BSG fic: Reservation (Kara/Leoben, PG-13)
Title: Reservation
Pairing: Kara/Leoben
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Set a few years after finding earth, and assuming a previous truce of some productive sort between the fleet and the Cylons. Oh, and there's carpentry. 4500 words.
Note: This is not the New Caprica Leoben; I can't deal with him. But I don't at all ignore Kara's history with the model. General spoilers for season four.
This is one of the weirder fics I've ever written. Not crack, just odd.
For super_kc, whose fault this is. And for lunar47.
Reservation
Two years he waits, just to touch her. Two years is a long time, long enough for her to learn to admire that quality that is always there, in every Leoben she's ever known: patience born of absolute certainty.
Two years is somehow long enough for her to learn to admire Leoben.
Every day he registers at the gate and receives his orders for work. It's day to day, piecemeal: the gods are as capricious as the weather and sometimes as elusive as supplies here where the only real god is crew boss Thrace. For four months last summer, he scorched and burned up on that roof because she wanted him there, out of sight. He said nothing to her about it, though he could have. They made casual conversation often enough, at least when he was on the ground. He didn't complain, but when she finally reassigned him to drywall, to help a crew that was falling behind, he smiled at her, that frankly devastating smile (the one that rattles back along her nerves to her instincts, until she's finally learned to stop that feeling in its tracks), and said, I was absolutely ready for a change of pace, boss.
She doesn't like being his boss. Or maybe she does. Likes the way he drinks her in with his eyes. Hates it. She's watched him-staring down off the roof and through the unfiltered sunlight, over the barren prairie-enough to know he's crazy. He's crazy if he can be that centered and still look at her like she is the missing piece of his life. It's a contradiction, and even if it weren't, it still bugs her. She is no one's piece of anything. And if she has missing pieces of her own, no one can fill them but herself.
Over this long cool late spring, they put up the frame. The joists hold and the weather cooperates. He consumes her with his eyes, and he talks to her about only the dry land, the open sky, the scarce water, the sparse trees. God. Gods. Those, too, of the native people who used to live here. The two of them wonder aloud to whom these things belong. To whoever can hold them, she says. (This earth is not her earth after all, but she will make it so.) He: To whoever can understand them. She is sure there's no middle ground.
Still, it is not an impasse but a conversation-despite some long silent days of hard work and contemplation, it feels unbroken each time they pick up the ends and fit them back together. They talk in calm weather and flashes of rain and dust storms, on concrete and dry ground and treated lumber, through tar and studs and grout.
One day as he washes his hands of that ever-present white powder and russet dust, he tells her resurrecting is actually messy business. Sticky. It is the first time they talk about the Cylons as if he is one, as if he is, after all, another copy of a model. It's easier to forget than she thought it might be. That makes her extraordinarily nervous.
He tells her about the baths in details and tones nothing like the books and data files, but she doesn't ask him any questions. After all, she knows what resurrection is, even if she didn't reboot on some ship. Even though she didn't really die, that does not mean she hasn't somehow been reborn. She has a feeling it was a process a lot slower than awakening one day, alive again. Rebirth does not bring new skin any more than it brings a new mind. It must be true for him, too.
But the point is she is different, and she thinks it has something to do with this sky-hers and this Leoben's. This sky-of the now-gone nativeamericans and of the Federally Protected Allies of the Last Colony of Kobol, state of arizona, south central reservation.
*
When it happens, they're standing out behind the supply trailer, just done hauling flats of shingles onto a wagon. His hands leave smudges on her arms, hers on his neck. Standing just inside her sphere of personal space, close enough she can smell him and feel the heat from his body, he looks precisely like he does every day as he walks through the gate, smiling mysteriously at her, but with a hint of friendly mischief. It's vaguely infuriating. It's vaguely a lot of other things, too, some she chooses not to think too hard on.
As his lips slide along the curve of her jaw, exploratory and soft despite rough stubble, she shivers and pushes back against him. He knows she's not pushing him away. That much he's learned in negotiating how they interact-what's allowed, how to read her. He is no different from the rest of her crew now: poking and prodding her, giving her sly looks and meeting her outright sarcasm with sarcasm of his own. But he is different from the rest of the crew. And he ought to know that she's shoving him now because she wants him to be Leoben, dammit. Whatever that means.
"Not made of glass," she mumbles, frustration mingled with deliberate friendly invitation. "I may bend a hell of a lot, may even like to, but I don't break."
"Never heard you say things like that." The wind almost carries his words away. He could so easily float away, blow back into the wide world he came from. Or maybe he could never be blown, not since he doesn't seem to want to be. He adds, "To me, I mean."
"'Cause you don't try to break me."
"You know why."
She lets her lips rest against his and breathes into his mouth, wanting to taste him again, but something in his voice gives her pause. So she shoves at him with words now:
"You came here, all the way from the City, took the trouble to get an official permanent pass and everything, to do something, and I sure as hell know it wasn't to write poetry on a half-tarred roof."
He smiles, and his body shakes with a warm chuckle, still warming as he says, voice full, "I don't write poetry, Kara."
But he does, in his way. Still: "I know that." Then, like a childhood dare: "So show me what it is you came to do."
