We used to wait. (Chapter 1/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 1/?)
author: apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2 where Lee Adama isn't in command of Pegasus during New Caprica.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 4,886
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
Kara stood in the center of CIC, duty blues pressed, cleaned, and for once, without stains. The plotting table was bare before her, as there hadn’t been many FTL jumps to be planned as of the previous few months. Most of the time, she expected Gaeta to come ambling up, his arms full of star charts. She could see it in her mind as clear as day and Kara closed her eyes for a moment as the memory played on. He’d spread each chart across the illuminated table, ruler and grease pencil in hand as his mouth bumbled on a mile a minute, his hands lagging behind. She saw it a million times before and try as she might to have gleaned some of the information he was always talking about, she was thankful that job and responsibility weren’t hers.
But Gaeta wasn’t in service any longer and this wasn’t even the Galactica. Her eyes opened and took in the surroundings that felt familiar and yet foreign at the same time. Pegasus. What she wouldn’t have given for the Old Man to smile from the other side of the table or Tigh to yell out one of his biting remarks. Hell, she’d even be comforted to hear Dee’s voice at the communications station, calling for an officer or signaling the CAP. It was a cleaner and more streamlined CIC, that much was absolutely certain. Whoever had designed this class of battlestars managed to improve upon the old designs, although Kara smiled to herself as she thought that despite its flaws, Galactica was rather perfect.
She reached up to rub the back of her neck, fingers rather harshly digging into the muscles there. Over a year now and the ache she got from staring up at DRADIS hadn’t eased up. Only the thought of her petitioning the Old Man yet again for a lounge chair made her smile. Last month she even made the request in writing, and he’d humored her, sending a Raptor over with a metal folding chair. She hadn’t used it, of course. Instead it occupied space in her quarters, leaned up against a sparse bookshelf. She kept it for the smile it gave her rather than the purpose.
Across from her, Helo grinned and interrupted the memory. “Something to smile about, Commander? Why don’t you share it with the rest of the class?”
It only made her lips pull even wider, hearing the mixture of formal and informal. She far outranked him these days, but knew Karl would never give her the propriety he would anyone else with the rank and title she now carried.
“Just thinking about your first week on Galactica. Remember that marine from Aerilon? Old enough to be your mother.” Kara didn’t even need to continue on because he more than knew the story she referenced. It was always the same one and he always kept his mouth shut afterwards, hoping to silence her any further. He was sure a few of their friends knew to what she referred to by now. After all, lips tended to get pretty loose after ambrosia and triad. But this was the Pegasus and the last thing he needed was this entire crew knowing his dirty laundry.
“As your XO, sir, I think it’s in your best interest not to mention it. Let the officers here still have some respect for me if you want me to do my job.” Helo smiled at her as Hoshi stifled a bit of laughter from a few feet away.
“Karl, it’s cute that you thought they had respect for you to begin with.” Her hands rested on the table before her, weight shifting as she leaned forward and opted to change the subject. “I don’t think I would’ve accepted the Admiral if I knew this would be all I did every frakking day. Do you think the Old Man would be mad if he found out we were playing triad on this thing?” Both palms thumped against the surface for emphasis.
“Only if it were strip triad, sir,” Hoshi answered.
“Well if it’s not strip triad then there’s no point in playing.” A sense of mock indignation was held for a moment before she relaxed back into her role.
“Pegasus, Racetrack. Requesting landing clearance for Raptor 861.” The familiar voice broke out over the comm system, resounding through CIC.
Kara nodded over to Hoshi with her hand held over the personal comm unit at her table. He gave the clearance requested and redirected the connection to her handset,
“Racetrack, Pegasus actual. You got a husband of mine on board?”
“Actual, I accidentally vented him out into space halfway back up. I couldn’t take him complaining about being careful any longer.”
Despite the smile on her face, she assumed her best commander voice. “Well, that’s for the best. Saves me the trouble of luring him into an airlock up here. Mission accomplished, Racetrack. Come on home.” She heard rustling and chatter on the open line before another voice cut through, this one deeper and decidedly male.
“It’s a good thing my name still holds some weight down there, Kara. There’s a long line of women waiting for me just to say yes.”
She snorted and held back her laughter as she imagined the dressing down Tigh would have given her for the conversation being held in the middle of CIC, albeit only onesided to those in the room. “I would imagine there’s a big interest in married narcissistic former pyramid players, Sammy. Maybe you can petition the people to build you a stadium before they get running water-”
Helo cut her off with his eyes locked on DRADIS above their heads. His voice was tight suddenly and Kara knew she hadn’t heard that tone since their trip back to Caprica. “Something on DRADIS, sir.”
The phone was hung up before she could even get a word off to Sam. They had docked, she knew that much, so her concern for him was fairly nonexistent. The icon of an unknown ship flickered off the scrambled screen and although she wanted to continue to lull herself into a bubble and where things remained predictable and safe, Kara knew better than that. Suddenly, the screen was speckled with tens of the ships, some indicating larger masses than others. Her hand was back on the comm link without a second thought and Hoshi had already connected her to Galactica. Her breath was held as the Admiral acknowledged her and confirmed what she saw.
“How the frak did they find us, Admiral?” Decorum was forgotten as her heart throbbed. They had been running practice drills for months now, and nothing had ever felt like this before. Kara held her current rank since they settled on the planet below and she knew that this moment was the only true test of being a Commander.
