BSG Fic: A Brief History of Starbuck and Apollo (Part 1/2)
TITLE: A Brief History of Starbuck and Apollo (Part 1/2)
AUTHOR: daphnaea
RATING: PG-13?
SPOILERS: None in Part 1
WORD COUNT: 3,483
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, I just got them on loan from the library. They’re due back in three weeks. I promise not to turn down their corners or spill anything on them.
PAIRINGS: Kara/Lee, Kara/Zak
SUMMARY: Secretly, she thought that in his pantheon, she would be Artemis, his twin, his darker self, the untamed goddess of the hunt. If anyone else had suggested it, she would have hit him. Part 1 is pre-mini, Part 2 (when I write it) will carry the story on through season 1.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This fic came about after I read a bunch of other stories about Lee and Kara at the Academy (many of which are truly excellent), and I noticed that in most of them (or at least the ones I read first), if anything at all sexual happens, Lee initiates it and Kara freaks out and plays it off as drunkenness or a brief mistake or just runs away. And I thought that since in general she’s the impetuous one and he’s the repressed one, the opposite would probably be more likely - especially since Kara was obviously willing to take the risk of getting involved with Zak. So I decided to do the story my way...
* * * * *
Kara Thrace never had the things that other little girls had. She never had parents who loved her. She never had girlfriends who came over to play after school. She never had anyone who believed in her. So she took other things, things no one else had, instead. When the other girls played with dolls, she played with model planes. When the other girls let the bullies push them around, Kara hit back. Sometimes she’d come home with a black eye or split lip and her mother would smile that cold, cold smile and press too hard on the bruise and Kara would promise herself that she would never be such a woman, that she would be all fire and no ice. Later, when the other girls painted each other’s nails and went shopping in gangs, Kara spent her time with the boys instead. Because while the girls would want to know her, the boys just wanted to frak her or fight her, and those things she could do.
After seventeen years in her parents’ house, she arrived at the Academy and for the first time she felt like she was home. There were no more object lessons in the sanctity of pain. Compared to her mother, the instructors were like doting uncles. Suddenly there was more to life than surviving, and Kara grabbed it with both hands, sucking everything in, the contents of every bottle and every textbook, every card game and every brawl. On the schoolyard she’d always been a tough girl, but at home she’d been weak, and that was something she would never be again. So she hit the gym as hard as she hit the library, pushing her body until she was sure that it could protect her, that she was no longer anyone’s baby. She ran loops around the track, mile after pounding mile, unsure if she was running away from something or towards it, just knowing that she needed the motion, the distance, the burn of hot air in her throat.
She learned a lot, that first year at the Academy. She learned that if the Gods had given her poor luck in childhood, they were now compensating her with excellent luck at the triad table. She learned that she was made to fly. That first stint in the flight simulators - the second week of classes, just to prove to all of them how much they had to learn - had whet a thirst which would never be sated. And she had, of all the amazing things, somehow, through instinct and luck and bravado, not died. She knew she was supposed to have been blown out of the sky like all her classmates, and the unexpected success led her, for the first time, to believe that she might actually be good for something after all.
By her second year she was already a legend. No one else quite understood how she could pull off the stunts that left others in broken birds and missile locks. Part of it was an intuitive grasp of tactics and physics and spatial relations. Part of it was the fact that where others feared death, she chased it, hungry for the near miss, the impossible odds, the fast hot blaze of glory that seemed the only fitting end to a life she’d never been sure she wanted in the first place.
