Oneshot - Kepéla (1/3)
Title: Kepéla
Show: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairing: Lee/Kara
Word count: 9,714
Rating: PG
Spoilers: You should probably have watched the entire series to read this unspoiled, even though it'fs not exactly canon, there's...stuff
Summary: Nothing is forgotten, only left behind. Wherever I am, she leads me down.
Author's note: I recently had the immense pleasure of watching the brilliant and beautiful Battlestar Galactica. I started writing this somewhere in the middle of the series, and then sometime when I was writing I finished the series but didn't want to get rid of a lot of what I'd written. So I'm calling this half-canon, because I use some of the stuff from canon, but fit it to what my ideas were about them before I was told the whole story. I think it works.
The title is not a real word, it is a word in a fictional language called Ku, from a film called The Interpreter. In that movie it means standing on opposite sides of a river. The lyrics in the summary are from Unbound by Robbie Robertson. I make no claims on either of them.
“I remember you.” He says when he finally reaches her, she probably saw him coming a mile away.
A lock of dampened hair clings to the front of her forehead, dropping down over one eye.
“I'm pretty difficult to forget.” Her lips quirk, and her head tilts, her grin doesn't reach her eyes.
“You're gonna love her Lee, she's amazing!” He's never seen Zak this excited. He doesn't think Zak's ever been this excited. Must be one hell of a girl to get him going like this, kid's been miserable for just about as long as Lee can remember
“I'm sure she is,” he's placating. He's tired and he wants to be in a bed, not roaming around the flight-school barracks in the dead of night looking for this girl, whoever she is. “I'm sure I will, but is it really necessary that I meet her right now? I mean, she's probably asleep.”
Zak rolls his eyes, apparently this girl is so amazing that she doesn't sleep. He's actually getting curious about who in the name of the gods she actually is and what the frak is so incredible about her.
They're at her door now and Zak is knocking too loudly for three in the morning and he rubs a hand over his eyes in embarrassment as the hinges creak and light from the inside falls over their forms.
The girl in front of them is tall, and thin, has delicate features and a wry smile. He likes the look of her, but he has to say, he doesn't see anything special. He smiles at her anyway, and she smiles back, he hopes they're going to like each other.
She turns to Zak and tells him in a hushed, yet affectionate tone, “You really don't want to wake her up right now.”
This girl isn't Zak's girl.
“Hey Apollo get your ass out of bed.” She's practically standing on top of him at this point, hanging out of the window that overlooks his bunk.
“Kara, go away, I need to sleep.” He turns over properly so that he's flat on his back, her body looming over him like a shadowy temple in a faraway dream.
“C'mooon.” She's whining and grinning and winning the fight. “Play with me.”
He can't do anything but laugh.
Zak convinces the girl in the doorway, Grace - he learns- is her name, to let them in. He's not sure how, but he suspects that she just likes him, and his enthusiasm is both endearing and infectious. And so he finds himself in a darkened room in the middle of the night, standing over the sleeping form of Kara Thrace.
She sleeps on her front, arms spread out over her head, her face is lost to the underside of one of her pillows. Her feet stick out at the end of her covers, her hair is shorter than he'd imagined.
“Kara, baby wake up.” Zak's hand is curving around her shoulder blade, he shakes a little, she grunts. Lee wonders briefly why Grace had thought it was a bad idea for them to wake her. Truth be told he knows nothing about this woman, and he has no idea what to expect.
“Kara, I've got someone I want you to meet.” The shaking gets a little more forceful, and before he realises what has happened, he hears the sound of connecting skin and Zak's yelp of surprise as he realises that the girl in the bed just back-handed his little brother round the face. Maybe he doesn't want to be there.
Zak's holding his face and staring at her in shock. Apart from the hand that struck him, she hasn't actually moved, he still can't see her face, but he knows she's awake because she's groaning and rolling her shoulders like she's too stiff to make any sudden movements yet.
