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ninety6tears[See Master Post.]
Lee says, “Lieutenant.”
After boarding the vessel, amazingly, with what he presumes to be the Arrow of Apollo (clearly the gods love her) strapped across her back, Thrace’s impossible accomplishment makes it easy for Lee to swallow the remaining shreds of humiliation from weeks ago and greet her respectfully. Her spirits are looking particularly ravaged, but when she sees him her features light up with the type of restrained smirk that he’s used to making him feel like there’s some kind of joke at his expense. But he must not care just then, since he’s smiling back.
“Captain.” Her tongue drags over her teeth when she reaches out to shake his hand, quickly but grabbing it tight, like a taunt.
Before she turns to march up to the president, she winks.
“Look...” Lee tries to start in with her when they’re making their seemingly aimless hike on Kobol, the two of them lagging several yards behind the rest of the oddly arranged party. “Um. Is it okay for me to talk to you?”
Since finding the Astral Queen, Kara’s attention to Lee has been virtually nonexistent except for in their short burst of almost violent but impersonal dispute about the toaster she dragged in, and a couple opportunities to fleetingly make fun of him. Somewhat indifferently, she comes out of the pensive silence of her walking to look at him, then rolls her eyes when she realizes what he means. “That was weeks and weeks ago. Not exactly on my mind right now.”
“Listen,” Lee sighs. “I know maybe you don’t care, especially not now, but just humor me? I want to explain myself.”
She grants him an amused smile, This better be good.
“This is none of my frakking business, okay, and you don’t have to tell me, it’s just kind of important for you to understand what I was talking about...” Lee sighs, hesitating.
Actually a bit curious, Kara stops walking to give Lee a confused look.
Up ahead, Laura has noticed the stalling; she turns and says something to Helo, who shouts back to them a second later, “Take five?”
Kara returns a quick affirmative gesture; she and Lee put down a couple heavier items they’re tired of carrying. After he sits down on the ground, she leans against a tree instead of following suit. He sighs, and stands back up again.
“Come on,” she says boredly. “Let’s have it, Apollo.”
“Did you sleep with Gaius Baltar?”
Her expression quite paintedly goes from initial shock, to being only halfway offended for a few seconds. Then she quite decidely smiles, and gradually falls into laughter.
“What?”
At the crest of a stretched-out giggle, she exclaims, “Really!? That’s what that was about?" She falls into another fit of snickers, none of it helped by his annoyance.
“Is it really that funny?” Lee grumbles.
“You have no idea how funny it is. The man’s a freaky piece of work. He started saying this weird stuff, like he was talking to himself, right...”
Lee cuts her off with a broadly unsettled gesture, “I—no. Pretty sure I don’t want to hear this."
She gives another little aah of laughter. "What do you wanna hear? That you were better?"
He practically coughs, blinking at her and way too close to actually wondering if she means that. "You’re the one that’s a frakking piece of work.”
She scoffs like he’s no fun. “...Apollo, what is your problem with me?”
“I guess while we’re being frank?” In his discomfort, he laughs. “I can’t take you cause you’re a frakking mess, Starbuck. You’re worth more than half the pilots I’ve got, but you drink like you’re trying to kill yourself and you frak around like you don’t have an inch of self-respect."
"That's not even—"
"No, come on, even I know you don't like Baltar," he cuts her off. "...It’s all frustrating as hell. Especially since without all of that, seriously, I sort of..." He finds he can't finish the sentence.
There's a weirdly suspicious look in her expression.
"Really, I’d give my left leg for half of your guts and gods know you are funny as hell, but. There’s all this baggage there I don’t even know what to do with.”
Kara lets one of her short, unamused laughs go; she now looks like she has a bit of a sour taste in her mouth, but like she’s still processing what he just said.
He mildly interjects, “Of course that’s...now. When I met you...Well, I was terrible when I met you.”
“It was because of your brother,” Kara says. “That’s why this thing with your father is so complicated for you, and that’s why you hate me so much. It doesn’t help that you miss your brother so bad, and I didn’t really lose anybody that day, not really. Right?”
Lee’s expression seems at first resistant to this possibility, then not so much, like everything she said was true and it wasn’t something he’d recognized. After a moment of contemplation, he just gives her a bewildered, “Hell, no wonder we don’t like each other very much.”
A whistling sound up ahead signals that the break is over. They continue walking in silence for a few more moments.
Lee notices a laugh forming on Kara’s face. “What are you smiling about?”
But now she isn’t smiling; she’s stopping and looking around. With the briefest click of a hand gesture from her he realizes she just heard something, and they both smoothly draw out their sidearms, forming back-to-back.
Before either of them can try to warn the others, the distinct crunch of sticks under feet is heard, and Kara quickly determines the direction, covering it with her sidearm and blocking in front of Lee.
“Hold your fire.”
That gruff command grabs a gasp out of Lee, who turns around whispering, “Holy shit.”
Kara smiles with relief as Bill Adama appears out of an obscuring tangle of trees. The commander pauses at the sight of both of them. For half a minute none of them can find any words.
Lee just stands there, his eyes flicking over at Kara momentarily, unsure. Finally she sighs, reaches back and grabs his upper sleeve to shove him forward. With that encouragement, he goes the few steps and throws his arms around his father.
She rolls her eyes to herself and mutters, “About frakking time.”
That night Kara is sitting propped back on her elbows, taking the night watch. Even though she knows the boss is probably also awake a handful of yards away, the darkness dims out her sight of anyone else in their party, making her feel more alone, profoundly bored. Lee, sleeping close under the small propped tent ceiling, has a slight rasp in his breath, and she rolls her eyes. Once she’s used to it, though, she recollects and entertains the details of him in bed with her; it’s just too amusing with prudish Apollo unconscious right there, unable to do anything about it.
After a minute of this Lee stirs, rolls clumsily over with a soft grunt, and his elbow digs right into her lower left abdomen.
“Frak—OW!!!” Seething with the sudden sharp pain, she wakes him with her low outburst and a hard shove that accidentally gets him in the face.
“What—?” Lee rears up angrily; then he sees her turning on the flashlight, holding it in her teeth, unzipping her jacket, and beginning to peel off her bandage.
In response to the dawning expression on Lee’s face, she puts the light down and cuts him off muttering, “These stitches are ready to come out anyway.” As she reaches for her first aid box, Lee tiredly sits up and snatches it over.
“I’ll do it.”
With the slight toss of her head in the dark, he can tell she’s rolling her eyes before she says, “I’m capable, thanks.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
She tries to pull the kit out of his hands. “Frak off—Look, just go back to sleep—”
“—Would you shut the hell up and let me help you?”
Kara is so startled by the frustration in his raspy hush through the thick dark that the aid kit slides easily out of her grasp. There’s a pause, and then with a heavy grudging sigh, she quickly reaches down and unfastens the waist of her pants to cuff it down a bit, cringing a little at the exertion of the sore muscles, and when he hands her the flashlight she leans back and aims the light where he needs it.
Lee is still agitated when he pulls out the first stitch. He grumbles, “I don’t understand why you have to be so frakking stubborn.”
She boredly replies, “I don’t understand why you give a shit.”
Still squinting a little in the weak yellow light, Lee shifts down so that his knees and feet rest on either side of her lower legs, his elbows propped gently close to her torso. He is still fixated on the careful task, not looking up at her, when he admits softly, “Maybe I’m a piece of work too.”
The rhythm of her breathing relaxes over the minutes, and they stay in silence up until one of the last threads he’s pulling away from the pink scar. “So what happened?”
She flatly replies, “I was shot.”
“Twice?” He asks this with some doubt but figures out pretty soon she’s not going to explain the other wound, if the one he’s tending to is in fact from a bullet. Then he stupidly prods, “By a cylon?”