He smiles and leans in close again. But he kisses her like she's not who she is.
She wonders, briefly, if maybe he knows her better than she knows herself. He has this way of reviving a certain scary fear of hers that she'll never dig deep enough to truly see to the bottom of herself. Because she wants to, now, doesn't she? Maybe if she would let him show her…
But when his tongue licks into her mouth, slow and tentative-not exactly hesitant but still too careful-she understands:
He doesn't really know me.
It makes her nearly giddy-not just the not knowing but the obvious wanting to know.
She wants to frak him, even behind the supply trailer. It's been too damn long here, isolated; knowing but unknown. And it's not like she hasn't frakked a Cylon before (there was that Doral, a musician called Picon John; there was her husband, lost along the way). But she doesn't.
Instead, she holds him tight around the waist, asks against his throat, "How old are you?"
He draws in a breath before he answers. When he speaks, that thing under his chin the americans call an adams apple (after the only child of one of their gods), vibrates against her mouth.
"How do you mean?" he asks. "Compared to you?"
"Not everything is relative to me." Not here, certainly. Especially not here.
But he says, "We are all relative to you."
When she shivers, he holds tighter, tightly enough. He murmurs warmly, "Way younger than you. But less young than some."
"So you really don't…" Her breath escapes in a warm sigh of air, and she can't help but smile.
"What?" When she doesn't answer immediately, just grins at him enigmatically, his eyes narrow. "Frak, what?"
It's as funny as hearing one of her old pilots talking to her over the telephone, slipping and saying fuck. And his impatience, too. She giggles and buries her face against his collarbone. "Nevermind."
"Kara."
"It's just… Well, you really don't know everything, do you?"
"Hmm?"
"You always seem like you know…everything, but you don't even understand why you're doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Exactly."
"Kara." Two syllables of naked frustration, then he's suddenly focusing everything down, making that face like he makes as he drives a nail, even if his voice is still so calm. "I know exactly what I think I'm doing and why. But if you expect me to understand myself any better than anybody else understands themselves, or you, well…"
She says with a twinkle in her eye: "You understand the sky."
He grins. "And you understand a good half of what I say is bullshit, don't you?"
"Thought that was poetry."
He snorts.
She leans in again and presses her face to his neck, rubs her nose against the hollow below his ear. "What ever made you think this mystical crap was a way to get in my pants?"
"Didn't know I was trying."
"Well, then, I'm disappointed."
His smile holds just long enough, then it fades out with a sigh. "It's what I know, that's all."
It only occurs to her then that she said such things to a Two without thinking. It only occurs to her much later that she didn't actually say such things to a Two but to him.
The next morning, when he comes through the gate to register, she puts him on clearing brush on the west side of the lot; difficult, parching work. It's nothing personal. Actually, it is: she suspects it will suit him.
At high sun, so much higher than it ever was on New Caprica, and brighter, too, she brings the small crew lunch and sits with them to eat. They are two Simons (neither Simon, though), two old marines who are just as contrary as she is, a brown-haired Six who calls herself Nine to be equally contrary or maybe just absurd, and Leoben.
"Gideon," she says, slapping a twist of bread and a jar of water into his hand. He came into the fleet aboard the Gideon. By the Colonial government, before earth, he was designated Two, Beta Gideon, just as Six who was Nine was legally Six, Omicron Prometheus. The American government designated her Kara Thrace, G14378.
But he greets her with a name this new country had nothing to do with: "Destiny."
When she's being particularly cranky, the crew calls her Destiny Comma Special, even the handful of oddball americans who don't know what the frak it means, who haven't earned it. Sometimes they call her simply Special, but mostly Destiny, because most days are good days, even when they're tough. She doesn't mind so much, either the hard work or the nickname. The word no longer means anything; it's just a sound, no different than Starbuck, a meaning all its own of her sharp gaze and her thick skin.
As she hands him the jar, she stares at him long enough it makes them both a little nervous, but she doesn't look away.
"What is it you're doing?" she finally asks. He raises his eyebrows, and she wants to kiss the quizzical quirk of his mouth. She adds, using one of his own all-knowing faces, but this one warmed with teasing: "And why?"
He smiles, understanding, but it takes him a moment to fabricate a suitable answer. "Having a place to sleep. Getting fed. Learning how to build things."
She imagines that he's learned a lot. So did she, in her first handful of years here, as the reservation began to take shape. There are still weeks and weeks left to go before this hospital is built. But there have already been weeks and weeks of work, and of her waiting for something to change that might never if she doesn't let it.
Slyly smiling, she says, "Well, haven't you learned enough by now?"
He doesn't reply, but when she finishes her own piece of bread, he offers her his jar and she takes a long drink without taking her eyes off him.
Determination, she thinks as she walks back toward the site, stepping between immature Joshua trees as she goes. Determination: the middle ground between them, between waiting forever and not being content with the wait.
*
The next night, he comes to her cabin with nothing in his hands. He simply coaxes her out the door and stands beside her as the wind whips around them and they look out over the empty prairie. It is the edge of the reservation, and they can see nothing but dark land and sky scattered with stars almost as bright as they looked from a viper. She misses it until she thinks her heart will burst, but she's come to realize that she would miss this too, should they be allowed to go back up.