She raises her head slightly, and the longer hair in front falls down and casts her face in shadow. The first words he ever hears her utter are, “I'm going to kill you.”
He has to admit he's just a little bit afraid.
“Do you remember it?” She twists around to face him, her fingertips lingering on the surface of the snapshot she keeps in her locker.
“That picture being taken?” He stops towelling his hair to stare at her from the other side of the bunk room. She shrugs, and turns back, looks at the picture again.
“The feeling of grass beneath your feet.”
Zak chuckles a little bit, the low light of the top-lamps over her bed casting half his face into shadow. He's still holding his face in his palm, trying to press the pain out of it.
“No.” Kara Thrace, now fully awake, turns her face toward them, but he still can't make out her features properly in the darkness. “I'm really going to kill you.” Her words are slow, and measured, he actually believes she would do it. She stretches out an arm to the bedside lamp and groans as the bulb flickers on, she shuts her eyes against the brightness and then opens them again moments later.
She really is kind of beautiful, and terrifying.
“I am going to wrap my bare hands around your scrawny little neck and squeeze until you're just dead.” She's shifted so that she's sitting up with her legs off the side of the bed with her arms out in front of her, and when she says squeeze he sees her fingers curl ever so slightly, like she's actually imagining it.
He's not entirely sure what Zak sees in this girl, but he's pretty certain she's not safe to be around.
And then she smiles, and he could swear he's never felt so warm.
“You're not coming?” He should be shocked, but he's really just not. Somehow he knew. Her eyes crease and her lips jerk, she's trying to smile, she can't quite make it.
“Don't do funerals.” She explains, simply, looking always slightly to the side of him. She nods, like that should be enough.
He should be shocked, but he's really just not. He walks away feeling nothing in particular.
“What in the gods' name is wrong with you anyway? Who the frak I gotta meet at whatever unholy hour of the morning we're even at?” She's still smiling, even though she's clearly not happy, he didn't know it was even possible to grin and glare at the same time, but somehow she makes it work. She is both menacing and mesmerising, he's beginning to understand what's gotten Zak falling all over himself.
He clears his throat, feeling the sudden need to call attention to himself. He waits until she turns her head, realises he's in the room, and adjusts from glare to curious hostility, a wide smile still painted on her full lips, and then he looks at his watch.
“It's a quarter after three, lieutenant.” He tells her, and cocks his head to the side in a move that he's been told is infuriatingly arrogant. He kind of feels like he wants to piss her off a little bit, like it's just something he's meant to do.
He didn't expect her to laugh, but she does. Just throws her head straight back and barks. Her laugh is violent, and loud, but not unattractive. Somehow the harshness of it makes her more feminine, if that makes any sense at all.
When she looks at him again, the hostility is gone from her eyes, now shining bright with mirth. A slip of dark pink tongue slides out along her bottom lip and quickly recedes.
“Holy frak you look alike.” She says, like it's a problem, and then grunts as she forces herself to a standing position and stretches her limbs. Zak looks terrified, and turned on, and when she finally looks at him after lowering her arms and cracking her neck, Kara's eyes darken and her apparently permanent grin becomes wolfish, predatory.
“Alright nugget,” she pushes at Zak's shoulder and reaches around him to grab her clothes from where they are heaped, crumpled on the dresser behind him. “You got me up, now you can get me drunk.” And she walks out of the room without another look at either of them.
He's staring after her open-mouthed, trying to figure out if this woman is actually for real, when he feels Zak's warm palm on his shoulder. His brother is laughing as he walks by, pats him on the arm.
“Why do you always do that?” He's staring straight in front of them. She's by his side doing the same.
She shrugs, he can see it in the corner of his eye, sees her head dip and then rise and then fall back and come up straight again.
“It's the only thing I really know how to do.” She says. She believes it, he never will.