It was in that second year that she met Lee. He wasn’t like the other guys - he didn’t seem to want to frak her or fight her or indeed even beat her at cards, but he wasn’t like the girls, either - he didn’t ask prying questions or gossip. He just watched her, obvious without being creepy, and then introduced himself - she’d known who he was, of course, but he always had a weakness for good manners - and then he was simply there. She didn’t know what had drawn him to her and she never asked, she just accepted his presence, sharing a table in the mess hall or the library, keeping pace with her around the track in the mornings. He couldn’t quite keep up with her in the flight sims, but he put up a hell of a lot more of a fight than any of the other cadets. And he, in turn, accepted her. She’d never had any idea what that was like, before - to be known without intrusion, to be accepted without judgment. She’d never known anyone who just wanted her to be herself. He tutored her in history and she taught him new tricks in the sims, he bailed her out of hack with a smirk and a throwaway line, and sometimes even joined her in it.
Their entire time at the Academy, he only outflew her twice. The first time was at the end of their second year, when there was a rumor going around that Lee had only gotten in because of his father. The first time she heard it, Kara simply punched the guy who said it and kept punching until he took it back. The second time, she realized more drastic measures were called for. So she arranged an audience the next time they went up against each other in the sims, and after a long and spectacular chase, she slowed herself down just the smallest bit, and flew straight into his trap. After they both climbed out, he looked dazed and almost confused, and she grinned and hit him in the shoulder and said, “I must be losing my touch,” and the rumor stopped. Later, in the library, he looked up from his book and asked if she’d let him take her down. She looked him in the eye and said, “You deserved that win.” Then she smirked. “But next time, your ass is mine.” He rolled his eyes and went back to studying. The next time around, she shot him down in record time, just to prove she still could. He was unfazed. For someone who expected unending perfection from himself, he was a remarkably gracious loser.
As a person more prone to action than introspection, Kara didn’t spend much time thinking about their friendship. She knew she was grateful for it, she knew that in some way she depended on it, and she knew that she’d fought for him, lied for him, and would if it ever came down to it die for him, but that was about it. When he pissed her off she told him, and when he wouldn’t listen she took a swing at him. He hit back, which she liked. He was always right there with her, laugh for laugh, drink for drink, blow for blow, her equal and opposite, reason to her passion, constant sun to her fickle moon. They orbited each other, locked in a gravitational dance of distance and momentum. Their days together were endless, and they lavished time on each other, lavished irritation and silliness and impatience on one another as if their whole lives would be spent in staring contests and triad games and arguments about who started which fight. They would have been taken for a couple, were it not for the fact that they both openly frakked other people, and were it not for the fact that no one had ever seen them kiss. Had anyone been paying attention, they might have noticed that most of Kara’s conquests came on nights she’d been flying with Lee. There was just something about being out there alone with him, nothing between them but empty space and death, that made her want to grab the next willing body and make some friction.
Later, after they were flying real Vipers and the sims were just for fun, they got their callsigns, and Kara was privately pleased by his. Apollo. The sungod, archer, lord of healing and reason. Secretly, she thought that in his pantheon, she would be Artemis, his twin, his darker self, the untamed goddess of the hunt. If anyone else had suggested it, she would have hit him.
The second time he outflew her, he did it fair and square, taking her down at the end of a dance so intricately lethal that she didn’t even mind losing - or at least, she didn’t mind much. And when she climbed out of the sim (because it had just been a private contest, just their regular weekly fun) her body was thrumming with adrenaline and just the feel of her clothes pulling against her when she moved made her want to rub up against something and she looked around but the only person in the room was Lee. And for the first time it occurred to her that he could be this for her, that she didn’t need to find someone else when the only person who felt what she did was standing two meters away from her. It seemed so perfect and obvious, so simple and logical that she couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought of it before. But Lee had always treated her with a kind of off-color formality that put her somewhere between ‘sister’ and ‘friend,’ and as she had no precedents for their relationship, she had accepted that designation without question. In her world, there were the men she frakked and, if she was lucky, there was a friend or two, and she’d never really considered that both roles could be played by one person. At that point she was sharing a room with Lee and two other cadets, so they’d seen each other naked and neither of them had made an issue of it, but he’d given her the occasional appreciative glance when he thought she wouldn’t notice. And she certainly knew he had all the necessary equipment.
