FANFIC POST: "Aerilon Girls Are Easy" part 4/5 (Battlestar Galactica)
Title: Aerilon Girls Are Easy
Author: Sara C. (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Lee/Kara(/Zak)
Rating: R
Summary: Without a war to bring them back together, it takes a lot for Kara and Lee to be able to forgive each other. And themselves.
Previous parts: I | II | III
Notes: I was very stubbornly trying to make sure I made the rest of this not get too long to post in one last part, but that was just getting impractical. So once again, just kidding, there'll be one more post of this than I've been saying there will be. Nothing very long, though; it will feel like sort of an epilogue after everything that happens in this part.
By the time they get halfway to Lee's apartment building, the rain has started pouring so heavily it's a little hard to see far and the storm is in a full rage. Their clothes and hair are soaked when they finally get there, and a neighbor who passes them on the stairs notes this and gives them a sympathetic look when they both smile at him.
As soon as they're in Lee's room, he gets a towel from the bathroom, comes back out where Kara is facing away from him looking at some pictures on his wall, and throws the towel over her head. She turns around as she pulls it off her head so she can see and starts trying to dry herself off as much as she can.
"Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to start drinking much," she sighs.
"First time I've ever heard you say that," he says as he goes back into his room and switches on a lamp. "Would you rather still be in traffic right now?"
"I guess not," she answers as she gives her hair a final vigorous rub with the towel and then throws it over the back of a chair before sitting down in it.
When she looks back over at Lee, his side is facing her as he pulls at the bottom of his wet shirt and peels it away from the smooth, damp surface of his back and chest. She doesn't look away, just stares through it and keeps casually looking in his general direction, focusing her eyes on nothing in particular as if there is nothing there. Then a round of thunder strikes, so shockingly loud it sounds like the sky has to be cracking apart like a porcelain bowl under some kind of intense strain, and she looks toward his one small window at the rain outside that is barely visible now that it's completely dark. As her skin has started drying, she suddenly feels strangely warm all over every surface of it, and something restless is squirming inside her. The air is full of a tangible electricity that is much easier to perceive removed from the pounding rain in the quiet apartment.
As Lee puts on just an undershirt, they both seem aware of the silence getting too thick. He moves out of her view through the doorway and says, "So are you going to tell me about the time you got arrested or not?"
Kara chews her bottom lip and looks down, tensely drumming her fingers on her leg for a moment, and just says something to change the subject. "Have you got a deck of cards and a bottle of ambrosia around here? Looks like I'm stuck here a while."
He reappears and stands right in the doorway, raising his hands to both sides and leaning forward that way as he looks at her. "I'm not betting against you, if you're hoping to rip me off."
"So don't bet," she says, shrugging. "Just play...If you want to take all the danger and fun out of it."
He smirks a little, retreats back into his room to get something and comes back with a handful of cubits. "What the hell," he says. "No frakking around."
Kara rubs her hands together in anticipation. "This night just started to look a lot more interesting."
Lee gestures toward the kitchen. "If I have any ambrosia, it's in the cabinet. I'm sure you would remember which one."
She quickly finds a large half-full bottle among his store and brings it with a couple shot glasses to the coffee table where Lee has now gotten out cards and taken a seat on the floor leaning against the couch. Kara sits on the side of the table adjacent to his as they play. Lee laughs at her when the next loud crack of thunder makes her jump and nearly spit out a mouthful of ambrosia right after she takes a shot. Nearly a half-hour later she has beat him at the first game and the bottle is an inch less full than before, and she has pushed it across to Lee's end of the table to cut herself off in hopes that she'll still eventually be able to get herself home tonight.
"No," Lee says, touching her arm to stop her as she starts dealing the cards for the next game. "Scorpian War this time."
She tilts her head. "You can't play that with two," she objects.
"Of course you can. It'll work."
"But I never have. I don't like that game."
"Wuss," he says, mildly grinning.
"Excuse me?" she says with a laugh. "This from the guy who just lost ten cubits."
She continues dealing the cards for a second until he drops a hand down onto hers to stop her a little forcibly, looking right at her face and shaking his head. "You only play games you know you can win," he says.
Her eyes narrow a little as she registers the challenge. "Fine," she says, slowly picking all the cards up to deal them differently.
It is a game with a more relaxed pace and less concentration required, so after a while of playing they drift off into easy conversation.
"I guess it's natural to never stop wanting your parents' approval," Kara says, staring a little boredly at her hand and leaning against the table in a very lazy position. "But you're a big boy now, Lee, and you have to realize you're free to do what you want. You don't even have anyone else to look out for anymore. The only person you have to answer to is yourself."
He gives a short, slightly dark laugh. "You make it sound like that's so easy," he says. "Answering to yourself."
"Well, at least you always know what you've got to do."
"But it doesn't exactly mean being free to do whatever you want," he says a little softly, no longer meeting eyes with her.
Kara looks away from him as well, sighs, and says, "Um...I'm calling a check. Show me three."
"Already?" he asks with surprise.
"Yeah. Already."
He selects three cards and puts them on the table in sight, now smiling. "I win," he says before she has even looked at them closely yet.
"What?" she asks in a doubtful tone, as if he has to be joking.
"Count 'em, sir," he says as she leans over to look at them and goes wide-eyed. "That there is a match."
"Frak!" she says loudly, throwing down her own cards. "This game? It doesn't even take any skill."
He laughs. "I beg to differ. Plenty of bluffing involved, don't you think?"
"No, not really, I don't think," she says bitterly.
Lee starts laughing harder, increasingly amused by how angry she sounds. "Wow. You really are pissed."
"Yeah, go ahead, act all satisfied because you beat Kara Thrace at Scorpian War. A frakking college kids' game."
He just keeps laughing as he starts shuffling the cards again.
"You're right," he says after a while, and she takes a moment to realize he is picking up their former conversation again. "It's a lot easier to just follow the path your parents have laid out for you, and the reason it took me so long to start trying to live the life I really want is because I'm just a little scared of what I don't know and understand so well. I mean...law? It's kind of morally ambiguous territory. Who knows what I'm capable of in that kind of career?"
She smirks in response to his half-joking tone. "You've always been stubbornly certain about what you think is right," she says teasingly. "I think you of all people wouldn't find yourself too conflicted about it and would be able to keep your head screwed on straight."