“We won’t last more than a few minutes against that many basestars. We’ve got to jump.” Adama’s voice was firm and Kara was thankful for it since her calm was wavering.
“Everyone is down there! We can’t, we can’t leave them.” She was frantic and inwardly ashamed of herself for falling apart so fast. She was the Commander of a battlestar for frak’s sake. All the racks may not have been occupied with bodies, but she was still in charge of hundreds of souls and she knew she was already putting them at risk. The Admiral made a mistake in appointing her Commander. She was sure of it.
“We’ll die, Kara. We’ll all die here if we don’t leave now. The people on that planet have no hope if we let ourselves be shot out of the sky.”
She faltered even more at the use of her own name as she considered all the people she knew down there. Laura. Galen and Cally and their baby due soon. Duck and Nora and the child they’d talked about wanting the last time she was planetside. Kara slipped into a worse place suddenly, as she imagined Nora tucked away in a breeding farm like Sue-Shaun, this one built down on the surface of New Caprica. Oh Gods, she thought. Lee was on New Caprica.
“Lee. Lee is down there. You can’t leave him.” Some might have accused her of playing dirty with that one, heaping a burden on the Admiral far more than he already carried. Helo and his worried brow, however, knew the truth. Kara Thrace didn’t sound like that when her game was manipulation. As good as she was at it, and her triad games were proof positive, she’d never willingly bare that much of herself in only a few words.
“I know.” His voice was gruff and his words short. “You’ve got the emergency coordinates. The fleet’s already away.”
The call went dead on the line and Kara was slow in replacing it in its cradle. Around her, the people with far more hours logged in their respective positions buzzed around. It was autopilot with them, especially after the months they endured Cain’s hard fist and nothing but perfection was expected of them. She steeled herself, blinking rapidly so her eyes didn’t betray her even more than the rest of her already had.
“Prepare for jump.”
-
Hours later and with the fleet finally secured, Helo was left in command as she returned to her quarters. She couldn’t remember the walk back, her head foggy with the fading surge of adrenaline as her body slowly metabolized it and returned her to a more normal kind of homeostasis. Without her usual nod to the marine guard at her door, she slipped through the automatic doors, them closing tight behind her. The bathroom was the first stop and she rinsed her face with the chilled water, barely stopping to dry it off before she blindly groped at the series of buttons on her uniform, letting it hang open and loose.
She was only vaguely aware of the sound of the hatch opening behind her, feeling as though her senses were tuned down in order to afford blood to more vital parts of her bodily function. Sam was speaking long before she found the energy to focus on his voice.
“-Just leave them there! Gods Kara, the cylons are going to tear them all apart and you jumped away to save your own ass. What if I was down there? Would you have just left your husband to die?” He was too close for comfort now, his words harsh and loud as she tried to go back to tuning him out. Were it any other moment, Starbuck would have been at the forefront and laying him out for the assumption that he could talk to her like that and get away with it.
Her hands flew up to get him to stop, but he stampeded on, his own larger hands shoving hers away. “Call the Admiral and tell him we’re going back. It doesn’t matter if we die trying. I should be down there. I didn’t crawl my way out of Caprica to leave everyone else to die. I should be with Jean and Paul and every other person we know.” Sam was wearing himself out as he spoke, pausing only to take a breath that did little to replenish his calm. His shoulders sagged and he gritted his teeth suddenly, slamming his hand on the nearby desk. “If you’re not going back then send me back. Put me on a Raptor and send me the frak back there.”
Kara took it all in, for once in her life deciding to listen rather than react with her fists first. She didn’t give him the chance to watch her reaction to his words, instead giving him her back. The air in the room stilled as he finished and Kara’s hand raised to her face for a moment, finger tips barely tracing across the pink of her lips. She was brought back to another time and place for that instant with her eyes closed tight. For so long, a simple action had been her refuge. A finger across her lips or across the shell of her ear. Her own hand mimicking a caress across the inside of her wrist or the line of her jaw. Years past his death and she was still drawing her silent comforts and strength from memories of Zak when she needed them most. It was a relief for only a moment this time though, because now when she thought of Zak, she instead thought of how she’d abandoned his brother on the grey planet to die.
She spoke suddenly, clearing her throat though her voice was rough and so unlike her usually smooth tone. “I’m not wasting a Raptor on a suicide machine for you, Sam.” She was stern in her delivery and she turned as she spoke, settling Starbuck’s features over her face. “I’m the Gods damned Commander of this ship. As long as you’re on it, you don’t question the orders from me or the Admiral, got it?”
Laughter erupted from his throat, though it wasn’t the jovial kind she was used to hearing from him. “I’m not some frakking soldier. I’m not going to salute and call you sir and take your word as scripture, Kara.”
She was on him in a second, hand on his chest as she forced him back into the bulkhead. Her other hand went to his jaw, thumb gripping on one cheek while the others curled around the other side, effectively silencing him as she applied pressure against his skin.
“You fall in line or you get off the ship. Do you understand?” Green eyes locked with his own as she spoke and Anders knew immediately that he wasn’t speaking with Kara anymore. “We’re going back.” Her jaw went rigid, teeth clashed tightly together as she finally released him, but this time with a final shove that knocked him back into the wall once again.