Of course she realized that sleeping with him was bound to change their friendship. But she’d been lucky, lately, and she was never one to back down in the pursuit of what she wanted, never one to wait and see when she could just jump into the fight, so she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and took him out for a congratulatory drink, and arranged for their roommates to be gone when she brought him home, and when their door was closed behind him she pushed him against the wall and kissed him. For a single second he responded, then he pushed her away.
“Are you kidding around?” he demanded.
Her eyebrows went up. “Is that what it felt like to you?” she asked. “Because maybe I was doing it wrong.”
“Kara, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” she told him. “Look, we’re good together, aren’t we? I just thought…” She shrugged. “Maybe we’d be good like this, too.”
“Look, it’s an appealing thought, but I just can’t see this ending well.”
“Ending? Come on, Lee, I haven’t planned as far as breakfast tomorrow. I just… don’t you want this? Don’t you want to know what it’d be like?”
“Sometimes we want things that aren’t good for us.” His voice was gentle, but the shutters dropped down behind her eyes.
“Suit yourself,” she said flippantly, turning away. “I’m gonna go find some better company.” She headed for the door, eyes stinging. She’d actually thought he was different. She’d actually thought he believed in her. But when it came down to it, she wasn’t good enough for him. Good enough to drink with, good enough to fight with… But not good enough to love. And she’d been a fool to ever have thought otherwise. She was a fool because she hadn’t even seen it coming.
“Kara,” he called after her, but she was already gone.
* * * * *
She spent that night alone with a bottle of ambrosia, but in the two weeks that followed he caught her in bed with first one of their roommates, then the other. It was on the second occasion that he began to realize how much he’d hurt her. At first he’d told himself she’d just been offering him a simple frak, just a night to celebrate his victory, but she wouldn’t be trying so hard to hurt him if there wasn’t more to it than that. He thought back to what she’d said and what he’d said and the more he thought about it, the stupider he felt. She hadn’t been offering him sex. She’d been offering him herself. And he’d thrown it away. He still didn’t know what he wanted from her, but it wasn’t what they had now, which was pretty much nothing. She’d moved her things out of their room one day while he was in class, and he didn’t know where she was staying. She didn’t jog in the mornings or study in the library, and in the one class they had together she sat in a corner surrounded by friends and never looked at him. It was another week before he finally cornered her in the mess hall.
He sat down at her table without asking permission. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.
She looked up from the book she’d been reading and shrugged, eyes flat and mocking. “You made your feelings pretty clear last time we talked. I didn’t figure there was much more to say.”
“I was an ass the last time we talked. Look… You kind of caught me off guard.”
“No wonder I always beat you. Pilots are supposed to think fast in unexpected, high pressure situations.”
“I’m trying to apologize, here. Will you let me do that?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you. I never wanted to do that.”
“Seems like there’s a lot of things you don’t want to do,” she quipped with an unpleasant smile.
“Hey, I admit that I handled things wrong.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But I don’t just jump into things the way you do.”
“So next time I want you to take a risk, I’ll just send you a formal proposal in triplicate. Except that oh, there isn’t going to be a next time. Never mind.”
“So we can’t be friends anymore because I didn’t want to frak you?”
She got up and left. He put the incident down as his all time worst apology.
After that, she didn’t avoid him anymore, but she didn’t seek him out, either. She’d jog with him if he showed up at the right time and sit at a table with him if there were other people around, too, but she was crueler, more sarcastic. She didn’t carry grudges, but she also didn’t exactly forgive. And in the light of her angry, smoldering eyes, he forgot that he’d never gotten around to telling her what she meant to him, that he’d never really asked her for a second chance. By the time they graduated, they weren’t StarbuckandApollo anymore. She was already working as an assistant flight instructor for the newest cadets, and he was spending more of his time in Caprica City, where he’d found a girlfriend, a preschool teacher with dark hair and hazel eyes who had never flown anything in her life. She was appreciative and undemanding and would never hit him, or even push him up against a wall.
