We used to wait. (Chapter 2/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 2/?)
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2 where Lee Adama isn't in command of Pegasus during New Caprica.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 3,163
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
It was a month later and the fleet remained no more than a pair of jumps out of range of New Caprica. In any other time, Kara’s mind would have been reeling with fear that they were soon to be found. Lack of news on the cylon front usually meant there was worse to come as their opponents bided their time, planning for the type of takedown they were unlikely to escape from. But like the rest of the people that made up the skeleton crew of the fleet these days, her concern was elsewhere. Protecting the twin battlestars was no longer first priority. Being able to get back to the people they left behind, that was where their focus laid.
Kara was on her daily trip over from Pegasus, having finished a double shift in CIC and handed it off to her second in command. Meetings with the Admiral had become a daily process, and she filed them into her usual routine behind brushing her teeth and forcing down some breakfast mush composite of stale rations and protein powder.
Kara stepped into the Admiral’s quarters without waiting for his usual clearance. She was here the same time every day, and if he wasn’t ready, she considered that his fault and not hers. As always, he was seated at his desk, folders open and scattered with the latest reports that said the same thing they said for the last month. Their daily raptor’s trip back to New Caprica had brought nothing. No contact from the surface. Their pilots tried to send their own scrambled messages down below, but they were jammed by signals coming from the basestars clustered up over the settlement. The only good news was that their sensors hadn’t read for any kind of radiological weaponry, which offered the hope that their people were still alive down there. Whether they were alive or dead by other means, nobody knew.
Her glass of water was waiting and she nodded her thanks. Kara had long since given up his offers of ambrosia on her visits. It was too tempting to her to not drink it, and she knew she needed as clear a head as possible. Drowning everything out, for once, wasn’t an option. She cleared her throat as she sat, settling her own pack of folders over her crossed knees. The top one was quickly opened and she scanned the words that she already read over a dozen times, both in her quarters and on the flight over.
“They’ve reduced their basestar numbers down to eight.” She knew and he knew, but she said it anyway. It was the glimmer of hope they had. They didn’t say it aloud, but both the Admiral and Commander knew they couldn’t take on that many ships. Even going in and knowing they’d lose both battlestars, they’d be lucky to take down half that number in the process. It would be a suicide mission and all the numbers they crunched every which way couldn’t even promise they would buy enough time to get a single civilian vessel off the ground.
Kara’s frustration was evident in her exhale. She had a card under the table, however, so she laid it out for the Admiral. “I think we need to bring Sharon into this.”
They had trusted the defected cylon before, particularly in the Caprica rescue mission, but she knew that the Old Man’s trust still hadn’t been fully placed in her. Sure, her security team had been diminished, especially with the lack of personnel on board. She even heard a rumor that the two of them were meeting on occasion to talk. What about, she had no idea. He had lightened up to her, no longer just seeing her as the version of her model that put a couple bullets in his chest and nearly cost him his life. She was Sharon, not Boomer. Despite all of this, Kara was certain he was not quite ready for the step she wanted him to take.
The Admiral’s face gave nothing away and his head shook without looking up at her. There was her answer.
It was the answer she was expecting, in fact, she wouldn’t have been quite sure what to do if he’d agreed to it. She hadn’t planned for that today. Kara needed him to turn her down once, hoping it would soften him up to her second request.
“How are you feeling about the practice runs the pilots have been doing?” She was already aware of his opinion on it as she had been hearing it over the wireless for weeks now. It was a set up and she hoped he didn’t realize it.
“It’s frakking pathetic, that’s what it is. I don’t care if they’ve only run routine CAPs for the last year, it’s like they’re complete rookies out there. If we had anyone else, I would’ve grounded them all a long time ago.”
