In the Whole World: Chapter 3, "Harder"
“Harder”
Chapter 3/13
Word Count: 3,105
By the time she fell into her cot that night, Kara had a to-do list as long as her arm. Let's see: tomorrow. Negotiate with Captain Jondran for the Hitei Kan's plating equipment. Ask Lee to requisition two welders from D-level. Coordinate with the centurions to see if they'll spare any laborers.
She had dreaded this time of every day for weeks. When they'd first arrived, she'd been driven out of the larger bunk tents-though not the bars-by prying stares that were trying to reconcile Kara Thrace, Angel and Savior, with Starbuck, ace pilot and professional badass. She'd talked Helo into requisitioning her a dome tent designed to sleep four officers. For Earth at present, they were swanky digs, but she'd earned them the hardest way possible, and didn't waste time feeling guilty about it. She'd needed a place to worry at fate. Unlike her quarters on the Demetrius, this tent seemed to hold the edges of her sanity steady so that she could keep her shit together outside.
Outside her tent, where most nights someone left photographs of their dead loved ones they believed she could contact, or candles burning that miraculously hadn't burned down her home yet, or simply held hands and sang hymns together for endless hours so she couldn't sleep.
Tonight, though. It felt good to be thinking about things she could change, rather than ones she couldn't, as she was trying to fall asleep. Even if she didn't understand why she was still supposed to change anything at all. You thought you were supposed to save him-them, Kara corrected herself, shoving a wary, watching pair of blue eyes into the corner of her mind. Save all of them. Get them to earth. So what if it turns out that it's harder? Harder's a way of life. You can have easy when you're dead.
Again.
That Leoben Conoy had given her the resources to build a temple on the same day her comatose husband had suggested she do it only affirmed what she knew to her soul: this was the missing piece of her destiny. She couldn't worry about Leoben anymore, not since she'd realized that he was just a part of the strange weather of her life, a kind of dampness in the air reminding her of old injuries.
The weather didn't change anything-not the injuries, not the job.
She was settling back into exhausted contemplation of her to-do list when the flap of her tent was abruptly jerked open, and someone ducked inside. It took a long moment before her eyes adjusted enough to make out who it was. And when she did, it was who she'd been expecting for long days, had given up expecting. Those blue eyes piercing the air, military bearing only as much at ease as it ever was. Which was to say, he would have looked to most other eyes like he'd come on business-but Kara knew he probably hadn't.
It's about time. "What the hell are you doing here, Lee?"
Lee met her gaze easily, although he knew a mutiny brewing when he saw it. Because he did, he didn't pause long before throwing his bag down on her spare cot. "Sleeping."
Ah. He's feeling guilty again. And afraid of what Leoben's up to. "In two weeks, Mr. President couldn't scare up the connections to land himself his own tent?"
Lee's small smirk was his way of letting her know he wasn't going to be riled. "Who do you think gave this one to Helo for you? Anyway, I have somewhere to stay." He knelt and methodically spread out his sleeping bag on the low cot four feet from hers-untie, untie, corner, corner, roll-proving as usual that you could take Lee Adama out of the military, but you most definitely could not take the military out of Lee Adama. "Namely here."
She had seen the leash he kept on his self-control, had seen it slacken and tauten. But he never dropped it altogether. She heard, faintly, the sound of an elemental yell erupting over a dark hillside on New Caprica, welling up from a deep pocket of her memory.Almost never.
Testing his control had long since become a favorite pasttime, because where Lee couldn't let anyone see him want, Kara couldn't let anyone see her care. Naturally: forcing him to let on that he wanted her had been the perfect way of showing she didn't care. It was so tempting-all of the pleasure, none of the guilt. The temptation of temptation-to be in his proximity, to draw deeply on the pleasure of goading him, but to not give in to it. She could feel the blood pounding in her throat and wrists, suddenly. Suddenly, she felt alive again.
Lee.
"Mmm. I don't think you're gonna like renting from me, Apollo. First month's rent is three years continuous service on a battlestar."
A raised eyebrow, as if he were saying, What's your game, Starbuck?, and damn if that wasn't good for a heart she hadn't realized was lonely for it. "Paid it," he offered.
"Perfect. Security deposit's a daily hot oil massage for your landlady." Reckless grin never faltering, she watched him, watched the quick gleam flicker across his eyes before he smothered it, felt her first flash of electric heat in weeks. "Garbage pickup is never. Oh, yeah, and heat and electricity are definitely not included."
He didn't crack a smile, this time, which, predictably, made her laugh. God, what was it about him? When was the last time she'd laughed? "On the flip side, the place is an absolute steal; I have a feeling property value around here is about to skyrocket."
Lee lowered himself heavily to the cot, and she noticed, as he did, just how tired he seemed. Had he just come from speaking fruitlessly with his father, coming up against the Old Man's utter withdrawal? From meeting with the ship captains, whose talk of scattering was already sweeping the camp? From looking at the sky and remembering when the arrow of Apollo had let them see earth from Kobol and they'd dreamed of days like this-days they hadn't known would be like this-wordlessly, uncertainly, together?