In the faint glow emanating outside the direct stream of light, he can see her shake her head incredulously. “Yes, by a toaster, Apollo. That’s what they do, they shoot people.”
He’s fixing her a new bandage, pressing the edges on gently. When he looks up, maybe to dryly say the all-better, something makes him fall silent.
She heavily adds, “Lots of people.” More like she’s talking to herself than to him.
His hand is unconsciously stilled on her skin for a few seconds, and Kara is hiding her consideration of him in the dark that swallows her expression, but she can faintly see that he's thinking, and an allergic surge of irritation wells up in her stomach against him. This is still Apollo she's talking to. Can it really sink in for him, imagining how hard it must have been for her? Having to skulk around like unwelcome rats on a planet still recognized as a home, now in shambles. Being unable to go back to that ignorance still held by most people that are still alive of what it was really like down there, that she feels ripped-up and almost bloodthirsty now with the comprehension of all that destruction. Or does he think that Starbuck is too numb for that? This is still Apollo. He stung her pretty bad when they were still meeting each other, when he seemed to be trying from day one to make her feel like an outsider on her own ship. He's a frakking hypocrite and he doesn't care about anyone else's pain and...
His thumb is moving as if on its will, in the shyest comforting caress at her stomach. And in the crisp thick air his hand is cool but in a kind of warm way and—it feels just kind of nice moving down around her hip like that.
As Kara’s head shifts slowly to look down at him, her expression hardly changes. But she does look.
He arches down and over, above her, and his left hand reaches up to her grasp around the flashlight next to her face. He joins his fingers with hers around the metal handle, and his thumb switches it off.
Things get bad, bad enough that Kara’s soon butting heads with other pilots even worse than she ever bickers with him. After she’s just had a huge argument with Lee over whether Kat should be grounded for the stims fiasco, she goes proudly quiet, undoes one button on Lee’s jacket, and heads into the racks. This is how it’s usually done, only a lot of the time Kara signals that she’s up for it by bending down and loosening her boots before she disappears behind a door, expecting him to follow. This was never verbally arranged and he doesn’t remember where it started. He’s lost count by now of how many times they’ve frakked; he’s lost track of why, exactly, they have to make a show of barely ever associate with each other, though in all truth, they don’t speak much more than they used to just because they’re doing this.
When he’s actually with her, on the spare days they actually find the time and space, it’s usually the most thought he’s given to her all day; but then when the form of it occurs, something withers as his body is trapped beyond the bending of those knees, leaving only the sensation that he has been craving this all along. As she coils up with pretty fury, under, above, against the wall, one half of his mind demands to know what he is doing. The other half is asking What the hell does it look like I’m doing? before his brain goes blowing apart into a hundred pieces and nobody’s talking upstairs anymore.
He wonders right when these things happen, in a way that he forgets when it’s not happening, if she does this too: Gets up and brushes her teeth and does her job and wants him and wants him, not knowing what she wants. What he feels most of the time and has known all along is that he should quit it with this, she is going to make him crazy simply because she is who she is. But there are other less definable places in him that wonder if they are the only thing keeping each other sane.
One day in the shooting range he can feel the boundaries sliding under them, slippery ice, because of the way she’s laughing in his direction, even with Hot Dog in the room, after he makes some snide comment complaining about the last time Ellen Tigh was trying to hit on him.
“Apollo, what the frak is that huge stain on your shirt?” There is no stain, and she giggles when he looks down.
He shakes his head while she lets a few rounds off. His head feels weirdly cloudy. “Why are you always frakkin’ with me, Starbuck?”
“Unh hah hah...” she sniggers, letting her pistol drop down. “Cause I love the way you do it.”
“What?” He laughs, and laughs. “What?”
Hotdog hits the floor, and while Kara is hazily finding it hilarious he's starting to think, Oh no.
Five minutes later he isn’t sure if he was passed out or not, if he’s coming to or not, he just has in his mind a blurred impression of her reaching past him, a body clinging and struggling over him, weakly sliding her grasp down him for the spare round he managed to mutter was still in his pocket. And he recalls wondering in his panic with no particular emotion attached whether somebody finding their bodies mingled together like this would mean that he won the game in the end. He remembers the sound of a bullet finally shattering the glass...
“Apollo!”
As his head clears, she’s standing over him, Katrain standing next to her volunteering to help her haul Hot Dog off to sick bay. Kara looks impatient, towardly annoyed at him as he starts laughing darkly beside himself.
“The hell?” Kat mutters.
Kara just says, “He’s fine.”
The arrival of Pegasus makes everything strange, including them. Everyone from Galactica is able to pretty quickly start feeling out what's so off about everything, how they've stumbled upon a huge pretty package of twice the complications they had before rather than a helpful brand of humanity. Adama's crew picks up on the sentiment from each other, even though nobody talks about it; she doesn't like that she's feeling it, but she feels it the most when she's around Apollo, gathers both comfort and irritation from the fact that even he doesn't want to accept everything that's going to change.
It all seems to start with the day they both get called into the old man's office and the first thing he says is, "I'm ordering both of you to be completely silent until I say otherwise." After the two fall into their confused composure, he then goes on to explain that they are both being transferred off Galactica, and their mouths are falling open in stupid infuriated silence before he gets to the finish, where he's proclaiming, "I am trusting both of you to handle this with dignity. Part of that means I don't want any single person on that ship mentioning to me that I have two pilots who can't seem to stop pulling each other out of line. Do you understand?"
Both of them are a little too stunned to even gesture a response, but the ensuing silence is affirmative enough.
"If I can't have you two aboard my ship, I at least need to rely on you to be my eyes and ears." Adama speaks at the exact speed that means he is forcing himself to say what he has to say without his own particular judgment, and Kara nearly loses it and barks some curse of protest. "You've both been at least trying...to work together more, or at least that's how I hear it...Well, I need you to do better than that. Understood?"
As Adama goes on to explain who they're both to report to, Kara feels the buzzing sense of Lee looking sidelong at her, looks forward as stoic as she can manage instead of meeting his eyes. But a few seconds later she slips a furtive look in his direction, relieved somehow to note that he is easily just as steamed up about all this as she is.
They are silent in their rage until the next morning when they're setting up on Pegasus, and Kara can't help going to stand over Lee's bunk when the room is all cleared out, leaning in a shoulder and just staring down at him. He gives one bitter, incredulous shake of his head, and she snap-replies, "I mean, what the hell?"
He just shrugs.
"So you're flying a Raptor now? And the old man is just gonna—"
"There isn't anything he can do. You heard what he said."
Kara's mouth is opening to say something brisk, when the hatch opens and two huskily laughing ensigns topple around the door. To Lee's obvious surprise, she lowers down closer to him to continue at a sharp whisper her complaint about something their CAG said to her earlier. Back on Galactica she was never as quick to tell him things, but they both have a lot to get off their chests and there's no one else around who's likely to be as pissed about all of it as she is.
The first day they report for briefing, Stinger proves to be twice as incompetent as she'd guessed. And after he dismisses her comments like some power-tripping school teacher who's never touched a tactical plan, her bristling anger makes her crane her head around, trying not to make it obvious that she's checking out Lee's reaction. But he's looking straight at her and shaking his head in annoyance, and she's just not sure who he's annoyed with.
"Remember what my father said?" is what he mutters when he hands her the camera kit in the corridor. She's stuffing it back into the bag out of sight, wide-eyed, smiling.
Things aren't so comparatively smooth between them when her stealth surveillance stunt gets her promoted above him, and there are a couple times she thinks she's about to assure him that she doesn't think that's frakking fair at all, but it snags in her throat. And instead, at the first opportunity that they're both off duty, she sits her back down against the table where he's finishing off an early dinner. "Bunks are empty right now," she mutters without even turning her head towards him. "Wanna follow me back?"