She nodded along sympathetically, her forehead creased just barely as her lips pursed in quiet contemplation. “Hear me out on this.” Kara’s hand raised to preemptively stifle his response. “Kat’s a great pilot, I trained her myself, you know that. But leading this? Sir,” She paused before she leaned in, palm pressed to the surface of the desk as she demanded eye contact. “I need to be out there with them. I’ve taught damn near all of them at some point and it needs to be me who kicks their asses into gear. I’m not saying I’m giving up command, in fact I won’t let you take it from me. I’ll work double shifts in CIC, triple shifts even, I don’t give a frak how much I sleep. But I need to be up there with them a couple hours a day.” It was something that would never have been allowed in peacetime, and especially not in a wartime that didn’t revolve around the remaining 45,000 humans in existence. But nothing they’d done in the last two years was exactly up to Colonial Fleet standards.
Her green and hazel eyes pleaded with him from a few feet away and she waited for any signal from him. They were at a standoff. Even Starbuck knew better than to challenge the Old Man like this, but she held her ground.
He relented and he spoke in that rough tone of voice that let Kara know what thin of a line she walked on. “Once, every other day, provided you manage to keep getting five hours of sleep. If I even hear a rumor that you nodded off while in command, that’s it, Kara, you’re done. You’re of no use if you can’t do anything.”
Kara’s shoulders eased and she nodded once as she stood up. He hadn’t formally said the meeting was over, but going into this room, she knew there was little he’d have to say given the current situation. Her arm raised in a rigid and sharp salute and she was off, rushing out of the hatch as soon as the sharp ascent of his head released her from her current duty.
She should have headed down to the hangar deck to call for a Raptor flight back and she planned to, in due time. The arrangements were already made and she wasn’t expected back any time soon. Kara had made Helo aware of the situation, and though she knew he respected the Admiral, part of her knew his loyalties were with not only herself but the woman he loved that still remained locked away as prisoner. She stepped in to the room that housed Sharon’s quarters, the informal brig they’d created to keep her there a long time ago. She silently mused that it felt like another lifetime entirely.
A nod was given to Mathias, the single marine guard standing watch this shift and Mathias returned it with something of a reserved smile. She unlocked the door to the cell, letting Kara in before locking her inside. It was only another moment before she stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her, this time to stand guard outside and offer the cylon and Commander a bit of privacy.
Sharon’s eyebrows raised in a familiar look of confusion and curiosity as she stood from the small cot she was lying upon. If it were anyone else locked into the cell with her without even her usual marine guard present, Sharon would have been afraid. After the incident with the Pegasus crew, part of her still clenched inside every time someone stepped inside that door. But this was Starbuck, and even without the new memories that she formed of her and with her since Caprica, she still recalled Boomer’s own memories and the friendship she once shared with Starbuck.
Kara eyed her for a moment, hands set on her hips even with the thick stack of folders in her grip. Then all of a sudden, she stepped forward, kneeling on the ground as she started to lay the papers out. Sharon instinctively met her on the ground, mirroring her posture before she glanced across to the woman that she still considered her friend and fellow pilot.
Across from her, Kara quirked a smile and spoke. “What we do here, Sharon, it doesn’t leave the room. Not to the Admiral, not to Helo, not in prayers to your one or many Gods.”
Sharon, whose face normally looked sullen since the loss of her daughter, further imitated Kara with her own spreading smile. She had her visits from Helo on and off, less frequent since his transfer to Pegasus, but it hadn’t helped to solve the loneliness she felt since she abandoned her own people. There was no longer a part of her that could even attempt to understand the horrible things her brothers and sisters had done, but for her rather short life, they were the only family she knew. And now, here on Galactica, with the people she remembered and loved, she remained isolated by their fear. For once in all those months since she found the fleet with Kara and Karl, Sharon’s heart thumped with a true sense of acceptance and above all, trust. To Kara, Sharon knew that she wasn’t just a cylon anymore.
Kara ran her her tongue over her teeth while sifting through the files of reconnaissance before she spoke again. “What do you know about cylon jamming frequencies?”
