Battlestar Galactica fic: Dry The Rain (1/2)
A/N: Maybe it's a bad idea to go looking through the WIPs lying in the dusty corners of my hard drive, but this was hardly one I'd forgotten as much as something I felt didn't have much of a place anymore. It's very old-school pre-series stuff that's now contradictory to canon in a few ways and it even has some head canon approaches to the characters I'm not sure I would completely go with anymore; and in any case it was the first thing I conceived of writing for this fandom and I fear that that shows in too many ways. But I guess letting over 12K just sit there makes me sad and what I had was a little more salvageable than I imagined, so I did some cleaning up on it. This isn't supposed to be one of those "BAH MY FIC SUCKS" author's notes, it's just that with my knowledge that I was obviously planning to do more with it I don't know how complete it feels, but it ends with more of a rough landing than a cliffhanger.
Title: Dry the Rain
(1/2)
Characters/Pairings: Kara Thrace, Zak Adama, Lee Adama, Bill Adama. Kara/Lee, Kara/Zak.
Summary: "Family" is a risky word.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Canon inconsistencies (see A/N), (canon-implied) infidelity, canon character death, references to abuse.
Kara awoke, blinking away the musky air of her apartment and instinctively burrowing her face into the strong chest her body was propped against to resist the garish noon light coming through the window.
Something smelled different in the dust of the room, felt stifled and low. In her hazed hunger for more sleep her mind hardly fixed on this at all; she scrunched her eyes shut and gave an encouraging rub to a shoulder blade. “Baby, you wanna get the blinds?”
After that mumbled request she was almost drowning back asleep. But after a baited silence, a truth like too much of the world being crammed inside of her skull slammed harshly back into focus.
“Kara.”
She opened her eyes to the blazing hangover, the terrible sharpening of it, the reason the muscles felt strange under her hands. The scent more like spice and sweat, and the voice worn raw. She was not lying next to Zak.
She was lying collapsed in the arms of the man whose brother she had just killed.
When Kara fell in love with Zak Adama, it was the only time she’d ever felt like her life might actually fall into some fixed order. From day one something in her was caught by the humor and compassion that had radiated from him as naturally as it did from children. The first time she realized he was trying to flirt with her was when he teasingly stole her hat right off her head in the mess hall; the way he smiled at her through her annoyed threats made her feel this pinning-down instinct that this might be the one man crazy and kind enough to put up with her for very long. When she started letting him spend his free days taking her out to coffee a few blocks from the academy, she thought at first she was just having fun with him on borrowed time. But then they’d known each other a while and she still hadn’t gotten herself to make or accept a move and she had to wonder why that was, cause it sure as hell wasn’t because of any lack of wanting to.
She just didn’t want to frak this up, whatever it was. The first and only thing in her life that hummed a tranquil note saying Slow down. It was out of pure loss of nerve that she contemplated sometimes that they should probably just be friends. He was unlike anyone she had ever gotten close to before and the gradual discovery that he’d gotten under her skin made her feel somehow like a better person; one night she told him, knowing he’d have the right sense of humor, that if they’d met on a schoolyard when they were nine and thirteen he would have gotten the shit bullied out of him:
“You wouldn’t know anything about how bad I can be, Adama.” She was stirring the little plastic straw in her take-out coffee as they sat on the hood of her car at sundown, amping up on caffeine for a late trip to the gym.
He’d laughed, missing the full meaning of it that he’d never fully understand. The point was that she was kinder to him than she’d ever been to anyone before and she didn’t know who this person was who suddenly loved him like she’d always been meant to. She never wanted to leave herself, now that he’d thrown this thing into her life that was simply liking it and even being happy to be herself, and she’d stopped him in the middle of the laugh nagging, “When are you going to kiss me?” There was something reckless and possessive in saying it. There was a part of her that also simply wanted it. She felt softly cleaned up, redeemed the first time he leaned fearlessly into her orbit. She was a good woman wherever he touched her, and even more than she wanted him to come home with her that night to make her body new all over, she wanted it to last. It was terrifying.
She supposed he was on the opposite side of how people turn out when they have imperfect or just absolutely terrible childhoods. They weren’t into digging up little heart-to-hearts, but it came up on the aside now and again. The daddy and the mommy issues. Mostly the mothers, a vulgar insult cutting out of her curling lips and smoothed away with another kiss. She always unknowingly felt at her knuckles whenever he asked about her. One day, in an almost knowing way, he kissed every single finger instead of asking why.
It would have been wrong to say that she thought of him sometimes as a brother, but just sometimes, when they nuzzled together tangled under somebody’s blankets and it was a kind of comfortable scene Kara could have never imagined herself a part of, it was hard to believe they weren’t exactly the same age; she felt like she was the girl crawling out of the dark closet into a safe place with this twin, escaping her fears lulled under a blanket containing its own universe where “I love you” did not ring with dark echoes of wondering grimly how much this was all going to hurt. Her heart started to do things it was never taught to do in that soft new place painted blue by dusk and cheap cotton. She knew there was a word for this kind of belonging, but she didn’t dare. On sleepless nights she would watch him dreaming and write foolish poetry in her head, but never with those irrevocable words.
She wasn’t looking for somebody to help her be angry, not any more; that was the opposite of how they were. She found a senseless hope in Zak, in how despite all the problems he didn’t actually hate his father. His resentment over his parents’ divorce was a sadness born of regrets and missed opportunities, no grudges. Bill Adama was a very occupied man who loved his sons and missed them. Zak understood that as well as he understood some things about Kara.
His brother, on the other hand.
What Kara knew about Lee before she met him was just a handful of things, mostly warnings. Not things that made her automatically dislike him. Things that made her vaguely certain that he was not going to like her.
