fic: BSG, Water Under Bridge, Kara/Lee
disclaimer: not mine.
genre: future fic, angst
length: 2000+
spoilers: Everything
characters: Kara Thrace, Lee Adama, OCs.
pairing: Kara Thrace/Lee Adama (yes, you did read that right)
notes: this is what listening to the Pet Shop Boys' "The Way it Used to Be" will do to your brain with the help of annoyed indignation.
eta: I suck so hard. Major thanks to sabaceanbabe and karate0kat for the betas! all remaining mistakes are totally me.
Water Under Bridge
by ALC Punk!
Willie, Cottle's third god-daughter, kept the records of births and relations. Anyone who needed to know if they were related simply asked her. Even as a young child, her brain had retained knowledge at a phenomenal rate. Wilhemina Adama shared bloodlines with Hera Agathon, so it was to be expected.
No one remembered how to spell Willie's full name; only the older members of their small colony remembered how to write. Books that had once been in high demand moldered or were turned into fodder for the cookfires that kept people alive.
Lee Adama, Willie's grandfather, sometimes looked ineffably saddened by that fact, though at his age, it was likely he was remembering the people that the stories were about. People who were dead.
Kara Thrace, Sam Anders, Felix Gaeta, Tom Zarek, Maggie Edmonson... The list went on, and they were names the aging man called out to at times. Cursing some, missing others, telling his father (a man who was still legend, though the reasons why were becoming obscure as the colony moved onto a third generation) that he'd been wrong.
Cottle himself had barely lived past Willie's naming ceremony, dying and leaving Ishay and two apprentices to take his place, walking between tiny villages and farmsteads, distributing comforting words more than medicines, knowledgeable hands rather than needles.
He could have diagnosed Lee's condition, told his adopted children and grandchildren that there was no hope. Sometimes, the mind went like this, slowly and imperceptibly, until Lee would mistake his son for his own brother, or his grandchildren as they laughed and played for rowdy pilots needing to be brought to task.
There were no corridors and decks to clean, no toothbrushes to clean them with.
Kitchen duty was long hours in front of banked fires, pounding out bread dough made from the small wheat crops that were slowly dying, despite Baltar's attempts at science. Caprica seemed more amused by this fact than anything else, though she, too, was aging, her eyes less clear than they had been, fine wrinkles around them from smiling too often in the sunlight.
Hera Agathon had taken over as leader for a short time before changing her mind and deciding Nicholas Costanza was a better choice. She never told him she could feel his Cylon heritage running through his veins, though that fact was recorded by first Cottle and later Willie, in an attempt to keep genetics from drifting too close together. She preferred the sunlight in the fields to long sessions worrying over whether there would be enough food and wood to keep them through another winter.
Frequently, she went walking, following Cottle and then Ishay (after Layne's children were born, she took up doctoring again, refusing to become something she never had been) as they tramped over untouched land until her feet had worn soft paths amongst the bones of the planet they were calling Earth.
Hera, too, was the first to be able to convince the natives that they perhaps weren't all bad. Her first child was born with few complications other than adding a new branch to the tree of genetics. She named her Cassandra.
All of this was something Lee tried to remember, tried to keep in his mind even as he slid further down the slope of dementia. He almost asked to be euthanized, when he was coherent. But there was some part of him that abhorred the idea of simply giving up like that. Still, he thought he was seeing things when she finally visited him.
"You're dead."
"So they tell me." Her fingers stroked through what was left of his hair, the pads cool against his scalp. "Lee. You need to stop worrying so much. Life will happen as it's supposed to."
"Don't give me that 'all this has happened before' crap," he growled.
She chuckled and shifted, "Wouldn't dream of it."
There was a moment where neither of them spoke and his eyes closed, his mouth working before he mumbled, "You're not real."
"I'm as real as you need me to be."
"You're awfully polite and sweet for Kara Thrace," he grumbled.
She laughed softly, "If you want, I could rant and rave at you, mock you, maybe punch you a couple times. Got any ambrosia around?"
That seemed to give him food for thought, and he was silent for a time before murmuring, "Like that time you punched 'Track over the strip triad game."
"Kat punched 'Track," Kara corrected, her voice amused. "I was taunting them both, and you were very obviously doing paperwork, wishing we'd shut the frak up."
"You never listened to reason," he ranted, though his voice was quiet.
"Tell me about it, Mr. Stick-up-my-ass."