-
It was night cycle and Kara was already down to her skivvies and tank when she heard the familiar open and shut of the outermost hatch in her quarters. It was Sam, that much she knew, as she had very few friends on this ship - at least ones that would visit her quarters at this time of night. Since the fleet pulled out of New Caprica, things between she and Anders had been less than amicable, even by Kara’s own standards. A glance over to him as he stepped into the bedroom, and she felt the guilt all over again for any number of their recent arguments. Although there were a number of people alive, and an even greater number dead, that would make a good argument for Starbuck never having felt an ounce of guilt or compassion, it was inherently untrue. She felt that guilt all of the time, but she was markedly better at making sure she never let it show.
What Kara could remember about the years she had two parents were fairly happy memories. It was a stark contrast to the number of years that followed her father’s departure. Of course there were more arguments towards the end, but the time between when things went completely sour and when her father disappeared was relatively short lived. Had Socrata and Dreilide drawn out their relationship’s end, she had no doubt that this was what those months or years would’ve felt like. Tense. Uncomfortable. A distinct lack of real conversation. Kara recalled on very few occasions, hearing Lee mention the years surrounding his parents’ divorce. It wasn’t something Zak had ever talked about with her more than in casual mention, and she now knew it wasn’t because it hadn’t been a bad divorce, but because he was too young to remember it well enough. For Lee on the other hand, despite what little he had confessed about it, Kara understood that he endured the worst of it.
“Deck Chief using you well, Anders?” She asked, genuinely curious. Before New Caprica, Anders hadn’t had enough time on Galactic or Pegasus to settle into a field of work since ‘Caprica Resistance Fighter’ was no longer an adequate job title. After settlement, Sam had insisted on settling down in tent city along with everyone else despite the marriage tattoos littering both of their arms. Kara still wasn’t sure what he spent most of his time doing down there, as every time she had set foot on the rock he was playing pyramid. She vaguely recalled a conversation in which he talked about helping in construction of new tents and the few buildings they had actually started working on down there.
Whatever it was that he did to occupy himself, it afforded him enough time to split between the surface and visiting her in command of Pegasus. At the start of their compromise, Sam hated the thought of being split up for most of their time, just not enough for him to concede to spending his days locked away on the battlestar with very idle hands. Kara, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed the arrangement from the start, for a number of reasons. He was gone enough so she could focus on her work without a constant distraction, but certainly there enough to keep her satisfied. Truth be told, even with how busy she was since the cylons had returned, Kara felt herself nearly choking at her husband’s constant presence.
Anders grunted briefly through the fabric of his shirt as he pulled it over his head, tossing it to the hamper in the corner of the room. Back when Kara first settled into the quarters and they were still unmarried, they had giggled over the presence of what had been such a simple item. But now, like the carpet, this hamper was one of the very last.
“Last day, actually.” Sam spoke like it was the most casual conversation topic, toeing off his unlaced boots and following them with the removal of his pants. “I start Vipers training tomorrow.”
Kara’s brow furrowed as she digested his words, unsure if what she heard was actually true. “Vipers?” Her voice sounded a little higher than normal, giving way to show her surprise.
“Figured if I was going to pull my weight around here I should stop complaining about everyone else doing something to help the people back there and just do it myself.” He smiled over at her, wide and childish in his admitted wrongs. “There are a lot of Vipers down on the decks that don’t ever get used. I know how hurting we are for pilots. Whatever you guys figure out with planning on going back there, we’re going to need them all.”
She nodded as she turned around in quiet contemplation. Her mind first went to the deceased man, hardly not even a boy anymore, that she was previously meant to marry. It terrified her now to know that another person she loved would be getting themselves mixed up in those ships. Zak had been at the Academy, had months of training in Sims, flight tests, and proper instruction, and still he had died. Now here was her husband, going to be getting the biggest crash course in just about the deadliest job in the fleet. If he was even ready to fly by time they were ready to go back for New Caprica, would he make it out of the fight? Gods, would they put him in a Viper even if he wasn’t ready for it? But despite the fear, her chest warmed with pride in him for taking such a step.