“The thing about Lee...” Zak had said to her once. “He tends to think he owns all the pain in the world.”
She hadn’t really known what he meant by that. But she picked up on all the other stuff he didn’t even tell her directly, what was there underneath all the comments like, “Of course he wouldn’t have a problem getting the job if he wanted it” and “I probably couldn’t keep track of Lee’s girlfriends if he even introduced me to half of them.” He said these things with a tone of easy admiration, but Kara could tell in a small sad way that Zak had been overshadowed his whole life, just enough to get a humbled shift in his manners whenever he talked about his brother. And he admired him still.
It was really not Lee, but the idea of Lee, that Kara started to hate a little.
Zak was supposed to be there when they met, but it didn’t happen quite right. Kara had not even seen a picture of him yet, so the first she ever saw of his face was the squinting and vaguely bothered expression when he opened the front door of his condominium in his undershirt and sweats to see this woman with freshly sweat-raked hair looking awkward and ashamed on his undecorated porch. She could guess easily enough that he hadn’t seen a picture of her either, since he clearly had no inkling who the hell she was.
“Hi,” she blurted out with a hand scratching nervously at her head, before he could manage any polite greeting. “Listen, um. I’m a friend of Zak’s?...”
“...Yeah?” Lee Adama cocked an eyebrow with more attentive anticipation and stepped out of the house. It seemed like the first time his face had wanted to move.
She unlocked her nervous lips, quickly stumbling through the explanation, “Well, he came and borrowed your car so we could go eat, and afterwards he was gonna be kinda late, and I thought since my apartment is on my side of town, I might as well drop him off and drive it back...”
He sighed. “And?”
She grimaced as he seemed to have an idea where this was going. “Okay, I-I nicked it on the mailbox-”
“Oh...frak it.” As he opened his screen door to step out in a tight movement, it took him getting moderately pissed for her to really take in the angle of the jaw, the smoldering restraint in his eyes; she felt a wave of intimidation from him simply for him being worlds away from the animated features of his brother rather than by the slightly angry crook in his demeanor. “Okay, ‘nicked’? As in...”
Kara cringed a little as he walked off the porch and went far enough down the driveway to get a look. There was a pause, and then he came back looking, at least, not surprised.
He also looked like he’d just figured something out.
“You must be Kara.”
Kara smirked a little, shoving her hands sheepishly into her pockets. “Yeah, that’s me.”
If she didn’t already know how much Zak had-and hadn’t-told Lee, she could have judged from the cynical expression on his face that he understood that she and his brother were something more than friends. Lee sighed and said, “In that case, I better let you off the hook.”
“To be honest, I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t,” Kara muttered. “I don’t have any siblings but if I have any idea of how the whole thing works, you’ll probably take it out on him later.”
That actually charmed him into a startlingly handsome smile, suddenly giving away a good nature that melted off some of her anxiety. “You know,” he said after some thought, “I think I might just get the hell over it?”
She turned her mouth up nervously when he reached out his hand. As she automatically clutched it, he said, “I’m sure you know my name’s Lee.”
She nodded. “Kara Thrace.”
Lee’s hand stopped still right in the middle of the shake. She could practically hear the sound of something clicking loudly in his mind.
And he got that steely, guarded look again, for somewhere between one second and nine thousand of them, until he realized their hands were still clutched. As he slowly let go of her fingers, a look of the slightest wary anger somehow yielded slowly into one of amusement.
“Are you seriously telling me,” he asked gruffly, “that Starbuck just crashed my new Satyr?”
Clearly, Zak had mentioned her to Lee in more than one context. And clearly he hadn’t yet overcome his hesitance to explain that Kara and that hell-of-a-pilot instructor were the same person. Making a mental note to kill her boyfriend later, Kara let out a deceivingly non-frantic chuckle, pulling for a joke to save her wits. “Yeah, if you can call it a car. I wouldn’t have expected Zak’s brother to drive such a toy.”
He smirked, challenged. “I didn’t expect Captain Thrace to do anything with my brother except bust his chops over his flying, but apparently we were both mistaken. I must have also been a little misinformed about your maneuvering skills.”
Her jaw clenched, and her retort came out only mostly playful. “Okay. Apollo. I am the best damn pilot to come out of the Academy in a decade, and I keep every promise I make, but you might as well know right off the bat I don’t make any promises that don’t involve a cockpit.”
Lee Adama could have taken all of this and done whatever he wanted with it and she would have let him, or so she would’ve liked to think later on. He could have threatened to call up somebody to get Kara fired so that she wouldn’t be messing around with his brother anymore, so that Zak wouldn’t be the next thing she got wrong, so that he would get shifted to some instructor that would grind him up and send him safely packing.
But he didn’t really believe her, so all he did was step closer and touch her shoulder for just a second and say, “You know what’s funny?...Zak fender-bent my first ride less than a month after I got it. It’s like you’re already part of the family.”
Before Kara could stop it, that last word hooked right through her chest even while she heard it as half a joke from Lee’s earnest face. For the first time since she’d knocked on Lee’s door her true smile came automatically over her and they loosened out, laughing.
In that moment something else, less loud, clicked in the air. But like a moth attempting to steal through a closing door, it was ignored, shut out to its frailty where it belonged.
When it was the three of them, the good days just precipitated. The moments that mattered for the rest of the year were Kara slamming shot glasses on a table seated between the brothers in front of the piece-of-junk TV and giggling out rules to the drinking game from her clowny grinning mirth, the “woah woah”s coming with amusement from either side when she was having too much. Drink one every time the Panthers score. Drink one for every bad commercial. Drink one every time somebody accidentally breaks a glass, every time Lee cocks his eyebrow like a smartass, drink one every time Zak is laughing at Lee for trying to be serious; fill up, again.