Kara backed off and paced away from him. She looked down at her open hands for an extended moment before she spoke, barely above a whisper. “Everything seems so far away. The way things feel. The way they taste. Like I’m watching myself, but I’m not really experiencing it, not living it. That’s how I feel right now.” Her words were cut off as she looked up at him suddenly, as if forgetting he was sharing the same room as her. Kara crossed her arms over her chest and gripped at the opposing upper arm, withdrawing into herself. This time when she spoke, she forced the strength back into words. “I went back for you. I’m going back for them.”
-
Adama was behind the desk in his quarters, Kara across from him as she sipped slowly at the beverage he’d poured her without offering. They hadn’t said a word since she arrived on the deck a half hour earlier, both preferring to stew over the events of the day.
“What you pulled earlier today, Kara, it can’t happen again.”
Her eyes closed for an extended blink as she chewed over the words. She already knew her panic could have cost the lives of those on her ship as well as lives throughout the civilian fleet. It hadn’t come to that, thankfully, but in another life, another minute of hesitation could have cost them even more than they’d already lost.
“If this was before the end of the worlds, that would’ve cost you your career.”
“If this wasn’t the end of the worlds, sir, no one would’ve let me anywhere near the command of a battlestar.” Her words hurt more out loud than they had in her head and she immediately winced in regret and took another sip at her glass, letting the burn in her mouth and throat be penance.
“If your XO was anyone else, if it had been Tigh-” He stopped suddenly at the reminder that the man that had been his lifelong friend and second in command was down on that Gods forsaken planet. Now he was the one taking a drink of his glass before continuing. “They would’ve relieved you of duty then and there. The Beast’s a tough ship to run, Starbuck. The crew already doesn’t want to trust you because you’re not one of them. I know you’ve been there on and off before I put you in command, but you weren’t there from the start. Now your first real test at the helm and you can’t keep it together.” Adama nearly slammed his glass down on his desk, a drop of the liquid splashing out and onto the blotter. “You’re better than this.”
Kara washed down the remaining mouthful before settling her glass down on the desk, albeit much gentler and quieter. She sat up in the seat, as if this simple action was enough to inspire his belief in her once again.
“I frakked up today, Admiral. If you’re going to relieve me, throw me in hack, then do it already.” It was a challenge from her, but he chose not to rise to it. His head gave a subtle back and forth shake.
“You and I both know we can’t leave them behind without trying. We’ve got a couple thousand people up here, at best, sir. If this is all that’s left of the human race to survive, we might as well not bother. We’ve been trying to get by for the last two years and we’ve come to terms with it as best we can. People have moved on, there are children being born every month now. It hasn’t been perfect, not even close to it, but everyone’s gotten by. Even if we find Earth and it’s everything we thought it would be, no one’s going to get over leaving tens of thousands of people behind to die, not when we could have tried to do something. If this is our end, Admiral, I’d rather meet it here then fifty years from now on some rock, pretending like leaving New Caprica didn’t kill all of us anyway.”
She relaxed back into her seat again before abruptly standing up and going for his bottle, refilling her glass with half a serving more. It wasn’t polite to serve herself, that much she knew, but going down to the rec room to drink with the Viper jocks right then wasn’t an option. Kara downed it quickly and replaced the soiled glass down on the counter.
The Admiral seemed to be in quiet contemplation of her words as he removed his glasses. His fingers pressed against his closed eyelids. “We’re going to need out of the box right now, Kara.”
Kara nodded and offered him a smile. She was glad they ignored the elephant in the room for now. If the Admiral had been the one to break down over Lee, she wasn’t sure she could have been the one to keep things together for him. “You know I was made for this.”
-
When she returned to Pegasus, Kara settled in for a shift in the CIC. The fleet remained on alert still, prepared to be followed by a basestar and Raiders sent to take them out for daring to flee from the fight. Her mind wandered as fatigue set in, going over a series of possibilities for those that remain down on Gaius Baltar’s next great failure, New Caprica.
She swallowed hard as her first thought was that they were simply nuked, the small settlement being taken out with great ease. The cylons would hardly have had to lift a finger to destroy the tens of thousands of people huddled up in tents, already sick and dying from the effects of the cold weather on them. What was worse was the thought that the cylons, sadistic as they were, would choose not to simply eliminate what remained of the human race. She imagined the breeding farms, and every woman and girl capable of of procreation being strapped to a machine or being cut open for the parts of them the cylons deemed most important. All the others, they’d be tortured for what little details they could give up about the whereabouts of the fleet, their bodies kicked into ditches by the metal feet of centurions. If they were lucky, they would get a mass grave. If they weren’t, she knew the skinjobs would let them rot where they died. New Caprica wasn’t Caprica City. There was no reason to clean up the mess because the cylons sure as hell didn’t intend on settling down on that soil.
Helo relieved her for the ship’s night cycle and Kara returned to her quarters to find Sam awake and waiting for her on the couch. He was silent as she entered, eyes following her as she crossed the room and began to undress on her way to the bedroom. She couldn’t hear him, but felt his footsteps behind her a second before his arms slipped around her, his hand sliding into her open jacket to rub at her stomach over tanks. For the moment, she relaxed into him, her hand rising up to cup his cheek as Sam kissed her neck. She knew every type of kiss he gave and this one screamed of apology.
Anders kept quiet as his hands met at her waist, unbuttoning her pants until there was enough give to tug them from her hips. He turned her around in his arms to slide the jacket from her torso and he backed her up further into the room as his mouth found a certain place just behind her ear. Kara gave in to it all, choosing to let him envelop her for as long as she could manage to ignore all the rest.