Words tumbled from his lips, memories and curses, things only she could remember with him. They talked about Zak as the sun set, and Kara teased him about his mountains and marriage, telling him that only staid, stick-in-the-muds would marry a woman they got pregnant.
Layne would have punched her if she'd been around. Perhaps Lee would have, too, but Kara's mockery was something he'd learned to take in stride, and pointing out that her own marriage hadn't had exactly noble beginnings shut her up for several minutes.
They had always been like this, in a way. Less lover-like, and more rivals trying to one-up each other and come out on top. Neither had ever won, in the end. Lee sometimes wondered if it would have worked to their advantage if they'd married. Still, watching Layne with their children, watching his grandchildren, was more than enough to remind him that what ifs and maybes were for a man who lived somewhere else.
Captain Apollo, as Roslin had once dubbed him. Not Leland Adama, mountain climber and founder of the tiny farming community sometimes referred to as Delphi City.
He tired too easily, of course, and she let him drift into sleep while she watched him, something strangely peaceful in the back of her eyes, though there was sorrow, too.
"It's nice of you to sit with him."
Willie's voice broke Kara from her spell and she turned to look at the younger woman, seeing pieces of Lee in her stance and the clarity in her eyes. "It seemed the least I could do."
"You're a stranger." Willie didn't sound worried, merely curious as she looked at Kara. "Did you know him--before, I mean?"
Kara didn't miss the slightly calculating look in Willie's eyes and half-smiled, "Not exactly. My mother knew him. She told me stories, her and him, and the others on the flight deck. I just--I thought she would have wanted to be here when he..." she stopped, awkward in her certain knowledge and unwilling to burden Willie with it.
But Willie finished for her. "He dies." Mouth twisting, she looked towards the badly-centered window that let in a little light when the sun was high in the air. The deep evening gloom barely managed to do more than glimmer. "It's soon, isn't it?"
Not a question, even though it was phrased as one.
Kara shook her head, "You can't really tell with these things." Though perhaps Willie could; Kara had watched her grow up, and seen that she could see some of the patterns in ways that would have made Leoben proud.
A laugh came from the bed, cracked with age, and Lee gasped out, his voice full of amusement, "You were always a shitty liar, Starbuck."
"Starbuck?" Willie's eyes narrowed again before she relaxed, "Poor gramps. He doesn't recognize me half the time, either. And grandma..." But Layne had passed more than a year before, catching the newest permutation of the flu and refusing to rest enough. She'd died in Lee's arms, telling him he was an idiot for being close to her where he could catch the disease. "He thinks Hera is my grandmother, sometimes."
"It's his brain," murmured Kara quietly, "Back in the colonies, there were... not cures, but drugs to help. Now there's nothing." For a moment, she almost said she was sorry. But Earth had been humanity's goal and respite.
Perhaps the broken cycle had been worth it.
"I've been reading--mother taught me, of course--and Doc Cottle's notes are nearly all we have left. He tried to write so much down for us, but there's really only experience to teach us, now." A sigh escaped Willie and she poked a thumb over her shoulder, "Would you like something to drink?"
"Ah, no. No, I should be going soon." Kara cleared her throat, her fingers brushing over Lee's forehead. He'd drifted back into sleep. "But thank you."
"Hospitality is almost the only thing we have left," was Willie's amused reply before she tilted her head, eyes going distant. "One of the children is about to come running for me. I've got to go. It was nice meeting you, miss--?"
But Kara ignored the hesitant question, her gaze drawn back to the bed. Willie gave her an inscrutable look and turned as someone pounded on the wall, a small voice shouting for her, the words echoing in the small square that might once have been enough for a civilization.
"Starbuck?"
Lee was awake again. Reaching up, Kara rubbed her fingers over her eyes and tried to smile, "I'm here, Lee."
"Thought you were a dream," he rasped, the words hesitant, uncertain.
"You've seen me before, Lee. Was I a dream then?" The words conjured memories, fleeting glimpses as she followed him up mountains and down well-worn trails. Catching him by surprise as he stood near the fields. Smiling from a hilltop while he chased his youngest... the memories were tinged with a golden light now.
His breathing shifted, catching, as he tried to speak again. "Couldn't... couldn't hope."
Kara huffed out a breath and wiped her eyes again, leaning down to kiss his lips. "I know, Lee. I had to hope for both of us."
No more hitching breaths or words answered her, and she sat in silence for several minutes before another footstep came, echoing a little strangely against the dirt floor (almost as though it were a boot against metal plates).
