[bsg] stupid thing last night: the rewind 1/2
A long long time ago in a galaxy far away I wrote a silly little fic called Stupid Thing Last Night. Much later (but still a long long time ago), I wrote another one: Stupid Thing Last Night: The Videotape edition.
Not so long ago, a fantastic writer by the name of elzed contacted me with the idea of sequel-ing the ... sequel? And lo, our powers combined across timezone inconveniences and conflicting timetables, and we wrote a fic which is probably eight times as long as the first two combined.
So here it is.
Stupid Thing Last Night: The Rewind.
Authors: stars_like_dust and elzed
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairings: Lee/Kara
Rating: NC-17 (no, really)
Spoilers: Season 1; up to early season 2 (Home)
Wordcount: This part: approx 8,300 (total 16,700)
Disclaimer: RDM said we could!
Betaed by the lovely overnighter.
You may need to reread the other two first, as this picks about mid-Videotape edition. :)
*
Stupid Thing Last Night
It takes Lee all of two seconds to go from wondering why the lights are off to recognizing Kara’s face on the screen. She looks so young, so beautiful, so utterly turned on - head thrown back against the wall, mouth half-open - that it makes him ache.
It’s another second before he recognizes himself, and then it hits him like a punch to the solar plexus. Oh gods. It’s the tape. He senses Kara going rigid next to him, so she’s obviously figured it out too. Who the hell is here? He scans the shapes in the shadows, one of them frantically trying to turn the screen off and - finally, mercifully - succeeding. Hover, it looks like. The others - Hotdog, Racetrack, Boomer and a girl with a bushy ponytail that can only be Kat - are all frozen.
Frak. Frakking frak.
Kara strides forward. “Okay. You've all had your fun. Out."
Her tone brooks no argument, and even Kat goes no further than a feeble “But…” before shutting up.
“Out,” Kara repeats. “Or the CAG will make it an order.”
If the CAG can find his voice, that is, because Lee is pretty sure that he can’t speak at this point. He takes a couple of deep, quiet breaths, tries to find his focus, but all he can think about is Kara’s face, her mouth, gods.
The pilots get up slowly, taking their time, and Kat - who really doesn’t know when to leave well alone - is looking from Kara to him with naked curiosity. When Hover ejects the tape and reaches for it, though, instinct takes over.
"You can leave the tape," he snaps. "I'm feeling generous. Now go."
Miraculously, they follow suit and troop out of the ready room obediently, even if Meg is choking on repressed laughter and Hover stumbles before he slams the hatch shut. The sound echoes in the silence.
Now it’s just Kara and him, alone in the semi-darkness. Neither of them says a word for maybe a minute, which Lee could swear is a half-hour, so slowly do the seconds tick in the stillness. He is desperate to put the tape back in the player, to watch more of her, of this elusive, dreamlike Kara - open and vulnerable and wanting - captured in the scene that has haunted him for the past four years.
It’s Kara who bends down and picks the tape up.
"Where did they get this thing?" she says, turning it between her fingers slowly. "It's Helo's writing. Oh lords, it must have been in his locker.”
Lee clears his throat.
"He held onto it all this time?"
"Of course," she says, putting her cane down carefully and easing into one of the chairs. "That thing is worth its weight in gold. Wouldn't you have kept it?"
He nods, then shakes his head, and she laughs.
“You know,” she says, “I wasn’t even sure this tape ever existed. I thought it was some kind of elaborate hoax he dreamed up to frak with us.”
“Me too.”
“And I just can’t believe that it survived the end of the world. That it survived him.” She says, her voice faltering at the end.
“Yeah? I can’t believe a bunch of pilots found it.”
She lets out another short bark of laughter. “Including a couple of my nuggets. That really sucks.”
"So," he asks slowly, “do you want to watch it?"
"Don't you?" she counters, and she knows he does, but he still feels he has to be the voice of reason.
"I think that would be a bad idea."
"Come on, Lee. We should at least watch the frakking thing once," she says, kicking her good foot up. Her eyes meet his as she delivers her killer argument. "Do you want those five knowing more about this than we do? I mean, Meg may not be so bad, but Sharon? And Hover?"
Touché.
"All right,” he says with a sigh. “Let's see the thing."
He works in some kind of smile as he says it, and he can’t quite believe he’s sounding so casual. Four years he’s waited to find out exactly what happened that night, beyond the intense half-remembered fragments that have starred in too many of his sexual fantasies to mention.
Four frakking years, and it’s about to happen.
She catches his eye briefly, as if to confirm that he meant it, and for a second, she looks terrified.
“You sure?”
He plucks the tape from her hands and pops it into the reader. There’s a faint whirring, and then the image that has been seared into his brain reappears on the screen, still paused, and Kara reaches for the remote and presses rewind.
“Might as well watch the whole show, right?”
“I just want it said," he mutters as the tape spins noisily in the deck, "that I think this is a really bad idea."
Kara shrugs.
“All I can say is we must’ve been crazy drunk.”
He nods his agreement. Sure. Except that he would have done it stone cold sober, and Kara wouldn’t - couldn’t - remember anything at all about the single sexiest memory of his life. It crucified him that the only time she’d let her guard down enough to let him in, it had been the booze and not her, not really. That much was clear from the moment he’d finally answered the phone the morning after - on the twelfth ring - knowing he’d have to face her again, eventually.
“So, who do you think actually taped this?” he asks, as the recording whines to is starting position and starts to unspool.
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” she says, offhand. “Oh, look, it’s the Pen.”
It’s their senior year haunt, packed with Academy pilots out on a tear. The air is thick with smoke, there’s bass thumping in the background and the camera mic catches snippets of drunken conversations and raucous laughter. Lee realizes with a start that he recognizes most faces, even if he can’t put a name to all of them.
“Hey,” he says, “isn’t that Dora, who used to date Helo? And that guy, in the corner, what was his name, the math whizz…?”
“Clayton,” Kara says. “And Spinner, behind him, remember him?”
“How could I forget Spinner? I thought he was going to shoot me when I made valedictorian ahead of him. I wonder what happ- ” He stops abruptly.
Next to him, Kara winces. “I was thinking the same thing, just now. And then it hit me. It’s crazy how easy it is…” her voice trails off.
There were maybe two hundred people in the bar that night, give or take, maybe more, most of them Academy pilots they knew, at least by sight. Every single damn one of them is dead now, except for Kara and himself, and their only surviving record is a crappy tape of them getting drunk on a Saturday night. It’s enough to make Lee wish for a stiff drink or three here and now, but he can’t tear himself away from the tape, because a familiar figure is now striding towards the camera - cocky and confident and so damn young - some rook trailing her with puppy dog eyes.
"Oh my gods, I'd completely forgotten Wells. Poor thing."
"He looks like he's fifteen." He sends her a brief sideways smirk. "I didn't know you liked them so young."
She snorts. "Please, Apollo. I didn't want to frak him, just… make him my slave."
"Ah yes," Lee stretches and puts his hands behind his head. "uou were always kind of a bitch, Kara."
"You have to start early in order to reach maximum potential. You told me that before our first exams."
"Which you failed."
"Just. And I whipped your ass in sims."
"Just."
"That's where it counts."
He rolls his eyes. "Focus, Kara."
She sticks her tongue out at him.
“Tex,” she says when a disembodied voice issues from behind the camera. “Frakking Tex, and he was filming it for Mike, remember?”
He does.
Onscreen, Kara’s cutting in on him and some blonde with too much eyeliner and bright red lipstick, and Lee cringes.
“Hey, look, Lee - you’re being the damsel in distress, as usual.”
“Not my fault they couldn’t keep their hands off me,” he says, but all he can see on screen is how he and Kara are reacting to each other, and how it must have looked to outside observers. Gods, he never realized they behaved so much like a couple. No wonder other people got so pissed.
"So who did I rescue you from this time? Mary. No, Mandy. Dorm 4 for easy access."
"Her name was Amanda."
Kara shrugs. "You might have called her Amanda, but the rest of us called her Mandy the… "
"You know," Lee says abruptly, his tone brooking no argument, "I think some things are better left forgotten."
She laughs, and bumps his arm with hers. "Still traumatized?"
"Shut up, Kara."
"You know, you should let your hair grow back like that. I liked it."
"Will you be quiet, please?"
They watch for a moment in companionable silence, until an unimpressed female voice on the tape breaks in over the background music, and Kara laughs.
"Elise! Oh, I'd forgotten all about her."
"Wasn't she that brunette…"
"That had a totally desperate crush on you? Yeah. That'd be her."
"She did not. You're imagining things."
"She totally did. Gods, Apollo, what she would have done to get you in bed - I remember once Sharon telling me that… "
"Okay, Kara, I get the idea. You don't need to go any further."
"Apollo, Apollo. Was there a girl that didn't want you?"
He gives her a quick look and she shuts up. This is getting a little close for comfort.
The next hour is one long nostalgia fest, starring most of the people in their graduating class, hotshot jocks, friends, the occasional frakbuddy - until suddenly the camera zooms onto a lanky guy walking in and they both catch their breath.
“Helo, you son of a bitch,” Kara whispers as their friend swaggers across the screen towards Tex and the camera. “Hey look, it’s us again.”
"Oh my gods. Look how drunk we were,” Lee says, leaning forward. "Wow. What did we drink to end up like that? In what, an hour?"
"Firebrand whisky?"
"Oh. Yeah. Hey. Yeah. I think I vaguely remember that."
Onscreen, they’re clutching onto each other to keep their balance, and it looks like Lee’s resting heavily on Kara’s shoulder.
Here in the room next to him, she cackles. "Look at you, you lightweight."
“You know, I’m beginning to wonder this was all just spur of the moment,” Lee says suddenly. There’s something a little too smooth about Helo’s patter, and Tex is playing along, focusing on the two of them to the exclusion of everyone else.
“Nah,” Kara says, but she doesn’t sound convinced as she watches the action unfold, each taunt leading inevitably to the next, their younger selves moving closer and closer into each other’s space.
“Frakking bastards set us up,” Lee insists, and it’s so obvious onscreen that Helo’s egging them on that Lee can’t believe they went for it. “Look at him - he knows exactly which buttons to push. Frak, I bet he made sure we were good and drunk, too.”
“Oh, like that was much of a challenge?” Kara scoffs, but her eyes are narrowed in suspicion.