“I’m sorry, Kara.” Sam groaned the words against her collarbone, only stopping to divest himself of his shirt.
She took the free moment to pull her own tanks off and suddenly her skin was pressed to his. The heat she felt off of him made her absolutely melt. It was satisfying at first, and then she was drowning in a memory of another time someone’s heated skin kept her warm when she needed it most. Suddenly she was awash in Lee Adama, the way he pulled her to his own chest and she slept atop him until he was waking her up by stroking her hair and the skin where her throat and shoulder connected. They’d hurriedly frakked for the third time that night and even in the cool air of New Caprica, his skin was sticky and searing hot against hers. It was enough to lull her back into sleep, her head pillowed on his chest.
There were arms around her again and Kara was quick to start pushing him back and away, an abrupt shove of her palms given to his chest as she crossed the room in her briefs and faded black sports bra.
“What the frak just happened?” He was frustrated in more ways than one and she heard it in the strain of his voice.
“Didn’t you get the hint, Sammy? I’ve got a headache,” she said, her words dripping with condescension. She slipped the bra from her body with her back turned to him, pulling on a fresh tank from her meager supply neatly folded away in her drawer. That was one of the benefits to being Commander, having someone else wash and fold and put away her laundry in neat little piles. It was a harmless thought, but it brought her back to Lee again and how he’d be so pleased with himself to see her succumbing to what he’d consider proper hygiene for once.
Sam remained in the doorway, shirtless and offended by her sudden brush off. He pondered making an attempt to goad her into yet another fight, but he considered the events of the day and simply reached for his shirt as he left her to her lonesome. He assumed his all too familiar position of sleeping on a couch made for a man a foot and a half shorter than he.
She waited until she was alone to start gathering her clothing, shaking the temporary wrinkles out of each before she hung each item in her closet, refastening the buttons as she worked. She went for her boots, abandoned haphazardly by the doorway, and pulled them together as she sat down just beside her bed. Her legs parted and stretched out across the floor, the last bit of carpeting in the universe as she often mused, and her hand reached out for the nearby kit.
Kara unpacked each item and laid them out in a neat row directly in front of the leather boots settled between her legs. With a glance towards where the living quarters and her husband were, she returned her attention to the first container and opened it. The strong scent bathed her and she took a moment just to breathe it in before her hand grasped the small brush nearby. She scooped a measured amount of the black polish out and lathered it across the surface of the first boot. It was a slow process for her and not because she was seriously concerned with the shine of her shoes, after all this wasn’t boot camp and she wasn’t about to get a demerit because her instructor couldn’t see their reflection in them. Rather, she slowed down the process on purpose to enjoy it for as long as she could. The scent of the polish filled her nostrils and all she saw was Lee.
Lee sat at the edge of his bunk, filling what little free time he had with removing the scuffs from what were probably the last pair of factory made boots he would ever own. Kara teased him every time she saw him in the process of it, but still he persisted with the futile attempt at keeping one normal activity in his life. They were drunk one night in the rec room, alone at last, and all she could think to ask him while he was in a drunken haze was why the frak he bothered to shine his shoes at all. Kara seemed to think he should have traded the kit for something of better value, although she’d argue half a swig of ambrosia would be a better deal. To her, that shoe polishing kit just spelled more work.
Lee laughed despite his state and took another drink. It wasn’t an embarrassing story, but admitting anything to Kara Thrace tended to drive one to drink. “It lets me pretend for a minute that none of this has happened,” he said, almost a little too quietly.
She pondered it for a moment and said nothing else, pulling the nearly empty bottle back from him to take her sip.
Kara was channeling him as she dragged the brush along the leather. She both heard and saw Lee following the same pattern across his own boots, and she began to think about how that very kit he used was probably somewhere on Galactica in storage now. She wondered what would happen to it if they never saw Lee again. Would his belongings just be abandoned and forgotten? Or would someone drag the box out and put them up for the usual auction? She vowed then and there that it wouldn’t ever come to that. Kara knew that the person who tried to pull those few possessions out of her arms would leave with a concussion and a few broken fingers.
She inherited her own kit by way of assuming command of Pegasus and every time she has pulled it out and laid each item out before her, she questioned if maybe it was cursed. Like Cain and Fisk and Garner, maybe she would be the next Commander laid to rest out an airlock, mutilated and broken. From the amount of polish that remained, however, she doubted any of her predecessors bothered to use the kit themselves. That was some ensigns job undoubtedly, but Kara kept this task for herself.
In better times, when Pegasus orbited over New Caprica, watching and protecting the people below, Kara would crawl out of bed with Anders, visiting on one of his trips from the surface. He’d caught her a few times, interrupting what she now found to be just as much of a ritual as rubbing at and praying to the idols she kept wrapped up in the back of her closet. Sam had often tried to convince her to come back to sleep or at least explain why she had developed a new habit of being laid out on the floor with a pair of boots and shoe polish. He’d long since given up understanding it, however, and part of Kara wished he could understand it on his own.
Because this is the only way I can have both of you, she’d often think, although she knew that game of pretend was doing nothing for her at all.