"What if I were to tell you I had a vision?" he says, breaking the silence. "Would that…worry you?"
She snorts, grinning. "Tell you the truth, it kind of freaks me out that you don't have them daily."
"Shut up," he grumbles, smiling, too.
She mock salutes. "Sure thing, Gid."
Their easy grins settle into quiet and solemnity; peace, in a way she'd never thought of when she dreamed of earth. Certainly not with him beside her. But earth was not what she dreamed. Even the City, miles away from them that might as well be FTL jumps, more like Caprica City than New Caprica ever was, was not what she dreamed.
The problem was she didn't actually know what to dream. Now she dreams of this, and it's enough. They've all had to find their own enoughs here. She wonders what his might be.
"So?" she says. "This vision…?"
"What if I said I'd seen you in a house I built for you?"
She can only think of one thing to ask, and quickly, before the whip of the wind can spread too much full silence: "Were you in it, too?"
He nods, then he touches her hand and she doesn't jump. He doesn't hold very tightly.
He says, "Do you know how projection works? I mean, what we do?"
"Vaguely."
"Doesn't matter anyway, I guess. All it means: we see ourselves where we'd rather be. Sometimes I'm not on that roof. Or between those walls or out pulling stubborn bushes out of the ground. But I am when you're there. I don't project when I'm with you."
"No?" Adrenaline washes into her bloodstream all at once, like she's been storing it in the reservoir at the meeting hall along with the drinking water for days and now she's carrying it out to this fringe of the town. Always the fringe for her. She's been moving further and further from what people expect her to be and do until she feels like she's at the edge of the world now. It's been calming, rejuvenating; it's never been close to panic, not like this.
But it's not panic, she tells herself. It's certainty, for once in a long time. Two years, maybe.
She laughs nervously. "Hell, I would. Project us a real world to live in and not this frakkin' reservation."
Oh, but he knows. "You didn't have to sign on with the Cylons when they chucked us out here, away from the City."
"We're all Cylons here," she says with a shake of her head. "This is where I want to be, for reasons that aren't just about wrangling FPA skinjobs for the unitedstates government. And you didn't have to come all the way out here. There are reservations nearer home."
"It's not home."
"I know."
He frowns for a moment, and she watches the outline of his face, the way he stares out at the land the same way she does. Sees different things, but his gaze is the same. He's not projecting now.
The frown softens and he pitches his energy back toward her without even looking at her. "Does it bother you that I'll see the work of our hands long after you're gone?"
She shrugs. "Does it bother you?"
"Sometimes." He goes on past that idea without descending into it, mercifully. "Anyway, I mention projection because I'm not sure if what I've seen is real. It might just be in my head." A wistful, negligibly bitter smile blooms on his face. "But isn't that what your cooperative anthropologists say about us? Us Twos. Delusional? Schizophrenic?"
"It's not fair."
It's really not. He's so solid standing there beside her. He's no more crazy than anyone else. He's twice as deeply beautiful, though, for all the things he feels, things that have nothing to do with circuitry. She wants to put her hands on him, not just feel his hand warm in hers, the only warm solid thing in this cool night; but she finds it difficult to let herself twist together with him again without wanting to bury herself against him, hide in a way she has promised herself she never will again.
He's saying, "Life isn't fair. Live long enough and you come to know that. 'Course, I don't have to tell you that. But, really, a little disassociation from your head can be a good thing."
"Why haven't you tried to frak me?" she says suddenly. She's never been good at disassociation. He's always been Leoben. But he doesn't know what that means to her, not what it means now. "Is it about New Caprica?" she says, before she can stop herself. "Because I know-"
"You don't know anything," he replies quietly.
He does that spooky thing with his voice, then, that cadence that's mesmerizing, almost soothing-if you could listen to the sounds and not the meaning:
"Have you thought about it, how you might need to slice me open one day? Even after we live in that house together and sleep in that bed, together. Life realigns itself, new things fall into old places or old in new, and a person takes time to adjust, if she does at all. He never adjusted to what you really are. You came down on him like a hammer, and you broke him." Suddenly, that rhythm falters, and his voice even cracks as he speeds up: "I'm not saying he didn't deserve it, or that he didn't do a hell of a lot worse to you, but you happened to him as much as he happened to you." Then he pitches back into that tone: "I made my decision to be here, to stay here where you are, knowing what I know about your past, but I had to decide if I could-"
She hadn't been able to move or even breathe as he spoke, but she finally finds herself jerking out of it. She's suddenly shaking as if she's cold when she feels a little bit like she's on fire.
"Frak, I've known dozens now. You know that, right? If I hadn't wanted Twos on my site, I didn't have to have any of you, perm cards or not. That's how much pull I still have. But I've never met any that weren't scared to death of… So I didn't set out boundaries. Didn't think I needed any."
"You don't like them anyway," he says, a little too knowingly.
"And it's not like I've been out looking to tempt fate or…frak, I don't know what. I don't know what the hell I'm looking for sometimes. But it wasn't for this. So if you think you could even possibly…"
"No," he says softly. "I meant you. You might need to kill me someday for nothing I've ever done. I had to decide if I could deal with that."
"Oh."
He just nods and turns his gaze back to the dark landscape.
