Two Months, Two Weeks and Two Days, for letterstonorah
Title: Two Months, Two Weeks and Two Days
Author: kag523
Original Story: Other Side, letterstonorah
Pairing: Lee/ Kara
Word Count: ~ 2,300 words
Rating: NC-17 for sexuality, suicidal thoughts and mature themes
Summary: Lee struggles to get start his life alone on New Earth.
Spoilers: Everything including Daybreak.
Disclaimer: Not for profit, publication or gain.
Lee was a ghost, a body without a soul. A shelled husk of man whose mind had narrowed down to a single truth: gone.
There was no way to end it. No way to start again. He sat in the field long after she disappeared, hands dangling limply between his knees, remembering their last moments together. Kara had been bright as the noonday sun, her eyes on the horizon. She’d asked him what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and Lee’d begun to answer. Before he’d finished, however, he’d looked away, following her line of sight, and-
He turned to look around the field for the tenth (twentieth, hundredth) time, thinking and hoping that she’d be there once more, that it had all been a joke. (Perhaps, his mind whispered, she was there somewhere, hidden in the grass and laughing at him even now.) He swore he could almost hear her giggling.
His thoughts were caught between the last day they’d shared, and the far distant past. Two completely different lifetimes. Another world altogether. He could still see her hair fluttering in the wind, so much like the Solstice streamers she’d held that first summer when Zak was alive. (When Lee had hated his brother as much as loved him.) Sitting here now, Lee remembered how Kara’d run across the back lawn of Carolanne’s house, whipping the ribbon in frantic circles, her laughter ringing loud in his ears.
And for just a moment, Lee had let himself wonder what he’d have to do to have her for himself.
Zak had been in the shadows of the porch, the two brothers, side by side. As Kara reached the far side of the lawn, collapsing on the grass, Lee’d had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched.
He’d turned, shocked to find Zak staring at him.
“What…?” Lee’d asked warily.
His brother’s face had darkened.
“Don’t even think it…” he’d growled.
Zak had died in his viper two weeks later.
Now, those memories tortured him endlessly. He hated Kara for leaving him, hated everything that the two of them had been. More than that, he despised everything they hadn’t been. The disgust for himself was the strongest: for having her once and letting her go. Today in the field she’d been his. His alone!
Now she wasn’t anything at all.
The sun rose and fell and Lee didn’t move. He sat in the field, drugged by memory, desperate to make sense of what had happened. The night passed and day began again. Still he kept his vigil. By the end of the second day, Kara still hadn’t returned. Thirst left his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, the unwieldy bulk of it blocking his throat. Vision swirling, he’d finally stood, stumbling his way to the water and drinking until he was sick. Behind him, the tent door flapped and popped in the rising wind, the empty sky and the bright day mocking him.
He had the new beginning they’d talked about, but with Kara gone, he didn’t want it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lee wasn’t certain when he decided that he could hear her, but once the idea had arrived, it burrowed deep. She taunted him endlessly. Her voice there and then not. Hints of it lifting over the edge of distant wind, words brushing beside the shell of his ear and over the bare curve of his shoulder as he stood shivering beside the river.
He hadn’t moved since Kara’d gone. He couldn’t. (He was a ghost after all.) Instead, he simply moved back into the tent to live. (Or die.)
Lee didn’t care.
One side of the tent’s interior was a shambles. Not her side, as you might have expected. (Kara’s was untouched.) Lee’s side was the one that was strewn with tattered, filled with stinking clothes, broken, muddy boots and detritus. The growing pile marking the passage of time. These days Lee revelled in the loss. (Why not, after all? He had nothing else to think about.)
Death was a close companion. He sat outside the tent, revolver in hand, balancing the solid weight of it. He loaded and unloaded the gun, then loaded it once again. Once he lifted it all the way up to his mouth, fitting it into the hollow above his tongue, scraping it along the ridges on the top of his mouth. Eyes closed, he focused on seeing Kara’s face one last time in his mind. He imagined her grinning wide, eyes crinkled with laughter. (It was the picture, Lee realized, that he’d left on the Memorial wall.)
His thumb had just started to tighten on the trigger when something brushed against his hand.
Lee jerked back in surprise. From the canopy of leaves overhead, a flock of birds burst into sudden, unexpected flight. Lee stared at them, awe-struck, dropping the gun to his lap. The birds wheeled circles in the sky, and that too brought her to mind. Unable to watch any longer, he went back into the cool shade of the tent, finding solace in the darkness.