Lee is a little astonished. After a second he starts laughing, and it's bitter but truly amused at the same time. "What, are you trying to make it up to me?"
Unapologetic as ever, she gives him a wry smile. She shrugs. Only five minutes later they're being a lot more obvious than usual when they jam the hatch behind them right as a younger pilot is exiting from grabbing a pack of cards.
"Not too—" Her voice is hitching through her fast and ungentle scraps of instructions when she's on one of the long benches, legs wrapping around his movements. "I don't like it when I'm—"
"Yeah, I know—" he cuts her off, annoyed and ecstatic and irritated and mindless, "—You think I don't know by now?"
"—Mmph," her voice whimpers out, interrupting her own attempts at control as his hand is kneading down her stomach, taking and guiding her hips around him.
In a second, he's starting to smirk a little bit between all the white noise of his own feeling. "You like that, though," he accuses, and she's grunting in protest as he's setting the pace, agonizingly slow.
"Nuh," she grumbles, impatient, hating when he does this, teases and teases so frakking slowly while she coils and twists and sweats and waits, until she's practically begging for it. "Apollo," she groans, and it's chiding, it's an insult, it's the only thing she ever calls him. "C'mon...Come on—"
And it's always worth the worst of her verbal abuse for when he starts doing her in in earnest; it gives him a warm sneering sensation in his chest when the tension thrums and picks up and neither of them can take it anymore and he knows it. He must feel some weird notion to give her something for her trouble though, cause when he has her wrists pinned above her he gives a hungry licking kiss to her mouth, and his thumbs are rubbing caresses into her palms as he hears himself asking, "Can I go down on you?" Her eyes go a little wide.
"Wh—" She swallows. "No."
"Okay." He lets her hands go, gets back up to supporting his weight on his palms. They both know he won't ask again.
Kara goes from a stiff posture of crossed arms and a schooled expression, to turning away, leaning a hand onto the CIC table. She's blinking and taking deep breaths, taking a moment to remember that she should probably say something, but Adama is still a step ahead of her.
"Don't feel like you're letting me down if you can't do this."
"Sir," she says, and it's not a confirmation or an answer. "If, um. If you have no objections, I would like to ask Lee to come with me as back-up...just in case...if—"
But she realizes he was probably about to suggest as much, from the look on his face, and there seems to be something about the way she said it that really surprises the old man. "Of course...He would be the most viable option of somebody to accompany you. I only wonder..."
"If he'll do it?" Kara's eyebrows lift up slowly. "If he'll do it for me."
Adama lets out a sigh. "It's between you and him. I can't be the one to ask."
Later that afternoon, then, Lee is clarifying, "Wait, you actually did ask me to come in here because you had something to talk to me about." She's just stopped him from untangling out of her bed sheets; this wasn't how she'd imagined it, but telling him while they're crammed into a bunk together seems as shitty a time as any. (And she really meant to ask him the second they were alone, but then she found herself pulling and touching, pressing a hand under his waistband, all in a sad and sudden way, as if she'd been missing it.)
Kara swallows, pushing her jaw out a little. The automatic attempts to get comfortable in the cramped area turn into her head lilting a little bit against his arm, and she's staring up at the bunk ceiling for gods know how long as she tries to sort out where the hell to start with something like this, and she needs to get it out before somebody starts pounding on the hatch.
"Hey," Lee says, a little too uncomfortable and confused to be necessarily soft with her, but not impatient either. "...What's going on?"
"I'm sorry I have to ask you this. I understand if you can't." She presses her lips together, and finally settles into sitting up, the sheet pulled up over her chest and staring straight forward.
"Ask me to do what?" he asks quietly, and she wishes, beyond any sense of what she would usually admit, in her clumsy and simple need for some comfort, that he would just say it, could say it and mean it, Anything for you, you know that. What do you need?
"...Help me assassinate Admiral Cain."
If someone had told him, six months ago, that it would eventually be possible for him to be angry at his father on Kara's behalf...
But he does know him at least well enough by now to know that he's got to be aware of how frakked up this is, it's got to be eating at him at least a little that he's putting it on somebody he cares about so much, he just doesn't understand...
"Do you even know, can you imagine, how hard it was for her to even spit it out when she came to me about this?" Lee is demanding as he stands over his father's desk. "I know, I guess, I'm...the best option, but there's got to be someone she trusts more, if you can pull some strings—"
"First of all," Adama says with a raise of his brows. "Who would you suggest?"
"I don't know, I haven't memorized all the tiers of her frakking social life, but with how many of us got moved to Pegasus, I'd think...The point is, you're already throwing this in her lap, and then you had to send her to me, to—?"
"You don't understand," he interrupts, comprehending Lee a little better now. "It was Kara's idea."
"...What?"
"She suggested you before I said anything about it. It was her idea."
Lee's mouth is hanging open for a couple seconds, and his composure sinks together almost instantly. And his next words are a stammered "I'll do it."
Whatever all of it means, he means it. He wants her to understand that he knows this is hard for her, that it's probably the toughest thing she'll ever have to do. He can't imagine saying it, so he accepts the mission, hoping she'll know, that in that small way that she'll let him and he'll let himself, they're in it together and he's there for her this once.
At the back of his mind, he's even strangely aware that he might do something like this if it meant she wouldn't have to.
He always had a pretty instinctive awareness of the protectiveness of everyone around him in these dire situations, but it was more just a supplement of something he'd felt towards other people his whole life; now, he doesn't know, he must be starting to understand it a little better than that. He remembers the gun fight against the cylons on Kobol, how he and Kara were finally able to put aside all the complications and just look out for each other in the heat of battle, how there was a certain companionship soldiers had to have for one another even if it was something sturdily manufactured. He may have a really hard time with her as a person, but he realizes now that if he was in her place, he'd want her at his side too. So he tells her he'll do it and he tells her nothing else, and he knows she'll understand, even if she thinks or assumes or knows that it's not really about her. They quietly shake on it.
The feel of her hand and how it lingers, just a little bit, just long enough for her thumb to rub against him as if it has a mind of its own: This is what he's thinking about when he has to punch out and when he's floating in the cold black, when he fails her and feels like he can't get back to where he's been.
The only time they even talk about it is the first idle moment Kara has a reason to hook a transport to Pegasus, when Lee is trying to catch a nap before a briefing. She climbs eagerly into his rack, straddles her thighs smoothly over him, sitting up as she removes both her tanks. His hands land automatically on her knees but don’t do much else when she leans down to land some teasing nibbles on his shoulder, and it doesn’t take her long to arch back off of him, a look of nonplussed boredom on her face.
It’s not like he has to even say, I’m not in the mood. He just gives her an apologetic shrug.
Kara sighs, leaning farther back and pushing a couple rogue bangs around on her forehead. “You need to let this go, Apollo.”
Lee looks unaffected, rests his forearm across his forehead in aggravation. He’s looking at her with a mix of disinterest and adoration, and in a half-decided second thought he pushes up to pull her into lying down. “Your opinion is noted,” he mutters numbly, and then he starts kissing his way down her neck, chest, grazing his teeth against her ribs at the bare skin below her bra.
“—Stop,” she demands with annoyance as it tickles her. As he sits up, over her now, and starts undoing her belt, she flatly says, “It’s not your fault, what happened, why don’t you get that? You need to shut that noise off in your head about what almost happened, because we're both still alive...” His gestures are harsher now, tugging out of the buckle and pulling her pants down her hips. “And even if something had happened to me, so frakking what? I took the mission, it’s my job. L— ” She rolls her eyes at herself, pivots her hips up to get her pants farther off.
His motions have frozen, his eyes suddenly glaring down at her with tight frustration. He could make something out of the near-slip, but instead he demands, “And what about trusting each other?”
Kara rolls her eyes.
