under her breath, and sends a quick look around to see if anyone heard her. Lee grins into his coffee cup, and she transfers her glare from him to the Vipers. "Why didn't - "
"Because it wasn't obvious - the - "
"Yeah, I know."
They stare at the board for a while. "You know," he starts, putting his mug down and leaning forward. "If we moved - "
"Actually, that could work. But only if - "
"But that would leave the - "
"Not if we - " He reaches out and sweeps the Vipers in through the left, to just behind the asteroid belt.
"Exactly," she says gleefully. "They won't know what's coming."
Lee grins at her, then extends his hand, slapping the other over his heart.
"Excellent plan, Thrace," he says, and it's almost a perfect imitation of the pomp and ceremony of McAllister, a lecturer they'd shared back at the Academy.
Kara places her hand in his, mimics his posture.
"It was an honour working with you, sir," she deadpans and finishes it off by giving him a sharp salute. Lee stares at her a moment longer and she counts, one-two-three-four, and then his face cracks up and by the time she thinks five they're both laughing, laughing like they haven't done in years, and every time she catches his eye she laughs harder.
Finally, Tigh coughs loudly and Kara wipes the tears from her eyes and tries to breathe. Then she looks around, to find half the CIC is staring at them in total confusion. Gaeta's lips are twitching helplessly.
Dee looks less than amused.
That alone almost starts her off again.
*
For a while, it's perfect.
They run together in the morning, eat lunch together when they're both off shift at the same time. She drops off his laundry one day when he falls asleep at his desk and misses the page. He teases her about her hair. She mocks him about his weight.
One day, they wrangle a session in the Pegasus sims, and blow Cylons out of the sky for an hour, so successfully they reset the highest scores for two of the runs by several hundred points.
Kat looks so annoyed at that that within two weeks, Starbuck and Apollo - or Apollo and Starbuck, depending on who won the rights to enter the names - replace all the previous high scores on every course the sims have to offer.
Kara smiles happily into Kat's scowl for a week, and challenges Apollo to one-on-one instead.
They're Starbuck and Apollo again. Nothing more, and she ignores the tiny part of her that feels like something is missing and enjoys being with him, enjoys having her best friend back.
She should have known it wouldn't last.
*
It's somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth boxing match when they end up in a cinch, his arms tight around her body, her hands caught against his chest.
The smell of his sweat hasn't changed, and she panics, pushes him away hard.
He stumbles back a step, and stares at her. She counts, one-two-three-four, and wills the feelings to go away.
Her next punch is a vicious left hook that he blocks, and then he swings back just as hard. By the end of an hour, he's wearing her bruises and the left side of her face is a pounding ache in time with her pulse.
Frak, she thinks.
*
Apollo. Starbuck. Apollo. Starbuck.
She can handle it.
*
She dreams about him, and wakes up at an ungodly hour hot and flustered with the feel of his skin all over hers and his name slipping off her lips. Kara curses, glares up at the bunk above her and the kicks off the sheet.
She thinks about letting her hand slide down her stomach, under the waistband of her boxers - it would be so easy - and then she shakes her head hard and gets out of bed, grabs a towel and marches to the head. Tries to think about the cold metal under her bare feet, anything but 'Gods, Kara - ' and the explosion of sensation as he kissed her neck, the slope of her breast -
Not giving in, she thinks, not this time, as she tries to scrubs the feel of him off her skin. It doesn't work; it wasn't real to start with, and the cold water only reduces the buzz in her body to vaguely bearable levels.
By the fourth night in two weeks, it doesn't work at all.
It takes her a week of avoiding his eyes to realise he's doing the same thing to her.
*
They're back to stumbling around each other, tripping over each other, a never-ending game of tag where they can't get out of each other's spaces. She catches him staring at her in meetings, and can't help the awkward ripple of heat down her body. Then later, she can't tear her eyes away from the curve of his arm into shoulder and he sees her, and she glances away so quickly she doesn't see his reaction. Later wishes she had.
On the surface, she thinks things are fine. They run, tease, laugh exactly like they've been doing for a two months and a half but she can't shake the feeling that underneath, they've shifted again into deeper waters and she's sick of treading over all the things they never frakking say.