After graduation, they went their separate ways and for the most part didn’t look back. She rarely thought of him by the time she met Zak. She had to look twice before she even noticed he was an Adama. She was curious about him, of course, but that first year he wasn’t in the classes she taught, so they might never have gotten to know each other if he hadn’t made an effort. Once a week the instructors ate lunch in the cadets’ mess hall to improve student-faculty relations, and it was at such a lunch that Zak plopped down next to her at the table, grinned, and said, “I had to meet the woman who blew my brother up a hundred times.”
She’d smiled at how young he was and told him, “Your brother did shoot me down once or twice as well.”
She’d been prepared to hate him because he was like Lee, or to hate him because he wasn’t like Lee, but she hadn’t been prepared for the reality of Zak, who had so much of his brother’s intelligence and charm, and none of his discipline and sober responsibility. She allowed him to befriend her because it was impossible to say no to him, and because to Zak, she was never really Starbuck, she was always Kara, always a woman, always beautiful. Where Lee had pushed her and teased her and fought her, Zak simply adored her. Where she and Lee were opposites, where Lee had pushed her into being more herself than ever before, Zak was too much like her - he changed her, softened her, made her think that maybe life could also happen outside a Viper cockpit. She didn’t mean to fall in love with him, but she liked dancing, so she said yes when he asked, and she found that she didn’t mind when his hand strayed down her back, or when he pulled her close, or even when he kissed her outside on the street. Their first night together, she kept her eyes open the whole time because she was afraid that if she closed them, she might see Lee’s face. But when she woke up in his arms he was all Zak, sweet and open and offering up his whole heart on a platter. How could she say no? It was so much more than anyone else had ever given her. It was easy to be with him, and she smiled more, and drank less, and almost never hit anyone. It didn’t particularly bother her that their relationship was against the rules - they were discreet, and as long as no one got hurt, she didn’t see what the problem was.
* * * * *
When Lee found out about them, his first reaction was to wonder whether she was using Zak to hurt him, but by the time he got leave to visit, he’d realized that didn’t quite make sense. For one thing, it had just been too long. For another, what his brother described was a lot more than a quick frak, which was about all Kara was willing to put forth in the cause of vengeance. And Kara was always careful to select targets who wouldn’t mind much when she rolled out of bed and left them. She was fair that way - she didn’t hurt other men to punish him. And Zak had definitely gotten attached. So by the time he landed on Caprica he didn’t know what to think. But within minutes of meeting up with them, it was clear that their relationship had nothing to do with him. When they looked at each other, he was invisible. First he hoped that Zak wouldn’t frak things up with Kara the way he had, because she looked happy for the first time in years and he didn’t want anything to take that away. His second thought was that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Zak screwed up, because then maybe he’d have another chance with her. Of course he dismissed that thought immediately as unworthy of all of them. They were happy. And he would be happy for them.
And he was, for the most part. Or at least he told himself he was, when he thought about it at all. For the most part he tried not to think about it. He found a girlfriend with red hair and blue eyes who worked in advertising and liked to be handcuffed to the bed, but of course after a while she got sick of the long waits between his visits.
And then their little world ended in fire and death and he found out that Kara had almost become his sister the same day he found out that she wasn’t going to, after all. He didn’t see her until the funeral and by that time they were both so lost in their private hells that they barely saw each other. Afterwards, at his mother’s house, it occurred to him that she must be shattered, that she must need someone, so he asked about her, and was told that she’d gone somewhere with his father. And the mention of his father made him so angry that he forgot about her again. Later, he found out she’d been reassigned to Galactica. First he’d lost her to Zak, and now he’d lost her to the Old Man. For the most part he tried not to think about it.
And then all the worlds ended, in fire and death, and there she was, so alive he could taste it from half a meter away when he just felt shell shocked and empty, and she smiled at him, and despite a certain hardness in the back of her eyes, he began to believe that there might still be a life for him, here after the end of all things.