“Doesn’t that mean a frakking thing? You picked me for this mission, and I let you down—”
“Do you trust me?” Kara’s expression has quite quickly gone to a perplexed, sort of patronizing fascination with him, and the question seems asked in pure curiosity.
He furrows his brow in hesitation, like he’s never really considered the question before. But it doesn’t take him long. He answers solidly, “Yes.”
From where she’s lying flat under him, Kara blinks, in realization of something. All she can give him is a pitying smile before she shakes her head once and says, “That’s a mistake.”
Because of the look on his face, the fact that he still doesn’t move, she sighs and turns to slip out of the rack. But suddenly with an almost grudging nature in his desire he grabs a shoulder and pushes her back flat again, gets the curtain, grips her by her wrists, pinning her arms back above her and kissing her, hard. She can't shrug out of the feeling of it, gives in and competes with the fervor, as if it's all just a fight he needs to get out of his system.
Things get even worse.
One hour after Kara is the only one of three pilots to return from a Viper dive around an asteroid, Lee hears an uproar far down the hall closer to the bunk chambers, a loud thud as if someone is being angrily thrown to a wall. A couple people look over at his approach as if relieved that somebody with some authority is showing up, and he makes out the unintelligible shouting as none other than Starbuck in response to Kat's angry taunting. Before he knows it he's grabbing the closer pair of shoulders as the uproar turns too close to a real fight, barking at them to split it up, but Kara turns as if to lash out in a new direction and for some reason Lee grabs her shoulders again, tighter this time, and her eyes just blaze back all dangerous and pained.
"What. Are you drunk?" he demands quietly. And because he knows there's something more than what it looks like here, "What's going on?"
She smacks up on his forearms to get out of his grasp and slips off. More self-conscious now about the little throng of pilots still standing around watching, he just gives an exasperated shake of his head and resolves that he can probably only rile her up even worse if he tries to make something out of how much of a mess she looks like.
But he’s barely started walking away when he hears a booming thud: one of her boots, shot just past him and bouncing off the wall treacherously close to his head. When he looks back at her she’s terrible and severe and headed into the bunks, slamming the hatch behind her. And the look he gives everyone before he follows her in with the one boot is a mix of total confusion and Don’t anyone frakking come in here, provoking a stream of shocked mutterings because it comes across like at least one of the two is going to come back out with a black eye.
And what he really is half-expecting from such a shook-up Kara is for her fist to go flying into his face the second the hatch shuts, is almost willing to have it out with her if it will get him any closer to understanding what the frak's going on. But he can't honestly say he's surprised when she goes for his belt instead.
"—Kara. Um."
"What?" she demands impatiently.
He looks up and down her, all the lines of grief in her face and the tension in her body and it's almost laughable and sour that she wants this right now. "I didn't come in here for that." She ignores him, and a second later he's insisting, "Stop it."
"What the hell do you want, Apollo?" She's already shifting into the gear of indifference, backing off of him.
Lee stupidly holds out her boot a bit before just chucking it to the floor as she sits back on the table and shucks off the other. "Look, why don't you just tell me what's going on with you?"
A bitter snigger lets out of her before she says, coldly calm, “No. I didn’t come in here for a conversation.”
Lee tenses up even more, watching her get up to mess around with something in her locker.
Her next remark is all the more frustrating for not even being that roughly delivered. "Like you and I could ever have a conversation about how bad things get without...competing with each other."
"I don't know if it would kill us to try, you know." He's a little bitterly surprised that she would still be thinking he's like that, but maybe he's never given her enough of a reason to think otherwise.
After a moment, despite looking like she isn't listening to him, she does add, “Why don’t you ask your old man, Apollo? I’m sure he’ll tell you all about my stupid ass making promises we can’t afford to keep.” She shakes her head, now mumbling bitterly to herself in syllables he can't make out.
"What?" But then he thinks he knows what she's talking about and just says, "Oh."
“I left them to die,” she insists, an undertone of why-am-I-bothering-even-saying-this-out-loud puncturing her words with exhaustion. She numbly adds, “I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve done something, I don’t know.”
“You did what you could,” Lee says, not just speaking about that but of what happened today. He doesn't know why he's so surprised that somebody like Starbuck needs to hear something like this, but he knows it's coming through in his voice. “You give what you have. None of it’s your fault.”
She looks away, still brimming up with so much anxiety her breath is a bit loud. Abruptly, after they fall into a pause and she's just staring at the floor in front of her, she asks, "You sure you don't want to frak me?"
Somehow it seems intentionally disarming and he can't help a laugh of surprise, and after a moment replies, "Yes...Look, if you have to take the morning off, I'll see what I can do. Just get some rest. And that's an order, Thrace."
"It is my professional, and personal opinion," Lee says, finishing off the half-inch of drink in his father's quarters. The president slowly cocks an eyebrow at the admiral. "Kara Thrace is, as you've said many times, the greatest pilot we've got. But she's slipping, and she might keep slipping if she doesn't at least have the chance to do this."
Adama, supportive as ever of the president putting down her foot, lets out a barely audible sigh.
"Of course I understand why you turned her down, it's...an extremely dangerous rescue mission, and for a group of people who may or may not even be alive. But from being CAG I can tell you that a lot of our pilots are very much about principles, and just not bothering to save people we know are out there..."
"This would be very much off the record," Roslin interrupts, in a tone of slightly more conversational rapport. "But considering Thrace's determination, I was wondering...if during her time back on Caprica, she may have formed a particularly close relationship with one of the resistance fighters..."
Lee's brow goes furrowed, and he exchanges an uncomfortable look with his father, who seems hesitant for a different reason.
"Captain Thrace, and Lee, don't have the closest of relationships," Bill explains a little matter-of-factly. "You can't assume he'd have any idea if that were the case, and frankly I don't know if—"
"Honestly?" Lee intercedes. "I don't think the way she's been is just about one person. Sure, it's possible something like that happened with somebody, but...I don't want you to think her becoming lax on things is all just her having some kind of personal tantrum. My bet would be, she made a promise to somebody, and she's trying to keep it. She isn't...isn't like that."
"Like..." Laura slowly grapples for the word, "Emotional?" and Lee almost feels like she's having a joke at him.
"I don't know her very well," he replies, quickly aware of how uncomfortable this is getting.
"I agree, though," his father says, slowly conceding to Kara's defense. "Thrace is more aware of what's out there, and if she thinks this is something we need to do, that's where I'm willing to stand."
When Roslin speaks after a moment, she's back to being legislative. "I am not approving the mission, but I will...consider it, once again," she tiredly promises.
That's good news, and Lee maybe looks a bit too loosened up for a moment. He just nods respectfully, and thanks her, and when he's getting up to leave he swears that the president is giving him a curiously slanted look on his way out the door.
She goes from her low to a considerable high when the planning of the rescue mission is more than underway. Their chance meetings are even fewer than usual lately, and the first time she sees him while she's over on Pegasus to brief the pilots, she's in a good mood, flippant and friendly while everyone around her is biting their nails over the election speeches.
"Hey," he mutters to her, a little distracted by what's on the radio in the rec room when she leans into the table next to him.
"Do I owe you a thanks?" she's asking. When his attention comes out of the stream of Baltar's lecturing and into what she just said, he just meets her eyes in a look much like the one she's giving him, surprised and amused and not quite aloof. He smiles.
"Hey, if I don't see you," he finally says, "Good luck out there."
Now the corner of her mouth threatens to smirk back at him. There's an almost uncomfortably long pause before she teases, "You worried about me?"
"I need every pilot I've got," he grants; even though he's not her CAG now and it's not quite an applicable comment, it seems a fitting joke between them. He's looking away from her again when he adds, "Especially you."
Something falls in Kara's expression, but not sadly. "Um. Thank you, sir," she finally quietly says.