Lee goes silent, his hands slowing to a stop and then setting the cards down. "That's really strange to hear," he says, still looking down at the table.
She raises her brow. "Why?"
He leans over to look at her face very closely, crossing his arms on the table. "It just doesn't seem true," he says quietly. "Even though I guess the way I act is always so consistent, like I've fallen into this secure and comfortable pattern that's hard to break. But I feel conflicted all the time...Except lately, actually..."
Kara shifts her eyes away from his for a second. Lately. That restless feeling in her chest is building up, fight or flight response taking tight hold of her every nerve. Attack or disengage. Take control and possibly win or risk just getting chased and shot down anyway.
He lets out a soft, slightly nervous laugh. "You asked if I feel like a good guy today?" he says. "Truth is I just feel really...powerless. Like I can't really be right or wrong right now. The world looks kind of absurd and is just...happening to me. And it feels good to just let it for once, instead of trying to be in control."
At some point, without realizing it, Kara has started breathing a little uneasily, and he has drawn a lot closer to her without her immediately perceiving it. As he keeps looking right into her eyes, his gaze never breaking away like a constant and unbearable light in her face, she sees some kind of struggle in his expression for a second before he slowly opens his mouth to say something more.
Piercing thunder cracks again, making them both look away in alarm, and an instant later the lights all shut off.
"Oh, great," Lee sighs quietly as they both look around, their eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness. But he doesn't sound like it even bothers him terribly much right now.
Then they both remain where they are in silence, unable to see anything around them clearly at all, the unspoken question formed deafeningly in the air. What can they do now? They stay still like this for a slightly prolonged moment, but something has to happen next and Kara knows it. Whether it happens to her or she makes it happen.
Lee is warm, audible breath in the dark beside her, still very close, and she can see just enough to notice him turning his head and looking back at her again. She feels blind and helpless and she panics. Turns and flies right into the attack. Reaches to him, her hands finding the smooth skin of his shoulders and neck, her mouth finding his before he can start talking again.
At first he freezes up, too taken aback to react to her, but then she can feel his whole body loosen up as he seems to just let his mind detach from it and go passive. His hands are first that strangely familiar solid heat at her back, and then one slides down around her waist and the other raises to tightly take hold of her hair with a surprising and sudden aggression, grabbing the back of her head to pull her a little closer as he starts kissing her more deeply and decidedly, letting out a long and sort of sinking, surrendering breath like a sigh.
That hunger that Kara has tried to become numb to but mostly just learned to live with the distant ache of every day, shutting it away like a plant in a drawer living away from light, is desperately clawing out and thriving in her moment of weakness, of carelessness, whatever this is. Maybe this is what it feels like to be able to finally move on and live again, but somewhere in the back of her mind she already decides it can't really be real; the sour reality will return to her afterwards even if the mindless high of the moment makes it all not matter. And she does not know what she is doing, only that this restless, powerful urge she's been fighting all night is making her feel like pulling him apart in her hands like soft pieces of cotton, in her hands like she can't with words. Let the damage free. It will crash and burn and then this volatile, unspoken thing that's been there so long no matter how long they've tried to kill it will surely have to finally die.
She has pressed him back against the couch and straddled her legs over his lap when Lee first starts to become hesitant again, recoiling as he seems to sense her urgency. He touches both her shoulders and gently, just slightly pushes her back away, leans his forehead in against hers and says softly and uncertainly, "Kara..."
The sound of his voice somehow threatens to break the suspended, comforting spell of being in the dark. She just plants her hands firmly at his neck and jaw on each side and mutters quickly, "Please shut up" before starting to kiss him again.
Lee raises a hand to the back of her head and grabs a handful of her hair again, and this time he roughly pulls her head away from him, forcing it back until her face is turned upward, her neck curved back and exposed, all of her only visible in barely defined, dark shapes. They certainly cannot read each other's faces right now, and Kara has no idea what is going to happen but does think she can detect some kind of determination just in how forcefully he's touching her. When he suddenly bends down and she feels his mouth on her neck, slowly exploring, it comes as a disarming surprise, and without meaning to she closes her eyes.
They have both slipped completely away, lost track of what time it could possibly be now, lost any kind of sense of space and surroundings and the size of the room they're in. There is no longer any hesitation, no conscious thought, only breathing, tasting. Lee somehow keeps pulling things back, keeping it slow and easy. His hands slide inside her shirt and up her back, taking it off over her head, and then she swiftly pulls off his undershirt, but he stops her before she can touch the fly of her jeans by grabbing her wrists. As they don't stop kissing there is a strange momentary struggle, and then he pushes her back to the floor with both her arms pinned back. She half-consciously understands what this is. It's as if they're wrestling for control, each trying to set the pace and determine what exactly this is, a quick frak or something else. And he's decided it isn't going to happen on the floor.
He leads her into a haphazard backwards crawl toward the doorway of the bedroom. They both finally slip out of their pants by the time they've reached the bed and Kara is backing up against it. Then as they sloppily start pulling themselves up onto it together while still intertwined, she hits herself against the bed frame at her tailbone, winces and sharply whispers, "Ow." She automatically reaches behind her to touch the spot she hit, but Lee's hand moves down from her waist, reaches it first and gently rubs it so that it soon stops stinging. Her face cracks into a humored smile he can't quite see, and then as he starts kissing her again and pulls her up onto the bed she makes a soft sound in her throat that sounds like half of a contented laugh.
Lee's hand on her lower back slides around to her front, then creeps down, now slowly rubbing elsewhere. Kara's breath hitches, her whole body clenching and curling inward a little. She clutches his back tightly with one hand, the other at his chest as if to push him away, her nails curling inward just a little as if unintentionally. She doesn't like going at this pace. She does and she doesn't. She can feel that she is losing. Maybe doesn't care anymore.
After a while he seems no longer able to keep holding back himself and they both start to move quickly and eagerly as they pull away the only clothes they still have on. They shuffle themselves around for a moment, finding the position and fit, and then when he finally slides in all slows down for a strangely pacified moment as if they both feel some sudden and great impact, a very heavy latch dropping, something locking tightly into place. Of course, it feels like, like this has always been, in so many moments they didn't realize were only painfully extended preludes to it, though it is only vaguely realized even now.