AUTHOR: daphnaea
RATING: PG-13?
SPOILERS: None in Part 1
WORD COUNT: 3,483
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, I just got them on loan from the library. They’re due back in three weeks. I promise not to turn down their corners or spill anything on them.
PAIRINGS: Kara/Lee, Kara/Zak
SUMMARY: Secretly, she thought that in his pantheon, she would be Artemis, his twin, his darker self, the untamed goddess of the hunt. If anyone else had suggested it, she would have hit him. Part 1 is pre-mini, Part 2 (when I write it) will carry the story on through season 1.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This fic came about after I read a bunch of other stories about Lee and Kara at the Academy (many of which are truly excellent), and I noticed that in most of them (or at least the ones I read first), if anything at all sexual happens, Lee initiates it and Kara freaks out and plays it off as drunkenness or a brief mistake or just runs away. And I thought that since in general she’s the impetuous one and he’s the repressed one, the opposite would probably be more likely - especially since Kara was obviously willing to take the risk of getting involved with Zak. So I decided to do the story my way...
* * * * *
Kara Thrace never had the things that other little girls had. She never had parents who loved her. She never had girlfriends who came over to play after school. She never had anyone who believed in her. So she took other things, things no one else had, instead. When the other girls played with dolls, she played with model planes. When the other girls let the bullies push them around, Kara hit back. Sometimes she’d come home with a black eye or split lip and her mother would smile that cold, cold smile and press too hard on the bruise and Kara would promise herself that she would never be such a woman, that she would be all fire and no ice. Later, when the other girls painted each other’s nails and went shopping in gangs, Kara spent her time with the boys instead. Because while the girls would want to know her, the boys just wanted to frak her or fight her, and those things she could do.
After seventeen years in her parents’ house, she arrived at the Academy and for the first time she felt like she was home. There were no more object lessons in the sanctity of pain. Compared to her mother, the instructors were like doting uncles. Suddenly there was more to life than surviving, and Kara grabbed it with both hands, sucking everything in, the contents of every bottle and every textbook, every card game and every brawl. On the schoolyard she’d always been a tough girl, but at home she’d been weak, and that was something she would never be again. So she hit the gym as hard as she hit the library, pushing her body until she was sure that it could protect her, that she was no longer anyone’s baby. She ran loops around the track, mile after pounding mile, unsure if she was running away from something or towards it, just knowing that she needed the motion, the distance, the burn of hot air in her throat.
She learned a lot, that first year at the Academy. She learned that if the Gods had given her poor luck in childhood, they were now compensating her with excellent luck at the triad table. She learned that she was made to fly. That first stint in the flight simulators - the second week of classes, just to prove to all of them how much they had to learn - had whet a thirst which would never be sated. And she had, of all the amazing things, somehow, through instinct and luck and bravado, not died. She knew she was supposed to have been blown out of the sky like all her classmates, and the unexpected success led her, for the first time, to believe that she might actually be good for something after all.
By her second year she was already a legend. No one else quite understood how she could pull off the stunts that left others in broken birds and missile locks. Part of it was an intuitive grasp of tactics and physics and spatial relations. Part of it was the fact that where others feared death, she chased it, hungry for the near miss, the impossible odds, the fast hot blaze of glory that seemed the only fitting end to a life she’d never been sure she wanted in the first place.
It was in that second year that she met Lee. He wasn’t like the other guys - he didn’t seem to want to frak her or fight her or indeed even beat her at cards, but he wasn’t like the girls, either - he didn’t ask prying questions or gossip. He just watched her, obvious without being creepy, and then introduced himself - she’d known who he was, of course, but he always had a weakness for good manners - and then he was simply there. She didn’t know what had drawn him to her and she never asked, she just accepted his presence, sharing a table in the mess hall or the library, keeping pace with her around the track in the mornings. He couldn’t quite keep up with her in the flight sims, but he put up a hell of a lot more of a fight than any of the other cadets. And he, in turn, accepted her. She’d never had any idea what that was like, before - to be known without intrusion, to be accepted without judgment. She’d never known anyone who just wanted her to be herself. He tutored her in history and she taught him new tricks in the sims, he bailed her out of hack with a smirk and a throwaway line, and sometimes even joined her in it.