Lee says, “Lieutenant.”
After boarding the vessel, amazingly, with what he presumes to be the Arrow of Apollo (clearly the gods love her) strapped across her back, Thrace’s impossible accomplishment makes it easy for Lee to swallow the remaining shreds of humiliation from weeks ago and greet her respectfully. Her spirits are looking particularly ravaged, but when she sees him her features light up with the type of restrained smirk that he’s used to making him feel like there’s some kind of joke at his expense. But he must not care just then, since he’s smiling back.
“Captain.” Her tongue drags over her teeth when she reaches out to shake his hand, quickly but grabbing it tight, like a taunt.
Before she turns to march up to the president, she winks.
“Look...” Lee tries to start in with her when they’re making their seemingly aimless hike on Kobol, the two of them lagging several yards behind the rest of the oddly arranged party. “Um. Is it okay for me to talk to you?”
Since finding the Astral Queen, Kara’s attention to Lee has been virtually nonexistent except for in their short burst of almost violent but impersonal dispute about the toaster she dragged in, and a couple opportunities to fleetingly make fun of him. Somewhat indifferently, she comes out of the pensive silence of her walking to look at him, then rolls her eyes when she realizes what he means. “That was weeks and weeks ago. Not exactly on my mind right now.”
“Listen,” Lee sighs. “I know maybe you don’t care, especially not now, but just humor me? I want to explain myself.”
She grants him an amused smile, This better be good.
“This is none of my frakking business, okay, and you don’t have to tell me, it’s just kind of important for you to understand what I was talking about...” Lee sighs, hesitating.
Actually a bit curious, Kara stops walking to give Lee a confused look.
Up ahead, Laura has noticed the stalling; she turns and says something to Helo, who shouts back to them a second later, “Take five?”
Kara returns a quick affirmative gesture; she and Lee put down a couple heavier items they’re tired of carrying. After he sits down on the ground, she leans against a tree instead of following suit. He sighs, and stands back up again.
“Come on,” she says boredly. “Let’s have it, Apollo.”
“Did you sleep with Gaius Baltar?”
Her expression quite paintedly goes from initial shock, to being only halfway offended for a few seconds. Then she quite decidely smiles, and gradually falls into laughter.
“What?”
At the crest of a stretched-out giggle, she exclaims, “Really!? That’s what that was about?" She falls into another fit of snickers, none of it helped by his annoyance.
“Is it really that funny?” Lee grumbles.
“You have no idea how funny it is. The man’s a freaky piece of work. He started saying this weird stuff, like he was talking to himself, right...”
Lee cuts her off with a broadly unsettled gesture, “I—no. Pretty sure I don’t want to hear this."
She gives another little aah of laughter. "What do you wanna hear? That you were better?"
He practically coughs, blinking at her and way too close to actually wondering if she means that. "You’re the one that’s a frakking piece of work.”
She scoffs like he’s no fun. “...Apollo, what is your problem with me?”
“I guess while we’re being frank?” In his discomfort, he laughs. “I can’t take you cause you’re a frakking mess, Starbuck. You’re worth more than half the pilots I’ve got, but you drink like you’re trying to kill yourself and you frak around like you don’t have an inch of self-respect."
"That's not even—"
"No, come on, even I know you don't like Baltar," he cuts her off. "...It’s all frustrating as hell. Especially since without all of that, seriously, I sort of..." He finds he can't finish the sentence.
There's a weirdly suspicious look in her expression.
"Really, I’d give my left leg for half of your guts and gods know you are funny as hell, but. There’s all this baggage there I don’t even know what to do with.”
Kara lets one of her short, unamused laughs go; she now looks like she has a bit of a sour taste in her mouth, but like she’s still processing what he just said.
He mildly interjects, “Of course that’s...now. When I met you...Well, I was terrible when I met you.”
“It was because of your brother,” Kara says. “That’s why this thing with your father is so complicated for you, and that’s why you hate me so much. It doesn’t help that you miss your brother so bad, and I didn’t really lose anybody that day, not really. Right?”
Lee’s expression seems at first resistant to this possibility, then not so much, like everything she said was true and it wasn’t something he’d recognized. After a moment of contemplation, he just gives her a bewildered, “Hell, no wonder we don’t like each other very much.”
A whistling sound up ahead signals that the break is over. They continue walking in silence for a few more moments.
Lee notices a laugh forming on Kara’s face. “What are you smiling about?”
But now she isn’t smiling; she’s stopping and looking around. With the briefest click of a hand gesture from her he realizes she just heard something, and they both smoothly draw out their sidearms, forming back-to-back.
Before either of them can try to warn the others, the distinct crunch of sticks under feet is heard, and Kara quickly determines the direction, covering it with her sidearm and blocking in front of Lee.
“Hold your fire.”
That gruff command grabs a gasp out of Lee, who turns around whispering, “Holy shit.”
Kara smiles with relief as Bill Adama appears out of an obscuring tangle of trees. The commander pauses at the sight of both of them. For half a minute none of them can find any words.
Lee just stands there, his eyes flicking over at Kara momentarily, unsure. Finally she sighs, reaches back and grabs his upper sleeve to shove him forward. With that encouragement, he goes the few steps and throws his arms around his father.
She rolls her eyes to herself and mutters, “About frakking time.”
That night Kara is sitting propped back on her elbows, taking the night watch. Even though she knows the boss is probably also awake a handful of yards away, the darkness dims out her sight of anyone else in their party, making her feel more alone, profoundly bored. Lee, sleeping close under the small propped tent ceiling, has a slight rasp in his breath, and she rolls her eyes. Once she’s used to it, though, she recollects and entertains the details of him in bed with her; it’s just too amusing with prudish Apollo unconscious right there, unable to do anything about it.
After a minute of this Lee stirs, rolls clumsily over with a soft grunt, and his elbow digs right into her lower left abdomen.
“Frak—OW!!!” Seething with the sudden sharp pain, she wakes him with her low outburst and a hard shove that accidentally gets him in the face.
“What—?” Lee rears up angrily; then he sees her turning on the flashlight, holding it in her teeth, unzipping her jacket, and beginning to peel off her bandage.
In response to the dawning expression on Lee’s face, she puts the light down and cuts him off muttering, “These stitches are ready to come out anyway.” As she reaches for her first aid box, Lee tiredly sits up and snatches it over.
“I’ll do it.”
With the slight toss of her head in the dark, he can tell she’s rolling her eyes before she says, “I’m capable, thanks.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
She tries to pull the kit out of his hands. “Frak off—Look, just go back to sleep—”
“—Would you shut the hell up and let me help you?”
Kara is so startled by the frustration in his raspy hush through the thick dark that the aid kit slides easily out of her grasp. There’s a pause, and then with a heavy grudging sigh, she quickly reaches down and unfastens the waist of her pants to cuff it down a bit, cringing a little at the exertion of the sore muscles, and when he hands her the flashlight she leans back and aims the light where he needs it.
Lee is still agitated when he pulls out the first stitch. He grumbles, “I don’t understand why you have to be so frakking stubborn.”
She boredly replies, “I don’t understand why you give a shit.”
Still squinting a little in the weak yellow light, Lee shifts down so that his knees and feet rest on either side of her lower legs, his elbows propped gently close to her torso. He is still fixated on the careful task, not looking up at her, when he admits softly, “Maybe I’m a piece of work too.”
The rhythm of her breathing relaxes over the minutes, and they stay in silence up until one of the last threads he’s pulling away from the pink scar. “So what happened?”
She flatly replies, “I was shot.”
“Twice?” He asks this with some doubt but figures out pretty soon she’s not going to explain the other wound, if the one he’s tending to is in fact from a bullet. Then he stupidly prods, “By a cylon?”