Then it naturally picks up again, their bodies completely taking over and running themselves, their heads stifled by the building heat. It is so easy, like they are feeling their way around in the dark but it's some place they have been before, as if they've known each other this way already. Kara has retreated into a familiar safe place, running along a path ignoring anything on the periphery, letting everything else but what she feels and sees right now slide away, and soon her world fills and overflows with nothing but the rhythmic heavy breathing and thick darkness.
This is when the power comes back on. The lamp by Lee's bed lights up brilliantly with a soft flick sound from the bulb and they each blink a few times, seeing spots. Kara only now notices that she can no longer hear any rain outside.
And she looks past Lee's shoulder and sees the ceiling above, a lot lower and closer than she thought she remembered. What is happening? Everything is too close, enclosing, past her defenses, inside. The slight panic returns, but she tries to take hold of it and just slide through this without letting it quite touch her, not quite feeling everything with all senses like before.
As she keeps looking far up, Lee brings a hand by her face and lightly touches her hair. He must see something in her face that concerns him because he asks a little breathlessly, "Are you alright?"
She blinks, meets eyes with him with difficulty and slightly smiles in a dark way that doesn't reach her eyes. "No," she says, as if the question is funny.
He shakes his head just a little. "You want to stop?"
"No," she just says again in a mutter. The harm is done.
He seems to see this, too, because after slowing down only a little he just buries his face back in her neck and keeps moving, but he keeps his eyes there and doesn't kiss her anymore. Kara keeps her eyes closed and the light from the lamp is red through her eyelids like an unbearable burning sun. Before long they're nearing the edge, both gasping, and Lee rakes his hand into her hair again like he has to hold onto something and isn't even thinking about it.
When Kara is getting close her voice cracks out in some shapeless soft cries and then forms into some words that manage to fight their way out without any thought. "Shit-Teller-"
"Okay," he says right back in a tight voice; following the cue, he lets go and pushes on through to the end fast and forcibly, until they both reach the top together, hearing each other's breath hold and then release in a final heavy exhale. Then down, relax, collapse together, both their bodies going loose after clutching strongly to each other the whole time.
Lee sits up a little, looks down at her. She doesn't look at him.
With her face turned away on the bed and her eyes fixed on a wall, she says in a calm voice, "Turn the light off."
He waits just a few seconds, then slides off of her and toward the bedside table, reaches over and switches the lamp off. Kara rolls away, turning on her side facing away from him, and feels him tiredly recline behind her. She closes her eyes, and it is dark and quiet again.
Two years and eight months ago, Zak's dimly lit little apartment, the TV on and takeout boxes scattered all over the table in front of them while they were sitting on the couch. They'd ordered noodles and watched some boxing matches, but now the volume was turned down a little and Zak was walking to the store down the street to get ice or something or other that he was out of.
Kara's engagement ring, now new and unfamiliar to see on her hand, had been strangely distracting to him all night, and eventually when they got to talking about it he asked, "Why are you marrying him?"
She tilted her head to one side as she stared at him, and then gave a strange laugh and said, "What kind of a question is that?"
Lee only then realized how that must have sounded, even though he was sure his tone had been light enough. "Well, of course I'm not surprised you're planning to in general," he amended. "You've just never struck me as the kind to be very eager to get married soon. And it almost seems kind of fast."
Kara shrugged. "No, I guess I'm not the type to care much about getting married," she said, "but it's not like we're making a big deal out of it. It'll just be a small ceremony, nothing humiliating for me."
Lee laughed and said, "Yeah, I've been trying to picture you in a lacy white dress..."
She shook her head and laughed. "And you know, we were already planning to move in together anyway. I just thought...Why not? I know that he is...it."
Lee smirked. "I believe what most people say is 'the one.'"
Kara just snorted with laughter, leaned over to pick up a box of rice and started nibbling on it some more. He watched her a moment, then made himself stare past her and look at nothing in particular, just absorbing the colors from the framed sports posters on Zak's walls. Just a passive observer of his brother's life.
Maybe that gutsy little voice was with him a little even back then, much more hindered from expressing itself than now. He recalls how after a while, he stopped associating "Teller" with a professional Pyramid player and it just became an elusive word, a strange sound, how sometimes when it was said what he heard in his head was something like Tell her.
Kara wakes up a while after him and gets a heavy feeling in her stomach before she groggily rolls over to find him not in bed beside her. She just lies there a minute, surrendering to the dark flood of realizations and detailed recollections and trying to find the motivation to get up and face it all.
They were not nearly as drunk as she would like to think they were and she can remember just about everything very clearly. The feelings are all still vivid and stuck to her, like some jarring and irreversible physical change to her body, not slipped away into a blur. And she wonders for a second now, as she didn't at the time, how Lee was able to tell exactly where she hurt herself knocking against the bed frame when it was so dark she can hardly imagine he saw right where she hit it. Trying not to think too much about the feeling of his hands on her, in a pitch-black room during a storm in a hot and dark concert hall while he's standing behind her a breathing voice she could feel on the other end of a phone line, she absently brings one hand up to her shoulder and smoothes it down the length of her arm, curling her body inward a little.
She sighs heavily, lowering her face down toward the mattress so much some hair falls over her eyes. Then her face goes hard, ready and determined, and she sits up to get out of bed.
When she comes out into the next room, dressed but for missing her shirt, Lee is sitting on the couch and leaning over as he slowly and idly shuffles the playing cards on the table. He looks up at her and just says, "Hi." With just the short word he makes his voice very cautious and gentle, experimentally prodding. Not expecting too much.
She barely looks at him before she goes to the chair and sits in it, bending over to get her shoes and socks on the floor. "What time is it?" she asks.
In the few seconds of silence he waits before answering, Kara is first able to perceive his disappointment.
"About ten-thirty," he says.
She stands up and starts searching the room for her shirt.
"So," he says, not quite sounding angry, "you're just gonna run again, huh?"
Kara glances over at him, looks away and ignores the question as she keeps looking around. "Dammit," she mutters after a while. "Where's my...?"
When she turns again she finds him standing by her and holding out her shirt to her. She grabs it and says, "Thanks" without looking right at him, slipping it on over her head.