"I'm an atheist," Lee protested from behind her.
A chuckle rocked Kara, but she didn't turn to look at him. "They don't care, Lee."
He made a cranky, grumpy noise, more like an old man than the shell collapsing in on itself on the bed before her. Then he moved, hand touching her shoulder hesitantly. "Kara, I don't understand."
"What's to understand, Apollo?" her words were sarcastic as she stood, turning to look at him. "You're dead. I'm dead."
It wasn't that simple, she could tell by the look in his eyes. It made her want to laugh; she was sure that, in the beginning, she'd had that look, too. In the beginning... Wistfully, she wondered how long this would last for them. There were no rules for the sort of thing she was doing. For visiting a dead man and seeing him one last time.
Or if there were, no one had bothered telling her about them.
"So, what, Kara? We run around as ghosts?"
"No," she said, choosing her words carefully. "We leave. You make your peace here, and we leave."
"Like you did?"
She couldn't tell him that wasn't what she did, that making her peace wasn't that simple and never had been. Instead, she reached for his hand. "C'mere, you idiot."
Hugging him was something she had missed and Kara turned her head, burying her face in his neck. He smelled like rubber and viper grease, and she wondered if the perception were simply her own memory, or if it was what Lee had unconsciously chosen for himself. The man hugging her back, after all, was not the old and wizened individual on the bed.
"Missed you," he whispered, arms closing convulsively around her.
Almost too tight, but Kara ignored the discomfort to revel in holding Lee. "Hey." She pulled back a little, when the word was too muffled by his neck to be intelligible. "I don't know how long we've got." Her lips twisted a little, eyes lighting, "Want to see the world?"
"With you? Can we?" There was an eagerness in his gaze, something that had once been there when he talked of mountains and settlements.
Kara smiled. "Yeah. Yeah, we can."
It didn't matter how long she thought they had. They could make the time work. When he was gone, she would remember.
Someone had to, and Sam had a memory too full of Cylons and planets that were dead and barren.
"Grandfather?" Willie's voice echoed as they stepped out of the hut and into the starlight. She would find him, and she would grieve, and then life would move on for her and the settlement. And someday, she would be the one walking the Earth in starlight, seeing the changes man had wrought.
-f-
genre: future fic, angst
length: 2000+
spoilers: Everything
characters: Kara Thrace, Lee Adama, OCs.
pairing: Kara Thrace/Lee Adama (yes, you did read that right)
notes: this is what listening to the Pet Shop Boys' "The Way it Used to Be" will do to your brain with the help of annoyed indignation.
eta: I suck so hard. Major thanks to sabaceanbabe and karate0kat for the betas! all remaining mistakes are totally me.
Water Under Bridge
by ALC Punk!
Willie, Cottle's third god-daughter, kept the records of births and relations. Anyone who needed to know if they were related simply asked her. Even as a young child, her brain had retained knowledge at a phenomenal rate. Wilhemina Adama shared bloodlines with Hera Agathon, so it was to be expected.
No one remembered how to spell Willie's full name; only the older members of their small colony remembered how to write. Books that had once been in high demand moldered or were turned into fodder for the cookfires that kept people alive.
Lee Adama, Willie's grandfather, sometimes looked ineffably saddened by that fact, though at his age, it was likely he was remembering the people that the stories were about. People who were dead.
Kara Thrace, Sam Anders, Felix Gaeta, Tom Zarek, Maggie Edmonson... The list went on, and they were names the aging man called out to at times. Cursing some, missing others, telling his father (a man who was still legend, though the reasons why were becoming obscure as the colony moved onto a third generation) that he'd been wrong.
Cottle himself had barely lived past Willie's naming ceremony, dying and leaving Ishay and two apprentices to take his place, walking between tiny villages and farmsteads, distributing comforting words more than medicines, knowledgeable hands rather than needles.
He could have diagnosed Lee's condition, told his adopted children and grandchildren that there was no hope. Sometimes, the mind went like this, slowly and imperceptibly, until Lee would mistake his son for his own brother, or his grandchildren as they laughed and played for rowdy pilots needing to be brought to task.
There were no corridors and decks to clean, no toothbrushes to clean them with.
Kitchen duty was long hours in front of banked fires, pounding out bread dough made from the small wheat crops that were slowly dying, despite Baltar's attempts at science. Caprica seemed more amused by this fact than anything else, though she, too, was aging, her eyes less clear than they had been, fine wrinkles around them from smiling too often in the sunlight.