He ate when he was hungry, though he wasn’t hungry much these days. Instead, his time was filled with drinking. The glass mason jars on the table were filled with rotgut strong enough to strip paint - kill a man if he wasn’t careful - but Lee was never so lucky. He always passed out beforehand.
Even asleep, he followed her.
Restless and sick with alcohol, he moaned aloud, his hands reaching out again and again, clutching the soiled sheets beside him. The dreams were always the same: that last night (before Lee had left, and not returned). The last night they’d had together, before the end of the worlds.
They’d buried Zak in the afternoon. By nightfall, the two of them had been stumbling through the darkened downtown streets, moving from bar to bar, drinking their pain away. (In sleep, Lee’s tongue darted out, desperate for drink.) He and Kara had been sitting at a secluded booth in a busy pub when their last ambrosia bottle had run dry. Lee had been a heartbeat away from kissing Kara then and there - frak the consequences! - but she’d suddenly pulled away.
“I’ll get us s’more,” she mumbled thickly, staggering into the milling crowd.
She hadn’t returned.
He’d gone looking for her, of course. (That had always been Lee’s role: to follow in her wake.) He’d found her up against the wall of the alley. A blond-haired officer with a lean, muscled frame was groping her, his lips making wet sounds as he suckled his way down her throat, hands moving under her shirt.
Kara’s eyes had met Lee’s over the man’s head.
“Gods, Kara?” he’d gasped in shock. “Is that you?”
“Oh frak,” she’d hissed, dropping her leg down, straightening her clothes. The man turned, glaring furiously at him, then reached down, redoing the fly of his pants.
“Were you...?” Lee had stammered, blood draining from his face. Kara’d pushed past him, striding out of the alley and into the street without answering. “Gods!” Lee’d barked, following. “He’s been dead a gods-damned week.”
(She hadn’t turned but she’d jerked as if slapped.)
“How could you do it, Kara?!” Lee had sneered, anger rising as he reached her side. “How could you do that to Zak?”
She’d stopped, spinning back around to face him, hands rising in fists.
“Because I frak things up!”
“That’s an excuse!” he’d retorted, fingers snaking forward to grab her wrist.
They’d grappled for a moment, their strength more evenly matched than he’d expected. Suddenly she’d torn away from him, leaving his fingers buzzing with the force of her departure.
“I ALWAYS frak things up, Lee,” she’d yelled, “and YOU of all people, should KNOW THAT!”
Lee woke in a cold sweat, breath coming in ragged gasps. Outside, a late Spring storm was brewing at the end of the valley, gusts of wind churning around the lone tent in the field of grass. Lee was certain he could hear her. Her wind rose and fell, her voice lacing through it like a single thread of gold.
Without warning, the tent door swung open, and closed once more. Still drunk, Lee gasped in shock. The tent stank of unwashed flesh, but above that, there was another scent now. Hers.
“Kara…?”
There was no answer. (There never was.) But for the first time in the two long weeks since she’d left him behind, Lee Adama stood up from his own bed, crossing the invisible boundary between the two sides of the tent. Outside the wind was swirling, pulling at the walls, rippling over the roof. Sobs catching in his throat, Lee stumbled onto Kara’s bed, falling, and spiralling down into fitful sleep.
In the sky, the storm clouds opened up, great sheets of rain pouring down, pounding the grass into a flat carpet, raindrops staining the canvas near the door. Asleep, Lee shifted in place, mumbling long-ago words, walking the empty streets of a destroyed world, now fading to dust. In the darkness, the long strands of hair across his forehead fluttered slightly - moved by a whisper of wind or something else - but he didn’t notice.
His mind, foggy with the dregs of alcohol, was already dreaming of losing her again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Spring turned to summer, the green of the meadow burnishing gold. The days were a blinding welter of heat. Nights filled the meadow with a dank warmth buzzing with the sound of insects. Outside the tent, the heavy heads of the grass - wild oats, Lee realized - now hung in heavy sheaves.
He didn’t bother to reap it.
With the barrier between Kara’s space and his broken, Lee lived surrounded by the fading memories of her. Each day brought her closer. He went through the pack of her clothes, folding and unfolding them to release the secret scent of her. There was a hairbrush in the pack, half-full of broken bristles. Lee picked out the strands of hair, braiding them into a small ring, and setting it in the fold of a book.
The summer nights became unbearable, the heat sullen and unshakeable. Overheated and sweating, Lee found her clothes again, pulling them against his chest, breathing her in. Throbbing with remembered desire, he stripped himself bare, locating a flimsy pair of Kara’s panties from the bottom of the pack, pulling them across his chest and groin, flashes of her appearing in his mind like lightning.