Kara starts talking to some guy almost as soon as they get to the bar. It's dark and hot, and stinks of pilots. He can barely hear what they're saying, but they seem to be enjoying themselves. Zak is just watching her. He kind of is too, he's never met someone this magnetic.
There's a Pyramid game on the wireless, and every few minutes she pauses in her conversation with the tall, thin guy whose name - he has come to understand - is Rake, to shout profanities at the set and throw her arms up in disbelief. It's pretty funny how riled she's getting, but it's clear she knows her stuff.
Someone calls to her from the other side of the room, asks if she has any news on someone called 'Helo'. She looks unimaginably sad for a fraction of a second before downing her drink and calling back, without even turning her head, that she's pretty sure he's dead, and isn't coming back.
He wonders briefly who Helo is, and what he meant to her.
She grouses for the fifteenth time about the new captain for the Buccaneers being a “frakkin' lousy defenseman”, and he kind of agrees. Zak cuts off halfway through a swig of beer and swallows quickly.
“I think he's actually pretty good.” He says, loud enough for everyone to hear. Kara rolls her eyes and without even looking at him tells him he knows absolutely nothing about Pyramid, and he's ruining her enjoyment of a truly awful game.
Zak pouts into his beer until she finally looks over at him and, rolling her eyes again, stalks around the bar and plants herself in his lap, giving him a kiss that would make a sailor blush, and then just as quickly breaks off, smacks him round the back of the head and hops down, heading to the bathroom amidst a cacophony of cheers and catcalls.
Zak's smile is sheepish, and far too wide, but all of Kara's friends are suddenly clapping him on the back and ribbing him good-naturedly, so Lee doesn't have the heart to tell him to be cool. He just takes another sip of his brew and chuckles low, to himself, and continues watching the game.
From the corner of his eye he can see Rake as he saunters around to their side of the bar, leaning on one arm next to Zak, smiling big and wide. His mouth is too big for his face, and it makes his smile kind of eerie and discomforting.
“Man,” he exhales, drawing out the syllable until it's almost a rasp, “old Starbuck never changes huh?”
Lee almost chokes on his beer.
“You and me.” She manages to slur out, her index finger tipped in the air in front of her, pulling her off balance so she leans into him just a little bit more. “Right here.” She continues, “Right now.” She finishes with a flourish of her arms, ta da, and laughs.
“On the table?” Somewhere in the back of his head this is a joke, but in truth it's just a question of practicality.
She's Starbuck. She's Starbuck. The myth, the legend, the enigma. But as she weaves through the bar and hops up onto a stool between he and Zak, throwing him the tiniest of winks and a grin as she ruffles his younger brother's hair, he realises that it makes perfect sense.
Of course she's Starbuck. And suddenly everything he's thought about her since the second he laid his weary eyes upon the back of her head falls exactly into place, and he thinks that somehow he knew.
He knew that this woman was not new to him, had haunted his dreams before this day had ever dawned. Gods.
He spent half of his time at the academy making sure he bested her scores in the sims, even though she was two years behind him and nothing more to him than a call-sign on a scoreboard. He never knew why it bothered him so much, so much that he'd stay up half the night on a Friday, when everyone else was out drinking or home sleeping or having some semblance of a life, running each scenario over and over until he had erased every single one of the scores assigned to Starbuck. Only to come back on Monday morning to find that she'd stolen them back.
Kara Thrace. Starbuck. And now she was captivating in a whole new way.
As is usual, he hears her before he sees her. Short breaths, deep, almost panting but more controlled, lead him round a corner to the sight before him. Kara, doing push-ups behind the bars of a brig cell.
“This seems familiar.” How many times has he done this? How many times has he stood on one side of the bars, her on the other? Two? Ten? A hundred? How many more times before she finally gets herself kicked out of the service.
“Captain Adama sir.” Her tone is respectful, her eyes are gleaming, she's out of breath. Sometimes he forgets just how beautiful she really is.