"What if I decided before you did?" she says a moment later. "What if I…back when you came, two years ago? What if I decided? Would you have run from me?"
"From Destiny?" he says with a soft, roguish smile. "No."
"Jesus," she swears.
She picked that one up from Lee, talking to him through the telephone, all the way in Washington. He knows words now that make no sense to her, no more than her talk of construction makes to him. Both of them, though, talking foundations in their own ways. He is where he belongs; she's begun to think of herself as belonging here, too, not just passing the time, not just avoiding the big bright City that's no more free than they were free pent up and adrift on Galactica.
"Special, my ass," she grouses. What does it mean, after all, to be the one to have brought them all here? Given the choice again…
"You are."
"As if it's not as much about you as me," she grumbles, more good-naturedly now. "You all really do think you're fated, don't you?"
He comes around to stand in front of her, taking up her other hand without making her feel like he's about to make a declaration. He has a way of making pronouncements sometimes seem ordinary, logical, easy; as much as his simplest turns of phrase often come out like ceremony. She's not sure which this is, actually: "We are. You are."
She hears him, his tone, calm and sure, but his eyes are still taking and taking from her, as if he'd take as much as she'd let him have. For two years now, she thinks; for two years, I have wanted to let him.
She doesn't turn away from his gaze now, but she does say: "Is there a particular reason you look at me completely different from how you kiss me?"
"Kara," he says quite seriously. "I haven't kissed you enough times for you to know what different really is, yet."
He's watching the sky-their sky, bigger than it ever seemed from a viper, not even the day she flew into the nebula-and looking ridiculously serious-like a teenage boy or something, and for all she knows his copy is about that old-and she feels laughter come bubbling up from inside her, so she lets it. She laughs so long she feels tears stinging her eyes.
He watches her curiously until she takes her hand back to wipe the tears away. He stops her, and on his way to kissing her cheek, her jaw, her neck, he kisses the tears from the corners of her eyes. She can't still herself, not with his mouth traveling her skin or his body drifting to hers, his hips fitting in against her hips. She tries not to mind. She just waits.
When he seems to pause, smiling against her throat, she murmurs about his bullshit poetry and for no good reason calls him a crappy-ass carpenter. She feels her ribs drop and her breath fill up her lungs again just before he kisses her suddenly on the mouth-hard, then soft and open, tongue probing wet and a little sloppy into her mouth.
He kisses her until she very nearly forgets where she is, except for the wind whipping her hair up. When he pulls out of the kiss, he pushes it back behind her ears, saying, "I guess you'll have to live in a crappy-ass house, then, Special."
Then he pushes her back into the slats of the cabin wall, his body much less careful than his mouth. Her mouth is the one careful here, to call him Leoben just as much as the familiar Gideon. She wonders if she's crazy. Clearly she is. But so is he. He doesn't understand this any better than she does. It's as comforting as anything could be.
Her lips gasp open when his hands slip up under her shirt, skating over her stomach. His palms are rough against her skin.
She says, "Maybe you're gonna let me build the house. Ever think of that?"
"I'll let you do whatthefrakever you want, boss," he murmurs in her ear.
And he mostly does-not that he doesn't argue with her sometimes, the same inscrutable way this barren land does. He bends over backwards to please her like the wide night sky throws out its stars for anyone who is willing to stand, small, among them. He is solid under her feet like parched ground from which tenacious things can grow.
*
One night over warm beer and something called potato salad that makes her wonder how they survived algae so long, he tells her his vision came weeks, months after he met her. He didn't have a plan or a mission when he came to her site, other than to see her.
One cool morning as they wait for the supply truck, she tells him she didn't think she'd like the way he fraks her slow and kind, though she does. This is not to say it's the only way he fraks her.
As days stretch to weeks, as this project, one of so many here at central, comes to a close, she no longer misinterprets his patience for certainty. It's still charming as hell, easy enough to fall into when she chooses, but now she knows it's not all he has. And she knows precisely how to push against him when she wants to, that what she'll get is exactly what she wants to handle. She has her own visions, and none of them involve punishing him for something that happened to another her. She doesn't, however, think of this Leoben as another him. Then that man would have to be another Gideon, and she doesn't know if she'll ever be ready for that.
Leoben talks to her of everything, but especially of the nativeamericans. And he listens to her tell about the lords of Kobol he doesn't believe in. They never quite agree who the sky belongs to, but they agree to disagree.
*
One day as he's up repairing the hospital's smokestack, he takes a bad fall off the roof, bad enough he asks an Eight, Alpha Pi Galactica (who rather likes being Sharon), to put him out. She not sure which of them she's angrier with, but that's only temporary. Temporary like his absence will be, she's sure. Mostly. He knows what kind of woman she is. She knows what kind of man he is, too, so she knows it's possible he might not come back from his odyssey at all.
But he does, walking through the gate one bright chilly morning halfway to lunch. He doesn't smell like sawdust and plaster, and all the scars he had acquired learning carpentry-on his ankle from a hammer, on his thumb from a putty knife, on his forehead from a low beam-are gone.
She knows him anyway. He knows her, too-by the way she throws him on her bed and fraks him hard like it's a cure for his brandnewness, by how she doesn't say I love you, only took you long enough.