Kara rubbed a cloth over the boot until the shine was to her satisfaction. She observed her work and then closed her eyes for just a moment as she whispered. “Lords of Kobol hear my prayer. Protect your son Lee Adama.”
author: apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2 where Lee Adama isn't in command of Pegasus during New Caprica.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 4,886
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
Kara stood in the center of CIC, duty blues pressed, cleaned, and for once, without stains. The plotting table was bare before her, as there hadn’t been many FTL jumps to be planned as of the previous few months. Most of the time, she expected Gaeta to come ambling up, his arms full of star charts. She could see it in her mind as clear as day and Kara closed her eyes for a moment as the memory played on. He’d spread each chart across the illuminated table, ruler and grease pencil in hand as his mouth bumbled on a mile a minute, his hands lagging behind. She saw it a million times before and try as she might to have gleaned some of the information he was always talking about, she was thankful that job and responsibility weren’t hers.
But Gaeta wasn’t in service any longer and this wasn’t even the Galactica. Her eyes opened and took in the surroundings that felt familiar and yet foreign at the same time. Pegasus. What she wouldn’t have given for the Old Man to smile from the other side of the table or Tigh to yell out one of his biting remarks. Hell, she’d even be comforted to hear Dee’s voice at the communications station, calling for an officer or signaling the CAP. It was a cleaner and more streamlined CIC, that much was absolutely certain. Whoever had designed this class of battlestars managed to improve upon the old designs, although Kara smiled to herself as she thought that despite its flaws, Galactica was rather perfect.
She reached up to rub the back of her neck, fingers rather harshly digging into the muscles there. Over a year now and the ache she got from staring up at DRADIS hadn’t eased up. Only the thought of her petitioning the Old Man yet again for a lounge chair made her smile. Last month she even made the request in writing, and he’d humored her, sending a Raptor over with a metal folding chair. She hadn’t used it, of course. Instead it occupied space in her quarters, leaned up against a sparse bookshelf. She kept it for the smile it gave her rather than the purpose.
Across from her, Helo grinned and interrupted the memory. “Something to smile about, Commander? Why don’t you share it with the rest of the class?”
It only made her lips pull even wider, hearing the mixture of formal and informal. She far outranked him these days, but knew Karl would never give her the propriety he would anyone else with the rank and title she now carried.
“Just thinking about your first week on Galactica. Remember that marine from Aerilon? Old enough to be your mother.” Kara didn’t even need to continue on because he more than knew the story she referenced. It was always the same one and he always kept his mouth shut afterwards, hoping to silence her any further. He was sure a few of their friends knew to what she referred to by now. After all, lips tended to get pretty loose after ambrosia and triad. But this was the Pegasus and the last thing he needed was this entire crew knowing his dirty laundry.
“As your XO, sir, I think it’s in your best interest not to mention it. Let the officers here still have some respect for me if you want me to do my job.” Helo smiled at her as Hoshi stifled a bit of laughter from a few feet away.
“Karl, it’s cute that you thought they had respect for you to begin with.” Her hands rested on the table before her, weight shifting as she leaned forward and opted to change the subject. “I don’t think I would’ve accepted the Admiral if I knew this would be all I did every frakking day. Do you think the Old Man would be mad if he found out we were playing triad on this thing?” Both palms thumped against the surface for emphasis.
“Only if it were strip triad, sir,” Hoshi answered.
“Well if it’s not strip triad then there’s no point in playing.” A sense of mock indignation was held for a moment before she relaxed back into her role.
“Pegasus, Racetrack. Requesting landing clearance for Raptor 861.” The familiar voice broke out over the comm system, resounding through CIC.
Kara nodded over to Hoshi with her hand held over the personal comm unit at her table. He gave the clearance requested and redirected the connection to her handset,
“Racetrack, Pegasus actual. You got a husband of mine on board?”
“Actual, I accidentally vented him out into space halfway back up. I couldn’t take him complaining about being careful any longer.”
Despite the smile on her face, she assumed her best commander voice. “Well, that’s for the best. Saves me the trouble of luring him into an airlock up here. Mission accomplished, Racetrack. Come on home.” She heard rustling and chatter on the open line before another voice cut through, this one deeper and decidedly male.
“It’s a good thing my name still holds some weight down there, Kara. There’s a long line of women waiting for me just to say yes.”
She snorted and held back her laughter as she imagined the dressing down Tigh would have given her for the conversation being held in the middle of CIC, albeit only onesided to those in the room. “I would imagine there’s a big interest in married narcissistic former pyramid players, Sammy. Maybe you can petition the people to build you a stadium before they get running water-”
Helo cut her off with his eyes locked on DRADIS above their heads. His voice was tight suddenly and Kara knew she hadn’t heard that tone since their trip back to Caprica. “Something on DRADIS, sir.”
The phone was hung up before she could even get a word off to Sam. They had docked, she knew that much, so her concern for him was fairly nonexistent. The icon of an unknown ship flickered off the scrambled screen and although she wanted to continue to lull herself into a bubble and where things remained predictable and safe, Kara knew better than that. Suddenly, the screen was speckled with tens of the ships, some indicating larger masses than others. Her hand was back on the comm link without a second thought and Hoshi had already connected her to Galactica. Her breath was held as the Admiral acknowledged her and confirmed what she saw.
“How the frak did they find us, Admiral?” Decorum was forgotten as her heart throbbed. They had been running practice drills for months now, and nothing had ever felt like this before. Kara held her current rank since they settled on the planet below and she knew that this moment was the only true test of being a Commander.