Anders approached and cautiously set his hand on her arm, fingers grasping over the black ink that had become a permanent part of her skin just as it had his. He tugged her around gently and he was surprised to see her smiling up at him.
“You’re so stupid, Sammy.” Her voice was light as she spoke and the worry in him faded away for the moment. Kara shook her head even as she rolled up onto the tiptoes of her bare feet, arms sliding around his neck as their bodies pulled one another in close. Sam slid his arms around her, crossing around her back and he lifted her just barely off the rug as he kissed her, eventually settling her back down.
“I’ve tried to tell you that so many times…” Sam spoke, voice trailing down to a whisper.
“Should I make you a box lunch to take with you on your first day of school?” Kara teased, even as her body said otherwise, her fingers gripping at the bottom of her tank to pull it off of her chest, leaving her torso completely bare to him for the first time in weeks.
“You gonna see me off at the ready room door, too? Kiss my forehead and tell me to listen to my teacher?”
She grinned so wide her cheeks begun to ache. The knuckles of her folded fists barely pushed against his chest as he obeyed, backing himself up to the side of the double bed, yet another privilege afforded to the Commander. Her fists released, finger tips trailing down his bare chest to the edge of his own underwear, slipping inside the fabric. She gripped him without a second of hesitation and Anders laughed and groaned against her hair, roughly nipping at her earlobe in response. His hands went for her own briefs first, sliding them down until gravity did its job. She took the lead with his own pair, pulling them down with one hand, the other continuing to grasp and stroke him as he laid down on the mattress.
Kara climbed atop him then, and having worked him until he was hard, she slid herself down onto him from her straddled position. Every muscle in her body tensed at the feel of him inside her once again and she shut her eyes. Kara found herself jarred from the moment as Anders raised his hips into her from beneath. She soon resumed control of the situation, her hands pressing down to the center of his chest as her long blonde hair fell over her shoulders and portions of her breasts.
“Just don’t let your instructor convince you to call her God.” She winked at him from above and rose up and down on him, rocking their bodies together. A groan left his lips and she smiled as her head tilted back. “You know that’s reserved for me.”
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2 where Lee Adama isn't in command of Pegasus during New Caprica.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 3,163
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
It was a month later and the fleet remained no more than a pair of jumps out of range of New Caprica. In any other time, Kara’s mind would have been reeling with fear that they were soon to be found. Lack of news on the cylon front usually meant there was worse to come as their opponents bided their time, planning for the type of takedown they were unlikely to escape from. But like the rest of the people that made up the skeleton crew of the fleet these days, her concern was elsewhere. Protecting the twin battlestars was no longer first priority. Being able to get back to the people they left behind, that was where their focus laid.
Kara was on her daily trip over from Pegasus, having finished a double shift in CIC and handed it off to her second in command. Meetings with the Admiral had become a daily process, and she filed them into her usual routine behind brushing her teeth and forcing down some breakfast mush composite of stale rations and protein powder.
Kara stepped into the Admiral’s quarters without waiting for his usual clearance. She was here the same time every day, and if he wasn’t ready, she considered that his fault and not hers. As always, he was seated at his desk, folders open and scattered with the latest reports that said the same thing they said for the last month. Their daily raptor’s trip back to New Caprica had brought nothing. No contact from the surface. Their pilots tried to send their own scrambled messages down below, but they were jammed by signals coming from the basestars clustered up over the settlement. The only good news was that their sensors hadn’t read for any kind of radiological weaponry, which offered the hope that their people were still alive down there. Whether they were alive or dead by other means, nobody knew.
Her glass of water was waiting and she nodded her thanks. Kara had long since given up his offers of ambrosia on her visits. It was too tempting to her to not drink it, and she knew she needed as clear a head as possible. Drowning everything out, for once, wasn’t an option. She cleared her throat as she sat, settling her own pack of folders over her crossed knees. The top one was quickly opened and she scanned the words that she already read over a dozen times, both in her quarters and on the flight over.