~
Pairing: Kara/Leoben
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Set a few years after finding earth, and assuming a previous truce of some productive sort between the fleet and the Cylons. Oh, and there's carpentry. 4500 words.
Note: This is not the New Caprica Leoben; I can't deal with him. But I don't at all ignore Kara's history with the model. General spoilers for season four.
This is one of the weirder fics I've ever written. Not crack, just odd.
For super_kc, whose fault this is. And for lunar47.
Reservation
Two years he waits, just to touch her. Two years is a long time, long enough for her to learn to admire that quality that is always there, in every Leoben she's ever known: patience born of absolute certainty.
Two years is somehow long enough for her to learn to admire Leoben.
Every day he registers at the gate and receives his orders for work. It's day to day, piecemeal: the gods are as capricious as the weather and sometimes as elusive as supplies here where the only real god is crew boss Thrace. For four months last summer, he scorched and burned up on that roof because she wanted him there, out of sight. He said nothing to her about it, though he could have. They made casual conversation often enough, at least when he was on the ground. He didn't complain, but when she finally reassigned him to drywall, to help a crew that was falling behind, he smiled at her, that frankly devastating smile (the one that rattles back along her nerves to her instincts, until she's finally learned to stop that feeling in its tracks), and said, I was absolutely ready for a change of pace, boss.
She doesn't like being his boss. Or maybe she does. Likes the way he drinks her in with his eyes. Hates it. She's watched him-staring down off the roof and through the unfiltered sunlight, over the barren prairie-enough to know he's crazy. He's crazy if he can be that centered and still look at her like she is the missing piece of his life. It's a contradiction, and even if it weren't, it still bugs her. She is no one's piece of anything. And if she has missing pieces of her own, no one can fill them but herself.
Over this long cool late spring, they put up the frame. The joists hold and the weather cooperates. He consumes her with his eyes, and he talks to her about only the dry land, the open sky, the scarce water, the sparse trees. God. Gods. Those, too, of the native people who used to live here. The two of them wonder aloud to whom these things belong. To whoever can hold them, she says. (This earth is not her earth after all, but she will make it so.) He: To whoever can understand them. She is sure there's no middle ground.
Still, it is not an impasse but a conversation-despite some long silent days of hard work and contemplation, it feels unbroken each time they pick up the ends and fit them back together. They talk in calm weather and flashes of rain and dust storms, on concrete and dry ground and treated lumber, through tar and studs and grout.
One day as he washes his hands of that ever-present white powder and russet dust, he tells her resurrecting is actually messy business. Sticky. It is the first time they talk about the Cylons as if he is one, as if he is, after all, another copy of a model. It's easier to forget than she thought it might be. That makes her extraordinarily nervous.
He tells her about the baths in details and tones nothing like the books and data files, but she doesn't ask him any questions. After all, she knows what resurrection is, even if she didn't reboot on some ship. Even though she didn't really die, that does not mean she hasn't somehow been reborn. She has a feeling it was a process a lot slower than awakening one day, alive again. Rebirth does not bring new skin any more than it brings a new mind. It must be true for him, too.
But the point is she is different, and she thinks it has something to do with this sky-hers and this Leoben's. This sky-of the now-gone nativeamericans and of the Federally Protected Allies of the Last Colony of Kobol, state of arizona, south central reservation.
*
When it happens, they're standing out behind the supply trailer, just done hauling flats of shingles onto a wagon. His hands leave smudges on her arms, hers on his neck. Standing just inside her sphere of personal space, close enough she can smell him and feel the heat from his body, he looks precisely like he does every day as he walks through the gate, smiling mysteriously at her, but with a hint of friendly mischief. It's vaguely infuriating. It's vaguely a lot of other things, too, some she chooses not to think too hard on.
As his lips slide along the curve of her jaw, exploratory and soft despite rough stubble, she shivers and pushes back against him. He knows she's not pushing him away. That much he's learned in negotiating how they interact-what's allowed, how to read her. He is no different from the rest of her crew now: poking and prodding her, giving her sly looks and meeting her outright sarcasm with sarcasm of his own. But he is different from the rest of the crew. And he ought to know that she's shoving him now because she wants him to be Leoben, dammit. Whatever that means.
"Not made of glass," she mumbles, frustration mingled with deliberate friendly invitation. "I may bend a hell of a lot, may even like to, but I don't break."
"Never heard you say things like that." The wind almost carries his words away. He could so easily float away, blow back into the wide world he came from. Or maybe he could never be blown, not since he doesn't seem to want to be. He adds, "To me, I mean."
"'Cause you don't try to break me."
"You know why."
She lets her lips rest against his and breathes into his mouth, wanting to taste him again, but something in his voice gives her pause. So she shoves at him with words now:
"You came here, all the way from the City, took the trouble to get an official permanent pass and everything, to do something, and I sure as hell know it wasn't to write poetry on a half-tarred roof."
He smiles, and his body shakes with a warm chuckle, still warming as he says, voice full, "I don't write poetry, Kara."
But he does, in his way. Still: "I know that." Then, like a childhood dare: "So show me what it is you came to do."
He smiles and leans in close again. But he kisses her like she's not who she is.