Playing pyramid with Lee behind Carolanne’s house; Lee laying atop her. Kara standing, white-faced at the cemetery, Zak’s casket a gulf neither could cross. Kara behind the bars of Galactica’s the brig; Lee’s heart pounding its way through his chest to see her again. Kara leaning over top of him, the raised points of her nipples brushing his bare chest. Lee staring up at the stars and the cosmos and her… always her! Her mouth open in an ‘o’ of desire, Lee’s face buried between her legs. Kara shouting her love for everyone to hear; Lee kissing her in return. Kara and Sam, walking toward him, hand in hand. Kara fighting him in the ring. Kara exploding in a shower of sparks. Kara dead and gone. Kara in her viper back again. Kara in the field. Kara gone once more.
“Kara… Kara… Kara…”
With a sob, Lee’s hand wrapped round the base of his cock, pumping hard to burn the images away under a haze of lust. He could feel her panting next to him, could hear the mewling sound she sometimes made in the back of her throat. (Maybe, his mind whispered, he really had gone crazy).
“Kara… Kara… Kara…”
He could smell her in the tent, and not just the warm scent of woman that lingered on the panties he pressed to his face, or the sweat of her clothes on her cot, but something tangible and real. He could smell her flesh. The scent that he knew, and loved: Kara’s body wet and ready for him.
“Kara… Kara… Kara…”
Lee’s hips bucked in place, his fingers, impossibly tight, replaced by a remembered moments with her, reliving all the times they’d come together - in the bunkroom, in the showers, in the back of the raptor - each flash more real than the next. He gasped, clenching his lids, leaving them spotted with stars. Somewhere in the darkness he could hear Kara gasping.
“Lee… please, oh gods, please!”
He groaned in release, spilling over his knuckles and onto his stomach.
“Kara!”
Outside the wind and the night time sounds of cicadas rose to replace his cries. Exhausted, he lay panting in the darkness, a slow trickle of sweat drawing a line from his forehead down the side of his face. His ears were rushing with the sound of blood, the scent of her heavy around him. With a weary groan, he let go of the crumpled panties, his hand falling limply to the covers and bumping into the warm flesh of someone lying at his side.
Author: kag523
Original Story: Other Side, letterstonorah
Pairing: Lee/ Kara
Word Count: ~ 2,300 words
Rating: NC-17 for sexuality, suicidal thoughts and mature themes
Summary: Lee struggles to get start his life alone on New Earth.
Spoilers: Everything including Daybreak.
Disclaimer: Not for profit, publication or gain.
Lee was a ghost, a body without a soul. A shelled husk of man whose mind had narrowed down to a single truth: gone.
There was no way to end it. No way to start again. He sat in the field long after she disappeared, hands dangling limply between his knees, remembering their last moments together. Kara had been bright as the noonday sun, her eyes on the horizon. She’d asked him what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and Lee’d begun to answer. Before he’d finished, however, he’d looked away, following her line of sight, and-
He turned to look around the field for the tenth (twentieth, hundredth) time, thinking and hoping that she’d be there once more, that it had all been a joke. (Perhaps, his mind whispered, she was there somewhere, hidden in the grass and laughing at him even now.) He swore he could almost hear her giggling.
His thoughts were caught between the last day they’d shared, and the far distant past. Two completely different lifetimes. Another world altogether. He could still see her hair fluttering in the wind, so much like the Solstice streamers she’d held that first summer when Zak was alive. (When Lee had hated his brother as much as loved him.) Sitting here now, Lee remembered how Kara’d run across the back lawn of Carolanne’s house, whipping the ribbon in frantic circles, her laughter ringing loud in his ears.
And for just a moment, Lee had let himself wonder what he’d have to do to have her for himself.
Zak had been in the shadows of the porch, the two brothers, side by side. As Kara reached the far side of the lawn, collapsing on the grass, Lee’d had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched.
He’d turned, shocked to find Zak staring at him.
“What…?” Lee’d asked warily.
His brother’s face had darkened.
“Don’t even think it…” he’d growled.
Zak had died in his viper two weeks later.
Now, those memories tortured him endlessly. He hated Kara for leaving him, hated everything that the two of them had been. More than that, he despised everything they hadn’t been. The disgust for himself was the strongest: for having her once and letting her go. Today in the field she’d been his. His alone!
Now she wasn’t anything at all.