“They’ve reduced their basestar numbers down to eight.” She knew and he knew, but she said it anyway. It was the glimmer of hope they had. They didn’t say it aloud, but both the Admiral and Commander knew they couldn’t take on that many ships. Even going in and knowing they’d lose both battlestars, they’d be lucky to take down half that number in the process. It would be a suicide mission and all the numbers they crunched every which way couldn’t even promise they would buy enough time to get a single civilian vessel off the ground.
Kara’s frustration was evident in her exhale. She had a card under the table, however, so she laid it out for the Admiral. “I think we need to bring Sharon into this.”
They had trusted the defected cylon before, particularly in the Caprica rescue mission, but she knew that the Old Man’s trust still hadn’t been fully placed in her. Sure, her security team had been diminished, especially with the lack of personnel on board. She even heard a rumor that the two of them were meeting on occasion to talk. What about, she had no idea. He had lightened up to her, no longer just seeing her as the version of her model that put a couple bullets in his chest and nearly cost him his life. She was Sharon, not Boomer. Despite all of this, Kara was certain he was not quite ready for the step she wanted him to take.
The Admiral’s face gave nothing away and his head shook without looking up at her. There was her answer.
It was the answer she was expecting, in fact, she wouldn’t have been quite sure what to do if he’d agreed to it. She hadn’t planned for that today. Kara needed him to turn her down once, hoping it would soften him up to her second request.
“How are you feeling about the practice runs the pilots have been doing?” She was already aware of his opinion on it as she had been hearing it over the wireless for weeks now. It was a set up and she hoped he didn’t realize it.
“It’s frakking pathetic, that’s what it is. I don’t care if they’ve only run routine CAPs for the last year, it’s like they’re complete rookies out there. If we had anyone else, I would’ve grounded them all a long time ago.”
She nodded along sympathetically, her forehead creased just barely as her lips pursed in quiet contemplation. “Hear me out on this.” Kara’s hand raised to preemptively stifle his response. “Kat’s a great pilot, I trained her myself, you know that. But leading this? Sir,” She paused before she leaned in, palm pressed to the surface of the desk as she demanded eye contact. “I need to be out there with them. I’ve taught damn near all of them at some point and it needs to be me who kicks their asses into gear. I’m not saying I’m giving up command, in fact I won’t let you take it from me. I’ll work double shifts in CIC, triple shifts even, I don’t give a frak how much I sleep. But I need to be up there with them a couple hours a day.” It was something that would never have been allowed in peacetime, and especially not in a wartime that didn’t revolve around the remaining 45,000 humans in existence. But nothing they’d done in the last two years was exactly up to Colonial Fleet standards.
Her green and hazel eyes pleaded with him from a few feet away and she waited for any signal from him. They were at a standoff. Even Starbuck knew better than to challenge the Old Man like this, but she held her ground.
He relented and he spoke in that rough tone of voice that let Kara know what thin of a line she walked on. “Once, every other day, provided you manage to keep getting five hours of sleep. If I even hear a rumor that you nodded off while in command, that’s it, Kara, you’re done. You’re of no use if you can’t do anything.”
Kara’s shoulders eased and she nodded once as she stood up. He hadn’t formally said the meeting was over, but going into this room, she knew there was little he’d have to say given the current situation. Her arm raised in a rigid and sharp salute and she was off, rushing out of the hatch as soon as the sharp ascent of his head released her from her current duty.
She should have headed down to the hangar deck to call for a Raptor flight back and she planned to, in due time. The arrangements were already made and she wasn’t expected back any time soon. Kara had made Helo aware of the situation, and though she knew he respected the Admiral, part of her knew his loyalties were with not only herself but the woman he loved that still remained locked away as prisoner. She stepped in to the room that housed Sharon’s quarters, the informal brig they’d created to keep her there a long time ago. She silently mused that it felt like another lifetime entirely.
A nod was given to Mathias, the single marine guard standing watch this shift and Mathias returned it with something of a reserved smile. She unlocked the door to the cell, letting Kara in before locking her inside. It was only another moment before she stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her, this time to stand guard outside and offer the cylon and Commander a bit of privacy.