The on-screen tension is starting to get to Lee, and although he’s already seen what’s going to happen, he’s dry-mouthed with anticipation.
“Frak me, Apollo! Two hundred and sixty-three cubits?”
Lee can feel his jaw drop, the expression mimicking that of his younger self on camera.
“They can’t be serious.”
“Gods, Lee, you must have been completely gone - you didn’t even correct Helo’s shoddy math.”
Lee, then and now, doesn’t give a frak about Helo’s math, because all his focus is on Kara’s mouth, and if the real Kara in the real here and now can’t tell how desperate he was to kiss her back then, then she’s blind.
When their lips meet on the screen in front of them, Lee has to dig his nails into his palms to stop himself from whimpering. Gratifyingly, he hears Kara breathe out very slowly, and he figures maybe she’s not quite as unaffected by all this as she’s pretending to be.
Onscreen, the Apollo and Starbuck show is heating up something fierce - he’s got her pinned against the wall, one of her legs hooked around his waist - and Lee cannot believe how into it they both were. This wasn’t just his imagination then; in front of his very eyes, Kara is returning his kiss passionately, and it’s so intense he feels his older, purportedly wiser self harden.
“Apollo, did you spike my drink?” Kara asks, another reminder of the here and now, trying to sound unconcerned and failing. He sneaks a look over at her. Her chest is rising and falling faster than it ought to and even in the dim light he can see two spots of color on her cheeks.
He snorts, because he doesn’t trust his voice.
On screen, they’re dry humping against the wall, and it’s as close to porn as anything he’s ever seen, except it’s better - because it’s Kara - and it’s worse - because there are dozens of onlookers, not to mention the handful of Galactica pilots who watched the tape.
Lee decides this is simultaneously the most embarrassing and arousing experience of his life, and for some twisted reason, he’s forcing himself to live through it twice.
“Frak, Lee, please tell me someone stopped us,” Kara hisses, and she reaches out for him blindly, her nails digging into the sleeve of his uniform. He steels himself not to react to her touch.
They’ve reached the point in the tape now at which they first walked in on the impromptu viewing party - Apollo’s hand halfway up Starbuck’s tank, his mouth on her neck, her legs around his waist, her head flung back against the wall.
Half of Lee’s attention is now focused on keeping his erection in check; but the other wilder half of his brain is fighting his natural impulse, which is to grab Kara and re-enact the scene in front of them in real time.
On the video, she lets out a strangled moan and bucks her hips into his, and Lee watches himself thrust back in response, baring his teeth against the skin of her shoulder.
Kara’s fingers tighten around his forearm.
It’s as if they’re suspended in time and space, glued to the screen but unable to move or speak, unwilling to break the spell keeping them here, and desire hangs thick in the air.
With an immense effort of will he tears his eyes away from their conjoined forms and focuses instead on the crowd in the bar. Even on the fuzzy screen, he can see that they’re all mesmerized - pupils wide in flushed faces - and gods, he can’t believe they’d put on a floor show to rival the strippers at the Vixen Club over the road. By rights he should be cowed by shame, but there’s something about the look on the younger Kara’s face that fills him with pride instead.
Still, he’s thankful when the burly shape of Alvin, the Pen’s bouncer, marches across the frame and glances menacingly at Tex before ordering them to cut the crap, or else.
The last thing Lee sees before the video on screen abruptly turns off - following the orders of a ghost - is the look of shock and disbelief on both their faces when Alvin breaks them up. That, and how swollen Kara’s lips were with his kisses.
The screen dissolves in a blur of dots and white noise, and Kara doesn’t let go of his arm. He risks a look at her and she’s looking back, lips parted, cheeks flaming, eyes dark and hungry. It’s only a moment, and when he blinks she’s turned away from him, her hand dropping from his arm.
He’s trying to figure out what to do when the intercom crackles to life with Lieutenant Gaeta’s voice.
“Attention, pass the word to the CAG. Captain Adama please report to CIC. Repeat, Captain Adama report to CIC.”
“Frak,” he swears under his breath, but orders are given to be followed, so he does. He turns back as he gets to the hatch and Kara hasn’t moved, still staring at the fuzzy screen, resolutely ignoring him. There’s nothing he could say that wouldn’t make the moment ever more awkward than it is already, so he steps through the hatch and walks down the corridor, his mind a whirl of emotions and images.
It occurs to him as he nears CIC he’d better get some good blackmail material on Hover, Racetrack and the others, or he might have to shoot them.
********************************
The hatch clangs shut behind him, and Kara sinks down in her seat and exhales.
Frak.
Her body feels hot, and she knows her pulse is racing. She hasn’t been this turned on since she can remember. Her lips feel swollen, her skin burning in all the places he touched her as if it had been real even now, and Kara drops her head into her hands and tries to think.
She’d forgotten - to all intents and purposes - that the tape even existed. Sure, it had made life at the Academy a little awkward for a week or so, but she was Starbuck and she’d made sure she’d gone out and done something even crazier the next weekend. When it was clear there were going to be no more repeat performances with Apollo, the kiss had passed into Academy folklore - talked about and exaggerated until it became almost unreal.
Now, however, she sees exactly what all the fuss had been about, and there is no memory whatsoever of the whole thing in her mind, which seems frakking unbelievable.
There’s a sudden loud click as onscreen an image emerges, different from the club before. It takes her a moment to work out what’s happening before she recognizes the street. It’s the main thoroughfare back to the Academy, and she sees Dozer, Flipper and another cadet whose name she can’t quite remember in the shadows as well.
There’s laughter, and just enough light from the streetlamps to illuminate the faces of her old classmates, and she leans forward in her seat as Helo crosses the screen.
“Holy frak,” Tex says from behind the camera. Helo is practically bent over laughing, even as he’s walking. “Did you see that? Gods, I thought they were going to frak right there.”
“I can’t believe it,” Flipper says, from where she‘s walking hand in hand with Dozer. “I just can’t believe it.”
“I can.”
Helo’s walking backwards so he can face Tex.
“They’ve wanted to do that since first year,” he continues.
“Oh, I can believe that,” Flipper answers. “I just can’t believe they finally did something about it.”
Someone laughs offscreen. “Did you see Apollo’s face?”
“Did you see Starbuck’s?”
“They wanted each other so bad.”
“Well, that’s been obvious all semester.”
“All year!”
“Since they met!”
“Except to them,” Helo puts in dryly.
“Except to Starbuck. Apollo, on the other hand…”
“Yeah, but he was never going to do anything about it.”
“You saw the way he looked at her? He only gets like that when he’s wasted.”
“Like she was something to eat.”
“Okay, way too much mental imagery,” Flipper says. “What I saw in the bar was enough, okay, boys? Enough. I’m not going to sleep as it is.”
Kara sinks a little into her seat as the laughter of ghosts echoes through the room. She can feel her face burning with embarrassment and her heart hammering and she’s so glad Lee left already because this is almost too much. Onscreen, Dozer is still looking stunned.
“Wow.”
“Starbuck and Apollo.”
“Finally.”
“I know, right?”
“You guys are living gods.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Tex says from behind the camera, as Helo bows with a flourish.
“Are you guys done yet?” A familiar voice cuts over the mix, and Tex turns to face Elise, and Kara almost laughs at the look on the girl’s face. “I mean, I know this has all been very funny, and whatever, but - “
“Aw, Elise, don’t worry,” Helo says, throwing an arm around her shoulders. “They’re just meant to be together.”
“Epic love and all that,” Flipper adds.
“More like epic sexual tension,” Tex drawls from behind the camera, and Helo snorts with laughter.
“Next time, we need to pay off Alvin,” he says, and Elise slaps his arm. “There were at least another few minutes of priceless footage there.”
“Yeah, the one thing we didn’t think about in our foolproof plan.”
Helo grins. “Mike,” he says seriously, looking into the camera, “You owe us big time.”
“As does the world,” Tex says extravagantly from behind the camera.
“Stay tuned for next week’s episode on Academy Pilots: The Apollo and Starbuck show,” Helo intones , and she hears all the pilots laugh for a second before the screen goes black for three seconds before the options menu reappears.
Kara hesitates a moment, then hits rewind, and skips back through the kissing - gods, the kissing - to the moment just before. After the dark of the street scene, the sound and lights of even the dimly-lit bar are blinding. Kara blinks, and when she focuses again, all she can see is Lee.
“You sound like you’re scared,” he’s saying, but there’s something in the way that he’s looking at her on the tape that makes Kara shifts in her seat as much as her knee will let her. “One hundred and thirty cubits.” His gaze is on Kara’s mouth now - focused on it with a laser precision.
“Fine. But I get the cubit left over,” says her counterpart onscreen.
“Shut up, Kara,” Lee answers her, and Kara hits pause on the tape. The frame freezes, and Kara looks at the expression on her own face as Lee leaned into her, the want and anticipation so naked on her face, her fingers tight against the fabric of his tanks. It’s painfully clear how much she wanted him, and Kara fumbles at the remote and hits eject before she can see anymore.
The tape pops out of the player, and the screen goes blue.
She scrubs a hand through her hair, and wishes she could deny everything but the evidence of how much she wanted Lee Adama was there all over her face, just as it is now in how she’s flushed, her skin prickling all over and aching for something she actually had four years ago, and can’t remember at all.
Frak.
**************************
The few minutes it takes him to walk through the ship are nowhere near enough for Lee to recover his composure, but he does manage to will his dick back into some sort of decent state before he has to face his father.
His mind, on the other hand, is a complete whirl. Focus, Lee, he thinks savagely as he steps into CIC, where his father and the XO are leaning over star charts spread on the display table.
“Captain Adama reporting to CIC, sir” he says, snapping a salute, hoping he doesn’t look too flushed or disheveled.
His father beckons him over and starts talking about the need for organizing regular surveys to find supplies before they run out rather than after, and could he work this into his CAP rotations? Lee nods dumbly, because he’s sure he will be able to manage that. Eventually. When his head isn’t frakked with visions of his younger self, desperate and hungry; of Kara’s parted lips; of his hands on her skin; of the way she mouthed his name...
If that ever happens.
“I want a draft of the new rosters on my desk by tomorrow, Apollo,” Tigh growls. “This is something we should’ve organized a while ago.”
“It’ll be there, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go and start on it, if that’s all you wanted to tell me. Commander?”
“Dismissed,” his father says. “Goodnight, Lee.”