The other word was “home.” When Lee got assigned routines an hour away from the academy, his visits involved making messes of hotel rooms when they’d had enough of the city; and there were so many moments of one of the brothers peering at her over the back of a passenger seat: “You’re coming back with us, aren’t you?”
Their favorite after dark was one old playground in Delphi evoking just the right mix of laughter and ghosts. See-saw, swing set, pyramid court all skeletal shadows still warm from the entire day’s sun. One night Kara was griping about her knee acting up again and eating potato chips when Lee got challenging, asking how well she could still play pyramid. Zak was all sniggers and “You’re messing with the pro here” until Lee actually wanted to have a match right there. Zak admitted he always felt like a dolt playing against Kara.
Only after so much nagging did Kara go to get the ball out of the car, promising to quickly kick Lee’s ass. Zak sat there with his hands clutched around the chains on one of the swings, and when Kara came back tossing the ball up and down, Lee was saying, "We could play two against one?"
"Nah." Zak shook his head, something forced in his voice. "I'll sit this one out."
With an idle bounce of the ball Kara grunted at Lee, “Let’s go,” and they jogged off to the court.
She gestured her head in Zak’s direction and said a bit heavily, “Just one game, alright, Apollo?” before crouching fast and placing the ball at center. She beat him at three rounds, their knuckles skinned by the end without any apologies for knocking each other down.
The invisible bullying began before she could stop the thing that was everything being tightened up in a different way when she and Lee were around each other. Kara was beginning to itch with hunches, that Zak’s nature at times was a fiction, that things he perceived as being agreeable and pliable she was only equipped to view as stubborn and threatening. Being around his soft manners for too long made her feel like her grip on anything steep and solid was leaning away, just like she needed back into his arms sometimes when his brother made her tense and almost volatile. Lee was more steady-minded and okay to be rough with, a cool surface for honing against. She couldn’t help being disappointed that she needed that as well as the fantasy, as she so unfairly seemed to consider it now.
Whatever happened some time after her down-and-out little family of two became a solid three, something had significantly changed from before. Kara could be mean to Zak.
She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong with it, only that things started to feel almost like a joke at Zak’s expense when he wasn’t around simply because of all the things she suddenly felt he didn’t understand. In a way that just wouldn’t have been noticed if it wasn’t something so laced with the possibility of cruelty, things shifted notes just slightly like after a child exits the room whenever the younger brother left them to run to the store on the corner. It wasn’t at all that things were better, they were just different, if they had their own gambles on sports or went to catch a movie while he was busy.
And then one night, when Zak had cancelled plans on them because of a big test he had to study for, his brother pointedly nudged her for the third time that night and said in comfortable annoyance, “I swear, if you crack your knuckles one more time...”
“What, you’ll break ‘em?”
He set down the book he'd been browsing. “...What the hell? Your mind goes straight there?”
It just slipped out of her, like one of those jokes you realize isn’t funny at all in the middle of telling it. She told Lee about her fractures, and instead of seeming uncomfortable with the sudden shift in the tone of the evening, he tried to ask Kara if Zak had ever told her about the things their mother used to do when she got drunk enough. He actually wasn’t sure after all if Zak had been too young to remember much of it. When she asked, though, he couldn’t seem to define in one way the things that Carolanne had done: sometimes a slap here or there, but mostly the booze just made her a nerve-rending short fuze. One night she properly freaked the shit out of Lee when some of the things she was yelling didn’t make any sense to him at all.
“I have this very distinct image in my head of her screaming at us from the bottom of the stairs, and she kept repeating some line-I can’t remember what it was, but it was straight out of some movie she’d been watching earlier. That was the worst it ever got in my mind, but I remember all her make-up was running from crying or sweating and she just, she looked scary. I think I was unable to look at her without seeing that night in my head for years and years after.”
She asked, “Did she get better before Zak got very old?”
No, but when Lee was old enough to think of it he started to sometimes take the bottle she was working on and pour everything in the sink while she was on the phone or showering. When nothing else worked he’d just make sure to move Zak out of the way, pull him into his room late at night to share the crammed bed because there was no lock on Zak’s door. Where Kara had been this type of defense tactic would have gotten her hell about “what goes on in my household,” but Lee and Zak’s mother was too proud and seemed to just feign constant amnesia about it when she was sober. For Zak, it sounded like, it was so reflexive to play along with her that he and Lee never even talked about it.
Suddenly the differences between Lee and his brother made so much sense. He’d always accepted a more weary awareness of the darkness in their family and bore the bruises with a bitterly waning sense of cause, and Zak had remained hidden in the corners learning gradually, though maybe in a way he didn’t quite remember, that nobody expected him to be able to handle things on his own.
This made her feel pretty dirty for every time she revealed some other regrettable aspect of herself to Zak’s brother. There was a growing list of little things Lee knew about her that Zak didn’t, and it turned into this unhealthy escape from the things she tried to tell herself Zak didn’t deserve to have to deal with; in reality she was building up two different versions of herself and neither of them were completely honest.
Lee somehow got all of the ugly, even when it was on accident. There was that sickly fateful frak-up of the first year anniversary of her mom’s death that eclipsed a smear of gloom over everything else that day: Zak and Kara’s first actual fight came on because of some stupid cutting remark she’d made in flight class, the dispute not even mattering as much as the fact of it being such an undesirable milestone in their relationship. She had to button herself into her dress uniform before he could even cool off because this wasn’t much of an excuse for missing the award ceremony she and Lee were both expected at in Delphi, and then there was far too much alcohol at the after-party. All she really remembered after sobering up around two in the morning was clutching and pulling into a half-lit hallway whatever looked good to her at the time, which turned out to be good old Major Lark. Upper-middle-class, Libran, mediocre Raptor pilot. He had charismatic leadership and barely tolerable kissing skills and light blond hair and eyes almost the exact blue of those belonging to the one who peeled him forcefully off of her after some minutes and told him to go enjoy some more ambrosia before turning and leaving Kara sloshed and winded against the wall.