“We won’t last more than a few minutes against that many basestars. We’ve got to jump.” Adama’s voice was firm and Kara was thankful for it since her calm was wavering.
“Everyone is down there! We can’t, we can’t leave them.” She was frantic and inwardly ashamed of herself for falling apart so fast. She was the Commander of a battlestar for frak’s sake. All the racks may not have been occupied with bodies, but she was still in charge of hundreds of souls and she knew she was already putting them at risk. The Admiral made a mistake in appointing her Commander. She was sure of it.
“We’ll die, Kara. We’ll all die here if we don’t leave now. The people on that planet have no hope if we let ourselves be shot out of the sky.”
She faltered even more at the use of her own name as she considered all the people she knew down there. Laura. Galen and Cally and their baby due soon. Duck and Nora and the child they’d talked about wanting the last time she was planetside. Kara slipped into a worse place suddenly, as she imagined Nora tucked away in a breeding farm like Sue-Shaun, this one built down on the surface of New Caprica. Oh Gods, she thought. Lee was on New Caprica.
“Lee. Lee is down there. You can’t leave him.” Some might have accused her of playing dirty with that one, heaping a burden on the Admiral far more than he already carried. Helo and his worried brow, however, knew the truth. Kara Thrace didn’t sound like that when her game was manipulation. As good as she was at it, and her triad games were proof positive, she’d never willingly bare that much of herself in only a few words.
“I know.” His voice was gruff and his words short. “You’ve got the emergency coordinates. The fleet’s already away.”
The call went dead on the line and Kara was slow in replacing it in its cradle. Around her, the people with far more hours logged in their respective positions buzzed around. It was autopilot with them, especially after the months they endured Cain’s hard fist and nothing but perfection was expected of them. She steeled herself, blinking rapidly so her eyes didn’t betray her even more than the rest of her already had.
“Prepare for jump.”
-
Hours later and with the fleet finally secured, Helo was left in command as she returned to her quarters. She couldn’t remember the walk back, her head foggy with the fading surge of adrenaline as her body slowly metabolized it and returned her to a more normal kind of homeostasis. Without her usual nod to the marine guard at her door, she slipped through the automatic doors, them closing tight behind her. The bathroom was the first stop and she rinsed her face with the chilled water, barely stopping to dry it off before she blindly groped at the series of buttons on her uniform, letting it hang open and loose.
She was only vaguely aware of the sound of the hatch opening behind her, feeling as though her senses were tuned down in order to afford blood to more vital parts of her bodily function. Sam was speaking long before she found the energy to focus on his voice.
“-Just leave them there! Gods Kara, the cylons are going to tear them all apart and you jumped away to save your own ass. What if I was down there? Would you have just left your husband to die?” He was too close for comfort now, his words harsh and loud as she tried to go back to tuning him out. Were it any other moment, Starbuck would have been at the forefront and laying him out for the assumption that he could talk to her like that and get away with it.
Her hands flew up to get him to stop, but he stampeded on, his own larger hands shoving hers away. “Call the Admiral and tell him we’re going back. It doesn’t matter if we die trying. I should be down there. I didn’t crawl my way out of Caprica to leave everyone else to die. I should be with Jean and Paul and every other person we know.” Sam was wearing himself out as he spoke, pausing only to take a breath that did little to replenish his calm. His shoulders sagged and he gritted his teeth suddenly, slamming his hand on the nearby desk. “If you’re not going back then send me back. Put me on a Raptor and send me the frak back there.”
Kara took it all in, for once in her life deciding to listen rather than react with her fists first. She didn’t give him the chance to watch her reaction to his words, instead giving him her back. The air in the room stilled as he finished and Kara’s hand raised to her face for a moment, finger tips barely tracing across the pink of her lips. She was brought back to another time and place for that instant with her eyes closed tight. For so long, a simple action had been her refuge. A finger across her lips or across the shell of her ear. Her own hand mimicking a caress across the inside of her wrist or the line of her jaw. Years past his death and she was still drawing her silent comforts and strength from memories of Zak when she needed them most. It was a relief for only a moment this time though, because now when she thought of Zak, she instead thought of how she’d abandoned his brother on the grey planet to die.
She spoke suddenly, clearing her throat though her voice was rough and so unlike her usually smooth tone. “I’m not wasting a Raptor on a suicide machine for you, Sam.” She was stern in her delivery and she turned as she spoke, settling Starbuck’s features over her face. “I’m the Gods damned Commander of this ship. As long as you’re on it, you don’t question the orders from me or the Admiral, got it?”
Laughter erupted from his throat, though it wasn’t the jovial kind she was used to hearing from him. “I’m not some frakking soldier. I’m not going to salute and call you sir and take your word as scripture, Kara.”
She was on him in a second, hand on his chest as she forced him back into the bulkhead. Her other hand went to his jaw, thumb gripping on one cheek while the others curled around the other side, effectively silencing him as she applied pressure against his skin.
“You fall in line or you get off the ship. Do you understand?” Green eyes locked with his own as she spoke and Anders knew immediately that he wasn’t speaking with Kara anymore. “We’re going back.” Her jaw went rigid, teeth clashed tightly together as she finally released him, but this time with a final shove that knocked him back into the wall once again.