“So, what's the charge this time?”
All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
Part two
Show: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairing: Lee/Kara
Word count: 9,714
Rating: PG
Spoilers: You should probably have watched the entire series to read this unspoiled, even though it'fs not exactly canon, there's...stuff
Summary: Nothing is forgotten, only left behind. Wherever I am, she leads me down.
Author's note: I recently had the immense pleasure of watching the brilliant and beautiful Battlestar Galactica. I started writing this somewhere in the middle of the series, and then sometime when I was writing I finished the series but didn't want to get rid of a lot of what I'd written. So I'm calling this half-canon, because I use some of the stuff from canon, but fit it to what my ideas were about them before I was told the whole story. I think it works.
The title is not a real word, it is a word in a fictional language called Ku, from a film called The Interpreter. In that movie it means standing on opposite sides of a river. The lyrics in the summary are from Unbound by Robbie Robertson. I make no claims on either of them.
“I remember you.” He says when he finally reaches her, she probably saw him coming a mile away.
A lock of dampened hair clings to the front of her forehead, dropping down over one eye.
“I'm pretty difficult to forget.” Her lips quirk, and her head tilts, her grin doesn't reach her eyes.
“You're gonna love her Lee, she's amazing!” He's never seen Zak this excited. He doesn't think Zak's ever been this excited. Must be one hell of a girl to get him going like this, kid's been miserable for just about as long as Lee can remember
“I'm sure she is,” he's placating. He's tired and he wants to be in a bed, not roaming around the flight-school barracks in the dead of night looking for this girl, whoever she is. “I'm sure I will, but is it really necessary that I meet her right now? I mean, she's probably asleep.”
Zak rolls his eyes, apparently this girl is so amazing that she doesn't sleep. He's actually getting curious about who in the name of the gods she actually is and what the frak is so incredible about her.
They're at her door now and Zak is knocking too loudly for three in the morning and he rubs a hand over his eyes in embarrassment as the hinges creak and light from the inside falls over their forms.
The girl in front of them is tall, and thin, has delicate features and a wry smile. He likes the look of her, but he has to say, he doesn't see anything special. He smiles at her anyway, and she smiles back, he hopes they're going to like each other.
She turns to Zak and tells him in a hushed, yet affectionate tone, “You really don't want to wake her up right now.”
This girl isn't Zak's girl.
“Hey Apollo get your ass out of bed.” She's practically standing on top of him at this point, hanging out of the window that overlooks his bunk.
“Kara, go away, I need to sleep.” He turns over properly so that he's flat on his back, her body looming over him like a shadowy temple in a faraway dream.
“C'mooon.” She's whining and grinning and winning the fight. “Play with me.”
He can't do anything but laugh.
Zak convinces the girl in the doorway, Grace - he learns- is her name, to let them in. He's not sure how, but he suspects that she just likes him, and his enthusiasm is both endearing and infectious. And so he finds himself in a darkened room in the middle of the night, standing over the sleeping form of Kara Thrace.
She sleeps on her front, arms spread out over her head, her face is lost to the underside of one of her pillows. Her feet stick out at the end of her covers, her hair is shorter than he'd imagined.
“Kara, baby wake up.” Zak's hand is curving around her shoulder blade, he shakes a little, she grunts. Lee wonders briefly why Grace had thought it was a bad idea for them to wake her. Truth be told he knows nothing about this woman, and he has no idea what to expect.
“Kara, I've got someone I want you to meet.” The shaking gets a little more forceful, and before he realises what has happened, he hears the sound of connecting skin and Zak's yelp of surprise as he realises that the girl in the bed just back-handed his little brother round the face. Maybe he doesn't want to be there.
Zak's holding his face and staring at her in shock. Apart from the hand that struck him, she hasn't actually moved, he still can't see her face, but he knows she's awake because she's groaning and rolling her shoulders like she's too stiff to make any sudden movements yet.