The phone rang in the morning: Zak calling from his campus house where she knew Lee would have crashed on the floor, a quiet measuring tone in his voice that made her recall more vividly their previous bickering. Wanting to know if she was up for lunch with “us.” Through the seeming charade of getting dressed and waiting to get picked up and all the way through ordering her food while Zak and Lee carried out the day like absolutely nothing unusual had happened, she was wondering how much longer she’d be a part of any kind of “us.”
“Babe. Are you okay?” Zak kept asking. There was no way to completely calm down and actually look fine, and he was feeling bad, assuming she was still upset about the argument. She kept shifting her hands around; if she didn’t put on some kind of convincing exterior he was going to start noticing that she hadn’t really said anything to Lee the whole time they’d been out.
She finally said, “Look, I need a smoke,” not knowing what she was doing except getting away from them for a while, trying to feel unstifled for even a moment. Outside, with her fingers stuttering around a cigarette, she wondered with distant curiosity if Kara Thrace had actually ever been this scared of anything before.
Zak never smoked but Lee did once in a blue moon, so this was an excuse, but she wasn’t exactly expecting him when he came around the bricked corner out behind the diner with the countenance he’d worn all day quite noticeably dropped into a stiff, impersonal wrath as he grabbed her by the arm, saying, “Calm the frak down.”
“And here I thought you were just using the opportunity to watch me squirm,” she threw back, cringing farther around the corner out of his grip.
“...No. No. Look, I’m not telling him. You don’t think I would have by now?”
She couldn’t begin to tell him what she thought about anything; her face probably conveyed as much. She just blurted out, “What?”
“...Listen, this is what’s going to happen.” Lee wasn’t looking her in the eye, not today, and his whole face was twitched up with a tension that was unbearable to witness. “You are going to clean up your act. And I’m going to clean up mine.”
She blinked, her head clasping in confusion onto that last part. “You...?”
“Oh, you’re gonna make me explain myself? Frak you. I should be doing everything I can to convince my brother that you’re no good. Instead I’m covering your ass.”
The words only half made sense to her. “You could still do the right thing,” she replied sardonically, not sure why she was being so upfront when she should just take this unfathomable favor without asking questions. “I don’t know what happened. You guys are like my family and I’m just so frakked up-”
“No, stop,” Lee suddenly snapped, not nearly as cruel as it was defensive, like he felt cornered. “Don’t.”
Her mouth shaped around the words, I’m sorry, but they couldn’t get out of her, her body couldn’t produce the sound. Not against the feeling flooding through her that she hadn’t only betrayed Zak the night before. And here was Lee denying her calling him a brother, squirming out of that sloppy word she’d just let slip as a rushed plea. Later, in the lowest mood, her jaw would tense up at the way she recalled his voice.
Because the way she would replay it, Lee was wanting to say, You are not my family. You are just messing with my family, and right now you are messing with me.
Lee finally straightened out his anger with a final sour glance at her and a shake of his head. He reached and took her cigarette from between her fingers, walking a few steps out into the parking lot and taking a couple draws on it. Without turning back to face her, he said, “Get back in there. I’m gonna be a couple minutes.”
Every time Lee visited her and Zak in the next couple months he was perfectly back to normal around Kara, but he no longer stopped by when Zak wasn’t around and seemed to diligently avoid being alone with her. If Zak was in the can, he rarely said anything at all. At the end of the weekend he would call a cab instead of letting Kara give him a ride to the bus station.
She didn’t sense that he was doing this to punish her. She started to realize this was what he’d meant by cleaning up his own act. She’d been demoted back to just being an attachment of his brother’s. He was angry at himself for what he hadn’t done; no good could come any more of them being friends.
One week the two of them were invited by a common acquaintance along with a good percentage of their graduating class to the kind of birthday party where everybody forgets whose birthday it is beyond one or two beers; even though Zak wasn’t technically invited he seemed to make pretty quick friends as soon as he got there.
Kara on the other hand had a migraine within the first hour and ended up tiredly sitting behind the secluded bar in the corner of the basement, playing with the straw in her too-weak cocktail and watching Ken Cage get his ass handed to him by Zak in a game of table court. People knew by now she wasn’t feeling very well and only occasionally went over to talk to her. When Lee eventually walked up, probably to pour himself another drink, she sunk farther down on her elbows.
On his way going over to the mini fridge under the bar, Lee tossed a white box that landed next to her arm. Realizing it was a package of pain killers, she groaned in relief. She’d attempted looting the host’s disaster zone of a medicine cabinet earlier to no success.
“Don’t mention it.” He really meant, don’t mention it. After swallowing down a couple of the pills with an arching back of her head, she stole a glance over at Lee. He was leaning against the bar without sitting down, wanting to get away from the crowds but still padding a space around her.
She sighed, nearly rolling her eyes. “Lee.”
“What.”
Her fingers twisted the stem of her glass back and forth. “When are you going to stop hating me?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Lee-” she shook her head, the hesitant repetition of his name feeling ineffectual. “Zak proposed to me yesterday.”
Lee’s face immediately went into a raw shock; after a second, he cooled to simple confusion.
“What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know he was going to do that.”
Kara blinked. “Oh.”
“...Did you say yes?”
Kara’s jaw went out in irritation. “...I told him I only like blond guys.”
“You know what, frak you. That’s not funny.”