Was he realizing that life on Earth, like everything else they'd ever shared, had turned out to be both more and less than the prospect of it had been?
When he spoke, it was a riddle-or perhaps it only seemed that way to her, because she was so used to hearing the riddes underlying the things he said to her. They had had their own code for far too long.
This was one she was terrified to decipher.
"Kara. I'm staying with you. Until I can't anymore."
The laughter died in her eyes. Oh, gods, what did I let slip? What did he see?
And then she finally took the time to think about what it meant that he had brought his pack with him, had rolled out his sleeping bag. About whether she wanted him to stay. The answer-the potency of it-jolted her. I should make him go, she thought. Anything else is selfish.
But, "So you gonna tell me bedtime stories?" she heard herself say.
Some of the tiredness and the tension seemed to melt off Lee, at that. He rolled himself into his sleeping bag and closed his eyes. "There once was a world-class Viper pilot, callsign 'Wiseass', who remembered an old song at just the right moment," and here his tone softened and tripped a loosening in the veins and arteries in her chest so that everything was suddenly unconstricted, "and against all odds saved the human race from endless drifting in the dark infinity of space. Got seventeen separate cocktails named after her in two weeks' time."
"No good. I've heard that one before." Kara blinked back her quick, completely irrational tears. "It ends with her costar, a pilot-turned-politician-callsign Choirboy-becoming a glorified resource allocation specialist on a planet no one's ever even heard of. Just plain boring."
Lee finally did laugh, at that, and there wasn't even any bitterness in it. She felt the coiled spring wrapped around her guts ease a little, hearing it. It'll be easier to leave if I know he can still laugh. That I didn't take that away.
That he survived, after all.
"So what are you gonna do to occupy your time on this boring planet you found for us? Seeing as how the need for high-stakes unconventional military strategy around here is at an all-time low…"
"I've got a plan." Kara swung her arms around her chest, not quite willing to tell Lee that it was more like a calling-more like the desperate tugging that had plagued her on the Demetrius. An urgent summons.
"Should I be worried?"
Yes. They're going to call me back, at the end of it, Lee. I can't stay. "No. Nothing dangerous." She bit her lip, knew he knew that she was lying, then took the plunge with a truth that hid the lie. "I'm gonna build a temple, for everyone. And-I'm gonna save Sam."
With that, she turned onto her side to face the tent wall, hitched her sleeping bag up. And so she didn't see, only felt Lee absorbing her blow. Felt it, and then heard it, too; in the dark, she thought she heard him swallow, hard-once, and again. "Conoy put you up to it?"
"No. It was Sam's idea. And the Chief's." And the gods'.
"There's something you're not telling me." She squeezed her eyes shut, didn't turn around. "Kara. Normally I don't ask. You know-you know how much I don't ask. But if something's happening-if something's going to happen to you… There are things we need to say-"
"No. Gods, Lee." She turned, now, but still didn't look at him. Stared at the ceiling of the tent, tried to stare past it, to hold onto the things that were out there, in the universe, that she knew. She reminded herself of the most pressing of them: Sometimes poison sets in so deep that you can't cut it out without cutting out vital organs.
You could still destroy him.
"No, I… there's nothing to say."
"Fine." His sigh reminded her that he, too, had been deciphering her codes for a long time. "Just-give me some warning."
She nodded. Thanks for the reprieve, Lee. "You always were a gentleman, Apollo." She paused, regained herself. "Too much of one, from what I hear. Why the hell haven't you commandeered all the ships in the fleet and frakking forced everyone to stay put?"
"Under what authority? I'm unelected. Hell, I'm untrained-it's my first year in politics." He was reciting words he'd told himself a thousand times, she could tell. "Even if I'd been voted in unanimously, the will of the people-"
He was interrupted by her pillow soaring across the room at him. "Gods, Lee. Just. Shut. Up." Another pillow, this one covered with something coarse. "Lords! It's like you can't learn! It's like you seriously can't be taught that good intentions don't yield good results, like you didn't see that the will of the people was an internment camp on New Caprica!"
"Did you-Kara, did you just actually start a pillow fight with me?"
"Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, at the New Earth Coliseum, Lee 'Vox Populi Vox Dei' Adama will read aloud to us from a book of ethics and we will all be so wise and our souls will be so safe that we won't even hear the clangs of civil war coming from the hills-"
"What do you want me to do?" Lee gritted, swinging to sit up in his bunk. "Because I'm getting sick of hearing about all the problems-I see all the problems! I'm not blind! Sometimes I think I see ten times more of them than anyone else even bothers to look for! Solutions, Kara. Give me something that will let me keep everything together."