Kara backed off and paced away from him. She looked down at her open hands for an extended moment before she spoke, barely above a whisper. “Everything seems so far away. The way things feel. The way they taste. Like I’m watching myself, but I’m not really experiencing it, not living it. That’s how I feel right now.” Her words were cut off as she looked up at him suddenly, as if forgetting he was sharing the same room as her. Kara crossed her arms over her chest and gripped at the opposing upper arm, withdrawing into herself. This time when she spoke, she forced the strength back into words. “I went back for you. I’m going back for them.”
-
Adama was behind the desk in his quarters, Kara across from him as she sipped slowly at the beverage he’d poured her without offering. They hadn’t said a word since she arrived on the deck a half hour earlier, both preferring to stew over the events of the day.
“What you pulled earlier today, Kara, it can’t happen again.”
Her eyes closed for an extended blink as she chewed over the words. She already knew her panic could have cost the lives of those on her ship as well as lives throughout the civilian fleet. It hadn’t come to that, thankfully, but in another life, another minute of hesitation could have cost them even more than they’d already lost.
“If this was before the end of the worlds, that would’ve cost you your career.”
“If this wasn’t the end of the worlds, sir, no one would’ve let me anywhere near the command of a battlestar.” Her words hurt more out loud than they had in her head and she immediately winced in regret and took another sip at her glass, letting the burn in her mouth and throat be penance.
“If your XO was anyone else, if it had been Tigh-” He stopped suddenly at the reminder that the man that had been his lifelong friend and second in command was down on that Gods forsaken planet. Now he was the one taking a drink of his glass before continuing. “They would’ve relieved you of duty then and there. The Beast’s a tough ship to run, Starbuck. The crew already doesn’t want to trust you because you’re not one of them. I know you’ve been there on and off before I put you in command, but you weren’t there from the start. Now your first real test at the helm and you can’t keep it together.” Adama nearly slammed his glass down on his desk, a drop of the liquid splashing out and onto the blotter. “You’re better than this.”
Kara washed down the remaining mouthful before settling her glass down on the desk, albeit much gentler and quieter. She sat up in the seat, as if this simple action was enough to inspire his belief in her once again.
“I frakked up today, Admiral. If you’re going to relieve me, throw me in hack, then do it already.” It was a challenge from her, but he chose not to rise to it. His head gave a subtle back and forth shake.
“You and I both know we can’t leave them behind without trying. We’ve got a couple thousand people up here, at best, sir. If this is all that’s left of the human race to survive, we might as well not bother. We’ve been trying to get by for the last two years and we’ve come to terms with it as best we can. People have moved on, there are children being born every month now. It hasn’t been perfect, not even close to it, but everyone’s gotten by. Even if we find Earth and it’s everything we thought it would be, no one’s going to get over leaving tens of thousands of people behind to die, not when we could have tried to do something. If this is our end, Admiral, I’d rather meet it here then fifty years from now on some rock, pretending like leaving New Caprica didn’t kill all of us anyway.”
She relaxed back into her seat again before abruptly standing up and going for his bottle, refilling her glass with half a serving more. It wasn’t polite to serve herself, that much she knew, but going down to the rec room to drink with the Viper jocks right then wasn’t an option. Kara downed it quickly and replaced the soiled glass down on the counter.
The Admiral seemed to be in quiet contemplation of her words as he removed his glasses. His fingers pressed against his closed eyelids. “We’re going to need out of the box right now, Kara.”
Kara nodded and offered him a smile. She was glad they ignored the elephant in the room for now. If the Admiral had been the one to break down over Lee, she wasn’t sure she could have been the one to keep things together for him. “You know I was made for this.”
-
When she returned to Pegasus, Kara settled in for a shift in the CIC. The fleet remained on alert still, prepared to be followed by a basestar and Raiders sent to take them out for daring to flee from the fight. Her mind wandered as fatigue set in, going over a series of possibilities for those that remain down on Gaius Baltar’s next great failure, New Caprica.
She swallowed hard as her first thought was that they were simply nuked, the small settlement being taken out with great ease. The cylons would hardly have had to lift a finger to destroy the tens of thousands of people huddled up in tents, already sick and dying from the effects of the cold weather on them. What was worse was the thought that the cylons, sadistic as they were, would choose not to simply eliminate what remained of the human race. She imagined the breeding farms, and every woman and girl capable of of procreation being strapped to a machine or being cut open for the parts of them the cylons deemed most important. All the others, they’d be tortured for what little details they could give up about the whereabouts of the fleet, their bodies kicked into ditches by the metal feet of centurions. If they were lucky, they would get a mass grave. If they weren’t, she knew the skinjobs would let them rot where they died. New Caprica wasn’t Caprica City. There was no reason to clean up the mess because the cylons sure as hell didn’t intend on settling down on that soil.
Helo relieved her for the ship’s night cycle and Kara returned to her quarters to find Sam awake and waiting for her on the couch. He was silent as she entered, eyes following her as she crossed the room and began to undress on her way to the bedroom. She couldn’t hear him, but felt his footsteps behind her a second before his arms slipped around her, his hand sliding into her open jacket to rub at her stomach over tanks. For the moment, she relaxed into him, her hand rising up to cup his cheek as Sam kissed her neck. She knew every type of kiss he gave and this one screamed of apology.
Anders kept quiet as his hands met at her waist, unbuttoning her pants until there was enough give to tug them from her hips. He turned her around in his arms to slide the jacket from her torso and he backed her up further into the room as his mouth found a certain place just behind her ear. Kara gave in to it all, choosing to let him envelop her for as long as she could manage to ignore all the rest.