In the faint glow emanating outside the direct stream of light, he can see her shake her head incredulously. “Yes, by a toaster, Apollo. That’s what they do, they shoot people.”
He’s fixing her a new bandage, pressing the edges on gently. When he looks up, maybe to dryly say the all-better, something makes him fall silent.
She heavily adds, “Lots of people.” More like she’s talking to herself than to him.
His hand is unconsciously stilled on her skin for a few seconds, and Kara is hiding her consideration of him in the dark that swallows her expression, but she can faintly see that he's thinking, and an allergic surge of irritation wells up in her stomach against him. This is still Apollo she's talking to. Can it really sink in for him, imagining how hard it must have been for her? Having to skulk around like unwelcome rats on a planet still recognized as a home, now in shambles. Being unable to go back to that ignorance still held by most people that are still alive of what it was really like down there, that she feels ripped-up and almost bloodthirsty now with the comprehension of all that destruction. Or does he think that Starbuck is too numb for that? This is still Apollo. He stung her pretty bad when they were still meeting each other, when he seemed to be trying from day one to make her feel like an outsider on her own ship. He's a frakking hypocrite and he doesn't care about anyone else's pain and...
His thumb is moving as if on its will, in the shyest comforting caress at her stomach. And in the crisp thick air his hand is cool but in a kind of warm way and—it feels just kind of nice moving down around her hip like that.
As Kara’s head shifts slowly to look down at him, her expression hardly changes. But she does look.
He arches down and over, above her, and his left hand reaches up to her grasp around the flashlight next to her face. He joins his fingers with hers around the metal handle, and his thumb switches it off.
Things get bad, bad enough that Kara’s soon butting heads with other pilots even worse than she ever bickers with him. After she’s just had a huge argument with Lee over whether Kat should be grounded for the stims fiasco, she goes proudly quiet, undoes one button on Lee’s jacket, and heads into the racks. This is how it’s usually done, only a lot of the time Kara signals that she’s up for it by bending down and loosening her boots before she disappears behind a door, expecting him to follow. This was never verbally arranged and he doesn’t remember where it started. He’s lost count by now of how many times they’ve frakked; he’s lost track of why, exactly, they have to make a show of barely ever associate with each other, though in all truth, they don’t speak much more than they used to just because they’re doing this.
When he’s actually with her, on the spare days they actually find the time and space, it’s usually the most thought he’s given to her all day; but then when the form of it occurs, something withers as his body is trapped beyond the bending of those knees, leaving only the sensation that he has been craving this all along. As she coils up with pretty fury, under, above, against the wall, one half of his mind demands to know what he is doing. The other half is asking What the hell does it look like I’m doing? before his brain goes blowing apart into a hundred pieces and nobody’s talking upstairs anymore.
He wonders right when these things happen, in a way that he forgets when it’s not happening, if she does this too: Gets up and brushes her teeth and does her job and wants him and wants him, not knowing what she wants. What he feels most of the time and has known all along is that he should quit it with this, she is going to make him crazy simply because she is who she is. But there are other less definable places in him that wonder if they are the only thing keeping each other sane.
One day in the shooting range he can feel the boundaries sliding under them, slippery ice, because of the way she’s laughing in his direction, even with Hot Dog in the room, after he makes some snide comment complaining about the last time Ellen Tigh was trying to hit on him.
“Apollo, what the frak is that huge stain on your shirt?” There is no stain, and she giggles when he looks down.
He shakes his head while she lets a few rounds off. His head feels weirdly cloudy. “Why are you always frakkin’ with me, Starbuck?”
“Unh hah hah...” she sniggers, letting her pistol drop down. “Cause I love the way you do it.”
“What?” He laughs, and laughs. “What?”
Hotdog hits the floor, and while Kara is hazily finding it hilarious he's starting to think, Oh no.
Five minutes later he isn’t sure if he was passed out or not, if he’s coming to or not, he just has in his mind a blurred impression of her reaching past him, a body clinging and struggling over him, weakly sliding her grasp down him for the spare round he managed to mutter was still in his pocket. And he recalls wondering in his panic with no particular emotion attached whether somebody finding their bodies mingled together like this would mean that he won the game in the end. He remembers the sound of a bullet finally shattering the glass...
“Apollo!”
As his head clears, she’s standing over him, Katrain standing next to her volunteering to help her haul Hot Dog off to sick bay. Kara looks impatient, towardly annoyed at him as he starts laughing darkly beside himself.
“The hell?” Kat mutters.
Kara just says, “He’s fine.”
The arrival of Pegasus makes everything strange, including them. Everyone from Galactica is able to pretty quickly start feeling out what's so off about everything, how they've stumbled upon a huge pretty package of twice the complications they had before rather than a helpful brand of humanity. Adama's crew picks up on the sentiment from each other, even though nobody talks about it; she doesn't like that she's feeling it, but she feels it the most when she's around Apollo, gathers both comfort and irritation from the fact that even he doesn't want to accept everything that's going to change.
It all seems to start with the day they both get called into the old man's office and the first thing he says is, "I'm ordering both of you to be completely silent until I say otherwise." After the two fall into their confused composure, he then goes on to explain that they are both being transferred off Galactica, and their mouths are falling open in stupid infuriated silence before he gets to the finish, where he's proclaiming, "I am trusting both of you to handle this with dignity. Part of that means I don't want any single person on that ship mentioning to me that I have two pilots who can't seem to stop pulling each other out of line. Do you understand?"
Both of them are a little too stunned to even gesture a response, but the ensuing silence is affirmative enough.
"If I can't have you two aboard my ship, I at least need to rely on you to be my eyes and ears." Adama speaks at the exact speed that means he is forcing himself to say what he has to say without his own particular judgment, and Kara nearly loses it and barks some curse of protest. "You've both been at least trying...to work together more, or at least that's how I hear it...Well, I need you to do better than that. Understood?"
As Adama goes on to explain who they're both to report to, Kara feels the buzzing sense of Lee looking sidelong at her, looks forward as stoic as she can manage instead of meeting his eyes. But a few seconds later she slips a furtive look in his direction, relieved somehow to note that he is easily just as steamed up about all this as she is.
They are silent in their rage until the next morning when they're setting up on Pegasus, and Kara can't help going to stand over Lee's bunk when the room is all cleared out, leaning in a shoulder and just staring down at him. He gives one bitter, incredulous shake of his head, and she snap-replies, "I mean, what the hell?"
He just shrugs.
"So you're flying a Raptor now? And the old man is just gonna—"
"There isn't anything he can do. You heard what he said."
Kara's mouth is opening to say something brisk, when the hatch opens and two huskily laughing ensigns topple around the door. To Lee's obvious surprise, she lowers down closer to him to continue at a sharp whisper her complaint about something their CAG said to her earlier. Back on Galactica she was never as quick to tell him things, but they both have a lot to get off their chests and there's no one else around who's likely to be as pissed about all of it as she is.
The first day they report for briefing, Stinger proves to be twice as incompetent as she'd guessed. And after he dismisses her comments like some power-tripping school teacher who's never touched a tactical plan, her bristling anger makes her crane her head around, trying not to make it obvious that she's checking out Lee's reaction. But he's looking straight at her and shaking his head in annoyance, and she's just not sure who he's annoyed with.
"Remember what my father said?" is what he mutters when he hands her the camera kit in the corridor. She's stuffing it back into the bag out of sight, wide-eyed, smiling.
Things aren't so comparatively smooth between them when her stealth surveillance stunt gets her promoted above him, and there are a couple times she thinks she's about to assure him that she doesn't think that's frakking fair at all, but it snags in her throat. And instead, at the first opportunity that they're both off duty, she sits her back down against the table where he's finishing off an early dinner. "Bunks are empty right now," she mutters without even turning her head towards him. "Wanna follow me back?"