"Well, Lee. Let's see. Your father has… mustered out. Saul resigned his commission." She didn't linger on that sore point, which would have forced both of them to think about the grim anti-Cylon protests that had led Saul to eject himself from the military he'd served for forty years in order to keep the peace. "That leaves… who's that again, who's third in command of the colonial fleet? Oh, right. Major Leland J. Adama."
"I retired."
"So resume your commission!"
"What's wrong with Helo's command?"
She shot him an incredulous look. "You seriously think Helo is going to agree to hold civilians against their will? He's the only person in camp with less common sense than you. No, if someone's going to get this done, it's going to have to be you, Major. Helo will live with it if it's by the book."
"But that's the least of it. I'm interim president. You don't get to be president and commander. Civilian control of the military is a basic tenet of democratic government. If you mix the two…"
"You think the old man didn't mix it up? If he didn't, why's he shacked up on a hillside with that particular gravestone?" Kara rolled her eyes skyward. "Look, you know I don't have much invested in all the political theory big idea crap that you do. Every kind of government is just another kind of '-ism' that lets us get by for a while. Survival, Lee. It's still the name of the game. You can't just throw up your hands now and quit worrying about it. What would-" She pressed her lips together before the words What would Laura say? could emerge from them. She didn't want to use the dead woman's memory; it still hurt too much. No: she didn't want to be the kind of person who frakking moralized this way, in the first place.
She knew that he heard Laura's name in the silence, because he said, quietly, "She'd tell me to do the smart thing, not the right thing." He rubbed his eyes tiredly. "That's what we were… working on, I guess."
"The smart thing, Lee. You have to keep everyone together, and you need control of all the ships to do it. You can do it. You can say…" She paused to think.
"That our tylium shortage justifies consolidating our resources to give priority to the general survival of the people of the Twelve Colonies and our technology and culture."
"Yes! Perfect." Then his words hit her. "Oh, gods. Lee-that's… that's true, isn't it? There's no tylium?"
Lee leaned forward, and she watched his hand begin to reach across the space between them, then fall. "Negative in this system. Fourteen ships out scouring nearby sectors."
She nodded, slowly. "How long do we have?"
Lee sighed, reached into his bag, pulled out a folder. "Page five. It's classified." He handed it to her.
Oh, gods… Inside, there were lists of machines to be turned off, in order of priority. Dishwashing, stoves, laundry, hot water in the showers-all those were to be suspended tomorrow. Water could be heated the old-fashioned way-a fire started with sticks.
"You'd better have serious manpower guarding the tylium reserves," she muttered, flipping the page. Water purifiers, land cruisers, equipment for new building construction, electrical lighting in public meeting rooms-they all had secondary priority that would last another few months.
The bulk of the reserves, it seemed, were being saved for a handful of big-ticket causes: Maintaining the functioning of a few Raptors to allow for scouting and long-distance movement. Computer mainframes, while records were being moved offline. The rebel base star and Galactica's defense systems, while threat of a further attack still lingered as a possibility, however remote. And the centurions themselves, whose sentience was unfortunately reliant on this very particular kind of fuel.
"The centurions will die," she muttered. And then she burst.
"Sam-Lee, Sam needs Galactica's life support to stay alive. Sam will die! We can't let that happen. You can't shut off Galactica!"
And just like that, suddenly they were back on New Caprica, and he was miles above her, on the Pegasus, and she was begging for Sam's life. But this time there was no pride to swallow; most of her pride had been burned with her body on the Cylon earth. And this time, Lee was a veteran of hearing this plea, had heard variations of it-I choose Sam-a hundred times over the course of a long year. And so he knew that there was actually no limit to the number of times she could shatter this particular bone in his chest, and also that it would never heal, so he didn't worry much about it as he felt it shatter again.
The guilt and the betrayal remained, too. They were a dark heavy curtain that hung in the air between them. It had been there since long before New Caprica, but both of them had grown so used to navigating around it that they hardly saw it anymore-like miners who'd grown used to semi-darkness and stooping whenever they attempted nearness.
"I know." His tone was patient. He sees all the problems before anyone else. He sees more of them. "Life has priority, Kara. That's what we'll work to save. The basic necessities-and the centurions-and, of course, Sam. So build your temple fast. Time's running out for heavy masonry equipment."
She blew out a breath. Harder. Always harder. "I don't think I'm going to like having you as a tenant. Nothing but bad news."
He snorted. "Yeah, well I don't think I'm going to like having you as my special ops leader when I commandeer 74 ships in three days' time, but we don't always get we want, do we?"
She grinned, at that. Finally. Something easy. "You'll like it, Choirboy."
She laid awake and listened to him laying awake for a while, but her strength to continue torturing herself failed her, finally, and she slept. For some reason, it was the first night since they'd landed on Earth that she didn't dream of the lights going out.
When Lee woke up and found Kara had crawled in beside him sometime during the night and was pressed all along his back, he was proud of himself on two counts. One, he only laid there a few moments to savor the feeling. And two, he didn't dwell too much, when he slipped quietly out of her tent at dawn, on poetic justice.
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