Hera Agathon had taken over as leader for a short time before changing her mind and deciding Nicholas Costanza was a better choice. She never told him she could feel his Cylon heritage running through his veins, though that fact was recorded by first Cottle and later Willie, in an attempt to keep genetics from drifting too close together. She preferred the sunlight in the fields to long sessions worrying over whether there would be enough food and wood to keep them through another winter.
Frequently, she went walking, following Cottle and then Ishay (after Layne's children were born, she took up doctoring again, refusing to become something she never had been) as they tramped over untouched land until her feet had worn soft paths amongst the bones of the planet they were calling Earth.
Hera, too, was the first to be able to convince the natives that they perhaps weren't all bad. Her first child was born with few complications other than adding a new branch to the tree of genetics. She named her Cassandra.
All of this was something Lee tried to remember, tried to keep in his mind even as he slid further down the slope of dementia. He almost asked to be euthanized, when he was coherent. But there was some part of him that abhorred the idea of simply giving up like that. Still, he thought he was seeing things when she finally visited him.
"You're dead."
"So they tell me." Her fingers stroked through what was left of his hair, the pads cool against his scalp. "Lee. You need to stop worrying so much. Life will happen as it's supposed to."
"Don't give me that 'all this has happened before' crap," he growled.
She chuckled and shifted, "Wouldn't dream of it."
There was a moment where neither of them spoke and his eyes closed, his mouth working before he mumbled, "You're not real."
"I'm as real as you need me to be."
"You're awfully polite and sweet for Kara Thrace," he grumbled.
She laughed softly, "If you want, I could rant and rave at you, mock you, maybe punch you a couple times. Got any ambrosia around?"
That seemed to give him food for thought, and he was silent for a time before murmuring, "Like that time you punched 'Track over the strip triad game."
"Kat punched 'Track," Kara corrected, her voice amused. "I was taunting them both, and you were very obviously doing paperwork, wishing we'd shut the frak up."
"You never listened to reason," he ranted, though his voice was quiet.
"Tell me about it, Mr. Stick-up-my-ass."
Words tumbled from his lips, memories and curses, things only she could remember with him. They talked about Zak as the sun set, and Kara teased him about his mountains and marriage, telling him that only staid, stick-in-the-muds would marry a woman they got pregnant.
Layne would have punched her if she'd been around. Perhaps Lee would have, too, but Kara's mockery was something he'd learned to take in stride, and pointing out that her own marriage hadn't had exactly noble beginnings shut her up for several minutes.
They had always been like this, in a way. Less lover-like, and more rivals trying to one-up each other and come out on top. Neither had ever won, in the end. Lee sometimes wondered if it would have worked to their advantage if they'd married. Still, watching Layne with their children, watching his grandchildren, was more than enough to remind him that what ifs and maybes were for a man who lived somewhere else.
Captain Apollo, as Roslin had once dubbed him. Not Leland Adama, mountain climber and founder of the tiny farming community sometimes referred to as Delphi City.
He tired too easily, of course, and she let him drift into sleep while she watched him, something strangely peaceful in the back of her eyes, though there was sorrow, too.
"It's nice of you to sit with him."
Willie's voice broke Kara from her spell and she turned to look at the younger woman, seeing pieces of Lee in her stance and the clarity in her eyes. "It seemed the least I could do."
"You're a stranger." Willie didn't sound worried, merely curious as she looked at Kara. "Did you know him--before, I mean?"
Kara didn't miss the slightly calculating look in Willie's eyes and half-smiled, "Not exactly. My mother knew him. She told me stories, her and him, and the others on the flight deck. I just--I thought she would have wanted to be here when he..." she stopped, awkward in her certain knowledge and unwilling to burden Willie with it.
But Willie finished for her. "He dies." Mouth twisting, she looked towards the badly-centered window that let in a little light when the sun was high in the air. The deep evening gloom barely managed to do more than glimmer. "It's soon, isn't it?"
Not a question, even though it was phrased as one.
Kara shook her head, "You can't really tell with these things." Though perhaps Willie could; Kara had watched her grow up, and seen that she could see some of the patterns in ways that would have made Leoben proud.
A laugh came from the bed, cracked with age, and Lee gasped out, his voice full of amusement, "You were always a shitty liar, Starbuck."