Their entire time at the Academy, he only outflew her twice. The first time was at the end of their second year, when there was a rumor going around that Lee had only gotten in because of his father. The first time she heard it, Kara simply punched the guy who said it and kept punching until he took it back. The second time, she realized more drastic measures were called for. So she arranged an audience the next time they went up against each other in the sims, and after a long and spectacular chase, she slowed herself down just the smallest bit, and flew straight into his trap. After they both climbed out, he looked dazed and almost confused, and she grinned and hit him in the shoulder and said, “I must be losing my touch,” and the rumor stopped. Later, in the library, he looked up from his book and asked if she’d let him take her down. She looked him in the eye and said, “You deserved that win.” Then she smirked. “But next time, your ass is mine.” He rolled his eyes and went back to studying. The next time around, she shot him down in record time, just to prove she still could. He was unfazed. For someone who expected unending perfection from himself, he was a remarkably gracious loser.
As a person more prone to action than introspection, Kara didn’t spend much time thinking about their friendship. She knew she was grateful for it, she knew that in some way she depended on it, and she knew that she’d fought for him, lied for him, and would if it ever came down to it die for him, but that was about it. When he pissed her off she told him, and when he wouldn’t listen she took a swing at him. He hit back, which she liked. He was always right there with her, laugh for laugh, drink for drink, blow for blow, her equal and opposite, reason to her passion, constant sun to her fickle moon. They orbited each other, locked in a gravitational dance of distance and momentum. Their days together were endless, and they lavished time on each other, lavished irritation and silliness and impatience on one another as if their whole lives would be spent in staring contests and triad games and arguments about who started which fight. They would have been taken for a couple, were it not for the fact that they both openly frakked other people, and were it not for the fact that no one had ever seen them kiss. Had anyone been paying attention, they might have noticed that most of Kara’s conquests came on nights she’d been flying with Lee. There was just something about being out there alone with him, nothing between them but empty space and death, that made her want to grab the next willing body and make some friction.
Later, after they were flying real Vipers and the sims were just for fun, they got their callsigns, and Kara was privately pleased by his. Apollo. The sungod, archer, lord of healing and reason. Secretly, she thought that in his pantheon, she would be Artemis, his twin, his darker self, the untamed goddess of the hunt. If anyone else had suggested it, she would have hit him.
The second time he outflew her, he did it fair and square, taking her down at the end of a dance so intricately lethal that she didn’t even mind losing - or at least, she didn’t mind much. And when she climbed out of the sim (because it had just been a private contest, just their regular weekly fun) her body was thrumming with adrenaline and just the feel of her clothes pulling against her when she moved made her want to rub up against something and she looked around but the only person in the room was Lee. And for the first time it occurred to her that he could be this for her, that she didn’t need to find someone else when the only person who felt what she did was standing two meters away from her. It seemed so perfect and obvious, so simple and logical that she couldn’t believe they hadn’t thought of it before. But Lee had always treated her with a kind of off-color formality that put her somewhere between ‘sister’ and ‘friend,’ and as she had no precedents for their relationship, she had accepted that designation without question. In her world, there were the men she frakked and, if she was lucky, there was a friend or two, and she’d never really considered that both roles could be played by one person. At that point she was sharing a room with Lee and two other cadets, so they’d seen each other naked and neither of them had made an issue of it, but he’d given her the occasional appreciative glance when he thought she wouldn’t notice. And she certainly knew he had all the necessary equipment.