Reworking the rosters is a nightmare, but preferable to trying to go to sleep, Lee decides as he slaves in his office over grids with too many slots and not enough pilots to fill them. It’s also the perfect opportunity to make sure that people are kept apart - like Kara and himself, especially since she isn’t flying CAPs at the moment. It limits his options, but he manages to work Hover and Racetrack, and Sharon in quite often, and to give the nuggets a punishing training schedule that will minimize their chances of spreading gossip.
Of course, it’s probably too late.
Eventually, he’s done as much as he can and the grid looks useable. It’s just as well since he’s so tired he can barely read it anymore, and he can’t postpone going to bed any longer.
The bunkroom is quiet. By the sound of it most of the pilots are asleep, or near enough. Kara’s curtain is drawn across, thank the gods, and there’s no light peeking out from either Hover’s or Racetrack’s bunka. Lee strips quietly and efficiently before climbing into his rack, and it feels so good to lie down that - for a short while - he fools himself into thinking that he’s immediately going to fall asleep.
No such luck, of course, because while his body is dog-tired, his brain is still revisiting the highlights of that frakking tape, which in turn stimulates his body back into a state of arousal that he can’t seem to shake off.
If he wasn’t so exhausted, he’d take himself to the showers for a quick resolution of this state of affairs, but that’s not likely to happen. Especially when he hears a sigh coming from the other side of his curtain, a sigh that he’s willing to bet is Kara’s. All he needs is for her to catch him on his way to the head with an obvious hard-on and… he shudders to think.
If it is indeed Kara, she’s not getting any more sleep than he is. Lee can hear restless shuffling in the rack across from his, which leads him naturally to imagining Kara in bed in her underwear, which does nothing for his problem. Maybe he’s going to have to deal with it here and now - not, in itself, anything unusual, but with enormous embarrassment potential if she hears him.
Then again, Lee’s lived long enough in shared bunkrooms to learn how to bring himself off discreetly.
Eyes closed, he takes himself in hand, and he doesn’t need to summon any memories because they’re already imprinted on his brain. He’s back in the Pen - dry-humping her against the wall, his erection pressing into her - and she’s moaning softly in his ear, arching against the wall to increase the pressure, her legs wrapped around his waist. He’s so hard he’s leaking - in record time, but he’s been trying to keep it down for too long, now - and strokes himself as slowly as he can, to avoid detection.
Silence is paramount - and the most difficult part of it all is trying to control his breathing, but that’s where extreme fitness has its advantages. All the time, he’s straining to hear any noises coming from her side, anything that indicates that she’s awake, and could be listening. Which is why he catches her gasp - quiet but definitely real - and the sharp intake of breath that follows.
Frak.
She can’t be.
He’s suddenly exponentially harder than he was a second ago, because superimposed on his memory of Kara against the wall, there now is an even more arousing fantasy of Kara lying in her rack, a couple of meters away, hand down her pants, caressing herself to ecstasy. He can see her so clearly in his mind’s eye, tanks and bra discarded, one hand touching her breast, the other busy between her legs - back arched, mouth half-open - Gods.
That tips him over the edge and he comes onto his stomach in a pure spasm of unadulterated pleasure, managing with superhuman effort not to groan as he does. His heartbeat is suddenly so loud to his ears he worries Kara can hear it, even though he knows it’s not possible. Grabbing a towel at the foot of his bunk, he wipes himself off before collapsing back onto his pillow, the exhaustion catching up with him. Kara is quiet on her side of the room, but he can’t erase the thought that he caught her pleasuring herself.
Even if it’s not true, it’s a compelling enough thought to make him fall asleep with a smile on his face, despite the clusterfrak that was his early evening. Tomorrow, he’ll deal with it. Tomorrow.
*****************************
The next morning she wakes up hot and slick and sweaty and she has no idea if her dream was fragments of memory coming back to her, or simply her imagination running in overdrive. Her knee is aching like a bitch, and - from the lack of sound outside her curtain - there's no one left in the bunkroom. Ordinarily, she’d revel in a few moments of privacy to pull herself together, but with her knee in the clumsy brace, Kara can barely lean over, let alone reach her feet, which means it's impossible to change by herself.
It's humiliating, just like dreaming about Lee; Starbuck's many things, but needy isn't one of them. Kara shoves the curtain back, determined to at least change her tanks by herself.
However, the bunkroom isn't empty after all, and the person left makes her want to draw her curtain again and sink back into the darkness.
"Good morning, Starbuck," Hover says, stretching out in his rack, and she wonders if he was waiting there just to check how many people were lying behind her curtain.
She acknowledges him with a nod, too frustrated with everything to be more than barely polite, and begins the process of maneuvering her leg out of her bunk. Hover doesn't take the hint.
"I'm surprised to see you here," he says conversationally. "Sleep well?"
"Oh, frak off," she snarls, and tries to stand. This proves to be a mistake, as the vague throbbing ache disappears under a stabbing wave of pain. She gasps and reaches out for the ladder, eyes watering at the shock of it, and the next second Hover's next to her, one hand on her waist and the other on her shoulder, supporting her until she finds an upright position that reduces the pain from agony to something just bearable.
"Okay?" he says after a moment, and she wants to stay mad at him but he's looking at her with genuine concern. Stupid frakking pilot loyalty.
"Painkillers," she gets out, and places both hands on the table, leaning her weight on it until Hover comes back with two of Doc Cottle's magic pills and her water bottle.
"I'll get Sharon for you," he says, and disappears while she's swallowing them down.
Sharon must not have been far away, because she appears at the hatch before Kara's even taken one step towards her locker.
"Kara?"
"I'm okay," Kara replies swiftly. "Just sore."
"What do you need?"
"I need to change," she says reluctantly, and Sharon crosses to her locker, coming back with her arms full of running shorts, new tanks, shoes and socks.
They slip into the routine they've formed over the last week - Kara changing her top half with Sharon covering all the things that would take impractical amounts of time if Kara was left to dress by herself. Kara pulls on a fresh sports bra, not bothering to fill the silence with idle talk because she knows what's coming - it's impossible to keep Sharon quiet on any sort of gossip, let alone something of this magnitude.
And Sharon doesn't disappoint. "So. You look tired," she says finally, as she tugs a clean pair of running shorts carefully up over the brace on Kara's knee.
"Sharon... "
"And I'm not surprised."
Kara groans, pulling her tanks over her head. "No - nothing…"
"Yeah, I know," Sharon cuts in cheerfully, reaching for Kara's shoes and socks.
"What do you mean, you know?"
"Please," Sharon says, as she carefully slides shoe onto Kara's foot without jolting her bad knee. "That would be the biggest gossip Galactica has ever seen and therefore all over the ship by now. And somebody would have a lot of socks. Well, in post-apocalyptic terms, anyway."
"Socks?"
Sharon's eyes sparkle, and Kara knows that look too well.
"Okay, I'm not asking."
"Good move." Sharon's smile widens. "So…. Lee Adama."
"Sharon, it was nothing. I don't even remember it. "
Sharon rolls her eyes, tying the final shoelaces in a neat bow. "If that was nothing, then I'm a Cylon."
"Nothing has happened!"
"Sure." Sharon gets up. "Yet. Well, aren't you going to say thank you?"
"Thank you," Kara says grudgingly, biting back numerous other choice retorts, because now is really not the time to be pushing boundaries.
"You're welcome. Can you get to the mess by yourself?"
"Yeah. I'll see you at the briefing."
"See you then." Sharon pauses at the hatch. "You will tell me, this time," she says, and it's not so much a request as an order.
***
The day degenerates from there. She stumbles through her part of a briefing, too aware of Kat's fiendish smile, Hover's smirk and the way Hotdog is carefully looking directly past her left ear. She's even more aware of Lee, which annoys her. She hasn't spent seven years learning how to ignore the buzz when he's near to have all that progress thrown away on a drunken misdemeanor that happened before Kat and Hotdog were out of high school. One she can't even remember.
She glances at Lee, who - predictably enough - is looking at her, and promptly loses her sentence halfway between 'CAP Rotation 5' and the pilots on it, and has to look down at her notes to collect herself and press on. She can tell, even without looking at Sharon, that her friend is wearing a grin the size of Io's udder and that only annoys her further.
She gets through the rest of the report without incident, mostly because she keeps her gaze on her notes, the board or the bottom of Stingray's boots, which he's kicked them up over the back of the chair in front of him.
When Lee gets up to finish the briefing - for the first time since the world ended - she pulls out a pen and takes notes, anything to give herself something to do that isn't looking at him or imagining. She tries to ignore the way Sharon's stifling giggles behind her for the rest of the briefing.
****************************
Ever since he walked into the ready room, Lee has been a bundle of nerves. So far, his morning has been relatively easy - he had breakfast before everybody, after waking up abruptly with a sinking feeling in his belly, and the realization that it wasn’t all a dream. The past couple of hours have been spent with Tigh and the Commander in CIC, working through the new rosters and discussing recon patrols with Gaeta.
Now he’s in a roomful of pilots - including Kara - and he doesn’t even know whether they all know about the godsdamned tape, or whether he’s just got a handful to worry about. A handful is bad enough, especially with that bunch. He’s already caught Hover smirking at him from three seats down, and he’s bracing himself for when Kara finishes her report and he has to face the crowd. He’s staring at her, so when she looks straight at him he sees her lose the thread of whatever she was talking about (which he should be listening to, but isn’t), and immediately makes a mental note not to look at her once he takes over at the podium.
It starts out easy enough, and the new survey runs that are being introduced involve a fair amount of clarification, which keeps his mind busy. He does, however, look at the assembled pilots a couple of times, and each time Hover is grinning, and Sharon is whispering something in Racetrack’s ear. He avoids searching out Kara, because he knows his limits, but he sees her scribbling something out of the corner of his eye and she never takes notes in briefings.
“Okay - that’s the basic outline. Any questions?”
And then the trouble begins. There are a couple of innocuous questions about duty rosters, and overstretching, which he dispatches swiftly.
Sharon raises a hand. “Sir, this doesn’t leave many Raptors free for emergencies. What if we need to engage in, say, a rescue mission?”
Her eyes are sparkling, and next to her, Racetrack is trying not to laugh, and failing.
Here we go.
“I’m sure we could have some Raptors on standby for that purpose, Boomer. You want to volunteer for being on-call between CAPs? I’ll put you down.” He flourishes his pen. “Next!”