"Starbuck?" Willie's eyes narrowed again before she relaxed, "Poor gramps. He doesn't recognize me half the time, either. And grandma..." But Layne had passed more than a year before, catching the newest permutation of the flu and refusing to rest enough. She'd died in Lee's arms, telling him he was an idiot for being close to her where he could catch the disease. "He thinks Hera is my grandmother, sometimes."
"It's his brain," murmured Kara quietly, "Back in the colonies, there were... not cures, but drugs to help. Now there's nothing." For a moment, she almost said she was sorry. But Earth had been humanity's goal and respite.
Perhaps the broken cycle had been worth it.
"I've been reading--mother taught me, of course--and Doc Cottle's notes are nearly all we have left. He tried to write so much down for us, but there's really only experience to teach us, now." A sigh escaped Willie and she poked a thumb over her shoulder, "Would you like something to drink?"
"Ah, no. No, I should be going soon." Kara cleared her throat, her fingers brushing over Lee's forehead. He'd drifted back into sleep. "But thank you."
"Hospitality is almost the only thing we have left," was Willie's amused reply before she tilted her head, eyes going distant. "One of the children is about to come running for me. I've got to go. It was nice meeting you, miss--?"
But Kara ignored the hesitant question, her gaze drawn back to the bed. Willie gave her an inscrutable look and turned as someone pounded on the wall, a small voice shouting for her, the words echoing in the small square that might once have been enough for a civilization.
"Starbuck?"
Lee was awake again. Reaching up, Kara rubbed her fingers over her eyes and tried to smile, "I'm here, Lee."
"Thought you were a dream," he rasped, the words hesitant, uncertain.
"You've seen me before, Lee. Was I a dream then?" The words conjured memories, fleeting glimpses as she followed him up mountains and down well-worn trails. Catching him by surprise as he stood near the fields. Smiling from a hilltop while he chased his youngest... the memories were tinged with a golden light now.
His breathing shifted, catching, as he tried to speak again. "Couldn't... couldn't hope."
Kara huffed out a breath and wiped her eyes again, leaning down to kiss his lips. "I know, Lee. I had to hope for both of us."
No more hitching breaths or words answered her, and she sat in silence for several minutes before another footstep came, echoing a little strangely against the dirt floor (almost as though it were a boot against metal plates).
"I'm an atheist," Lee protested from behind her.
A chuckle rocked Kara, but she didn't turn to look at him. "They don't care, Lee."
He made a cranky, grumpy noise, more like an old man than the shell collapsing in on itself on the bed before her. Then he moved, hand touching her shoulder hesitantly. "Kara, I don't understand."
"What's to understand, Apollo?" her words were sarcastic as she stood, turning to look at him. "You're dead. I'm dead."
It wasn't that simple, she could tell by the look in his eyes. It made her want to laugh; she was sure that, in the beginning, she'd had that look, too. In the beginning... Wistfully, she wondered how long this would last for them. There were no rules for the sort of thing she was doing. For visiting a dead man and seeing him one last time.
Or if there were, no one had bothered telling her about them.
"So, what, Kara? We run around as ghosts?"
"No," she said, choosing her words carefully. "We leave. You make your peace here, and we leave."
"Like you did?"
She couldn't tell him that wasn't what she did, that making her peace wasn't that simple and never had been. Instead, she reached for his hand. "C'mere, you idiot."
Hugging him was something she had missed and Kara turned her head, burying her face in his neck. He smelled like rubber and viper grease, and she wondered if the perception were simply her own memory, or if it was what Lee had unconsciously chosen for himself. The man hugging her back, after all, was not the old and wizened individual on the bed.
"Missed you," he whispered, arms closing convulsively around her.
Almost too tight, but Kara ignored the discomfort to revel in holding Lee. "Hey." She pulled back a little, when the word was too muffled by his neck to be intelligible. "I don't know how long we've got." Her lips twisted a little, eyes lighting, "Want to see the world?"
"With you? Can we?" There was an eagerness in his gaze, something that had once been there when he talked of mountains and settlements.
Kara smiled. "Yeah. Yeah, we can."
It didn't matter how long she thought they had. They could make the time work. When he was gone, she would remember.
Someone had to, and Sam had a memory too full of Cylons and planets that were dead and barren.
"Grandfather?" Willie's voice echoed as they stepped out of the hut and into the starlight. She would find him, and she would grieve, and then life would move on for her and the settlement. And someday, she would be the one walking the Earth in starlight, seeing the changes man had wrought.
-f-