She returned his same look of slight unhinged disgust. “Seriously? You’re telling me that it’s not funny?”
“Kara, I know you want me to be able to act like this isn’t a big deal, but I can’t. I won’t. Zak’s my brother, and I’d like to tell you that I’m going to kill you if you do it again, but I can’t do that either.”
“Oh. See, I wasn’t aware that you’re the only one who’s allowed to feel like shit about this.”
“Would you even feel bad about it if I hadn’t found out?”
Her entire body seemed to scoot in a little farther from him at that. She closed her eyes for a second and then stood up, walked a few steps over to Lee so that she could more quietly reply, “Listen to me. You know...you do, you know, without having known me before, that this is the only time I’ve really been happy. And maybe I never planned on getting married, maybe I’m doing this just so I don’t lose him. So what? If anyone can understand why it doesn’t matter...” With an uncomfortable, self-resistant shake of her head, she looked him more directly in the face, her expression showing an abandonment of her next thought. There was an indirect echo of a previous conversation, but she wasn’t sure of which one it had to be.
Lee’s eyes faltered into a swallowing sadness, looking down and somewhere around her fingers.
“But there’s another thing,” Kara said, a defensive and flat finality now in her tone. “I don’t want to be a part of Zak’s family if his brother won’t even frakking talk to me.”
She turned and left the bar. Ten minutes later she managed to run into one of the evening’s temporary buddies in the upstairs kitchen and say, “Hey, if Zak asks, I went home. He seems to be having a good time and I know he’d feel bad not leaving with me, so...”
It was almost an hour’s walk to the nearest shuttle station and the whole idea quickly seemed pretty stupid when she hadn’t walked for more than ten minutes and it started raining, soaking quickly through to chill her skin all over. She kept walking, saying to herself it wasn’t so bad even though her head didn’t feel much better and her thin jacket wasn’t nearly enough to keep her from shivering in the wet breeze.
She didn’t get very far out of the neighborhood before an approaching car pulled over to the shoulder of the road and honked. She turned to see a white Satyr and her heart sort of passed out, plummeting and landing.
She came over slowly and leaned to glance into the window across the empty passenger seat to see Lee at the wheel giving an impatient gesture and mouthing, “Would you get in?”
It was so much warmer inside she could’ve cried. She was dripping all over the leather, apologizing, “I’m gonna ruin your seats...”
“Frak the upholstery. Are you insane? You’re completely soaked-Zak worries about stupid things, it’s frakking freezing outside...”
“Gods.” She laughed, interrupting him. “What are you, my-”
But she couldn’t finish that sentence because nothing worked right, nothing was the right size. It would never even work as a joke. She looked over and saw a calm understanding in Lee’s eyes as her trailing off punctuated some undefinable affection between them.
“Did you even tell Zak before you took off?”
“No. I’m sure he’ll assume I gave you a ride home. I couldn’t even find him...”
They were both laughing in admiration then, Kara saying, “I bet Ken got him in the backyard to go play with the four wheelers.”
“Can you believe, I think he met more people tonight than I did in my whole time at the school...”
"Yeah,” Kara replied, chuckling tiredly. “I can believe it.”
When they were done laughing, Kara rested her head down on the back of the seat and began nodding halfway to sleep, felt the tranquil rocking and jilting of the car’s motion through the pattering rain. Part of her dreamt, and the part of her that was still awake seemed to feel the warming weight of an occasional lingering glance along with the vague glow of the stop light bleeding through her lashes.
Everything was back to before, pulling at her with a brisker clarity. Zak and Lee, Lee and Zak; they connected in her mind now as the only future she could really breathe with, everything outside of that possibility simply unthinkable. She knew then that she would either have or lose both, and it made the present so frighteningly fragile, so balanced on a fine edge, that maybe even then she felt the lie beginning to form inside her before it even needed to be told.
>>>
Title: Dry the Rain
(1/2)
Characters/Pairings: Kara Thrace, Zak Adama, Lee Adama, Bill Adama. Kara/Lee, Kara/Zak.
Summary: "Family" is a risky word.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Canon inconsistencies (see A/N), (canon-implied) infidelity, canon character death, references to abuse.
Kara awoke, blinking away the musky air of her apartment and instinctively burrowing her face into the strong chest her body was propped against to resist the garish noon light coming through the window.
Something smelled different in the dust of the room, felt stifled and low. In her hazed hunger for more sleep her mind hardly fixed on this at all; she scrunched her eyes shut and gave an encouraging rub to a shoulder blade. “Baby, you wanna get the blinds?”
After that mumbled request she was almost drowning back asleep. But after a baited silence, a truth like too much of the world being crammed inside of her skull slammed harshly back into focus.
“Kara.”
She opened her eyes to the blazing hangover, the terrible sharpening of it, the reason the muscles felt strange under her hands. The scent more like spice and sweat, and the voice worn raw. She was not lying next to Zak.
She was lying collapsed in the arms of the man whose brother she had just killed.
When Kara fell in love with Zak Adama, it was the only time she’d ever felt like her life might actually fall into some fixed order. From day one something in her was caught by the humor and compassion that had radiated from him as naturally as it did from children. The first time she realized he was trying to flirt with her was when he teasingly stole her hat right off her head in the mess hall; the way he smiled at her through her annoyed threats made her feel this pinning-down instinct that this might be the one man crazy and kind enough to put up with her for very long. When she started letting him spend his free days taking her out to coffee a few blocks from the academy, she thought at first she was just having fun with him on borrowed time. But then they’d known each other a while and she still hadn’t gotten herself to make or accept a move and she had to wonder why that was, cause it sure as hell wasn’t because of any lack of wanting to.