Next is, of course, Hover.
“How are the search patterns going to be set out sir? Will it be random? Every hundredth rock, or every hundred and fiftieth, or every… two hundred and sixty third, say?”
Lee can feel the blush creeping up his face.
“I don’t know, Hover - Lieutenant Gaeta will be plotting the jumps. If you’ve got suggestions and you want to discuss them with him, go right ahead.”
“Whatever you deem appropriate, sir,” Hover says with a genial smile, and Lee sees Hotdog shaking his head in awe. This has got to be nipped in the bud.
“This briefing is over. Dismissed.”
As the pilots walk out, Lee makes a beeline for Hover, who’s obviously been expecting him because he unfolds slowly from his seat, taking advantage of their height difference, which annoys Lee further. The guy is second only to Starbuck in his willingness to challenge authority, something Lee has become well acquainted with in the past weeks.
“Sir?” He still has that infuriating smirk playing on his lips, and Lee’s fist itches.
“I know it’s not jump calc, but I need someone to organize maintenance shifts, and you seem willing to help out,” he says, pasting as large a smile as he can muster on his face. He knows Hover isn’t fooled, but he has to play the game.
“Sir, yes sir.”
“So if you swing by the office after lunch, I’ll hand you over some paperwork. Thank you for your support, Lieutenant.”
“Sure thing, sir,” Hover says - but there’s something a little forced about his grin, and Lee knows he’s scored a hit. Later, when he offloads a month’s worth of maintenance planning, he congratulates himself on his strategy.
“I’m sure it won’t take you more than a couple of hours to deal with it, Lieutenant,” he says lightly as Hover walks off with a bulging file. He’s lying through his teeth, because if Hover can get it done in a few days, around CAPs, he’s a better planner than Lee gives him credit for.
Revenge is sweet.
Lee flies a routine CAP in the afternoon, relishing the hours spent on his own, without anyone snickering in his direction, and without having to compute where Kara might be at any given time. He’s rostered Hotdog with him, because he knows that the kid won’t try anything while flying with the CAG.
Now and then Lee barks some complex maneuver over the ship to ship channel, under the pretence of taking Hotdog through his paces, and critiques his technique extensively. If Hotdog’s nervous replies are any indication, there shouldn’t be any challenge to Lee’s authority from his corner after CAP. That nugget is cowed.
In between bouts of torturing Hotdog, Lee also finds himself dwelling - again - on the damn tape, and on the extent of his public humiliation. He is, in fact, amazed that he didn’t get more of a ribbing from his fellow cadets in the days following the event, because all he could see there was how utterly desperate he was to kiss her, touch her, at any cost.
He runs into Kat in the showers and she blushes when she sees him exiting a stall with a towel around his waist. He ignores her, but after he catches her sneaking looks at him in the mirror, he beckons her.
“No staring in the showers, nugget,” he says curtly. “It’s basic battlestar etiquette.”
Someone snorts in one of the cubicles and Kat turns beet red and all but runs out of the head, muttering apologies, which makes Lee feel better, if a little shabby.
His strategy must be working, though, because everyone gives him a wide berth at the mess, and he actually manages to get some work done while eating dinner.
There’s a triad game in progress when he hits the rec room, and while he knows neither Hover nor Kara will be there - she’s on the nightshift today, not entirely by design, but it works for him; and Hover probably won’t have any free time for the next week - he still braces himself for unwelcome comments. As it happens, everyone pretty much ignores him, even Racetrack whose head remains resolutely bowed over her cards. It probably won’t last, but for now, it’s good enough.
He sleeps much better that night - probably because Kara’s not in the room to distract him; not to mention he’s absolutely exhausted - and manages to wake up after most of the other pilots. He’s stretched out on his rack, enjoying a rare moment of solitude when the hatch crashes open and Kara hobbles in, swearing.
“Good morning to you too,” he says, still too relaxed by his orgy of sleep to feel tense.
“The only good thing about this morning is that it’s the end of my watch,” Kara bites off. “And by the way? Thanks for putting me on nights. Subtle.”
“Believe me, it was by accident more than anything else.”
“Bullshit,” she mutters, but low enough that he can pretend he hasn’t heard her.
He lays his head back and closes his eyes as she starts unbuttoning her uniform jacket. No need to ramp up the sexual tension. She’s obviously come to the same conclusion, because she tries - awkwardly - to strike up a conversation as she undresses, slowly.
“So, I hear you’ve turned into Captain Hardass?”
He grins.
“Who told you?”
“Scuttlebutt says the nuggets are running scared, and that Apollo is - and I’m quoting Cally - on the warpath.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Lee say, eyes still closed. “Any mention of why?”
“Not in my hearing. Oh, frak!”
He hears something slamming into a locker, swiftly followed by a groan of pain, which has him out of his rack and by her side in an instant.
“Hey, are you all right? You don’t look so good.”
“It’s nothing,” Kara huffs, but she’s very pale and there’s sweat beading on her upper lip.
“Painkillers?”
She shakes her head.
“No, I’ll be okay. But…” she tails off, and if Lee didn’t know her better, he’d swear she was embarrassed.
“What?”
“Well, okay. Normally Sharon helps me, but since you’ve been altering the rosters, I guess she’s flying now.”
“Helps you?”
She’s leaning against the door of her locker, grimacing, and gestures vaguely towards her knee.
Oh.
“I can help,” Lee says, and she snorts. “Or I can get someone else…”
“I just want to get into bed, Lee,” she sighs. “Now. Can you just help me with my shoes and…”
“Sure.”
He kneels down at her feet and unties her shoes quickly, removing one, then the other, peeling off her socks while trying to keep the actual touching of her bare skin to a minimum. She’s unbuttoned her shorts and hooked two fingers in the waistband, and he tugs on them and slides them down her legs, deliberately not looking at her ass, or the top of her thighs, despite a compelling desire to do so. The knee brace takes a little maneuvering, and the sight of her bandaged, swollen leg reminds him - yet again - how close he was to losing her, how thankful he is to have her back after those desperate hours searching, that awful moment when they gave up the search, gave up on her.
Impulsively, he grabs her ankles and squeezes.
“It’s good to have you back, Starbuck, even if you are a walking casualty,” he says, grinning, and he looks up at her.
There are two bright spots on her cheeks and she’s shaking slightly, but he can’t tell if it’s pain or something else. The way she avoids his eyes makes him think it’s more about their close quarters than anything else, though, so of course he starts feeling terribly awkward.
“Apollo, you do know how to compliment a lady,” she says with an uneasy chuckle.
“There’s a lady here?” he says, automatically, eyebrows rising, and she laughs more sincerely.
“If I wasn’t a cripple, I’d make you pay for that,” she says with a shove.
“If you weren’t a cripple, I wouldn’t be kneeling at your feet in the first place.”
*****************************
Kara wonders briefly at the gods and their twisted sense of humor; she has Lee Adama on his knees before her, undressing her, and all she can think of is how to get herself out of this situation as quickly as possible. She can't quite believe she can be both embarrassed and turned on at the same time, but she is, and horribly so. To make matters worse, Lee seems to be dealing with it all just fine - taking her shoes and socks off methodically, tucking them in her locker in the kind of anal-retentive neatness that she always teases him for.
He then turns his attention to her shorts, and Kara curls one hand around the top of the chair and holds on, because even the slight touches along her legs are enough to bring her body shockingly awake.
Not fair, she thinks, searching for something innocuous to say, but he beats her to it, his hands gripping her ankles.
"It's good to have you back, Starbuck, even if you are a walking casualty."
He sounds warm, sincere, like the Lee she's missed for the last two days, ever since the tape turned them abruptly into something just more than friends. Against her better judgment, she looks down at him - his eyes are so blue and his hair is sleep-mussed and tousled, and for a moment he looks impossibly young. She wants to run her fingers through his hair. She wants him to keep smiling at her like that - like she's the most important thing in his world. She wants to sink down onto the floor with him and press her mouth to his.
After a moment, she looks away and reaches for something to say. "Apollo, you do know how to compliment a lady."
"There's a lady here?" he retorts, and it surprises a laugh out of her.
"If I wasn't a cripple, I'd make you pay for that," she tells him, slugging his shoulder with the hand she doesn't need for balance.
He grins. "If you weren't a cripple, I wouldn't be kneeling at your feet in the first place."
"Such a shame, too," she retorts without thinking. It's what Starbuck would have said two days ago, with an accompanying smirk, and she would have enjoyed Lee's blush and endearing stammer, but now - now his hands are still on her ankles, thumbs dragging against her skin, and her mind is supplying her with a whole list of things he could be doing, and Lee's flushing, all the way up to his cheekbones.
He coughs, and reaches into her locker for a fresh pair of shorts. She busies herself pulling a fresh set of tanks over her head - another bra can wait until after she's slept, she's not going to stand in front of him any more naked than she already is - and then Lee's carefully sliding her shorts up her legs, over the brace. It's easy to tell he's trying not to touch her but it's impossible to dress someone without skin meeting skin occasionally. She bites her lip as his fingers touch her thighs, skim across the curve of her ass, over her hipbones. She lasts right up until his thumbs slide briefly across her stomach, and then her whole lower body is liquid heat and she wants him.
"I've got it from here," she says abruptly, and he drops his hands like she's burned him. Which - she thinks fleetingly - is pretty ironic, given it feels like he burned her.
"Okay," Lee says after a moment, stepping back, and now there is distance in between them again - not just physical, either - and she wishes she'd just kept her mouth shut.
"Thanks for helping," she tries, trying to inject some warmth into her voice. "Really."
"You're saying thank you?" he says, feigning shock. "What happened to Starbuck?"
She rolls her eyes. "You need some new material, Apollo," she tells him, and shuffles past him, sitting down on her rack, pulling her bad leg up onto the mattress. She can feel him still looking at her.
"Kara - " he starts, and she's just too tired to deal with anything, especially the mess between them.
"Can it wait?"
He hesitates. "Yeah," he says, finally, sounding reluctant.
"Okay," she says, and beats her pillow into shape before finally putting her head down, breathing out in one long exhalation, feeling her back melt into the mattress.
Lee's still hovering.
"What?" she says finally, knowing she sounds terse, and he opens his mouth to say something and then shuts it again.
"Nothing. Sleep well."
"Yeah. Anytime you want to take me off nights, feel free," she says and drags her curtain shut as he laughs.