She wonders, briefly, if maybe he knows her better than she knows herself. He has this way of reviving a certain scary fear of hers that she'll never dig deep enough to truly see to the bottom of herself. Because she wants to, now, doesn't she? Maybe if she would let him show her…
But when his tongue licks into her mouth, slow and tentative-not exactly hesitant but still too careful-she understands:
He doesn't really know me.
It makes her nearly giddy-not just the not knowing but the obvious wanting to know.
She wants to frak him, even behind the supply trailer. It's been too damn long here, isolated; knowing but unknown. And it's not like she hasn't frakked a Cylon before (there was that Doral, a musician called Picon John; there was her husband, lost along the way). But she doesn't.
Instead, she holds him tight around the waist, asks against his throat, "How old are you?"
He draws in a breath before he answers. When he speaks, that thing under his chin the americans call an adams apple (after the only child of one of their gods), vibrates against her mouth.
"How do you mean?" he asks. "Compared to you?"
"Not everything is relative to me." Not here, certainly. Especially not here.
But he says, "We are all relative to you."
When she shivers, he holds tighter, tightly enough. He murmurs warmly, "Way younger than you. But less young than some."
"So you really don't…" Her breath escapes in a warm sigh of air, and she can't help but smile.
"What?" When she doesn't answer immediately, just grins at him enigmatically, his eyes narrow. "Frak, what?"
It's as funny as hearing one of her old pilots talking to her over the telephone, slipping and saying fuck. And his impatience, too. She giggles and buries her face against his collarbone. "Nevermind."
"Kara."
"It's just… Well, you really don't know everything, do you?"
"Hmm?"
"You always seem like you know…everything, but you don't even understand why you're doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Exactly."
"Kara." Two syllables of naked frustration, then he's suddenly focusing everything down, making that face like he makes as he drives a nail, even if his voice is still so calm. "I know exactly what I think I'm doing and why. But if you expect me to understand myself any better than anybody else understands themselves, or you, well…"
She says with a twinkle in her eye: "You understand the sky."
He grins. "And you understand a good half of what I say is bullshit, don't you?"
"Thought that was poetry."
He snorts.
She leans in again and presses her face to his neck, rubs her nose against the hollow below his ear. "What ever made you think this mystical crap was a way to get in my pants?"
"Didn't know I was trying."
"Well, then, I'm disappointed."
His smile holds just long enough, then it fades out with a sigh. "It's what I know, that's all."
It only occurs to her then that she said such things to a Two without thinking. It only occurs to her much later that she didn't actually say such things to a Two but to him.
The next morning, when he comes through the gate to register, she puts him on clearing brush on the west side of the lot; difficult, parching work. It's nothing personal. Actually, it is: she suspects it will suit him.
At high sun, so much higher than it ever was on New Caprica, and brighter, too, she brings the small crew lunch and sits with them to eat. They are two Simons (neither Simon, though), two old marines who are just as contrary as she is, a brown-haired Six who calls herself Nine to be equally contrary or maybe just absurd, and Leoben.
"Gideon," she says, slapping a twist of bread and a jar of water into his hand. He came into the fleet aboard the Gideon. By the Colonial government, before earth, he was designated Two, Beta Gideon, just as Six who was Nine was legally Six, Omicron Prometheus. The American government designated her Kara Thrace, G14378.
But he greets her with a name this new country had nothing to do with: "Destiny."
When she's being particularly cranky, the crew calls her Destiny Comma Special, even the handful of oddball americans who don't know what the frak it means, who haven't earned it. Sometimes they call her simply Special, but mostly Destiny, because most days are good days, even when they're tough. She doesn't mind so much, either the hard work or the nickname. The word no longer means anything; it's just a sound, no different than Starbuck, a meaning all its own of her sharp gaze and her thick skin.
As she hands him the jar, she stares at him long enough it makes them both a little nervous, but she doesn't look away.
"What is it you're doing?" she finally asks. He raises his eyebrows, and she wants to kiss the quizzical quirk of his mouth. She adds, using one of his own all-knowing faces, but this one warmed with teasing: "And why?"
He smiles, understanding, but it takes him a moment to fabricate a suitable answer. "Having a place to sleep. Getting fed. Learning how to build things."
She imagines that he's learned a lot. So did she, in her first handful of years here, as the reservation began to take shape. There are still weeks and weeks left to go before this hospital is built. But there have already been weeks and weeks of work, and of her waiting for something to change that might never if she doesn't let it.
Slyly smiling, she says, "Well, haven't you learned enough by now?"
He doesn't reply, but when she finishes her own piece of bread, he offers her his jar and she takes a long drink without taking her eyes off him.
Determination, she thinks as she walks back toward the site, stepping between immature Joshua trees as she goes. Determination: the middle ground between them, between waiting forever and not being content with the wait.
*
The next night, he comes to her cabin with nothing in his hands. He simply coaxes her out the door and stands beside her as the wind whips around them and they look out over the empty prairie. It is the edge of the reservation, and they can see nothing but dark land and sky scattered with stars almost as bright as they looked from a viper. She misses it until she thinks her heart will burst, but she's come to realize that she would miss this too, should they be allowed to go back up.