She just didn’t want to frak this up, whatever it was. The first and only thing in her life that hummed a tranquil note saying Slow down. It was out of pure loss of nerve that she contemplated sometimes that they should probably just be friends. He was unlike anyone she had ever gotten close to before and the gradual discovery that he’d gotten under her skin made her feel somehow like a better person; one night she told him, knowing he’d have the right sense of humor, that if they’d met on a schoolyard when they were nine and thirteen he would have gotten the shit bullied out of him:
“You wouldn’t know anything about how bad I can be, Adama.” She was stirring the little plastic straw in her take-out coffee as they sat on the hood of her car at sundown, amping up on caffeine for a late trip to the gym.
He’d laughed, missing the full meaning of it that he’d never fully understand. The point was that she was kinder to him than she’d ever been to anyone before and she didn’t know who this person was who suddenly loved him like she’d always been meant to. She never wanted to leave herself, now that he’d thrown this thing into her life that was simply liking it and even being happy to be herself, and she’d stopped him in the middle of the laugh nagging, “When are you going to kiss me?” There was something reckless and possessive in saying it. There was a part of her that also simply wanted it. She felt softly cleaned up, redeemed the first time he leaned fearlessly into her orbit. She was a good woman wherever he touched her, and even more than she wanted him to come home with her that night to make her body new all over, she wanted it to last. It was terrifying.
She supposed he was on the opposite side of how people turn out when they have imperfect or just absolutely terrible childhoods. They weren’t into digging up little heart-to-hearts, but it came up on the aside now and again. The daddy and the mommy issues. Mostly the mothers, a vulgar insult cutting out of her curling lips and smoothed away with another kiss. She always unknowingly felt at her knuckles whenever he asked about her. One day, in an almost knowing way, he kissed every single finger instead of asking why.
It would have been wrong to say that she thought of him sometimes as a brother, but just sometimes, when they nuzzled together tangled under somebody’s blankets and it was a kind of comfortable scene Kara could have never imagined herself a part of, it was hard to believe they weren’t exactly the same age; she felt like she was the girl crawling out of the dark closet into a safe place with this twin, escaping her fears lulled under a blanket containing its own universe where “I love you” did not ring with dark echoes of wondering grimly how much this was all going to hurt. Her heart started to do things it was never taught to do in that soft new place painted blue by dusk and cheap cotton. She knew there was a word for this kind of belonging, but she didn’t dare. On sleepless nights she would watch him dreaming and write foolish poetry in her head, but never with those irrevocable words.
She wasn’t looking for somebody to help her be angry, not any more; that was the opposite of how they were. She found a senseless hope in Zak, in how despite all the problems he didn’t actually hate his father. His resentment over his parents’ divorce was a sadness born of regrets and missed opportunities, no grudges. Bill Adama was a very occupied man who loved his sons and missed them. Zak understood that as well as he understood some things about Kara.
His brother, on the other hand.
What Kara knew about Lee before she met him was just a handful of things, mostly warnings. Not things that made her automatically dislike him. Things that made her vaguely certain that he was not going to like her.
“The thing about Lee...” Zak had said to her once. “He tends to think he owns all the pain in the world.”
She hadn’t really known what he meant by that. But she picked up on all the other stuff he didn’t even tell her directly, what was there underneath all the comments like, “Of course he wouldn’t have a problem getting the job if he wanted it” and “I probably couldn’t keep track of Lee’s girlfriends if he even introduced me to half of them.” He said these things with a tone of easy admiration, but Kara could tell in a small sad way that Zak had been overshadowed his whole life, just enough to get a humbled shift in his manners whenever he talked about his brother. And he admired him still.
It was really not Lee, but the idea of Lee, that Kara started to hate a little.
Zak was supposed to be there when they met, but it didn’t happen quite right. Kara had not even seen a picture of him yet, so the first she ever saw of his face was the squinting and vaguely bothered expression when he opened the front door of his condominium in his undershirt and sweats to see this woman with freshly sweat-raked hair looking awkward and ashamed on his undecorated porch. She could guess easily enough that he hadn’t seen a picture of her either, since he clearly had no inkling who the hell she was.
“Hi,” she blurted out with a hand scratching nervously at her head, before he could manage any polite greeting. “Listen, um. I’m a friend of Zak’s?...”
“...Yeah?” Lee Adama cocked an eyebrow with more attentive anticipation and stepped out of the house. It seemed like the first time his face had wanted to move.
She unlocked her nervous lips, quickly stumbling through the explanation, “Well, he came and borrowed your car so we could go eat, and afterwards he was gonna be kinda late, and I thought since my apartment is on my side of town, I might as well drop him off and drive it back...”
He sighed. “And?”
She grimaced as he seemed to have an idea where this was going. “Okay, I-I nicked it on the mailbox-”
“Oh...frak it.” As he opened his screen door to step out in a tight movement, it took him getting moderately pissed for her to really take in the angle of the jaw, the smoldering restraint in his eyes; she felt a wave of intimidation from him simply for him being worlds away from the animated features of his brother rather than by the slightly angry crook in his demeanor. “Okay, ‘nicked’? As in...”
Kara cringed a little as he walked off the porch and went far enough down the driveway to get a look. There was a pause, and then he came back looking, at least, not surprised.
He also looked like he’d just figured something out.
“You must be Kara.”
Kara smirked a little, shoving her hands sheepishly into her pockets. “Yeah, that’s me.”
If she didn’t already know how much Zak had-and hadn’t-told Lee, she could have judged from the cynical expression on his face that he understood that she and his brother were something more than friends. Lee sighed and said, “In that case, I better let you off the hook.”
“To be honest, I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t,” Kara muttered. “I don’t have any siblings but if I have any idea of how the whole thing works, you’ll probably take it out on him later.”