Of course she realized that sleeping with him was bound to change their friendship. But she’d been lucky, lately, and she was never one to back down in the pursuit of what she wanted, never one to wait and see when she could just jump into the fight, so she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and took him out for a congratulatory drink, and arranged for their roommates to be gone when she brought him home, and when their door was closed behind him she pushed him against the wall and kissed him. For a single second he responded, then he pushed her away.
“Are you kidding around?” he demanded.
Her eyebrows went up. “Is that what it felt like to you?” she asked. “Because maybe I was doing it wrong.”
“Kara, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” she told him. “Look, we’re good together, aren’t we? I just thought…” She shrugged. “Maybe we’d be good like this, too.”
“Look, it’s an appealing thought, but I just can’t see this ending well.”
“Ending? Come on, Lee, I haven’t planned as far as breakfast tomorrow. I just… don’t you want this? Don’t you want to know what it’d be like?”
“Sometimes we want things that aren’t good for us.” His voice was gentle, but the shutters dropped down behind her eyes.
“Suit yourself,” she said flippantly, turning away. “I’m gonna go find some better company.” She headed for the door, eyes stinging. She’d actually thought he was different. She’d actually thought he believed in her. But when it came down to it, she wasn’t good enough for him. Good enough to drink with, good enough to fight with… But not good enough to love. And she’d been a fool to ever have thought otherwise. She was a fool because she hadn’t even seen it coming.
“Kara,” he called after her, but she was already gone.
* * * * *
She spent that night alone with a bottle of ambrosia, but in the two weeks that followed he caught her in bed with first one of their roommates, then the other. It was on the second occasion that he began to realize how much he’d hurt her. At first he’d told himself she’d just been offering him a simple frak, just a night to celebrate his victory, but she wouldn’t be trying so hard to hurt him if there wasn’t more to it than that. He thought back to what she’d said and what he’d said and the more he thought about it, the stupider he felt. She hadn’t been offering him sex. She’d been offering him herself. And he’d thrown it away. He still didn’t know what he wanted from her, but it wasn’t what they had now, which was pretty much nothing. She’d moved her things out of their room one day while he was in class, and he didn’t know where she was staying. She didn’t jog in the mornings or study in the library, and in the one class they had together she sat in a corner surrounded by friends and never looked at him. It was another week before he finally cornered her in the mess hall.
He sat down at her table without asking permission. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.
She looked up from the book she’d been reading and shrugged, eyes flat and mocking. “You made your feelings pretty clear last time we talked. I didn’t figure there was much more to say.”
“I was an ass the last time we talked. Look… You kind of caught me off guard.”
“No wonder I always beat you. Pilots are supposed to think fast in unexpected, high pressure situations.”
“I’m trying to apologize, here. Will you let me do that?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m sorry I hurt you. I never wanted to do that.”
“Seems like there’s a lot of things you don’t want to do,” she quipped with an unpleasant smile.
“Hey, I admit that I handled things wrong.” He ran a hand through his hair. “But I don’t just jump into things the way you do.”
“So next time I want you to take a risk, I’ll just send you a formal proposal in triplicate. Except that oh, there isn’t going to be a next time. Never mind.”
“So we can’t be friends anymore because I didn’t want to frak you?”
She got up and left. He put the incident down as his all time worst apology.
After that, she didn’t avoid him anymore, but she didn’t seek him out, either. She’d jog with him if he showed up at the right time and sit at a table with him if there were other people around, too, but she was crueler, more sarcastic. She didn’t carry grudges, but she also didn’t exactly forgive. And in the light of her angry, smoldering eyes, he forgot that he’d never gotten around to telling her what she meant to him, that he’d never really asked her for a second chance. By the time they graduated, they weren’t StarbuckandApollo anymore. She was already working as an assistant flight instructor for the newest cadets, and he was spending more of his time in Caprica City, where he’d found a girlfriend, a preschool teacher with dark hair and hazel eyes who had never flown anything in her life. She was appreciative and undemanding and would never hit him, or even push him up against a wall.