Before she can turn away from him again, he grabs her forearm to stop her. Then he just holds onto her, waiting, until she stops resisting and looks at him, meeting his eyes with a resigned look and swallowing. She knows she can't get out of giving him this much.
Lee is still very composed, but his voice starts to carry an edge of bitterness. "And what if I eventually get tired of having to catch up to you? You may not want to admit it but I think you're depending on that. You expect me to keep doing this forever?"
"No, Lee, I expect you to finally do something that makes sense!" she says. "Start trying to make amends with your real family, not me. Stay with your nice Aerilonese girl next door who will never be a difficult pain in the ass or embarrass you in front of people after drinking way too much. I mean, for frak sakes, Lee, I tell you my last boyfriend ended up in a box because of me, and what do you do? You-you just keep showing up again, more relentlessly than ever and won't stay away-"
"Not everybody only cares about protecting themselves at all costs. Gods, do I actually have to say it?" he says, grabbing her shoulders for a moment and saying it directly to her face with emphasis. "I forgive you. Is that so impossible for you to understand? To believe? Yeah, I know you were hoping that throwing that at me would be enough to get me out of your life for good. Thanks a lot. And I don't even want to think about what last night was supposed to be about. But that just shows how amazingly obtuse your guilt and self-hatred can make you. Tell me something. How did you become so frakking terrified of being happy?"
Kara is shaking her head, her mouth in a small, dark grin. "So I'm just off the hook, just like that?" she says incredulously. "And just like that, now everything's fine and we can be happy? It just doesn't make any difference to you what really happened to your brother?"
"That's not the frakking point and you know it," he says harshly. "How long are going to keep using him as an excuse?"
In a heated instant her eyes go wide and her hand flies up to slap him hard across the face. Then in the following silence, they both just start to look a little sorry. Kara slowly turns away, disoriented for a moment before she remembers where her keys are on the kitchen counter and heads that way.
"Will you just...let me know the next time you're going to be home?" Lee asks.
Kara stops to turn on the faucet at the sink, filling her hands with water to take a drink and then quickly washing her face. "I don't think that's a good idea," she says flatly.
He comes over to her side as she turns to get her keys and puts them in her pocket. "Listen...We can forget this ever happened. I'm sure that's what you'll do anyway. Just tell me it won't be another two years before I so much as hear from you again."
She stops where she is, turned a little away from him. Something in her face falters for a moment and then she turns quickly to him, takes his face in her hands to pull him to her and kisses him forcefully, holding it for a long and very silent moment. Caught off guard, Lee can only react slowly, and he has just barely, lightly touched her waist when she lets go.
"Bye, Lee," she says quietly without looking directly at him, and then passes him to reach the door.
He stands there facing the way he was and doesn't watch her go, just sinking his head down a little when he hears the door shut behind her.
Do it.
"Why are you marrying him?" he asked. But this time, he imagines, it would not have been with a casual tone. Quietly, carrying some kind of serious meaning.
Kara would have just looked at him a long time without saying anything, her brow narrowing in confusion.
"It almost seems kind of soon to be getting married...Have you asked yourself why?"
Then she would have shook her head, said softly, "What the hell kind of a question is that?"
His face would not have completely hidden the almost sickening fear rising in his chest as his voice came out very uneasily. "Is it because you love him? Or is it because...you love him...and there's also the other one?"
He can see her looking away from him then, just staring across the room with wide eyes.
"And you know it just can't be otherwise, or you think it can't, so you either have to keep both of them as you have them now or ruin everything and lose both, and that's why you're so sure you'll never want any of this to change and you're doing the right thing. Because you can't have me...but you can't lose me."
"What the frak do you think you're doing?" she might have just whispered then.
"Being honest...and a bastard. Believe me, I feel like a really terrible person right now, but I don't know what to do...Do you think this is going to get any simpler when you're my sister-in-law?"
Neither of them had yet said the word "in-law" in reference to what they were going to become, and he imagines her visibly disturbed a little to hear it said out loud like that, closing her eyes a moment.
Past this he isn't sure what would have happened. He thinks after a while she probably would have said, not necessarily with anger, "I think you should leave," like something might happen otherwise, and then made some excuse for him having to take off when Zak came back.
After a couple days there would be a phone call. "It's me," his voice would come through after she picked up. No more code words. He would be able to tell just from her tense way of speaking that Zak must be with her and would make it short. A brief but sincere apology. "I just needed to say those things so I'd know" and "I think maybe we shouldn't see so much of each other anymore, when we can help it."
"Yeah" would be her small, cool voice, so very far away.
He can easily see it going this way, ending this way, if he had somehow summoned the courage to do it, the most difficult, ugly, unpleasant thing he ever would have had to do. After losing Zak, they would have parted in a much less bitter way, just with a somewhat cold goodbye. "Take care of yourself, Lee Adama" and "Yeah, you too." And doing the impossible by being able to say it would have been for nothing.
But he can also maybe see it happening differently. Maybe being faced with the sudden, unexpected reality of having to lose one of them, choose one, would have given her some kind of clarity she'd never had before. And ever since that phone call, she would find herself fiddling uneasily with the ring on her finger, knowing this is it, forever. And realize she couldn't do it.
Even if she didn't tell him what she knew now she really wanted, perhaps Zak always suspected, perhaps he would know why. And maybe he would have hated them for a while. However it happened it never would have been easy. But then three weeks later when he did his flight test, after having to do something as hard as disappointing him like that, failing him would not have been nearly as hard for Kara. And he could still be alive.
No matter how he imagines this, endlessly dwelling on it ever since Kara told him the truth that shook his whole world up at first, something about it still seems too easy and not quite possible. He's sure she probably couldn't even say now what her choice would have been. He knows it is just natural and human to be tormented by all the possibilities, how it could have been prevented. And he also knows that he may just want to find some comfort in the idea that they might not have been punished for what there was between them after all, after so much time of feeling this intense and stomach-turning guilt along with feeling its presence. But he is sure the memory of his brother will never stop sometimes making him think about it at least a little and wonder.
But in the end, he's not some god with control over fate and cause and effect, he can't completely understand it, and he doesn't know. He'll never know. As much as they can't help but still pick apart the possibilities and causes to try to find the one easy answer and reason as if that would make it all better, as if they or at least somebody has to pay and suffer and then there will finally be closure, they have to accept that.