She raises her head slightly, and the longer hair in front falls down and casts her face in shadow. The first words he ever hears her utter are, “I'm going to kill you.”
He has to admit he's just a little bit afraid.
“Do you remember it?” She twists around to face him, her fingertips lingering on the surface of the snapshot she keeps in her locker.
“That picture being taken?” He stops towelling his hair to stare at her from the other side of the bunk room. She shrugs, and turns back, looks at the picture again.
“The feeling of grass beneath your feet.”
Zak chuckles a little bit, the low light of the top-lamps over her bed casting half his face into shadow. He's still holding his face in his palm, trying to press the pain out of it.
“No.” Kara Thrace, now fully awake, turns her face toward them, but he still can't make out her features properly in the darkness. “I'm really going to kill you.” Her words are slow, and measured, he actually believes she would do it. She stretches out an arm to the bedside lamp and groans as the bulb flickers on, she shuts her eyes against the brightness and then opens them again moments later.
She really is kind of beautiful, and terrifying.
“I am going to wrap my bare hands around your scrawny little neck and squeeze until you're just dead.” She's shifted so that she's sitting up with her legs off the side of the bed with her arms out in front of her, and when she says squeeze he sees her fingers curl ever so slightly, like she's actually imagining it.
He's not entirely sure what Zak sees in this girl, but he's pretty certain she's not safe to be around.
And then she smiles, and he could swear he's never felt so warm.
“You're not coming?” He should be shocked, but he's really just not. Somehow he knew. Her eyes crease and her lips jerk, she's trying to smile, she can't quite make it.
“Don't do funerals.” She explains, simply, looking always slightly to the side of him. She nods, like that should be enough.
He should be shocked, but he's really just not. He walks away feeling nothing in particular.
“What in the gods' name is wrong with you anyway? Who the frak I gotta meet at whatever unholy hour of the morning we're even at?” She's still smiling, even though she's clearly not happy, he didn't know it was even possible to grin and glare at the same time, but somehow she makes it work. She is both menacing and mesmerising, he's beginning to understand what's gotten Zak falling all over himself.
He clears his throat, feeling the sudden need to call attention to himself. He waits until she turns her head, realises he's in the room, and adjusts from glare to curious hostility, a wide smile still painted on her full lips, and then he looks at his watch.
“It's a quarter after three, lieutenant.” He tells her, and cocks his head to the side in a move that he's been told is infuriatingly arrogant. He kind of feels like he wants to piss her off a little bit, like it's just something he's meant to do.
He didn't expect her to laugh, but she does. Just throws her head straight back and barks. Her laugh is violent, and loud, but not unattractive. Somehow the harshness of it makes her more feminine, if that makes any sense at all.
When she looks at him again, the hostility is gone from her eyes, now shining bright with mirth. A slip of dark pink tongue slides out along her bottom lip and quickly recedes.
“Holy frak you look alike.” She says, like it's a problem, and then grunts as she forces herself to a standing position and stretches her limbs. Zak looks terrified, and turned on, and when she finally looks at him after lowering her arms and cracking her neck, Kara's eyes darken and her apparently permanent grin becomes wolfish, predatory.
“Alright nugget,” she pushes at Zak's shoulder and reaches around him to grab her clothes from where they are heaped, crumpled on the dresser behind him. “You got me up, now you can get me drunk.” And she walks out of the room without another look at either of them.
He's staring after her open-mouthed, trying to figure out if this woman is actually for real, when he feels Zak's warm palm on his shoulder. His brother is laughing as he walks by, pats him on the arm.
“Why do you always do that?” He's staring straight in front of them. She's by his side doing the same.
She shrugs, he can see it in the corner of his eye, sees her head dip and then rise and then fall back and come up straight again.
“It's the only thing I really know how to do.” She says. She believes it, he never will.