She can still feel his hands on her ankles.
She's so frakked.
*
On to part 2.
Not so long ago, a fantastic writer by the name of elzed contacted me with the idea of sequel-ing the ... sequel? And lo, our powers combined across timezone inconveniences and conflicting timetables, and we wrote a fic which is probably eight times as long as the first two combined.
So here it is.
Stupid Thing Last Night: The Rewind.
Authors: stars_like_dust and elzed
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairings: Lee/Kara
Rating: NC-17 (no, really)
Spoilers: Season 1; up to early season 2 (Home)
Wordcount: This part: approx 8,300 (total 16,700)
Disclaimer: RDM said we could!
Betaed by the lovely overnighter.
You may need to reread the other two first, as this picks about mid-Videotape edition. :)
*
Stupid Thing Last Night
It takes Lee all of two seconds to go from wondering why the lights are off to recognizing Kara’s face on the screen. She looks so young, so beautiful, so utterly turned on - head thrown back against the wall, mouth half-open - that it makes him ache.
It’s another second before he recognizes himself, and then it hits him like a punch to the solar plexus. Oh gods. It’s the tape. He senses Kara going rigid next to him, so she’s obviously figured it out too. Who the hell is here? He scans the shapes in the shadows, one of them frantically trying to turn the screen off and - finally, mercifully - succeeding. Hover, it looks like. The others - Hotdog, Racetrack, Boomer and a girl with a bushy ponytail that can only be Kat - are all frozen.
Frak. Frakking frak.
Kara strides forward. “Okay. You've all had your fun. Out."
Her tone brooks no argument, and even Kat goes no further than a feeble “But…” before shutting up.
“Out,” Kara repeats. “Or the CAG will make it an order.”
If the CAG can find his voice, that is, because Lee is pretty sure that he can’t speak at this point. He takes a couple of deep, quiet breaths, tries to find his focus, but all he can think about is Kara’s face, her mouth, gods.
The pilots get up slowly, taking their time, and Kat - who really doesn’t know when to leave well alone - is looking from Kara to him with naked curiosity. When Hover ejects the tape and reaches for it, though, instinct takes over.
"You can leave the tape," he snaps. "I'm feeling generous. Now go."
Miraculously, they follow suit and troop out of the ready room obediently, even if Meg is choking on repressed laughter and Hover stumbles before he slams the hatch shut. The sound echoes in the silence.
Now it’s just Kara and him, alone in the semi-darkness. Neither of them says a word for maybe a minute, which Lee could swear is a half-hour, so slowly do the seconds tick in the stillness. He is desperate to put the tape back in the player, to watch more of her, of this elusive, dreamlike Kara - open and vulnerable and wanting - captured in the scene that has haunted him for the past four years.
It’s Kara who bends down and picks the tape up.
"Where did they get this thing?" she says, turning it between her fingers slowly. "It's Helo's writing. Oh lords, it must have been in his locker.”
Lee clears his throat.
"He held onto it all this time?"
"Of course," she says, putting her cane down carefully and easing into one of the chairs. "That thing is worth its weight in gold. Wouldn't you have kept it?"
He nods, then shakes his head, and she laughs.
“You know,” she says, “I wasn’t even sure this tape ever existed. I thought it was some kind of elaborate hoax he dreamed up to frak with us.”
“Me too.”
“And I just can’t believe that it survived the end of the world. That it survived him.” She says, her voice faltering at the end.
“Yeah? I can’t believe a bunch of pilots found it.”
She lets out another short bark of laughter. “Including a couple of my nuggets. That really sucks.”
"So," he asks slowly, “do you want to watch it?"
"Don't you?" she counters, and she knows he does, but he still feels he has to be the voice of reason.
"I think that would be a bad idea."
"Come on, Lee. We should at least watch the frakking thing once," she says, kicking her good foot up. Her eyes meet his as she delivers her killer argument. "Do you want those five knowing more about this than we do? I mean, Meg may not be so bad, but Sharon? And Hover?"
Touché.
"All right,” he says with a sigh. “Let's see the thing."
He works in some kind of smile as he says it, and he can’t quite believe he’s sounding so casual. Four years he’s waited to find out exactly what happened that night, beyond the intense half-remembered fragments that have starred in too many of his sexual fantasies to mention.
Four frakking years, and it’s about to happen.
She catches his eye briefly, as if to confirm that he meant it, and for a second, she looks terrified.
“You sure?”
He plucks the tape from her hands and pops it into the reader. There’s a faint whirring, and then the image that has been seared into his brain reappears on the screen, still paused, and Kara reaches for the remote and presses rewind.
“Might as well watch the whole show, right?”
“I just want it said," he mutters as the tape spins noisily in the deck, "that I think this is a really bad idea."
Kara shrugs.
“All I can say is we must’ve been crazy drunk.”
He nods his agreement. Sure. Except that he would have done it stone cold sober, and Kara wouldn’t - couldn’t - remember anything at all about the single sexiest memory of his life. It crucified him that the only time she’d let her guard down enough to let him in, it had been the booze and not her, not really. That much was clear from the moment he’d finally answered the phone the morning after - on the twelfth ring - knowing he’d have to face her again, eventually.
“So, who do you think actually taped this?” he asks, as the recording whines to is starting position and starts to unspool.
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” she says, offhand. “Oh, look, it’s the Pen.”
It’s their senior year haunt, packed with Academy pilots out on a tear. The air is thick with smoke, there’s bass thumping in the background and the camera mic catches snippets of drunken conversations and raucous laughter. Lee realizes with a start that he recognizes most faces, even if he can’t put a name to all of them.
“Hey,” he says, “isn’t that Dora, who used to date Helo? And that guy, in the corner, what was his name, the math whizz…?”
“Clayton,” Kara says. “And Spinner, behind him, remember him?”
“How could I forget Spinner? I thought he was going to shoot me when I made valedictorian ahead of him. I wonder what happ- ” He stops abruptly.
Next to him, Kara winces. “I was thinking the same thing, just now. And then it hit me. It’s crazy how easy it is…” her voice trails off.
There were maybe two hundred people in the bar that night, give or take, maybe more, most of them Academy pilots they knew, at least by sight. Every single damn one of them is dead now, except for Kara and himself, and their only surviving record is a crappy tape of them getting drunk on a Saturday night. It’s enough to make Lee wish for a stiff drink or three here and now, but he can’t tear himself away from the tape, because a familiar figure is now striding towards the camera - cocky and confident and so damn young - some rook trailing her with puppy dog eyes.
"Oh my gods, I'd completely forgotten Wells. Poor thing."
"He looks like he's fifteen." He sends her a brief sideways smirk. "I didn't know you liked them so young."
She snorts. "Please, Apollo. I didn't want to frak him, just… make him my slave."
"Ah yes," Lee stretches and puts his hands behind his head. "uou were always kind of a bitch, Kara."
"You have to start early in order to reach maximum potential. You told me that before our first exams."
"Which you failed."
"Just. And I whipped your ass in sims."
"Just."
"That's where it counts."
He rolls his eyes. "Focus, Kara."
She sticks her tongue out at him.
“Tex,” she says when a disembodied voice issues from behind the camera. “Frakking Tex, and he was filming it for Mike, remember?”
He does.
Onscreen, Kara’s cutting in on him and some blonde with too much eyeliner and bright red lipstick, and Lee cringes.
“Hey, look, Lee - you’re being the damsel in distress, as usual.”
“Not my fault they couldn’t keep their hands off me,” he says, but all he can see on screen is how he and Kara are reacting to each other, and how it must have looked to outside observers. Gods, he never realized they behaved so much like a couple. No wonder other people got so pissed.
"So who did I rescue you from this time? Mary. No, Mandy. Dorm 4 for easy access."
"Her name was Amanda."
Kara shrugs. "You might have called her Amanda, but the rest of us called her Mandy the… "
"You know," Lee says abruptly, his tone brooking no argument, "I think some things are better left forgotten."
She laughs, and bumps his arm with hers. "Still traumatized?"
"Shut up, Kara."
"You know, you should let your hair grow back like that. I liked it."
"Will you be quiet, please?"
They watch for a moment in companionable silence, until an unimpressed female voice on the tape breaks in over the background music, and Kara laughs.
"Elise! Oh, I'd forgotten all about her."
"Wasn't she that brunette…"
"That had a totally desperate crush on you? Yeah. That'd be her."
"She did not. You're imagining things."
"She totally did. Gods, Apollo, what she would have done to get you in bed - I remember once Sharon telling me that… "
"Okay, Kara, I get the idea. You don't need to go any further."
"Apollo, Apollo. Was there a girl that didn't want you?"
He gives her a quick look and she shuts up. This is getting a little close for comfort.
The next hour is one long nostalgia fest, starring most of the people in their graduating class, hotshot jocks, friends, the occasional frakbuddy - until suddenly the camera zooms onto a lanky guy walking in and they both catch their breath.
“Helo, you son of a bitch,” Kara whispers as their friend swaggers across the screen towards Tex and the camera. “Hey look, it’s us again.”
"Oh my gods. Look how drunk we were,” Lee says, leaning forward. "Wow. What did we drink to end up like that? In what, an hour?"
"Firebrand whisky?"
"Oh. Yeah. Hey. Yeah. I think I vaguely remember that."
Onscreen, they’re clutching onto each other to keep their balance, and it looks like Lee’s resting heavily on Kara’s shoulder.
Here in the room next to him, she cackles. "Look at you, you lightweight."
“You know, I’m beginning to wonder this was all just spur of the moment,” Lee says suddenly. There’s something a little too smooth about Helo’s patter, and Tex is playing along, focusing on the two of them to the exclusion of everyone else.
“Nah,” Kara says, but she doesn’t sound convinced as she watches the action unfold, each taunt leading inevitably to the next, their younger selves moving closer and closer into each other’s space.
“Frakking bastards set us up,” Lee insists, and it’s so obvious onscreen that Helo’s egging them on that Lee can’t believe they went for it. “Look at him - he knows exactly which buttons to push. Frak, I bet he made sure we were good and drunk, too.”
“Oh, like that was much of a challenge?” Kara scoffs, but her eyes are narrowed in suspicion.
The on-screen tension is starting to get to Lee, and although he’s already seen what’s going to happen, he’s dry-mouthed with anticipation.