Go to part V.
Author: Sara C. (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Lee/Kara(/Zak)
Rating: R
Summary: Without a war to bring them back together, it takes a lot for Kara and Lee to be able to forgive each other. And themselves.
Previous parts: I | II | III
Notes: I was very stubbornly trying to make sure I made the rest of this not get too long to post in one last part, but that was just getting impractical. So once again, just kidding, there'll be one more post of this than I've been saying there will be. Nothing very long, though; it will feel like sort of an epilogue after everything that happens in this part.
By the time they get halfway to Lee's apartment building, the rain has started pouring so heavily it's a little hard to see far and the storm is in a full rage. Their clothes and hair are soaked when they finally get there, and a neighbor who passes them on the stairs notes this and gives them a sympathetic look when they both smile at him.
As soon as they're in Lee's room, he gets a towel from the bathroom, comes back out where Kara is facing away from him looking at some pictures on his wall, and throws the towel over her head. She turns around as she pulls it off her head so she can see and starts trying to dry herself off as much as she can.
"Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to start drinking much," she sighs.
"First time I've ever heard you say that," he says as he goes back into his room and switches on a lamp. "Would you rather still be in traffic right now?"
"I guess not," she answers as she gives her hair a final vigorous rub with the towel and then throws it over the back of a chair before sitting down in it.
When she looks back over at Lee, his side is facing her as he pulls at the bottom of his wet shirt and peels it away from the smooth, damp surface of his back and chest. She doesn't look away, just stares through it and keeps casually looking in his general direction, focusing her eyes on nothing in particular as if there is nothing there. Then a round of thunder strikes, so shockingly loud it sounds like the sky has to be cracking apart like a porcelain bowl under some kind of intense strain, and she looks toward his one small window at the rain outside that is barely visible now that it's completely dark. As her skin has started drying, she suddenly feels strangely warm all over every surface of it, and something restless is squirming inside her. The air is full of a tangible electricity that is much easier to perceive removed from the pounding rain in the quiet apartment.
As Lee puts on just an undershirt, they both seem aware of the silence getting too thick. He moves out of her view through the doorway and says, "So are you going to tell me about the time you got arrested or not?"
Kara chews her bottom lip and looks down, tensely drumming her fingers on her leg for a moment, and just says something to change the subject. "Have you got a deck of cards and a bottle of ambrosia around here? Looks like I'm stuck here a while."
He reappears and stands right in the doorway, raising his hands to both sides and leaning forward that way as he looks at her. "I'm not betting against you, if you're hoping to rip me off."
"So don't bet," she says, shrugging. "Just play...If you want to take all the danger and fun out of it."
He smirks a little, retreats back into his room to get something and comes back with a handful of cubits. "What the hell," he says. "No frakking around."
Kara rubs her hands together in anticipation. "This night just started to look a lot more interesting."
Lee gestures toward the kitchen. "If I have any ambrosia, it's in the cabinet. I'm sure you would remember which one."
She quickly finds a large half-full bottle among his store and brings it with a couple shot glasses to the coffee table where Lee has now gotten out cards and taken a seat on the floor leaning against the couch. Kara sits on the side of the table adjacent to his as they play. Lee laughs at her when the next loud crack of thunder makes her jump and nearly spit out a mouthful of ambrosia right after she takes a shot. Nearly a half-hour later she has beat him at the first game and the bottle is an inch less full than before, and she has pushed it across to Lee's end of the table to cut herself off in hopes that she'll still eventually be able to get herself home tonight.
"No," Lee says, touching her arm to stop her as she starts dealing the cards for the next game. "Scorpian War this time."
She tilts her head. "You can't play that with two," she objects.
"Of course you can. It'll work."
"But I never have. I don't like that game."
"Wuss," he says, mildly grinning.
"Excuse me?" she says with a laugh. "This from the guy who just lost ten cubits."
She continues dealing the cards for a second until he drops a hand down onto hers to stop her a little forcibly, looking right at her face and shaking his head. "You only play games you know you can win," he says.
Her eyes narrow a little as she registers the challenge. "Fine," she says, slowly picking all the cards up to deal them differently.
It is a game with a more relaxed pace and less concentration required, so after a while of playing they drift off into easy conversation.
"I guess it's natural to never stop wanting your parents' approval," Kara says, staring a little boredly at her hand and leaning against the table in a very lazy position. "But you're a big boy now, Lee, and you have to realize you're free to do what you want. You don't even have anyone else to look out for anymore. The only person you have to answer to is yourself."
He gives a short, slightly dark laugh. "You make it sound like that's so easy," he says. "Answering to yourself."
"Well, at least you always know what you've got to do."
"But it doesn't exactly mean being free to do whatever you want," he says a little softly, no longer meeting eyes with her.
Kara looks away from him as well, sighs, and says, "Um...I'm calling a check. Show me three."
"Already?" he asks with surprise.
"Yeah. Already."
He selects three cards and puts them on the table in sight, now smiling. "I win," he says before she has even looked at them closely yet.
"What?" she asks in a doubtful tone, as if he has to be joking.
"Count 'em, sir," he says as she leans over to look at them and goes wide-eyed. "That there is a match."
"Frak!" she says loudly, throwing down her own cards. "This game? It doesn't even take any skill."
He laughs. "I beg to differ. Plenty of bluffing involved, don't you think?"
"No, not really, I don't think," she says bitterly.
Lee starts laughing harder, increasingly amused by how angry she sounds. "Wow. You really are pissed."
"Yeah, go ahead, act all satisfied because you beat Kara Thrace at Scorpian War. A frakking college kids' game."
He just keeps laughing as he starts shuffling the cards again.
"You're right," he says after a while, and she takes a moment to realize he is picking up their former conversation again. "It's a lot easier to just follow the path your parents have laid out for you, and the reason it took me so long to start trying to live the life I really want is because I'm just a little scared of what I don't know and understand so well. I mean...law? It's kind of morally ambiguous territory. Who knows what I'm capable of in that kind of career?"
She smirks in response to his half-joking tone. "You've always been stubbornly certain about what you think is right," she says teasingly. "I think you of all people wouldn't find yourself too conflicted about it and would be able to keep your head screwed on straight."