The sun rose and fell and Lee didn’t move. He sat in the field, drugged by memory, desperate to make sense of what had happened. The night passed and day began again. Still he kept his vigil. By the end of the second day, Kara still hadn’t returned. Thirst left his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, the unwieldy bulk of it blocking his throat. Vision swirling, he’d finally stood, stumbling his way to the water and drinking until he was sick. Behind him, the tent door flapped and popped in the rising wind, the empty sky and the bright day mocking him.
He had the new beginning they’d talked about, but with Kara gone, he didn’t want it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lee wasn’t certain when he decided that he could hear her, but once the idea had arrived, it burrowed deep. She taunted him endlessly. Her voice there and then not. Hints of it lifting over the edge of distant wind, words brushing beside the shell of his ear and over the bare curve of his shoulder as he stood shivering beside the river.
He hadn’t moved since Kara’d gone. He couldn’t. (He was a ghost after all.) Instead, he simply moved back into the tent to live. (Or die.)
Lee didn’t care.
One side of the tent’s interior was a shambles. Not her side, as you might have expected. (Kara’s was untouched.) Lee’s side was the one that was strewn with tattered, filled with stinking clothes, broken, muddy boots and detritus. The growing pile marking the passage of time. These days Lee revelled in the loss. (Why not, after all? He had nothing else to think about.)
Death was a close companion. He sat outside the tent, revolver in hand, balancing the solid weight of it. He loaded and unloaded the gun, then loaded it once again. Once he lifted it all the way up to his mouth, fitting it into the hollow above his tongue, scraping it along the ridges on the top of his mouth. Eyes closed, he focused on seeing Kara’s face one last time in his mind. He imagined her grinning wide, eyes crinkled with laughter. (It was the picture, Lee realized, that he’d left on the Memorial wall.)
His thumb had just started to tighten on the trigger when something brushed against his hand.
Lee jerked back in surprise. From the canopy of leaves overhead, a flock of birds burst into sudden, unexpected flight. Lee stared at them, awe-struck, dropping the gun to his lap. The birds wheeled circles in the sky, and that too brought her to mind. Unable to watch any longer, he went back into the cool shade of the tent, finding solace in the darkness.
He ate when he was hungry, though he wasn’t hungry much these days. Instead, his time was filled with drinking. The glass mason jars on the table were filled with rotgut strong enough to strip paint - kill a man if he wasn’t careful - but Lee was never so lucky. He always passed out beforehand.
Even asleep, he followed her.
Restless and sick with alcohol, he moaned aloud, his hands reaching out again and again, clutching the soiled sheets beside him. The dreams were always the same: that last night (before Lee had left, and not returned). The last night they’d had together, before the end of the worlds.
They’d buried Zak in the afternoon. By nightfall, the two of them had been stumbling through the darkened downtown streets, moving from bar to bar, drinking their pain away. (In sleep, Lee’s tongue darted out, desperate for drink.) He and Kara had been sitting at a secluded booth in a busy pub when their last ambrosia bottle had run dry. Lee had been a heartbeat away from kissing Kara then and there - frak the consequences! - but she’d suddenly pulled away.
“I’ll get us s’more,” she mumbled thickly, staggering into the milling crowd.
She hadn’t returned.
He’d gone looking for her, of course. (That had always been Lee’s role: to follow in her wake.) He’d found her up against the wall of the alley. A blond-haired officer with a lean, muscled frame was groping her, his lips making wet sounds as he suckled his way down her throat, hands moving under her shirt.
Kara’s eyes had met Lee’s over the man’s head.
“Gods, Kara?” he’d gasped in shock. “Is that you?”
“Oh frak,” she’d hissed, dropping her leg down, straightening her clothes. The man turned, glaring furiously at him, then reached down, redoing the fly of his pants.
“Were you...?” Lee had stammered, blood draining from his face. Kara’d pushed past him, striding out of the alley and into the street without answering. “Gods!” Lee’d barked, following. “He’s been dead a gods-damned week.”
(She hadn’t turned but she’d jerked as if slapped.)
“How could you do it, Kara?!” Lee had sneered, anger rising as he reached her side. “How could you do that to Zak?”
She’d stopped, spinning back around to face him, hands rising in fists.
“Because I frak things up!”
“That’s an excuse!” he’d retorted, fingers snaking forward to grab her wrist.
They’d grappled for a moment, their strength more evenly matched than he’d expected. Suddenly she’d torn away from him, leaving his fingers buzzing with the force of her departure.