That actually charmed him into a startlingly handsome smile, suddenly giving away a good nature that melted off some of her anxiety. “You know,” he said after some thought, “I think I might just get the hell over it?”
She turned her mouth up nervously when he reached out his hand. As she automatically clutched it, he said, “I’m sure you know my name’s Lee.”
She nodded. “Kara Thrace.”
Lee’s hand stopped still right in the middle of the shake. She could practically hear the sound of something clicking loudly in his mind.
And he got that steely, guarded look again, for somewhere between one second and nine thousand of them, until he realized their hands were still clutched. As he slowly let go of her fingers, a look of the slightest wary anger somehow yielded slowly into one of amusement.
“Are you seriously telling me,” he asked gruffly, “that Starbuck just crashed my new Satyr?”
Clearly, Zak had mentioned her to Lee in more than one context. And clearly he hadn’t yet overcome his hesitance to explain that Kara and that hell-of-a-pilot instructor were the same person. Making a mental note to kill her boyfriend later, Kara let out a deceivingly non-frantic chuckle, pulling for a joke to save her wits. “Yeah, if you can call it a car. I wouldn’t have expected Zak’s brother to drive such a toy.”
He smirked, challenged. “I didn’t expect Captain Thrace to do anything with my brother except bust his chops over his flying, but apparently we were both mistaken. I must have also been a little misinformed about your maneuvering skills.”
Her jaw clenched, and her retort came out only mostly playful. “Okay. Apollo. I am the best damn pilot to come out of the Academy in a decade, and I keep every promise I make, but you might as well know right off the bat I don’t make any promises that don’t involve a cockpit.”
Lee Adama could have taken all of this and done whatever he wanted with it and she would have let him, or so she would’ve liked to think later on. He could have threatened to call up somebody to get Kara fired so that she wouldn’t be messing around with his brother anymore, so that Zak wouldn’t be the next thing she got wrong, so that he would get shifted to some instructor that would grind him up and send him safely packing.
But he didn’t really believe her, so all he did was step closer and touch her shoulder for just a second and say, “You know what’s funny?...Zak fender-bent my first ride less than a month after I got it. It’s like you’re already part of the family.”
Before Kara could stop it, that last word hooked right through her chest even while she heard it as half a joke from Lee’s earnest face. For the first time since she’d knocked on Lee’s door her true smile came automatically over her and they loosened out, laughing.
In that moment something else, less loud, clicked in the air. But like a moth attempting to steal through a closing door, it was ignored, shut out to its frailty where it belonged.
When it was the three of them, the good days just precipitated. The moments that mattered for the rest of the year were Kara slamming shot glasses on a table seated between the brothers in front of the piece-of-junk TV and giggling out rules to the drinking game from her clowny grinning mirth, the “woah woah”s coming with amusement from either side when she was having too much. Drink one every time the Panthers score. Drink one for every bad commercial. Drink one every time somebody accidentally breaks a glass, every time Lee cocks his eyebrow like a smartass, drink one every time Zak is laughing at Lee for trying to be serious; fill up, again.
The other word was “home.” When Lee got assigned routines an hour away from the academy, his visits involved making messes of hotel rooms when they’d had enough of the city; and there were so many moments of one of the brothers peering at her over the back of a passenger seat: “You’re coming back with us, aren’t you?”
Their favorite after dark was one old playground in Delphi evoking just the right mix of laughter and ghosts. See-saw, swing set, pyramid court all skeletal shadows still warm from the entire day’s sun. One night Kara was griping about her knee acting up again and eating potato chips when Lee got challenging, asking how well she could still play pyramid. Zak was all sniggers and “You’re messing with the pro here” until Lee actually wanted to have a match right there. Zak admitted he always felt like a dolt playing against Kara.
Only after so much nagging did Kara go to get the ball out of the car, promising to quickly kick Lee’s ass. Zak sat there with his hands clutched around the chains on one of the swings, and when Kara came back tossing the ball up and down, Lee was saying, "We could play two against one?"
"Nah." Zak shook his head, something forced in his voice. "I'll sit this one out."
With an idle bounce of the ball Kara grunted at Lee, “Let’s go,” and they jogged off to the court.
She gestured her head in Zak’s direction and said a bit heavily, “Just one game, alright, Apollo?” before crouching fast and placing the ball at center. She beat him at three rounds, their knuckles skinned by the end without any apologies for knocking each other down.
The invisible bullying began before she could stop the thing that was everything being tightened up in a different way when she and Lee were around each other. Kara was beginning to itch with hunches, that Zak’s nature at times was a fiction, that things he perceived as being agreeable and pliable she was only equipped to view as stubborn and threatening. Being around his soft manners for too long made her feel like her grip on anything steep and solid was leaning away, just like she needed back into his arms sometimes when his brother made her tense and almost volatile. Lee was more steady-minded and okay to be rough with, a cool surface for honing against. She couldn’t help being disappointed that she needed that as well as the fantasy, as she so unfairly seemed to consider it now.
Whatever happened some time after her down-and-out little family of two became a solid three, something had significantly changed from before. Kara could be mean to Zak.
She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong with it, only that things started to feel almost like a joke at Zak’s expense when he wasn’t around simply because of all the things she suddenly felt he didn’t understand. In a way that just wouldn’t have been noticed if it wasn’t something so laced with the possibility of cruelty, things shifted notes just slightly like after a child exits the room whenever the younger brother left them to run to the store on the corner. It wasn’t at all that things were better, they were just different, if they had their own gambles on sports or went to catch a movie while he was busy.
And then one night, when Zak had cancelled plans on them because of a big test he had to study for, his brother pointedly nudged her for the third time that night and said in comfortable annoyance, “I swear, if you crack your knuckles one more time...”