Lee goes silent, his hands slowing to a stop and then setting the cards down. "That's really strange to hear," he says, still looking down at the table.
She raises her brow. "Why?"
He leans over to look at her face very closely, crossing his arms on the table. "It just doesn't seem true," he says quietly. "Even though I guess the way I act is always so consistent, like I've fallen into this secure and comfortable pattern that's hard to break. But I feel conflicted all the time...Except lately, actually..."
Kara shifts her eyes away from his for a second. Lately. That restless feeling in her chest is building up, fight or flight response taking tight hold of her every nerve. Attack or disengage. Take control and possibly win or risk just getting chased and shot down anyway.
He lets out a soft, slightly nervous laugh. "You asked if I feel like a good guy today?" he says. "Truth is I just feel really...powerless. Like I can't really be right or wrong right now. The world looks kind of absurd and is just...happening to me. And it feels good to just let it for once, instead of trying to be in control."
At some point, without realizing it, Kara has started breathing a little uneasily, and he has drawn a lot closer to her without her immediately perceiving it. As he keeps looking right into her eyes, his gaze never breaking away like a constant and unbearable light in her face, she sees some kind of struggle in his expression for a second before he slowly opens his mouth to say something more.
Piercing thunder cracks again, making them both look away in alarm, and an instant later the lights all shut off.
"Oh, great," Lee sighs quietly as they both look around, their eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkness. But he doesn't sound like it even bothers him terribly much right now.
Then they both remain where they are in silence, unable to see anything around them clearly at all, the unspoken question formed deafeningly in the air. What can they do now? They stay still like this for a slightly prolonged moment, but something has to happen next and Kara knows it. Whether it happens to her or she makes it happen.
Lee is warm, audible breath in the dark beside her, still very close, and she can see just enough to notice him turning his head and looking back at her again. She feels blind and helpless and she panics. Turns and flies right into the attack. Reaches to him, her hands finding the smooth skin of his shoulders and neck, her mouth finding his before he can start talking again.
At first he freezes up, too taken aback to react to her, but then she can feel his whole body loosen up as he seems to just let his mind detach from it and go passive. His hands are first that strangely familiar solid heat at her back, and then one slides down around her waist and the other raises to tightly take hold of her hair with a surprising and sudden aggression, grabbing the back of her head to pull her a little closer as he starts kissing her more deeply and decidedly, letting out a long and sort of sinking, surrendering breath like a sigh.
That hunger that Kara has tried to become numb to but mostly just learned to live with the distant ache of every day, shutting it away like a plant in a drawer living away from light, is desperately clawing out and thriving in her moment of weakness, of carelessness, whatever this is. Maybe this is what it feels like to be able to finally move on and live again, but somewhere in the back of her mind she already decides it can't really be real; the sour reality will return to her afterwards even if the mindless high of the moment makes it all not matter. And she does not know what she is doing, only that this restless, powerful urge she's been fighting all night is making her feel like pulling him apart in her hands like soft pieces of cotton, in her hands like she can't with words. Let the damage free. It will crash and burn and then this volatile, unspoken thing that's been there so long no matter how long they've tried to kill it will surely have to finally die.
She has pressed him back against the couch and straddled her legs over his lap when Lee first starts to become hesitant again, recoiling as he seems to sense her urgency. He touches both her shoulders and gently, just slightly pushes her back away, leans his forehead in against hers and says softly and uncertainly, "Kara..."
The sound of his voice somehow threatens to break the suspended, comforting spell of being in the dark. She just plants her hands firmly at his neck and jaw on each side and mutters quickly, "Please shut up" before starting to kiss him again.
Lee raises a hand to the back of her head and grabs a handful of her hair again, and this time he roughly pulls her head away from him, forcing it back until her face is turned upward, her neck curved back and exposed, all of her only visible in barely defined, dark shapes. They certainly cannot read each other's faces right now, and Kara has no idea what is going to happen but does think she can detect some kind of determination just in how forcefully he's touching her. When he suddenly bends down and she feels his mouth on her neck, slowly exploring, it comes as a disarming surprise, and without meaning to she closes her eyes.
They have both slipped completely away, lost track of what time it could possibly be now, lost any kind of sense of space and surroundings and the size of the room they're in. There is no longer any hesitation, no conscious thought, only breathing, tasting. Lee somehow keeps pulling things back, keeping it slow and easy. His hands slide inside her shirt and up her back, taking it off over her head, and then she swiftly pulls off his undershirt, but he stops her before she can touch the fly of her jeans by grabbing her wrists. As they don't stop kissing there is a strange momentary struggle, and then he pushes her back to the floor with both her arms pinned back. She half-consciously understands what this is. It's as if they're wrestling for control, each trying to set the pace and determine what exactly this is, a quick frak or something else. And he's decided it isn't going to happen on the floor.
He leads her into a haphazard backwards crawl toward the doorway of the bedroom. They both finally slip out of their pants by the time they've reached the bed and Kara is backing up against it. Then as they sloppily start pulling themselves up onto it together while still intertwined, she hits herself against the bed frame at her tailbone, winces and sharply whispers, "Ow." She automatically reaches behind her to touch the spot she hit, but Lee's hand moves down from her waist, reaches it first and gently rubs it so that it soon stops stinging. Her face cracks into a humored smile he can't quite see, and then as he starts kissing her again and pulls her up onto the bed she makes a soft sound in her throat that sounds like half of a contented laugh.
Lee's hand on her lower back slides around to her front, then creeps down, now slowly rubbing elsewhere. Kara's breath hitches, her whole body clenching and curling inward a little. She clutches his back tightly with one hand, the other at his chest as if to push him away, her nails curling inward just a little as if unintentionally. She doesn't like going at this pace. She does and she doesn't. She can feel that she is losing. Maybe doesn't care anymore.
After a while he seems no longer able to keep holding back himself and they both start to move quickly and eagerly as they pull away the only clothes they still have on. They shuffle themselves around for a moment, finding the position and fit, and then when he finally slides in all slows down for a strangely pacified moment as if they both feel some sudden and great impact, a very heavy latch dropping, something locking tightly into place. Of course, it feels like, like this has always been, in so many moments they didn't realize were only painfully extended preludes to it, though it is only vaguely realized even now.