After graduation, they went their separate ways and for the most part didn’t look back. She rarely thought of him by the time she met Zak. She had to look twice before she even noticed he was an Adama. She was curious about him, of course, but that first year he wasn’t in the classes she taught, so they might never have gotten to know each other if he hadn’t made an effort. Once a week the instructors ate lunch in the cadets’ mess hall to improve student-faculty relations, and it was at such a lunch that Zak plopped down next to her at the table, grinned, and said, “I had to meet the woman who blew my brother up a hundred times.”
She’d smiled at how young he was and told him, “Your brother did shoot me down once or twice as well.”
She’d been prepared to hate him because he was like Lee, or to hate him because he wasn’t like Lee, but she hadn’t been prepared for the reality of Zak, who had so much of his brother’s intelligence and charm, and none of his discipline and sober responsibility. She allowed him to befriend her because it was impossible to say no to him, and because to Zak, she was never really Starbuck, she was always Kara, always a woman, always beautiful. Where Lee had pushed her and teased her and fought her, Zak simply adored her. Where she and Lee were opposites, where Lee had pushed her into being more herself than ever before, Zak was too much like her - he changed her, softened her, made her think that maybe life could also happen outside a Viper cockpit. She didn’t mean to fall in love with him, but she liked dancing, so she said yes when he asked, and she found that she didn’t mind when his hand strayed down her back, or when he pulled her close, or even when he kissed her outside on the street. Their first night together, she kept her eyes open the whole time because she was afraid that if she closed them, she might see Lee’s face. But when she woke up in his arms he was all Zak, sweet and open and offering up his whole heart on a platter. How could she say no? It was so much more than anyone else had ever given her. It was easy to be with him, and she smiled more, and drank less, and almost never hit anyone. It didn’t particularly bother her that their relationship was against the rules - they were discreet, and as long as no one got hurt, she didn’t see what the problem was.
* * * * *
When Lee found out about them, his first reaction was to wonder whether she was using Zak to hurt him, but by the time he got leave to visit, he’d realized that didn’t quite make sense. For one thing, it had just been too long. For another, what his brother described was a lot more than a quick frak, which was about all Kara was willing to put forth in the cause of vengeance. And Kara was always careful to select targets who wouldn’t mind much when she rolled out of bed and left them. She was fair that way - she didn’t hurt other men to punish him. And Zak had definitely gotten attached. So by the time he landed on Caprica he didn’t know what to think. But within minutes of meeting up with them, it was clear that their relationship had nothing to do with him. When they looked at each other, he was invisible. First he hoped that Zak wouldn’t frak things up with Kara the way he had, because she looked happy for the first time in years and he didn’t want anything to take that away. His second thought was that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Zak screwed up, because then maybe he’d have another chance with her. Of course he dismissed that thought immediately as unworthy of all of them. They were happy. And he would be happy for them.
And he was, for the most part. Or at least he told himself he was, when he thought about it at all. For the most part he tried not to think about it. He found a girlfriend with red hair and blue eyes who worked in advertising and liked to be handcuffed to the bed, but of course after a while she got sick of the long waits between his visits.
And then their little world ended in fire and death and he found out that Kara had almost become his sister the same day he found out that she wasn’t going to, after all. He didn’t see her until the funeral and by that time they were both so lost in their private hells that they barely saw each other. Afterwards, at his mother’s house, it occurred to him that she must be shattered, that she must need someone, so he asked about her, and was told that she’d gone somewhere with his father. And the mention of his father made him so angry that he forgot about her again. Later, he found out she’d been reassigned to Galactica. First he’d lost her to Zak, and now he’d lost her to the Old Man. For the most part he tried not to think about it.
And then all the worlds ended, in fire and death, and there she was, so alive he could taste it from half a meter away when he just felt shell shocked and empty, and she smiled at him, and despite a certain hardness in the back of her eyes, he began to believe that there might still be a life for him, here after the end of all things.