It's late one night, halfway through rotation six, and she sits down in the deserted ready room and writes out a careful list of all the reasons why they should just stay Starbuck and Apollo, nothing less and certainly nothing more.
It starts with You're my CAG again, remember? and finishes with Do we really want anyone to win the pool? and she's pretty sure she's understating a lot when she mentions Sam or Dee and where that mess got them all. Or when she doesn't mention anything about the way her body is always aware of him, the way her skin heats when he touches her, but she's spent the last three weeks - or maybe seven years - trying not to admit that, so she figures one more night won't make a difference.
Then she takes it to the head and rips it into pieces and flushes them away, and goes to find him while she thinks she has a chance of actually saying some of it in a coherent, understandable manner.
"Hey," he says when he sees her at the door, and his voice is warm and soft and a part of her traitorously wishes she could just plant herself in the chair opposite him and put her feet up and tease laughter out of him for the next hour.
"Look," she says, sitting down awkwardly across from him. "I think we need to talk about this - "
"Are you drunk?" he says abruptly, and her spine stiffens.
"Why would I be?"
"Normally you are when you want to talk about this. Us."
It stings, and more so because it's true, and she's so thankful that for once she's not riding on courage fuelled by ambrosia.
"Oh," she says. His eyes flick down at the table and she rushes on. "It's just - we're Starbuck and Apollo," she says, "And anything else seems to just - stuff us up."
She's not looking at his face, so she sees exactly the way his fingers close around his pencil, convulsively, white knuckle tight. She swallows.
"So what are you suggesting?"
"I don't know," she says helplessly. She's not good at the talking thing, and all her carefully thought out, logical points have fled from her.
"So you're running away? Again?"
"No - I just - "
"Have you ever considered the opposite alternative, Kara?" he says, and she hasn't heard her name from him for so long she'd almost forgotten how good he made it sound. Then her brain catches up to his meaning and her breath chokes slightly, deep in her lungs, like he'd hit her.
He takes her silence for the assent it is. "If it doesn't work, then at least we know that, right?"
She still doesn't answer, and after a moment, his hand reaches out across the desk, and he catches her fingers in his. "Kara?"
Being with Zak was nothing like this; it was lighter, easier. There was no simmering promise in his eyes, no feeling of jumping off a cliff top and falling falling falling, faster and faster -
"What if we hate each other?" she says finally, and his fingers slide out of hers. She looks down, missing the contact already and listens to the sound of his chair scraping as he pushes it back, waits for the hatch to clang as he leaves.
Well done, Kara, she thinks bitterly, and then suddenly his hands are tight on her arms and he's hauling her to her feet.
"You're thinking too much," Lee says, and it's such a un-Lee-like thing to say that she half laughs for a second and then he is definitely in her personal space and there is no mistaking the intent in his eyes. She steps back, ends up pressed against the desk and realises that was probably his plan all along.
"Lee," she gets out, and sees his very self-satisfied smirk before he steps even closer and her eyes flutter closed. When his mouth covers hers, she waits for the kick in her stomach, waits for her brain to give her all the reasons why they shouldn't be doing this, why this can't possibly work. Why she doesn't deserve this, him, happiness at all.
Lee hums her name, his hands wrapping around her body, holding her close and Kara realises, slowly, before the feel of him takes away every other thought, that this feels right.
*
A month after that, she's laughing breathlessly as he pushes her back against the wall of his office and tugs frantically at her belt. Two months after that, they yell at each other until they're hoarse, and she spends the night trying not to cry herself to sleep. The next morning she goes to see him in his office, and stares at him through the hatch. He looks as tired and miserable as her, and she knows they'll be okay.
Still waits for him to come and apologise first.
Six months after that, she wakes up in his arms, and stares at his sleep ruffled hair and the faint creases in his forehead and tells him she loves him, soft and low so he won't wake up. He smiles, even in his sleep, and slings an arm around her waist.
"Starbuck," he murmurs, but he says it like Kara, and she realises that finally, they're now the same thing.
FIN
*