Sharon’s eyebrows raised in a familiar look of confusion and curiosity as she stood from the small cot she was lying upon. If it were anyone else locked into the cell with her without even her usual marine guard present, Sharon would have been afraid. After the incident with the Pegasus crew, part of her still clenched inside every time someone stepped inside that door. But this was Starbuck, and even without the new memories that she formed of her and with her since Caprica, she still recalled Boomer’s own memories and the friendship she once shared with Starbuck.
Kara eyed her for a moment, hands set on her hips even with the thick stack of folders in her grip. Then all of a sudden, she stepped forward, kneeling on the ground as she started to lay the papers out. Sharon instinctively met her on the ground, mirroring her posture before she glanced across to the woman that she still considered her friend and fellow pilot.
Across from her, Kara quirked a smile and spoke. “What we do here, Sharon, it doesn’t leave the room. Not to the Admiral, not to Helo, not in prayers to your one or many Gods.”
Sharon, whose face normally looked sullen since the loss of her daughter, further imitated Kara with her own spreading smile. She had her visits from Helo on and off, less frequent since his transfer to Pegasus, but it hadn’t helped to solve the loneliness she felt since she abandoned her own people. There was no longer a part of her that could even attempt to understand the horrible things her brothers and sisters had done, but for her rather short life, they were the only family she knew. And now, here on Galactica, with the people she remembered and loved, she remained isolated by their fear. For once in all those months since she found the fleet with Kara and Karl, Sharon’s heart thumped with a true sense of acceptance and above all, trust. To Kara, Sharon knew that she wasn’t just a cylon anymore.
Kara ran her her tongue over her teeth while sifting through the files of reconnaissance before she spoke again. “What do you know about cylon jamming frequencies?”
-
It was night cycle and Kara was already down to her skivvies and tank when she heard the familiar open and shut of the outermost hatch in her quarters. It was Sam, that much she knew, as she had very few friends on this ship - at least ones that would visit her quarters at this time of night. Since the fleet pulled out of New Caprica, things between she and Anders had been less than amicable, even by Kara’s own standards. A glance over to him as he stepped into the bedroom, and she felt the guilt all over again for any number of their recent arguments. Although there were a number of people alive, and an even greater number dead, that would make a good argument for Starbuck never having felt an ounce of guilt or compassion, it was inherently untrue. She felt that guilt all of the time, but she was markedly better at making sure she never let it show.
What Kara could remember about the years she had two parents were fairly happy memories. It was a stark contrast to the number of years that followed her father’s departure. Of course there were more arguments towards the end, but the time between when things went completely sour and when her father disappeared was relatively short lived. Had Socrata and Dreilide drawn out their relationship’s end, she had no doubt that this was what those months or years would’ve felt like. Tense. Uncomfortable. A distinct lack of real conversation. Kara recalled on very few occasions, hearing Lee mention the years surrounding his parents’ divorce. It wasn’t something Zak had ever talked about with her more than in casual mention, and she now knew it wasn’t because it hadn’t been a bad divorce, but because he was too young to remember it well enough. For Lee on the other hand, despite what little he had confessed about it, Kara understood that he endured the worst of it.
“Deck Chief using you well, Anders?” She asked, genuinely curious. Before New Caprica, Anders hadn’t had enough time on Galactic or Pegasus to settle into a field of work since ‘Caprica Resistance Fighter’ was no longer an adequate job title. After settlement, Sam had insisted on settling down in tent city along with everyone else despite the marriage tattoos littering both of their arms. Kara still wasn’t sure what he spent most of his time doing down there, as every time she had set foot on the rock he was playing pyramid. She vaguely recalled a conversation in which he talked about helping in construction of new tents and the few buildings they had actually started working on down there.