Then it naturally picks up again, their bodies completely taking over and running themselves, their heads stifled by the building heat. It is so easy, like they are feeling their way around in the dark but it's some place they have been before, as if they've known each other this way already. Kara has retreated into a familiar safe place, running along a path ignoring anything on the periphery, letting everything else but what she feels and sees right now slide away, and soon her world fills and overflows with nothing but the rhythmic heavy breathing and thick darkness.
This is when the power comes back on. The lamp by Lee's bed lights up brilliantly with a soft flick sound from the bulb and they each blink a few times, seeing spots. Kara only now notices that she can no longer hear any rain outside.
And she looks past Lee's shoulder and sees the ceiling above, a lot lower and closer than she thought she remembered. What is happening? Everything is too close, enclosing, past her defenses, inside. The slight panic returns, but she tries to take hold of it and just slide through this without letting it quite touch her, not quite feeling everything with all senses like before.
As she keeps looking far up, Lee brings a hand by her face and lightly touches her hair. He must see something in her face that concerns him because he asks a little breathlessly, "Are you alright?"
She blinks, meets eyes with him with difficulty and slightly smiles in a dark way that doesn't reach her eyes. "No," she says, as if the question is funny.
He shakes his head just a little. "You want to stop?"
"No," she just says again in a mutter. The harm is done.
He seems to see this, too, because after slowing down only a little he just buries his face back in her neck and keeps moving, but he keeps his eyes there and doesn't kiss her anymore. Kara keeps her eyes closed and the light from the lamp is red through her eyelids like an unbearable burning sun. Before long they're nearing the edge, both gasping, and Lee rakes his hand into her hair again like he has to hold onto something and isn't even thinking about it.
When Kara is getting close her voice cracks out in some shapeless soft cries and then forms into some words that manage to fight their way out without any thought. "Shit-Teller-"
"Okay," he says right back in a tight voice; following the cue, he lets go and pushes on through to the end fast and forcibly, until they both reach the top together, hearing each other's breath hold and then release in a final heavy exhale. Then down, relax, collapse together, both their bodies going loose after clutching strongly to each other the whole time.
Lee sits up a little, looks down at her. She doesn't look at him.
With her face turned away on the bed and her eyes fixed on a wall, she says in a calm voice, "Turn the light off."
He waits just a few seconds, then slides off of her and toward the bedside table, reaches over and switches the lamp off. Kara rolls away, turning on her side facing away from him, and feels him tiredly recline behind her. She closes her eyes, and it is dark and quiet again.
Two years and eight months ago, Zak's dimly lit little apartment, the TV on and takeout boxes scattered all over the table in front of them while they were sitting on the couch. They'd ordered noodles and watched some boxing matches, but now the volume was turned down a little and Zak was walking to the store down the street to get ice or something or other that he was out of.
Kara's engagement ring, now new and unfamiliar to see on her hand, had been strangely distracting to him all night, and eventually when they got to talking about it he asked, "Why are you marrying him?"
She tilted her head to one side as she stared at him, and then gave a strange laugh and said, "What kind of a question is that?"
Lee only then realized how that must have sounded, even though he was sure his tone had been light enough. "Well, of course I'm not surprised you're planning to in general," he amended. "You've just never struck me as the kind to be very eager to get married soon. And it almost seems kind of fast."
Kara shrugged. "No, I guess I'm not the type to care much about getting married," she said, "but it's not like we're making a big deal out of it. It'll just be a small ceremony, nothing humiliating for me."
Lee laughed and said, "Yeah, I've been trying to picture you in a lacy white dress..."
She shook her head and laughed. "And you know, we were already planning to move in together anyway. I just thought...Why not? I know that he is...it."
Lee smirked. "I believe what most people say is 'the one.'"
Kara just snorted with laughter, leaned over to pick up a box of rice and started nibbling on it some more. He watched her a moment, then made himself stare past her and look at nothing in particular, just absorbing the colors from the framed sports posters on Zak's walls. Just a passive observer of his brother's life.
Maybe that gutsy little voice was with him a little even back then, much more hindered from expressing itself than now. He recalls how after a while, he stopped associating "Teller" with a professional Pyramid player and it just became an elusive word, a strange sound, how sometimes when it was said what he heard in his head was something like Tell her.
Kara wakes up a while after him and gets a heavy feeling in her stomach before she groggily rolls over to find him not in bed beside her. She just lies there a minute, surrendering to the dark flood of realizations and detailed recollections and trying to find the motivation to get up and face it all.
They were not nearly as drunk as she would like to think they were and she can remember just about everything very clearly. The feelings are all still vivid and stuck to her, like some jarring and irreversible physical change to her body, not slipped away into a blur. And she wonders for a second now, as she didn't at the time, how Lee was able to tell exactly where she hurt herself knocking against the bed frame when it was so dark she can hardly imagine he saw right where she hit it. Trying not to think too much about the feeling of his hands on her, in a pitch-black room during a storm in a hot and dark concert hall while he's standing behind her a breathing voice she could feel on the other end of a phone line, she absently brings one hand up to her shoulder and smoothes it down the length of her arm, curling her body inward a little.
She sighs heavily, lowering her face down toward the mattress so much some hair falls over her eyes. Then her face goes hard, ready and determined, and she sits up to get out of bed.
When she comes out into the next room, dressed but for missing her shirt, Lee is sitting on the couch and leaning over as he slowly and idly shuffles the playing cards on the table. He looks up at her and just says, "Hi." With just the short word he makes his voice very cautious and gentle, experimentally prodding. Not expecting too much.
She barely looks at him before she goes to the chair and sits in it, bending over to get her shoes and socks on the floor. "What time is it?" she asks.
In the few seconds of silence he waits before answering, Kara is first able to perceive his disappointment.
"About ten-thirty," he says.
She stands up and starts searching the room for her shirt.
"So," he says, not quite sounding angry, "you're just gonna run again, huh?"
Kara glances over at him, looks away and ignores the question as she keeps looking around. "Dammit," she mutters after a while. "Where's my...?"
When she turns again she finds him standing by her and holding out her shirt to her. She grabs it and says, "Thanks" without looking right at him, slipping it on over her head.
Before she can turn away from him again, he grabs her forearm to stop her. Then he just holds onto her, waiting, until she stops resisting and looks at him, meeting his eyes with a resigned look and swallowing. She knows she can't get out of giving him this much.