Lee is a little astonished. After a second he starts laughing, and it's bitter but truly amused at the same time. "What, are you trying to make it up to me?"
Unapologetic as ever, she gives him a wry smile. She shrugs. Only five minutes later they're being a lot more obvious than usual when they jam the hatch behind them right as a younger pilot is exiting from grabbing a pack of cards.
"Not too—" Her voice is hitching through her fast and ungentle scraps of instructions when she's on one of the long benches, legs wrapping around his movements. "I don't like it when I'm—"
"Yeah, I know—" he cuts her off, annoyed and ecstatic and irritated and mindless, "—You think I don't know by now?"
"—Mmph," her voice whimpers out, interrupting her own attempts at control as his hand is kneading down her stomach, taking and guiding her hips around him.
In a second, he's starting to smirk a little bit between all the white noise of his own feeling. "You like that, though," he accuses, and she's grunting in protest as he's setting the pace, agonizingly slow.
"Nuh," she grumbles, impatient, hating when he does this, teases and teases so frakking slowly while she coils and twists and sweats and waits, until she's practically begging for it. "Apollo," she groans, and it's chiding, it's an insult, it's the only thing she ever calls him. "C'mon...Come on—"
And it's always worth the worst of her verbal abuse for when he starts doing her in in earnest; it gives him a warm sneering sensation in his chest when the tension thrums and picks up and neither of them can take it anymore and he knows it. He must feel some weird notion to give her something for her trouble though, cause when he has her wrists pinned above her he gives a hungry licking kiss to her mouth, and his thumbs are rubbing caresses into her palms as he hears himself asking, "Can I go down on you?" Her eyes go a little wide.
"Wh—" She swallows. "No."
"Okay." He lets her hands go, gets back up to supporting his weight on his palms. They both know he won't ask again.
Kara goes from a stiff posture of crossed arms and a schooled expression, to turning away, leaning a hand onto the CIC table. She's blinking and taking deep breaths, taking a moment to remember that she should probably say something, but Adama is still a step ahead of her.
"Don't feel like you're letting me down if you can't do this."
"Sir," she says, and it's not a confirmation or an answer. "If, um. If you have no objections, I would like to ask Lee to come with me as back-up...just in case...if—"
But she realizes he was probably about to suggest as much, from the look on his face, and there seems to be something about the way she said it that really surprises the old man. "Of course...He would be the most viable option of somebody to accompany you. I only wonder..."
"If he'll do it?" Kara's eyebrows lift up slowly. "If he'll do it for me."
Adama lets out a sigh. "It's between you and him. I can't be the one to ask."
Later that afternoon, then, Lee is clarifying, "Wait, you actually did ask me to come in here because you had something to talk to me about." She's just stopped him from untangling out of her bed sheets; this wasn't how she'd imagined it, but telling him while they're crammed into a bunk together seems as shitty a time as any. (And she really meant to ask him the second they were alone, but then she found herself pulling and touching, pressing a hand under his waistband, all in a sad and sudden way, as if she'd been missing it.)
Kara swallows, pushing her jaw out a little. The automatic attempts to get comfortable in the cramped area turn into her head lilting a little bit against his arm, and she's staring up at the bunk ceiling for gods know how long as she tries to sort out where the hell to start with something like this, and she needs to get it out before somebody starts pounding on the hatch.
"Hey," Lee says, a little too uncomfortable and confused to be necessarily soft with her, but not impatient either. "...What's going on?"
"I'm sorry I have to ask you this. I understand if you can't." She presses her lips together, and finally settles into sitting up, the sheet pulled up over her chest and staring straight forward.
"Ask me to do what?" he asks quietly, and she wishes, beyond any sense of what she would usually admit, in her clumsy and simple need for some comfort, that he would just say it, could say it and mean it, Anything for you, you know that. What do you need?
"...Help me assassinate Admiral Cain."
If someone had told him, six months ago, that it would eventually be possible for him to be angry at his father on Kara's behalf...
But he does know him at least well enough by now to know that he's got to be aware of how frakked up this is, it's got to be eating at him at least a little that he's putting it on somebody he cares about so much, he just doesn't understand...
"Do you even know, can you imagine, how hard it was for her to even spit it out when she came to me about this?" Lee is demanding as he stands over his father's desk. "I know, I guess, I'm...the best option, but there's got to be someone she trusts more, if you can pull some strings—"
"First of all," Adama says with a raise of his brows. "Who would you suggest?"
"I don't know, I haven't memorized all the tiers of her frakking social life, but with how many of us got moved to Pegasus, I'd think...The point is, you're already throwing this in her lap, and then you had to send her to me, to—?"
"You don't understand," he interrupts, comprehending Lee a little better now. "It was Kara's idea."
"...What?"
"She suggested you before I said anything about it. It was her idea."
Lee's mouth is hanging open for a couple seconds, and his composure sinks together almost instantly. And his next words are a stammered "I'll do it."
Whatever all of it means, he means it. He wants her to understand that he knows this is hard for her, that it's probably the toughest thing she'll ever have to do. He can't imagine saying it, so he accepts the mission, hoping she'll know, that in that small way that she'll let him and he'll let himself, they're in it together and he's there for her this once.
At the back of his mind, he's even strangely aware that he might do something like this if it meant she wouldn't have to.
He always had a pretty instinctive awareness of the protectiveness of everyone around him in these dire situations, but it was more just a supplement of something he'd felt towards other people his whole life; now, he doesn't know, he must be starting to understand it a little better than that. He remembers the gun fight against the cylons on Kobol, how he and Kara were finally able to put aside all the complications and just look out for each other in the heat of battle, how there was a certain companionship soldiers had to have for one another even if it was something sturdily manufactured. He may have a really hard time with her as a person, but he realizes now that if he was in her place, he'd want her at his side too. So he tells her he'll do it and he tells her nothing else, and he knows she'll understand, even if she thinks or assumes or knows that it's not really about her. They quietly shake on it.
The feel of her hand and how it lingers, just a little bit, just long enough for her thumb to rub against him as if it has a mind of its own: This is what he's thinking about when he has to punch out and when he's floating in the cold black, when he fails her and feels like he can't get back to where he's been.
The only time they even talk about it is the first idle moment Kara has a reason to hook a transport to Pegasus, when Lee is trying to catch a nap before a briefing. She climbs eagerly into his rack, straddles her thighs smoothly over him, sitting up as she removes both her tanks. His hands land automatically on her knees but don’t do much else when she leans down to land some teasing nibbles on his shoulder, and it doesn’t take her long to arch back off of him, a look of nonplussed boredom on her face.
It’s not like he has to even say, I’m not in the mood. He just gives her an apologetic shrug.
Kara sighs, leaning farther back and pushing a couple rogue bangs around on her forehead. “You need to let this go, Apollo.”
Lee looks unaffected, rests his forearm across his forehead in aggravation. He’s looking at her with a mix of disinterest and adoration, and in a half-decided second thought he pushes up to pull her into lying down. “Your opinion is noted,” he mutters numbly, and then he starts kissing his way down her neck, chest, grazing his teeth against her ribs at the bare skin below her bra.
“—Stop,” she demands with annoyance as it tickles her. As he sits up, over her now, and starts undoing her belt, she flatly says, “It’s not your fault, what happened, why don’t you get that? You need to shut that noise off in your head about what almost happened, because we're both still alive...” His gestures are harsher now, tugging out of the buckle and pulling her pants down her hips. “And even if something had happened to me, so frakking what? I took the mission, it’s my job. L— ” She rolls her eyes at herself, pivots her hips up to get her pants farther off.
His motions have frozen, his eyes suddenly glaring down at her with tight frustration. He could make something out of the near-slip, but instead he demands, “And what about trusting each other?”
Kara rolls her eyes.