Kara starts talking to some guy almost as soon as they get to the bar. It's dark and hot, and stinks of pilots. He can barely hear what they're saying, but they seem to be enjoying themselves. Zak is just watching her. He kind of is too, he's never met someone this magnetic.
There's a Pyramid game on the wireless, and every few minutes she pauses in her conversation with the tall, thin guy whose name - he has come to understand - is Rake, to shout profanities at the set and throw her arms up in disbelief. It's pretty funny how riled she's getting, but it's clear she knows her stuff.
Someone calls to her from the other side of the room, asks if she has any news on someone called 'Helo'. She looks unimaginably sad for a fraction of a second before downing her drink and calling back, without even turning her head, that she's pretty sure he's dead, and isn't coming back.
He wonders briefly who Helo is, and what he meant to her.
She grouses for the fifteenth time about the new captain for the Buccaneers being a “frakkin' lousy defenseman”, and he kind of agrees. Zak cuts off halfway through a swig of beer and swallows quickly.
“I think he's actually pretty good.” He says, loud enough for everyone to hear. Kara rolls her eyes and without even looking at him tells him he knows absolutely nothing about Pyramid, and he's ruining her enjoyment of a truly awful game.
Zak pouts into his beer until she finally looks over at him and, rolling her eyes again, stalks around the bar and plants herself in his lap, giving him a kiss that would make a sailor blush, and then just as quickly breaks off, smacks him round the back of the head and hops down, heading to the bathroom amidst a cacophony of cheers and catcalls.
Zak's smile is sheepish, and far too wide, but all of Kara's friends are suddenly clapping him on the back and ribbing him good-naturedly, so Lee doesn't have the heart to tell him to be cool. He just takes another sip of his brew and chuckles low, to himself, and continues watching the game.
From the corner of his eye he can see Rake as he saunters around to their side of the bar, leaning on one arm next to Zak, smiling big and wide. His mouth is too big for his face, and it makes his smile kind of eerie and discomforting.
“Man,” he exhales, drawing out the syllable until it's almost a rasp, “old Starbuck never changes huh?”
Lee almost chokes on his beer.
“You and me.” She manages to slur out, her index finger tipped in the air in front of her, pulling her off balance so she leans into him just a little bit more. “Right here.” She continues, “Right now.” She finishes with a flourish of her arms, ta da, and laughs.
“On the table?” Somewhere in the back of his head this is a joke, but in truth it's just a question of practicality.
She's Starbuck. She's Starbuck. The myth, the legend, the enigma. But as she weaves through the bar and hops up onto a stool between he and Zak, throwing him the tiniest of winks and a grin as she ruffles his younger brother's hair, he realises that it makes perfect sense.
Of course she's Starbuck. And suddenly everything he's thought about her since the second he laid his weary eyes upon the back of her head falls exactly into place, and he thinks that somehow he knew.
He knew that this woman was not new to him, had haunted his dreams before this day had ever dawned. Gods.
He spent half of his time at the academy making sure he bested her scores in the sims, even though she was two years behind him and nothing more to him than a call-sign on a scoreboard. He never knew why it bothered him so much, so much that he'd stay up half the night on a Friday, when everyone else was out drinking or home sleeping or having some semblance of a life, running each scenario over and over until he had erased every single one of the scores assigned to Starbuck. Only to come back on Monday morning to find that she'd stolen them back.
Kara Thrace. Starbuck. And now she was captivating in a whole new way.
As is usual, he hears her before he sees her. Short breaths, deep, almost panting but more controlled, lead him round a corner to the sight before him. Kara, doing push-ups behind the bars of a brig cell.
“This seems familiar.” How many times has he done this? How many times has he stood on one side of the bars, her on the other? Two? Ten? A hundred? How many more times before she finally gets herself kicked out of the service.
“Captain Adama sir.” Her tone is respectful, her eyes are gleaming, she's out of breath. Sometimes he forgets just how beautiful she really is.
“So, what's the charge this time?”
All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
Part two