Lee is still very composed, but his voice starts to carry an edge of bitterness. "And what if I eventually get tired of having to catch up to you? You may not want to admit it but I think you're depending on that. You expect me to keep doing this forever?"
"No, Lee, I expect you to finally do something that makes sense!" she says. "Start trying to make amends with your real family, not me. Stay with your nice Aerilonese girl next door who will never be a difficult pain in the ass or embarrass you in front of people after drinking way too much. I mean, for frak sakes, Lee, I tell you my last boyfriend ended up in a box because of me, and what do you do? You-you just keep showing up again, more relentlessly than ever and won't stay away-"
"Not everybody only cares about protecting themselves at all costs. Gods, do I actually have to say it?" he says, grabbing her shoulders for a moment and saying it directly to her face with emphasis. "I forgive you. Is that so impossible for you to understand? To believe? Yeah, I know you were hoping that throwing that at me would be enough to get me out of your life for good. Thanks a lot. And I don't even want to think about what last night was supposed to be about. But that just shows how amazingly obtuse your guilt and self-hatred can make you. Tell me something. How did you become so frakking terrified of being happy?"
Kara is shaking her head, her mouth in a small, dark grin. "So I'm just off the hook, just like that?" she says incredulously. "And just like that, now everything's fine and we can be happy? It just doesn't make any difference to you what really happened to your brother?"
"That's not the frakking point and you know it," he says harshly. "How long are going to keep using him as an excuse?"
In a heated instant her eyes go wide and her hand flies up to slap him hard across the face. Then in the following silence, they both just start to look a little sorry. Kara slowly turns away, disoriented for a moment before she remembers where her keys are on the kitchen counter and heads that way.
"Will you just...let me know the next time you're going to be home?" Lee asks.
Kara stops to turn on the faucet at the sink, filling her hands with water to take a drink and then quickly washing her face. "I don't think that's a good idea," she says flatly.
He comes over to her side as she turns to get her keys and puts them in her pocket. "Listen...We can forget this ever happened. I'm sure that's what you'll do anyway. Just tell me it won't be another two years before I so much as hear from you again."
She stops where she is, turned a little away from him. Something in her face falters for a moment and then she turns quickly to him, takes his face in her hands to pull him to her and kisses him forcefully, holding it for a long and very silent moment. Caught off guard, Lee can only react slowly, and he has just barely, lightly touched her waist when she lets go.
"Bye, Lee," she says quietly without looking directly at him, and then passes him to reach the door.
He stands there facing the way he was and doesn't watch her go, just sinking his head down a little when he hears the door shut behind her.
Do it.
"Why are you marrying him?" he asked. But this time, he imagines, it would not have been with a casual tone. Quietly, carrying some kind of serious meaning.
Kara would have just looked at him a long time without saying anything, her brow narrowing in confusion.
"It almost seems kind of soon to be getting married...Have you asked yourself why?"
Then she would have shook her head, said softly, "What the hell kind of a question is that?"
His face would not have completely hidden the almost sickening fear rising in his chest as his voice came out very uneasily. "Is it because you love him? Or is it because...you love him...and there's also the other one?"
He can see her looking away from him then, just staring across the room with wide eyes.
"And you know it just can't be otherwise, or you think it can't, so you either have to keep both of them as you have them now or ruin everything and lose both, and that's why you're so sure you'll never want any of this to change and you're doing the right thing. Because you can't have me...but you can't lose me."
"What the frak do you think you're doing?" she might have just whispered then.
"Being honest...and a bastard. Believe me, I feel like a really terrible person right now, but I don't know what to do...Do you think this is going to get any simpler when you're my sister-in-law?"
Neither of them had yet said the word "in-law" in reference to what they were going to become, and he imagines her visibly disturbed a little to hear it said out loud like that, closing her eyes a moment.
Past this he isn't sure what would have happened. He thinks after a while she probably would have said, not necessarily with anger, "I think you should leave," like something might happen otherwise, and then made some excuse for him having to take off when Zak came back.
After a couple days there would be a phone call. "It's me," his voice would come through after she picked up. No more code words. He would be able to tell just from her tense way of speaking that Zak must be with her and would make it short. A brief but sincere apology. "I just needed to say those things so I'd know" and "I think maybe we shouldn't see so much of each other anymore, when we can help it."
"Yeah" would be her small, cool voice, so very far away.
He can easily see it going this way, ending this way, if he had somehow summoned the courage to do it, the most difficult, ugly, unpleasant thing he ever would have had to do. After losing Zak, they would have parted in a much less bitter way, just with a somewhat cold goodbye. "Take care of yourself, Lee Adama" and "Yeah, you too." And doing the impossible by being able to say it would have been for nothing.
But he can also maybe see it happening differently. Maybe being faced with the sudden, unexpected reality of having to lose one of them, choose one, would have given her some kind of clarity she'd never had before. And ever since that phone call, she would find herself fiddling uneasily with the ring on her finger, knowing this is it, forever. And realize she couldn't do it.
Even if she didn't tell him what she knew now she really wanted, perhaps Zak always suspected, perhaps he would know why. And maybe he would have hated them for a while. However it happened it never would have been easy. But then three weeks later when he did his flight test, after having to do something as hard as disappointing him like that, failing him would not have been nearly as hard for Kara. And he could still be alive.
No matter how he imagines this, endlessly dwelling on it ever since Kara told him the truth that shook his whole world up at first, something about it still seems too easy and not quite possible. He's sure she probably couldn't even say now what her choice would have been. He knows it is just natural and human to be tormented by all the possibilities, how it could have been prevented. And he also knows that he may just want to find some comfort in the idea that they might not have been punished for what there was between them after all, after so much time of feeling this intense and stomach-turning guilt along with feeling its presence. But he is sure the memory of his brother will never stop sometimes making him think about it at least a little and wonder.
But in the end, he's not some god with control over fate and cause and effect, he can't completely understand it, and he doesn't know. He'll never know. As much as they can't help but still pick apart the possibilities and causes to try to find the one easy answer and reason as if that would make it all better, as if they or at least somebody has to pay and suffer and then there will finally be closure, they have to accept that.
Go to part V.