“Frak me, Apollo! Two hundred and sixty-three cubits?”
Lee can feel his jaw drop, the expression mimicking that of his younger self on camera.
“They can’t be serious.”
“Gods, Lee, you must have been completely gone - you didn’t even correct Helo’s shoddy math.”
Lee, then and now, doesn’t give a frak about Helo’s math, because all his focus is on Kara’s mouth, and if the real Kara in the real here and now can’t tell how desperate he was to kiss her back then, then she’s blind.
When their lips meet on the screen in front of them, Lee has to dig his nails into his palms to stop himself from whimpering. Gratifyingly, he hears Kara breathe out very slowly, and he figures maybe she’s not quite as unaffected by all this as she’s pretending to be.
Onscreen, the Apollo and Starbuck show is heating up something fierce - he’s got her pinned against the wall, one of her legs hooked around his waist - and Lee cannot believe how into it they both were. This wasn’t just his imagination then; in front of his very eyes, Kara is returning his kiss passionately, and it’s so intense he feels his older, purportedly wiser self harden.
“Apollo, did you spike my drink?” Kara asks, another reminder of the here and now, trying to sound unconcerned and failing. He sneaks a look over at her. Her chest is rising and falling faster than it ought to and even in the dim light he can see two spots of color on her cheeks.
He snorts, because he doesn’t trust his voice.
On screen, they’re dry humping against the wall, and it’s as close to porn as anything he’s ever seen, except it’s better - because it’s Kara - and it’s worse - because there are dozens of onlookers, not to mention the handful of Galactica pilots who watched the tape.
Lee decides this is simultaneously the most embarrassing and arousing experience of his life, and for some twisted reason, he’s forcing himself to live through it twice.
“Frak, Lee, please tell me someone stopped us,” Kara hisses, and she reaches out for him blindly, her nails digging into the sleeve of his uniform. He steels himself not to react to her touch.
They’ve reached the point in the tape now at which they first walked in on the impromptu viewing party - Apollo’s hand halfway up Starbuck’s tank, his mouth on her neck, her legs around his waist, her head flung back against the wall.
Half of Lee’s attention is now focused on keeping his erection in check; but the other wilder half of his brain is fighting his natural impulse, which is to grab Kara and re-enact the scene in front of them in real time.
On the video, she lets out a strangled moan and bucks her hips into his, and Lee watches himself thrust back in response, baring his teeth against the skin of her shoulder.
Kara’s fingers tighten around his forearm.
It’s as if they’re suspended in time and space, glued to the screen but unable to move or speak, unwilling to break the spell keeping them here, and desire hangs thick in the air.
With an immense effort of will he tears his eyes away from their conjoined forms and focuses instead on the crowd in the bar. Even on the fuzzy screen, he can see that they’re all mesmerized - pupils wide in flushed faces - and gods, he can’t believe they’d put on a floor show to rival the strippers at the Vixen Club over the road. By rights he should be cowed by shame, but there’s something about the look on the younger Kara’s face that fills him with pride instead.
Still, he’s thankful when the burly shape of Alvin, the Pen’s bouncer, marches across the frame and glances menacingly at Tex before ordering them to cut the crap, or else.
The last thing Lee sees before the video on screen abruptly turns off - following the orders of a ghost - is the look of shock and disbelief on both their faces when Alvin breaks them up. That, and how swollen Kara’s lips were with his kisses.
The screen dissolves in a blur of dots and white noise, and Kara doesn’t let go of his arm. He risks a look at her and she’s looking back, lips parted, cheeks flaming, eyes dark and hungry. It’s only a moment, and when he blinks she’s turned away from him, her hand dropping from his arm.
He’s trying to figure out what to do when the intercom crackles to life with Lieutenant Gaeta’s voice.
“Attention, pass the word to the CAG. Captain Adama please report to CIC. Repeat, Captain Adama report to CIC.”
“Frak,” he swears under his breath, but orders are given to be followed, so he does. He turns back as he gets to the hatch and Kara hasn’t moved, still staring at the fuzzy screen, resolutely ignoring him. There’s nothing he could say that wouldn’t make the moment ever more awkward than it is already, so he steps through the hatch and walks down the corridor, his mind a whirl of emotions and images.
It occurs to him as he nears CIC he’d better get some good blackmail material on Hover, Racetrack and the others, or he might have to shoot them.
********************************
The hatch clangs shut behind him, and Kara sinks down in her seat and exhales.
Frak.
Her body feels hot, and she knows her pulse is racing. She hasn’t been this turned on since she can remember. Her lips feel swollen, her skin burning in all the places he touched her as if it had been real even now, and Kara drops her head into her hands and tries to think.
She’d forgotten - to all intents and purposes - that the tape even existed. Sure, it had made life at the Academy a little awkward for a week or so, but she was Starbuck and she’d made sure she’d gone out and done something even crazier the next weekend. When it was clear there were going to be no more repeat performances with Apollo, the kiss had passed into Academy folklore - talked about and exaggerated until it became almost unreal.
Now, however, she sees exactly what all the fuss had been about, and there is no memory whatsoever of the whole thing in her mind, which seems frakking unbelievable.
There’s a sudden loud click as onscreen an image emerges, different from the club before. It takes her a moment to work out what’s happening before she recognizes the street. It’s the main thoroughfare back to the Academy, and she sees Dozer, Flipper and another cadet whose name she can’t quite remember in the shadows as well.
There’s laughter, and just enough light from the streetlamps to illuminate the faces of her old classmates, and she leans forward in her seat as Helo crosses the screen.
“Holy frak,” Tex says from behind the camera. Helo is practically bent over laughing, even as he’s walking. “Did you see that? Gods, I thought they were going to frak right there.”
“I can’t believe it,” Flipper says, from where she‘s walking hand in hand with Dozer. “I just can’t believe it.”
“I can.”
Helo’s walking backwards so he can face Tex.
“They’ve wanted to do that since first year,” he continues.
“Oh, I can believe that,” Flipper answers. “I just can’t believe they finally did something about it.”
Someone laughs offscreen. “Did you see Apollo’s face?”
“Did you see Starbuck’s?”
“They wanted each other so bad.”
“Well, that’s been obvious all semester.”
“All year!”
“Since they met!”
“Except to them,” Helo puts in dryly.
“Except to Starbuck. Apollo, on the other hand…”
“Yeah, but he was never going to do anything about it.”
“You saw the way he looked at her? He only gets like that when he’s wasted.”
“Like she was something to eat.”
“Okay, way too much mental imagery,” Flipper says. “What I saw in the bar was enough, okay, boys? Enough. I’m not going to sleep as it is.”
Kara sinks a little into her seat as the laughter of ghosts echoes through the room. She can feel her face burning with embarrassment and her heart hammering and she’s so glad Lee left already because this is almost too much. Onscreen, Dozer is still looking stunned.
“Wow.”
“Starbuck and Apollo.”
“Finally.”
“I know, right?”
“You guys are living gods.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Tex says from behind the camera, as Helo bows with a flourish.
“Are you guys done yet?” A familiar voice cuts over the mix, and Tex turns to face Elise, and Kara almost laughs at the look on the girl’s face. “I mean, I know this has all been very funny, and whatever, but - “
“Aw, Elise, don’t worry,” Helo says, throwing an arm around her shoulders. “They’re just meant to be together.”
“Epic love and all that,” Flipper adds.
“More like epic sexual tension,” Tex drawls from behind the camera, and Helo snorts with laughter.
“Next time, we need to pay off Alvin,” he says, and Elise slaps his arm. “There were at least another few minutes of priceless footage there.”
“Yeah, the one thing we didn’t think about in our foolproof plan.”
Helo grins. “Mike,” he says seriously, looking into the camera, “You owe us big time.”
“As does the world,” Tex says extravagantly from behind the camera.
“Stay tuned for next week’s episode on Academy Pilots: The Apollo and Starbuck show,” Helo intones , and she hears all the pilots laugh for a second before the screen goes black for three seconds before the options menu reappears.
Kara hesitates a moment, then hits rewind, and skips back through the kissing - gods, the kissing - to the moment just before. After the dark of the street scene, the sound and lights of even the dimly-lit bar are blinding. Kara blinks, and when she focuses again, all she can see is Lee.
“You sound like you’re scared,” he’s saying, but there’s something in the way that he’s looking at her on the tape that makes Kara shifts in her seat as much as her knee will let her. “One hundred and thirty cubits.” His gaze is on Kara’s mouth now - focused on it with a laser precision.
“Fine. But I get the cubit left over,” says her counterpart onscreen.
“Shut up, Kara,” Lee answers her, and Kara hits pause on the tape. The frame freezes, and Kara looks at the expression on her own face as Lee leaned into her, the want and anticipation so naked on her face, her fingers tight against the fabric of his tanks. It’s painfully clear how much she wanted him, and Kara fumbles at the remote and hits eject before she can see anymore.
The tape pops out of the player, and the screen goes blue.
She scrubs a hand through her hair, and wishes she could deny everything but the evidence of how much she wanted Lee Adama was there all over her face, just as it is now in how she’s flushed, her skin prickling all over and aching for something she actually had four years ago, and can’t remember at all.
Frak.
**************************
The few minutes it takes him to walk through the ship are nowhere near enough for Lee to recover his composure, but he does manage to will his dick back into some sort of decent state before he has to face his father.
His mind, on the other hand, is a complete whirl. Focus, Lee, he thinks savagely as he steps into CIC, where his father and the XO are leaning over star charts spread on the display table.
“Captain Adama reporting to CIC, sir” he says, snapping a salute, hoping he doesn’t look too flushed or disheveled.
His father beckons him over and starts talking about the need for organizing regular surveys to find supplies before they run out rather than after, and could he work this into his CAP rotations? Lee nods dumbly, because he’s sure he will be able to manage that. Eventually. When his head isn’t frakked with visions of his younger self, desperate and hungry; of Kara’s parted lips; of his hands on her skin; of the way she mouthed his name...
If that ever happens.
“I want a draft of the new rosters on my desk by tomorrow, Apollo,” Tigh growls. “This is something we should’ve organized a while ago.”
“It’ll be there, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go and start on it, if that’s all you wanted to tell me. Commander?”
“Dismissed,” his father says. “Goodnight, Lee.”