"What if I were to tell you I had a vision?" he says, breaking the silence. "Would that…worry you?"
She snorts, grinning. "Tell you the truth, it kind of freaks me out that you don't have them daily."
"Shut up," he grumbles, smiling, too.
She mock salutes. "Sure thing, Gid."
Their easy grins settle into quiet and solemnity; peace, in a way she'd never thought of when she dreamed of earth. Certainly not with him beside her. But earth was not what she dreamed. Even the City, miles away from them that might as well be FTL jumps, more like Caprica City than New Caprica ever was, was not what she dreamed.
The problem was she didn't actually know what to dream. Now she dreams of this, and it's enough. They've all had to find their own enoughs here. She wonders what his might be.
"So?" she says. "This vision…?"
"What if I said I'd seen you in a house I built for you?"
She can only think of one thing to ask, and quickly, before the whip of the wind can spread too much full silence: "Were you in it, too?"
He nods, then he touches her hand and she doesn't jump. He doesn't hold very tightly.
He says, "Do you know how projection works? I mean, what we do?"
"Vaguely."
"Doesn't matter anyway, I guess. All it means: we see ourselves where we'd rather be. Sometimes I'm not on that roof. Or between those walls or out pulling stubborn bushes out of the ground. But I am when you're there. I don't project when I'm with you."
"No?" Adrenaline washes into her bloodstream all at once, like she's been storing it in the reservoir at the meeting hall along with the drinking water for days and now she's carrying it out to this fringe of the town. Always the fringe for her. She's been moving further and further from what people expect her to be and do until she feels like she's at the edge of the world now. It's been calming, rejuvenating; it's never been close to panic, not like this.
But it's not panic, she tells herself. It's certainty, for once in a long time. Two years, maybe.
She laughs nervously. "Hell, I would. Project us a real world to live in and not this frakkin' reservation."
Oh, but he knows. "You didn't have to sign on with the Cylons when they chucked us out here, away from the City."
"We're all Cylons here," she says with a shake of her head. "This is where I want to be, for reasons that aren't just about wrangling FPA skinjobs for the unitedstates government. And you didn't have to come all the way out here. There are reservations nearer home."
"It's not home."
"I know."
He frowns for a moment, and she watches the outline of his face, the way he stares out at the land the same way she does. Sees different things, but his gaze is the same. He's not projecting now.
The frown softens and he pitches his energy back toward her without even looking at her. "Does it bother you that I'll see the work of our hands long after you're gone?"
She shrugs. "Does it bother you?"
"Sometimes." He goes on past that idea without descending into it, mercifully. "Anyway, I mention projection because I'm not sure if what I've seen is real. It might just be in my head." A wistful, negligibly bitter smile blooms on his face. "But isn't that what your cooperative anthropologists say about us? Us Twos. Delusional? Schizophrenic?"
"It's not fair."
It's really not. He's so solid standing there beside her. He's no more crazy than anyone else. He's twice as deeply beautiful, though, for all the things he feels, things that have nothing to do with circuitry. She wants to put her hands on him, not just feel his hand warm in hers, the only warm solid thing in this cool night; but she finds it difficult to let herself twist together with him again without wanting to bury herself against him, hide in a way she has promised herself she never will again.
He's saying, "Life isn't fair. Live long enough and you come to know that. 'Course, I don't have to tell you that. But, really, a little disassociation from your head can be a good thing."
"Why haven't you tried to frak me?" she says suddenly. She's never been good at disassociation. He's always been Leoben. But he doesn't know what that means to her, not what it means now. "Is it about New Caprica?" she says, before she can stop herself. "Because I know-"
"You don't know anything," he replies quietly.
He does that spooky thing with his voice, then, that cadence that's mesmerizing, almost soothing-if you could listen to the sounds and not the meaning:
"Have you thought about it, how you might need to slice me open one day? Even after we live in that house together and sleep in that bed, together. Life realigns itself, new things fall into old places or old in new, and a person takes time to adjust, if she does at all. He never adjusted to what you really are. You came down on him like a hammer, and you broke him." Suddenly, that rhythm falters, and his voice even cracks as he speeds up: "I'm not saying he didn't deserve it, or that he didn't do a hell of a lot worse to you, but you happened to him as much as he happened to you." Then he pitches back into that tone: "I made my decision to be here, to stay here where you are, knowing what I know about your past, but I had to decide if I could-"
She hadn't been able to move or even breathe as he spoke, but she finally finds herself jerking out of it. She's suddenly shaking as if she's cold when she feels a little bit like she's on fire.
"Frak, I've known dozens now. You know that, right? If I hadn't wanted Twos on my site, I didn't have to have any of you, perm cards or not. That's how much pull I still have. But I've never met any that weren't scared to death of… So I didn't set out boundaries. Didn't think I needed any."
"You don't like them anyway," he says, a little too knowingly.
"And it's not like I've been out looking to tempt fate or…frak, I don't know what. I don't know what the hell I'm looking for sometimes. But it wasn't for this. So if you think you could even possibly…"
"No," he says softly. "I meant you. You might need to kill me someday for nothing I've ever done. I had to decide if I could deal with that."
"Oh."
He just nods and turns his gaze back to the dark landscape.