Whatever it was that he did to occupy himself, it afforded him enough time to split between the surface and visiting her in command of Pegasus. At the start of their compromise, Sam hated the thought of being split up for most of their time, just not enough for him to concede to spending his days locked away on the battlestar with very idle hands. Kara, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed the arrangement from the start, for a number of reasons. He was gone enough so she could focus on her work without a constant distraction, but certainly there enough to keep her satisfied. Truth be told, even with how busy she was since the cylons had returned, Kara felt herself nearly choking at her husband’s constant presence.
Anders grunted briefly through the fabric of his shirt as he pulled it over his head, tossing it to the hamper in the corner of the room. Back when Kara first settled into the quarters and they were still unmarried, they had giggled over the presence of what had been such a simple item. But now, like the carpet, this hamper was one of the very last.
“Last day, actually.” Sam spoke like it was the most casual conversation topic, toeing off his unlaced boots and following them with the removal of his pants. “I start Vipers training tomorrow.”
Kara’s brow furrowed as she digested his words, unsure if what she heard was actually true. “Vipers?” Her voice sounded a little higher than normal, giving way to show her surprise.
“Figured if I was going to pull my weight around here I should stop complaining about everyone else doing something to help the people back there and just do it myself.” He smiled over at her, wide and childish in his admitted wrongs. “There are a lot of Vipers down on the decks that don’t ever get used. I know how hurting we are for pilots. Whatever you guys figure out with planning on going back there, we’re going to need them all.”
She nodded as she turned around in quiet contemplation. Her mind first went to the deceased man, hardly not even a boy anymore, that she was previously meant to marry. It terrified her now to know that another person she loved would be getting themselves mixed up in those ships. Zak had been at the Academy, had months of training in Sims, flight tests, and proper instruction, and still he had died. Now here was her husband, going to be getting the biggest crash course in just about the deadliest job in the fleet. If he was even ready to fly by time they were ready to go back for New Caprica, would he make it out of the fight? Gods, would they put him in a Viper even if he wasn’t ready for it? But despite the fear, her chest warmed with pride in him for taking such a step.
Anders approached and cautiously set his hand on her arm, fingers grasping over the black ink that had become a permanent part of her skin just as it had his. He tugged her around gently and he was surprised to see her smiling up at him.
“You’re so stupid, Sammy.” Her voice was light as she spoke and the worry in him faded away for the moment. Kara shook her head even as she rolled up onto the tiptoes of her bare feet, arms sliding around his neck as their bodies pulled one another in close. Sam slid his arms around her, crossing around her back and he lifted her just barely off the rug as he kissed her, eventually settling her back down.
“I’ve tried to tell you that so many times…” Sam spoke, voice trailing down to a whisper.
“Should I make you a box lunch to take with you on your first day of school?” Kara teased, even as her body said otherwise, her fingers gripping at the bottom of her tank to pull it off of her chest, leaving her torso completely bare to him for the first time in weeks.
“You gonna see me off at the ready room door, too? Kiss my forehead and tell me to listen to my teacher?”
She grinned so wide her cheeks begun to ache. The knuckles of her folded fists barely pushed against his chest as he obeyed, backing himself up to the side of the double bed, yet another privilege afforded to the Commander. Her fists released, finger tips trailing down his bare chest to the edge of his own underwear, slipping inside the fabric. She gripped him without a second of hesitation and Anders laughed and groaned against her hair, roughly nipping at her earlobe in response. His hands went for her own briefs first, sliding them down until gravity did its job. She took the lead with his own pair, pulling them down with one hand, the other continuing to grasp and stroke him as he laid down on the mattress.
Kara climbed atop him then, and having worked him until he was hard, she slid herself down onto him from her straddled position. Every muscle in her body tensed at the feel of him inside her once again and she shut her eyes. Kara found herself jarred from the moment as Anders raised his hips into her from beneath. She soon resumed control of the situation, her hands pressing down to the center of his chest as her long blonde hair fell over her shoulders and portions of her breasts.
“Just don’t let your instructor convince you to call her God.” She winked at him from above and rose up and down on him, rocking their bodies together. A groan left his lips and she smiled as her head tilted back. “You know that’s reserved for me.”