“I ALWAYS frak things up, Lee,” she’d yelled, “and YOU of all people, should KNOW THAT!”
Lee woke in a cold sweat, breath coming in ragged gasps. Outside, a late Spring storm was brewing at the end of the valley, gusts of wind churning around the lone tent in the field of grass. Lee was certain he could hear her. Her wind rose and fell, her voice lacing through it like a single thread of gold.
Without warning, the tent door swung open, and closed once more. Still drunk, Lee gasped in shock. The tent stank of unwashed flesh, but above that, there was another scent now. Hers.
“Kara…?”
There was no answer. (There never was.) But for the first time in the two long weeks since she’d left him behind, Lee Adama stood up from his own bed, crossing the invisible boundary between the two sides of the tent. Outside the wind was swirling, pulling at the walls, rippling over the roof. Sobs catching in his throat, Lee stumbled onto Kara’s bed, falling, and spiralling down into fitful sleep.
In the sky, the storm clouds opened up, great sheets of rain pouring down, pounding the grass into a flat carpet, raindrops staining the canvas near the door. Asleep, Lee shifted in place, mumbling long-ago words, walking the empty streets of a destroyed world, now fading to dust. In the darkness, the long strands of hair across his forehead fluttered slightly - moved by a whisper of wind or something else - but he didn’t notice.
His mind, foggy with the dregs of alcohol, was already dreaming of losing her again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Spring turned to summer, the green of the meadow burnishing gold. The days were a blinding welter of heat. Nights filled the meadow with a dank warmth buzzing with the sound of insects. Outside the tent, the heavy heads of the grass - wild oats, Lee realized - now hung in heavy sheaves.
He didn’t bother to reap it.
With the barrier between Kara’s space and his broken, Lee lived surrounded by the fading memories of her. Each day brought her closer. He went through the pack of her clothes, folding and unfolding them to release the secret scent of her. There was a hairbrush in the pack, half-full of broken bristles. Lee picked out the strands of hair, braiding them into a small ring, and setting it in the fold of a book.
The summer nights became unbearable, the heat sullen and unshakeable. Overheated and sweating, Lee found her clothes again, pulling them against his chest, breathing her in. Throbbing with remembered desire, he stripped himself bare, locating a flimsy pair of Kara’s panties from the bottom of the pack, pulling them across his chest and groin, flashes of her appearing in his mind like lightning.
Playing pyramid with Lee behind Carolanne’s house; Lee laying atop her. Kara standing, white-faced at the cemetery, Zak’s casket a gulf neither could cross. Kara behind the bars of Galactica’s the brig; Lee’s heart pounding its way through his chest to see her again. Kara leaning over top of him, the raised points of her nipples brushing his bare chest. Lee staring up at the stars and the cosmos and her… always her! Her mouth open in an ‘o’ of desire, Lee’s face buried between her legs. Kara shouting her love for everyone to hear; Lee kissing her in return. Kara and Sam, walking toward him, hand in hand. Kara fighting him in the ring. Kara exploding in a shower of sparks. Kara dead and gone. Kara in her viper back again. Kara in the field. Kara gone once more.
“Kara… Kara… Kara…”
With a sob, Lee’s hand wrapped round the base of his cock, pumping hard to burn the images away under a haze of lust. He could feel her panting next to him, could hear the mewling sound she sometimes made in the back of her throat. (Maybe, his mind whispered, he really had gone crazy).
“Kara… Kara… Kara…”
He could smell her in the tent, and not just the warm scent of woman that lingered on the panties he pressed to his face, or the sweat of her clothes on her cot, but something tangible and real. He could smell her flesh. The scent that he knew, and loved: Kara’s body wet and ready for him.
“Kara… Kara… Kara…”
Lee’s hips bucked in place, his fingers, impossibly tight, replaced by a remembered moments with her, reliving all the times they’d come together - in the bunkroom, in the showers, in the back of the raptor - each flash more real than the next. He gasped, clenching his lids, leaving them spotted with stars. Somewhere in the darkness he could hear Kara gasping.
“Lee… please, oh gods, please!”
He groaned in release, spilling over his knuckles and onto his stomach.
“Kara!”
Outside the wind and the night time sounds of cicadas rose to replace his cries. Exhausted, he lay panting in the darkness, a slow trickle of sweat drawing a line from his forehead down the side of his face. His ears were rushing with the sound of blood, the scent of her heavy around him. With a weary groan, he let go of the crumpled panties, his hand falling limply to the covers and bumping into the warm flesh of someone lying at his side.