Reworking the rosters is a nightmare, but preferable to trying to go to sleep, Lee decides as he slaves in his office over grids with too many slots and not enough pilots to fill them. It’s also the perfect opportunity to make sure that people are kept apart - like Kara and himself, especially since she isn’t flying CAPs at the moment. It limits his options, but he manages to work Hover and Racetrack, and Sharon in quite often, and to give the nuggets a punishing training schedule that will minimize their chances of spreading gossip.
Of course, it’s probably too late.
Eventually, he’s done as much as he can and the grid looks useable. It’s just as well since he’s so tired he can barely read it anymore, and he can’t postpone going to bed any longer.
The bunkroom is quiet. By the sound of it most of the pilots are asleep, or near enough. Kara’s curtain is drawn across, thank the gods, and there’s no light peeking out from either Hover’s or Racetrack’s bunka. Lee strips quietly and efficiently before climbing into his rack, and it feels so good to lie down that - for a short while - he fools himself into thinking that he’s immediately going to fall asleep.
No such luck, of course, because while his body is dog-tired, his brain is still revisiting the highlights of that frakking tape, which in turn stimulates his body back into a state of arousal that he can’t seem to shake off.
If he wasn’t so exhausted, he’d take himself to the showers for a quick resolution of this state of affairs, but that’s not likely to happen. Especially when he hears a sigh coming from the other side of his curtain, a sigh that he’s willing to bet is Kara’s. All he needs is for her to catch him on his way to the head with an obvious hard-on and… he shudders to think.
If it is indeed Kara, she’s not getting any more sleep than he is. Lee can hear restless shuffling in the rack across from his, which leads him naturally to imagining Kara in bed in her underwear, which does nothing for his problem. Maybe he’s going to have to deal with it here and now - not, in itself, anything unusual, but with enormous embarrassment potential if she hears him.
Then again, Lee’s lived long enough in shared bunkrooms to learn how to bring himself off discreetly.
Eyes closed, he takes himself in hand, and he doesn’t need to summon any memories because they’re already imprinted on his brain. He’s back in the Pen - dry-humping her against the wall, his erection pressing into her - and she’s moaning softly in his ear, arching against the wall to increase the pressure, her legs wrapped around his waist. He’s so hard he’s leaking - in record time, but he’s been trying to keep it down for too long, now - and strokes himself as slowly as he can, to avoid detection.
Silence is paramount - and the most difficult part of it all is trying to control his breathing, but that’s where extreme fitness has its advantages. All the time, he’s straining to hear any noises coming from her side, anything that indicates that she’s awake, and could be listening. Which is why he catches her gasp - quiet but definitely real - and the sharp intake of breath that follows.
Frak.
She can’t be.
He’s suddenly exponentially harder than he was a second ago, because superimposed on his memory of Kara against the wall, there now is an even more arousing fantasy of Kara lying in her rack, a couple of meters away, hand down her pants, caressing herself to ecstasy. He can see her so clearly in his mind’s eye, tanks and bra discarded, one hand touching her breast, the other busy between her legs - back arched, mouth half-open - Gods.
That tips him over the edge and he comes onto his stomach in a pure spasm of unadulterated pleasure, managing with superhuman effort not to groan as he does. His heartbeat is suddenly so loud to his ears he worries Kara can hear it, even though he knows it’s not possible. Grabbing a towel at the foot of his bunk, he wipes himself off before collapsing back onto his pillow, the exhaustion catching up with him. Kara is quiet on her side of the room, but he can’t erase the thought that he caught her pleasuring herself.
Even if it’s not true, it’s a compelling enough thought to make him fall asleep with a smile on his face, despite the clusterfrak that was his early evening. Tomorrow, he’ll deal with it. Tomorrow.
*****************************
The next morning she wakes up hot and slick and sweaty and she has no idea if her dream was fragments of memory coming back to her, or simply her imagination running in overdrive. Her knee is aching like a bitch, and - from the lack of sound outside her curtain - there's no one left in the bunkroom. Ordinarily, she’d revel in a few moments of privacy to pull herself together, but with her knee in the clumsy brace, Kara can barely lean over, let alone reach her feet, which means it's impossible to change by herself.
It's humiliating, just like dreaming about Lee; Starbuck's many things, but needy isn't one of them. Kara shoves the curtain back, determined to at least change her tanks by herself.
However, the bunkroom isn't empty after all, and the person left makes her want to draw her curtain again and sink back into the darkness.
"Good morning, Starbuck," Hover says, stretching out in his rack, and she wonders if he was waiting there just to check how many people were lying behind her curtain.
She acknowledges him with a nod, too frustrated with everything to be more than barely polite, and begins the process of maneuvering her leg out of her bunk. Hover doesn't take the hint.
"I'm surprised to see you here," he says conversationally. "Sleep well?"
"Oh, frak off," she snarls, and tries to stand. This proves to be a mistake, as the vague throbbing ache disappears under a stabbing wave of pain. She gasps and reaches out for the ladder, eyes watering at the shock of it, and the next second Hover's next to her, one hand on her waist and the other on her shoulder, supporting her until she finds an upright position that reduces the pain from agony to something just bearable.
"Okay?" he says after a moment, and she wants to stay mad at him but he's looking at her with genuine concern. Stupid frakking pilot loyalty.
"Painkillers," she gets out, and places both hands on the table, leaning her weight on it until Hover comes back with two of Doc Cottle's magic pills and her water bottle.
"I'll get Sharon for you," he says, and disappears while she's swallowing them down.
Sharon must not have been far away, because she appears at the hatch before Kara's even taken one step towards her locker.
"Kara?"
"I'm okay," Kara replies swiftly. "Just sore."
"What do you need?"
"I need to change," she says reluctantly, and Sharon crosses to her locker, coming back with her arms full of running shorts, new tanks, shoes and socks.
They slip into the routine they've formed over the last week - Kara changing her top half with Sharon covering all the things that would take impractical amounts of time if Kara was left to dress by herself. Kara pulls on a fresh sports bra, not bothering to fill the silence with idle talk because she knows what's coming - it's impossible to keep Sharon quiet on any sort of gossip, let alone something of this magnitude.
And Sharon doesn't disappoint. "So. You look tired," she says finally, as she tugs a clean pair of running shorts carefully up over the brace on Kara's knee.
"Sharon... "
"And I'm not surprised."
Kara groans, pulling her tanks over her head. "No - nothing…"
"Yeah, I know," Sharon cuts in cheerfully, reaching for Kara's shoes and socks.
"What do you mean, you know?"
"Please," Sharon says, as she carefully slides shoe onto Kara's foot without jolting her bad knee. "That would be the biggest gossip Galactica has ever seen and therefore all over the ship by now. And somebody would have a lot of socks. Well, in post-apocalyptic terms, anyway."
"Socks?"
Sharon's eyes sparkle, and Kara knows that look too well.
"Okay, I'm not asking."
"Good move." Sharon's smile widens. "So…. Lee Adama."
"Sharon, it was nothing. I don't even remember it. "
Sharon rolls her eyes, tying the final shoelaces in a neat bow. "If that was nothing, then I'm a Cylon."
"Nothing has happened!"
"Sure." Sharon gets up. "Yet. Well, aren't you going to say thank you?"
"Thank you," Kara says grudgingly, biting back numerous other choice retorts, because now is really not the time to be pushing boundaries.
"You're welcome. Can you get to the mess by yourself?"
"Yeah. I'll see you at the briefing."
"See you then." Sharon pauses at the hatch. "You will tell me, this time," she says, and it's not so much a request as an order.
***
The day degenerates from there. She stumbles through her part of a briefing, too aware of Kat's fiendish smile, Hover's smirk and the way Hotdog is carefully looking directly past her left ear. She's even more aware of Lee, which annoys her. She hasn't spent seven years learning how to ignore the buzz when he's near to have all that progress thrown away on a drunken misdemeanor that happened before Kat and Hotdog were out of high school. One she can't even remember.
She glances at Lee, who - predictably enough - is looking at her, and promptly loses her sentence halfway between 'CAP Rotation 5' and the pilots on it, and has to look down at her notes to collect herself and press on. She can tell, even without looking at Sharon, that her friend is wearing a grin the size of Io's udder and that only annoys her further.
She gets through the rest of the report without incident, mostly because she keeps her gaze on her notes, the board or the bottom of Stingray's boots, which he's kicked them up over the back of the chair in front of him.
When Lee gets up to finish the briefing - for the first time since the world ended - she pulls out a pen and takes notes, anything to give herself something to do that isn't looking at him or imagining. She tries to ignore the way Sharon's stifling giggles behind her for the rest of the briefing.
****************************
Ever since he walked into the ready room, Lee has been a bundle of nerves. So far, his morning has been relatively easy - he had breakfast before everybody, after waking up abruptly with a sinking feeling in his belly, and the realization that it wasn’t all a dream. The past couple of hours have been spent with Tigh and the Commander in CIC, working through the new rosters and discussing recon patrols with Gaeta.
Now he’s in a roomful of pilots - including Kara - and he doesn’t even know whether they all know about the godsdamned tape, or whether he’s just got a handful to worry about. A handful is bad enough, especially with that bunch. He’s already caught Hover smirking at him from three seats down, and he’s bracing himself for when Kara finishes her report and he has to face the crowd. He’s staring at her, so when she looks straight at him he sees her lose the thread of whatever she was talking about (which he should be listening to, but isn’t), and immediately makes a mental note not to look at her once he takes over at the podium.
It starts out easy enough, and the new survey runs that are being introduced involve a fair amount of clarification, which keeps his mind busy. He does, however, look at the assembled pilots a couple of times, and each time Hover is grinning, and Sharon is whispering something in Racetrack’s ear. He avoids searching out Kara, because he knows his limits, but he sees her scribbling something out of the corner of his eye and she never takes notes in briefings.
“Okay - that’s the basic outline. Any questions?”
And then the trouble begins. There are a couple of innocuous questions about duty rosters, and overstretching, which he dispatches swiftly.
Sharon raises a hand. “Sir, this doesn’t leave many Raptors free for emergencies. What if we need to engage in, say, a rescue mission?”
Her eyes are sparkling, and next to her, Racetrack is trying not to laugh, and failing.
Here we go.
“I’m sure we could have some Raptors on standby for that purpose, Boomer. You want to volunteer for being on-call between CAPs? I’ll put you down.” He flourishes his pen. “Next!”
Next is, of course, Hover.