“I’m sorry, Kara.” Sam groaned the words against her collarbone, only stopping to divest himself of his shirt.
She took the free moment to pull her own tanks off and suddenly her skin was pressed to his. The heat she felt off of him made her absolutely melt. It was satisfying at first, and then she was drowning in a memory of another time someone’s heated skin kept her warm when she needed it most. Suddenly she was awash in Lee Adama, the way he pulled her to his own chest and she slept atop him until he was waking her up by stroking her hair and the skin where her throat and shoulder connected. They’d hurriedly frakked for the third time that night and even in the cool air of New Caprica, his skin was sticky and searing hot against hers. It was enough to lull her back into sleep, her head pillowed on his chest.
There were arms around her again and Kara was quick to start pushing him back and away, an abrupt shove of her palms given to his chest as she crossed the room in her briefs and faded black sports bra.
“What the frak just happened?” He was frustrated in more ways than one and she heard it in the strain of his voice.
“Didn’t you get the hint, Sammy? I’ve got a headache,” she said, her words dripping with condescension. She slipped the bra from her body with her back turned to him, pulling on a fresh tank from her meager supply neatly folded away in her drawer. That was one of the benefits to being Commander, having someone else wash and fold and put away her laundry in neat little piles. It was a harmless thought, but it brought her back to Lee again and how he’d be so pleased with himself to see her succumbing to what he’d consider proper hygiene for once.
Sam remained in the doorway, shirtless and offended by her sudden brush off. He pondered making an attempt to goad her into yet another fight, but he considered the events of the day and simply reached for his shirt as he left her to her lonesome. He assumed his all too familiar position of sleeping on a couch made for a man a foot and a half shorter than he.
She waited until she was alone to start gathering her clothing, shaking the temporary wrinkles out of each before she hung each item in her closet, refastening the buttons as she worked. She went for her boots, abandoned haphazardly by the doorway, and pulled them together as she sat down just beside her bed. Her legs parted and stretched out across the floor, the last bit of carpeting in the universe as she often mused, and her hand reached out for the nearby kit.
Kara unpacked each item and laid them out in a neat row directly in front of the leather boots settled between her legs. With a glance towards where the living quarters and her husband were, she returned her attention to the first container and opened it. The strong scent bathed her and she took a moment just to breathe it in before her hand grasped the small brush nearby. She scooped a measured amount of the black polish out and lathered it across the surface of the first boot. It was a slow process for her and not because she was seriously concerned with the shine of her shoes, after all this wasn’t boot camp and she wasn’t about to get a demerit because her instructor couldn’t see their reflection in them. Rather, she slowed down the process on purpose to enjoy it for as long as she could. The scent of the polish filled her nostrils and all she saw was Lee.
Lee sat at the edge of his bunk, filling what little free time he had with removing the scuffs from what were probably the last pair of factory made boots he would ever own. Kara teased him every time she saw him in the process of it, but still he persisted with the futile attempt at keeping one normal activity in his life. They were drunk one night in the rec room, alone at last, and all she could think to ask him while he was in a drunken haze was why the frak he bothered to shine his shoes at all. Kara seemed to think he should have traded the kit for something of better value, although she’d argue half a swig of ambrosia would be a better deal. To her, that shoe polishing kit just spelled more work.
Lee laughed despite his state and took another drink. It wasn’t an embarrassing story, but admitting anything to Kara Thrace tended to drive one to drink. “It lets me pretend for a minute that none of this has happened,” he said, almost a little too quietly.
She pondered it for a moment and said nothing else, pulling the nearly empty bottle back from him to take her sip.
Kara was channeling him as she dragged the brush along the leather. She both heard and saw Lee following the same pattern across his own boots, and she began to think about how that very kit he used was probably somewhere on Galactica in storage now. She wondered what would happen to it if they never saw Lee again. Would his belongings just be abandoned and forgotten? Or would someone drag the box out and put them up for the usual auction? She vowed then and there that it wouldn’t ever come to that. Kara knew that the person who tried to pull those few possessions out of her arms would leave with a concussion and a few broken fingers.
She inherited her own kit by way of assuming command of Pegasus and every time she has pulled it out and laid each item out before her, she questioned if maybe it was cursed. Like Cain and Fisk and Garner, maybe she would be the next Commander laid to rest out an airlock, mutilated and broken. From the amount of polish that remained, however, she doubted any of her predecessors bothered to use the kit themselves. That was some ensigns job undoubtedly, but Kara kept this task for herself.
In better times, when Pegasus orbited over New Caprica, watching and protecting the people below, Kara would crawl out of bed with Anders, visiting on one of his trips from the surface. He’d caught her a few times, interrupting what she now found to be just as much of a ritual as rubbing at and praying to the idols she kept wrapped up in the back of her closet. Sam had often tried to convince her to come back to sleep or at least explain why she had developed a new habit of being laid out on the floor with a pair of boots and shoe polish. He’d long since given up understanding it, however, and part of Kara wished he could understand it on his own.
Because this is the only way I can have both of you, she’d often think, although she knew that game of pretend was doing nothing for her at all.
Kara rubbed a cloth over the boot until the shine was to her satisfaction. She observed her work and then closed her eyes for just a moment as she whispered. “Lords of Kobol hear my prayer. Protect your son Lee Adama.”