“Doesn’t that mean a frakking thing? You picked me for this mission, and I let you down—”
“Do you trust me?” Kara’s expression has quite quickly gone to a perplexed, sort of patronizing fascination with him, and the question seems asked in pure curiosity.
He furrows his brow in hesitation, like he’s never really considered the question before. But it doesn’t take him long. He answers solidly, “Yes.”
From where she’s lying flat under him, Kara blinks, in realization of something. All she can give him is a pitying smile before she shakes her head once and says, “That’s a mistake.”
Because of the look on his face, the fact that he still doesn’t move, she sighs and turns to slip out of the rack. But suddenly with an almost grudging nature in his desire he grabs a shoulder and pushes her back flat again, gets the curtain, grips her by her wrists, pinning her arms back above her and kissing her, hard. She can't shrug out of the feeling of it, gives in and competes with the fervor, as if it's all just a fight he needs to get out of his system.
Things get even worse.
One hour after Kara is the only one of three pilots to return from a Viper dive around an asteroid, Lee hears an uproar far down the hall closer to the bunk chambers, a loud thud as if someone is being angrily thrown to a wall. A couple people look over at his approach as if relieved that somebody with some authority is showing up, and he makes out the unintelligible shouting as none other than Starbuck in response to Kat's angry taunting. Before he knows it he's grabbing the closer pair of shoulders as the uproar turns too close to a real fight, barking at them to split it up, but Kara turns as if to lash out in a new direction and for some reason Lee grabs her shoulders again, tighter this time, and her eyes just blaze back all dangerous and pained.
"What. Are you drunk?" he demands quietly. And because he knows there's something more than what it looks like here, "What's going on?"
She smacks up on his forearms to get out of his grasp and slips off. More self-conscious now about the little throng of pilots still standing around watching, he just gives an exasperated shake of his head and resolves that he can probably only rile her up even worse if he tries to make something out of how much of a mess she looks like.
But he’s barely started walking away when he hears a booming thud: one of her boots, shot just past him and bouncing off the wall treacherously close to his head. When he looks back at her she’s terrible and severe and headed into the bunks, slamming the hatch behind her. And the look he gives everyone before he follows her in with the one boot is a mix of total confusion and Don’t anyone frakking come in here, provoking a stream of shocked mutterings because it comes across like at least one of the two is going to come back out with a black eye.
And what he really is half-expecting from such a shook-up Kara is for her fist to go flying into his face the second the hatch shuts, is almost willing to have it out with her if it will get him any closer to understanding what the frak's going on. But he can't honestly say he's surprised when she goes for his belt instead.
"—Kara. Um."
"What?" she demands impatiently.
He looks up and down her, all the lines of grief in her face and the tension in her body and it's almost laughable and sour that she wants this right now. "I didn't come in here for that." She ignores him, and a second later he's insisting, "Stop it."
"What the hell do you want, Apollo?" She's already shifting into the gear of indifference, backing off of him.
Lee stupidly holds out her boot a bit before just chucking it to the floor as she sits back on the table and shucks off the other. "Look, why don't you just tell me what's going on with you?"
A bitter snigger lets out of her before she says, coldly calm, “No. I didn’t come in here for a conversation.”
Lee tenses up even more, watching her get up to mess around with something in her locker.
Her next remark is all the more frustrating for not even being that roughly delivered. "Like you and I could ever have a conversation about how bad things get without...competing with each other."
"I don't know if it would kill us to try, you know." He's a little bitterly surprised that she would still be thinking he's like that, but maybe he's never given her enough of a reason to think otherwise.
After a moment, despite looking like she isn't listening to him, she does add, “Why don’t you ask your old man, Apollo? I’m sure he’ll tell you all about my stupid ass making promises we can’t afford to keep.” She shakes her head, now mumbling bitterly to herself in syllables he can't make out.
"What?" But then he thinks he knows what she's talking about and just says, "Oh."
“I left them to die,” she insists, an undertone of why-am-I-bothering-even-saying-this-out-loud puncturing her words with exhaustion. She numbly adds, “I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve done something, I don’t know.”
“You did what you could,” Lee says, not just speaking about that but of what happened today. He doesn't know why he's so surprised that somebody like Starbuck needs to hear something like this, but he knows it's coming through in his voice. “You give what you have. None of it’s your fault.”
She looks away, still brimming up with so much anxiety her breath is a bit loud. Abruptly, after they fall into a pause and she's just staring at the floor in front of her, she asks, "You sure you don't want to frak me?"
Somehow it seems intentionally disarming and he can't help a laugh of surprise, and after a moment replies, "Yes...Look, if you have to take the morning off, I'll see what I can do. Just get some rest. And that's an order, Thrace."
"It is my professional, and personal opinion," Lee says, finishing off the half-inch of drink in his father's quarters. The president slowly cocks an eyebrow at the admiral. "Kara Thrace is, as you've said many times, the greatest pilot we've got. But she's slipping, and she might keep slipping if she doesn't at least have the chance to do this."
Adama, supportive as ever of the president putting down her foot, lets out a barely audible sigh.
"Of course I understand why you turned her down, it's...an extremely dangerous rescue mission, and for a group of people who may or may not even be alive. But from being CAG I can tell you that a lot of our pilots are very much about principles, and just not bothering to save people we know are out there..."
"This would be very much off the record," Roslin interrupts, in a tone of slightly more conversational rapport. "But considering Thrace's determination, I was wondering...if during her time back on Caprica, she may have formed a particularly close relationship with one of the resistance fighters..."
Lee's brow goes furrowed, and he exchanges an uncomfortable look with his father, who seems hesitant for a different reason.
"Captain Thrace, and Lee, don't have the closest of relationships," Bill explains a little matter-of-factly. "You can't assume he'd have any idea if that were the case, and frankly I don't know if—"
"Honestly?" Lee intercedes. "I don't think the way she's been is just about one person. Sure, it's possible something like that happened with somebody, but...I don't want you to think her becoming lax on things is all just her having some kind of personal tantrum. My bet would be, she made a promise to somebody, and she's trying to keep it. She isn't...isn't like that."
"Like..." Laura slowly grapples for the word, "Emotional?" and Lee almost feels like she's having a joke at him.
"I don't know her very well," he replies, quickly aware of how uncomfortable this is getting.
"I agree, though," his father says, slowly conceding to Kara's defense. "Thrace is more aware of what's out there, and if she thinks this is something we need to do, that's where I'm willing to stand."
When Roslin speaks after a moment, she's back to being legislative. "I am not approving the mission, but I will...consider it, once again," she tiredly promises.
That's good news, and Lee maybe looks a bit too loosened up for a moment. He just nods respectfully, and thanks her, and when he's getting up to leave he swears that the president is giving him a curiously slanted look on his way out the door.
She goes from her low to a considerable high when the planning of the rescue mission is more than underway. Their chance meetings are even fewer than usual lately, and the first time she sees him while she's over on Pegasus to brief the pilots, she's in a good mood, flippant and friendly while everyone around her is biting their nails over the election speeches.
"Hey," he mutters to her, a little distracted by what's on the radio in the rec room when she leans into the table next to him.
"Do I owe you a thanks?" she's asking. When his attention comes out of the stream of Baltar's lecturing and into what she just said, he just meets her eyes in a look much like the one she's giving him, surprised and amused and not quite aloof. He smiles.
"Hey, if I don't see you," he finally says, "Good luck out there."
Now the corner of her mouth threatens to smirk back at him. There's an almost uncomfortably long pause before she teases, "You worried about me?"
"I need every pilot I've got," he grants; even though he's not her CAG now and it's not quite an applicable comment, it seems a fitting joke between them. He's looking away from her again when he adds, "Especially you."
Something falls in Kara's expression, but not sadly. "Um. Thank you, sir," she finally quietly says.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-03 06:29 pm (UTC)