“How are the search patterns going to be set out sir? Will it be random? Every hundredth rock, or every hundred and fiftieth, or every… two hundred and sixty third, say?”
Lee can feel the blush creeping up his face.
“I don’t know, Hover - Lieutenant Gaeta will be plotting the jumps. If you’ve got suggestions and you want to discuss them with him, go right ahead.”
“Whatever you deem appropriate, sir,” Hover says with a genial smile, and Lee sees Hotdog shaking his head in awe. This has got to be nipped in the bud.
“This briefing is over. Dismissed.”
As the pilots walk out, Lee makes a beeline for Hover, who’s obviously been expecting him because he unfolds slowly from his seat, taking advantage of their height difference, which annoys Lee further. The guy is second only to Starbuck in his willingness to challenge authority, something Lee has become well acquainted with in the past weeks.
“Sir?” He still has that infuriating smirk playing on his lips, and Lee’s fist itches.
“I know it’s not jump calc, but I need someone to organize maintenance shifts, and you seem willing to help out,” he says, pasting as large a smile as he can muster on his face. He knows Hover isn’t fooled, but he has to play the game.
“Sir, yes sir.”
“So if you swing by the office after lunch, I’ll hand you over some paperwork. Thank you for your support, Lieutenant.”
“Sure thing, sir,” Hover says - but there’s something a little forced about his grin, and Lee knows he’s scored a hit. Later, when he offloads a month’s worth of maintenance planning, he congratulates himself on his strategy.
“I’m sure it won’t take you more than a couple of hours to deal with it, Lieutenant,” he says lightly as Hover walks off with a bulging file. He’s lying through his teeth, because if Hover can get it done in a few days, around CAPs, he’s a better planner than Lee gives him credit for.
Revenge is sweet.
Lee flies a routine CAP in the afternoon, relishing the hours spent on his own, without anyone snickering in his direction, and without having to compute where Kara might be at any given time. He’s rostered Hotdog with him, because he knows that the kid won’t try anything while flying with the CAG.
Now and then Lee barks some complex maneuver over the ship to ship channel, under the pretence of taking Hotdog through his paces, and critiques his technique extensively. If Hotdog’s nervous replies are any indication, there shouldn’t be any challenge to Lee’s authority from his corner after CAP. That nugget is cowed.
In between bouts of torturing Hotdog, Lee also finds himself dwelling - again - on the damn tape, and on the extent of his public humiliation. He is, in fact, amazed that he didn’t get more of a ribbing from his fellow cadets in the days following the event, because all he could see there was how utterly desperate he was to kiss her, touch her, at any cost.
He runs into Kat in the showers and she blushes when she sees him exiting a stall with a towel around his waist. He ignores her, but after he catches her sneaking looks at him in the mirror, he beckons her.
“No staring in the showers, nugget,” he says curtly. “It’s basic battlestar etiquette.”
Someone snorts in one of the cubicles and Kat turns beet red and all but runs out of the head, muttering apologies, which makes Lee feel better, if a little shabby.
His strategy must be working, though, because everyone gives him a wide berth at the mess, and he actually manages to get some work done while eating dinner.
There’s a triad game in progress when he hits the rec room, and while he knows neither Hover nor Kara will be there - she’s on the nightshift today, not entirely by design, but it works for him; and Hover probably won’t have any free time for the next week - he still braces himself for unwelcome comments. As it happens, everyone pretty much ignores him, even Racetrack whose head remains resolutely bowed over her cards. It probably won’t last, but for now, it’s good enough.
He sleeps much better that night - probably because Kara’s not in the room to distract him; not to mention he’s absolutely exhausted - and manages to wake up after most of the other pilots. He’s stretched out on his rack, enjoying a rare moment of solitude when the hatch crashes open and Kara hobbles in, swearing.
“Good morning to you too,” he says, still too relaxed by his orgy of sleep to feel tense.
“The only good thing about this morning is that it’s the end of my watch,” Kara bites off. “And by the way? Thanks for putting me on nights. Subtle.”
“Believe me, it was by accident more than anything else.”
“Bullshit,” she mutters, but low enough that he can pretend he hasn’t heard her.
He lays his head back and closes his eyes as she starts unbuttoning her uniform jacket. No need to ramp up the sexual tension. She’s obviously come to the same conclusion, because she tries - awkwardly - to strike up a conversation as she undresses, slowly.
“So, I hear you’ve turned into Captain Hardass?”
He grins.
“Who told you?”
“Scuttlebutt says the nuggets are running scared, and that Apollo is - and I’m quoting Cally - on the warpath.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Lee say, eyes still closed. “Any mention of why?”
“Not in my hearing. Oh, frak!”
He hears something slamming into a locker, swiftly followed by a groan of pain, which has him out of his rack and by her side in an instant.
“Hey, are you all right? You don’t look so good.”
“It’s nothing,” Kara huffs, but she’s very pale and there’s sweat beading on her upper lip.
“Painkillers?”
She shakes her head.
“No, I’ll be okay. But…” she tails off, and if Lee didn’t know her better, he’d swear she was embarrassed.
“What?”
“Well, okay. Normally Sharon helps me, but since you’ve been altering the rosters, I guess she’s flying now.”
“Helps you?”
She’s leaning against the door of her locker, grimacing, and gestures vaguely towards her knee.
Oh.
“I can help,” Lee says, and she snorts. “Or I can get someone else…”
“I just want to get into bed, Lee,” she sighs. “Now. Can you just help me with my shoes and…”
“Sure.”
He kneels down at her feet and unties her shoes quickly, removing one, then the other, peeling off her socks while trying to keep the actual touching of her bare skin to a minimum. She’s unbuttoned her shorts and hooked two fingers in the waistband, and he tugs on them and slides them down her legs, deliberately not looking at her ass, or the top of her thighs, despite a compelling desire to do so. The knee brace takes a little maneuvering, and the sight of her bandaged, swollen leg reminds him - yet again - how close he was to losing her, how thankful he is to have her back after those desperate hours searching, that awful moment when they gave up the search, gave up on her.
Impulsively, he grabs her ankles and squeezes.
“It’s good to have you back, Starbuck, even if you are a walking casualty,” he says, grinning, and he looks up at her.
There are two bright spots on her cheeks and she’s shaking slightly, but he can’t tell if it’s pain or something else. The way she avoids his eyes makes him think it’s more about their close quarters than anything else, though, so of course he starts feeling terribly awkward.
“Apollo, you do know how to compliment a lady,” she says with an uneasy chuckle.
“There’s a lady here?” he says, automatically, eyebrows rising, and she laughs more sincerely.
“If I wasn’t a cripple, I’d make you pay for that,” she says with a shove.
“If you weren’t a cripple, I wouldn’t be kneeling at your feet in the first place.”
*****************************
Kara wonders briefly at the gods and their twisted sense of humor; she has Lee Adama on his knees before her, undressing her, and all she can think of is how to get herself out of this situation as quickly as possible. She can't quite believe she can be both embarrassed and turned on at the same time, but she is, and horribly so. To make matters worse, Lee seems to be dealing with it all just fine - taking her shoes and socks off methodically, tucking them in her locker in the kind of anal-retentive neatness that she always teases him for.
He then turns his attention to her shorts, and Kara curls one hand around the top of the chair and holds on, because even the slight touches along her legs are enough to bring her body shockingly awake.
Not fair, she thinks, searching for something innocuous to say, but he beats her to it, his hands gripping her ankles.
"It's good to have you back, Starbuck, even if you are a walking casualty."
He sounds warm, sincere, like the Lee she's missed for the last two days, ever since the tape turned them abruptly into something just more than friends. Against her better judgment, she looks down at him - his eyes are so blue and his hair is sleep-mussed and tousled, and for a moment he looks impossibly young. She wants to run her fingers through his hair. She wants him to keep smiling at her like that - like she's the most important thing in his world. She wants to sink down onto the floor with him and press her mouth to his.
After a moment, she looks away and reaches for something to say. "Apollo, you do know how to compliment a lady."
"There's a lady here?" he retorts, and it surprises a laugh out of her.
"If I wasn't a cripple, I'd make you pay for that," she tells him, slugging his shoulder with the hand she doesn't need for balance.
He grins. "If you weren't a cripple, I wouldn't be kneeling at your feet in the first place."
"Such a shame, too," she retorts without thinking. It's what Starbuck would have said two days ago, with an accompanying smirk, and she would have enjoyed Lee's blush and endearing stammer, but now - now his hands are still on her ankles, thumbs dragging against her skin, and her mind is supplying her with a whole list of things he could be doing, and Lee's flushing, all the way up to his cheekbones.
He coughs, and reaches into her locker for a fresh pair of shorts. She busies herself pulling a fresh set of tanks over her head - another bra can wait until after she's slept, she's not going to stand in front of him any more naked than she already is - and then Lee's carefully sliding her shorts up her legs, over the brace. It's easy to tell he's trying not to touch her but it's impossible to dress someone without skin meeting skin occasionally. She bites her lip as his fingers touch her thighs, skim across the curve of her ass, over her hipbones. She lasts right up until his thumbs slide briefly across her stomach, and then her whole lower body is liquid heat and she wants him.
"I've got it from here," she says abruptly, and he drops his hands like she's burned him. Which - she thinks fleetingly - is pretty ironic, given it feels like he burned her.
"Okay," Lee says after a moment, stepping back, and now there is distance in between them again - not just physical, either - and she wishes she'd just kept her mouth shut.
"Thanks for helping," she tries, trying to inject some warmth into her voice. "Really."
"You're saying thank you?" he says, feigning shock. "What happened to Starbuck?"
She rolls her eyes. "You need some new material, Apollo," she tells him, and shuffles past him, sitting down on her rack, pulling her bad leg up onto the mattress. She can feel him still looking at her.
"Kara - " he starts, and she's just too tired to deal with anything, especially the mess between them.
"Can it wait?"
He hesitates. "Yeah," he says, finally, sounding reluctant.
"Okay," she says, and beats her pillow into shape before finally putting her head down, breathing out in one long exhalation, feeling her back melt into the mattress.
Lee's still hovering.
"What?" she says finally, knowing she sounds terse, and he opens his mouth to say something and then shuts it again.
"Nothing. Sleep well."
"Yeah. Anytime you want to take me off nights, feel free," she says and drags her curtain shut as he laughs.
She can still feel his hands on her ankles.
She's so frakked.
*
On to part 2.