"What if I decided before you did?" she says a moment later. "What if I…back when you came, two years ago? What if I decided? Would you have run from me?"
"From Destiny?" he says with a soft, roguish smile. "No."
"Jesus," she swears.
She picked that one up from Lee, talking to him through the telephone, all the way in Washington. He knows words now that make no sense to her, no more than her talk of construction makes to him. Both of them, though, talking foundations in their own ways. He is where he belongs; she's begun to think of herself as belonging here, too, not just passing the time, not just avoiding the big bright City that's no more free than they were free pent up and adrift on Galactica.
"Special, my ass," she grouses. What does it mean, after all, to be the one to have brought them all here? Given the choice again…
"You are."
"As if it's not as much about you as me," she grumbles, more good-naturedly now. "You all really do think you're fated, don't you?"
He comes around to stand in front of her, taking up her other hand without making her feel like he's about to make a declaration. He has a way of making pronouncements sometimes seem ordinary, logical, easy; as much as his simplest turns of phrase often come out like ceremony. She's not sure which this is, actually: "We are. You are."
She hears him, his tone, calm and sure, but his eyes are still taking and taking from her, as if he'd take as much as she'd let him have. For two years now, she thinks; for two years, I have wanted to let him.
She doesn't turn away from his gaze now, but she does say: "Is there a particular reason you look at me completely different from how you kiss me?"
"Kara," he says quite seriously. "I haven't kissed you enough times for you to know what different really is, yet."
He's watching the sky-their sky, bigger than it ever seemed from a viper, not even the day she flew into the nebula-and looking ridiculously serious-like a teenage boy or something, and for all she knows his copy is about that old-and she feels laughter come bubbling up from inside her, so she lets it. She laughs so long she feels tears stinging her eyes.
He watches her curiously until she takes her hand back to wipe the tears away. He stops her, and on his way to kissing her cheek, her jaw, her neck, he kisses the tears from the corners of her eyes. She can't still herself, not with his mouth traveling her skin or his body drifting to hers, his hips fitting in against her hips. She tries not to mind. She just waits.
When he seems to pause, smiling against her throat, she murmurs about his bullshit poetry and for no good reason calls him a crappy-ass carpenter. She feels her ribs drop and her breath fill up her lungs again just before he kisses her suddenly on the mouth-hard, then soft and open, tongue probing wet and a little sloppy into her mouth.
He kisses her until she very nearly forgets where she is, except for the wind whipping her hair up. When he pulls out of the kiss, he pushes it back behind her ears, saying, "I guess you'll have to live in a crappy-ass house, then, Special."
Then he pushes her back into the slats of the cabin wall, his body much less careful than his mouth. Her mouth is the one careful here, to call him Leoben just as much as the familiar Gideon. She wonders if she's crazy. Clearly she is. But so is he. He doesn't understand this any better than she does. It's as comforting as anything could be.
Her lips gasp open when his hands slip up under her shirt, skating over her stomach. His palms are rough against her skin.
She says, "Maybe you're gonna let me build the house. Ever think of that?"
"I'll let you do whatthefrakever you want, boss," he murmurs in her ear.
And he mostly does-not that he doesn't argue with her sometimes, the same inscrutable way this barren land does. He bends over backwards to please her like the wide night sky throws out its stars for anyone who is willing to stand, small, among them. He is solid under her feet like parched ground from which tenacious things can grow.
*
One night over warm beer and something called potato salad that makes her wonder how they survived algae so long, he tells her his vision came weeks, months after he met her. He didn't have a plan or a mission when he came to her site, other than to see her.
One cool morning as they wait for the supply truck, she tells him she didn't think she'd like the way he fraks her slow and kind, though she does. This is not to say it's the only way he fraks her.
As days stretch to weeks, as this project, one of so many here at central, comes to a close, she no longer misinterprets his patience for certainty. It's still charming as hell, easy enough to fall into when she chooses, but now she knows it's not all he has. And she knows precisely how to push against him when she wants to, that what she'll get is exactly what she wants to handle. She has her own visions, and none of them involve punishing him for something that happened to another her. She doesn't, however, think of this Leoben as another him. Then that man would have to be another Gideon, and she doesn't know if she'll ever be ready for that.
Leoben talks to her of everything, but especially of the nativeamericans. And he listens to her tell about the lords of Kobol he doesn't believe in. They never quite agree who the sky belongs to, but they agree to disagree.
*
One day as he's up repairing the hospital's smokestack, he takes a bad fall off the roof, bad enough he asks an Eight, Alpha Pi Galactica (who rather likes being Sharon), to put him out. She not sure which of them she's angrier with, but that's only temporary. Temporary like his absence will be, she's sure. Mostly. He knows what kind of woman she is. She knows what kind of man he is, too, so she knows it's possible he might not come back from his odyssey at all.
But he does, walking through the gate one bright chilly morning halfway to lunch. He doesn't smell like sawdust and plaster, and all the scars he had acquired learning carpentry-on his ankle from a hammer, on his thumb from a putty knife, on his forehead from a low beam-are gone.
She knows him anyway. He knows her, too-by the way she throws him on her bed and fraks him hard like it's a cure for his brandnewness, by how she doesn't say I love you, only took you long enough.
~