“What, you’ll break ‘em?”
He set down the book he'd been browsing. “...What the hell? Your mind goes straight there?”
It just slipped out of her, like one of those jokes you realize isn’t funny at all in the middle of telling it. She told Lee about her fractures, and instead of seeming uncomfortable with the sudden shift in the tone of the evening, he tried to ask Kara if Zak had ever told her about the things their mother used to do when she got drunk enough. He actually wasn’t sure after all if Zak had been too young to remember much of it. When she asked, though, he couldn’t seem to define in one way the things that Carolanne had done: sometimes a slap here or there, but mostly the booze just made her a nerve-rending short fuze. One night she properly freaked the shit out of Lee when some of the things she was yelling didn’t make any sense to him at all.
“I have this very distinct image in my head of her screaming at us from the bottom of the stairs, and she kept repeating some line-I can’t remember what it was, but it was straight out of some movie she’d been watching earlier. That was the worst it ever got in my mind, but I remember all her make-up was running from crying or sweating and she just, she looked scary. I think I was unable to look at her without seeing that night in my head for years and years after.”
She asked, “Did she get better before Zak got very old?”
No, but when Lee was old enough to think of it he started to sometimes take the bottle she was working on and pour everything in the sink while she was on the phone or showering. When nothing else worked he’d just make sure to move Zak out of the way, pull him into his room late at night to share the crammed bed because there was no lock on Zak’s door. Where Kara had been this type of defense tactic would have gotten her hell about “what goes on in my household,” but Lee and Zak’s mother was too proud and seemed to just feign constant amnesia about it when she was sober. For Zak, it sounded like, it was so reflexive to play along with her that he and Lee never even talked about it.
Suddenly the differences between Lee and his brother made so much sense. He’d always accepted a more weary awareness of the darkness in their family and bore the bruises with a bitterly waning sense of cause, and Zak had remained hidden in the corners learning gradually, though maybe in a way he didn’t quite remember, that nobody expected him to be able to handle things on his own.
This made her feel pretty dirty for every time she revealed some other regrettable aspect of herself to Zak’s brother. There was a growing list of little things Lee knew about her that Zak didn’t, and it turned into this unhealthy escape from the things she tried to tell herself Zak didn’t deserve to have to deal with; in reality she was building up two different versions of herself and neither of them were completely honest.
Lee somehow got all of the ugly, even when it was on accident. There was that sickly fateful frak-up of the first year anniversary of her mom’s death that eclipsed a smear of gloom over everything else that day: Zak and Kara’s first actual fight came on because of some stupid cutting remark she’d made in flight class, the dispute not even mattering as much as the fact of it being such an undesirable milestone in their relationship. She had to button herself into her dress uniform before he could even cool off because this wasn’t much of an excuse for missing the award ceremony she and Lee were both expected at in Delphi, and then there was far too much alcohol at the after-party. All she really remembered after sobering up around two in the morning was clutching and pulling into a half-lit hallway whatever looked good to her at the time, which turned out to be good old Major Lark. Upper-middle-class, Libran, mediocre Raptor pilot. He had charismatic leadership and barely tolerable kissing skills and light blond hair and eyes almost the exact blue of those belonging to the one who peeled him forcefully off of her after some minutes and told him to go enjoy some more ambrosia before turning and leaving Kara sloshed and winded against the wall.
The phone rang in the morning: Zak calling from his campus house where she knew Lee would have crashed on the floor, a quiet measuring tone in his voice that made her recall more vividly their previous bickering. Wanting to know if she was up for lunch with “us.” Through the seeming charade of getting dressed and waiting to get picked up and all the way through ordering her food while Zak and Lee carried out the day like absolutely nothing unusual had happened, she was wondering how much longer she’d be a part of any kind of “us.”
“Babe. Are you okay?” Zak kept asking. There was no way to completely calm down and actually look fine, and he was feeling bad, assuming she was still upset about the argument. She kept shifting her hands around; if she didn’t put on some kind of convincing exterior he was going to start noticing that she hadn’t really said anything to Lee the whole time they’d been out.
She finally said, “Look, I need a smoke,” not knowing what she was doing except getting away from them for a while, trying to feel unstifled for even a moment. Outside, with her fingers stuttering around a cigarette, she wondered with distant curiosity if Kara Thrace had actually ever been this scared of anything before.
Zak never smoked but Lee did once in a blue moon, so this was an excuse, but she wasn’t exactly expecting him when he came around the bricked corner out behind the diner with the countenance he’d worn all day quite noticeably dropped into a stiff, impersonal wrath as he grabbed her by the arm, saying, “Calm the frak down.”
“And here I thought you were just using the opportunity to watch me squirm,” she threw back, cringing farther around the corner out of his grip.
“...No. No. Look, I’m not telling him. You don’t think I would have by now?”
She couldn’t begin to tell him what she thought about anything; her face probably conveyed as much. She just blurted out, “What?”
“...Listen, this is what’s going to happen.” Lee wasn’t looking her in the eye, not today, and his whole face was twitched up with a tension that was unbearable to witness. “You are going to clean up your act. And I’m going to clean up mine.”
She blinked, her head clasping in confusion onto that last part. “You...?”
“Oh, you’re gonna make me explain myself? Frak you. I should be doing everything I can to convince my brother that you’re no good. Instead I’m covering your ass.”
The words only half made sense to her. “You could still do the right thing,” she replied sardonically, not sure why she was being so upfront when she should just take this unfathomable favor without asking questions. “I don’t know what happened. You guys are like my family and I’m just so frakked up-”
“No, stop,” Lee suddenly snapped, not nearly as cruel as it was defensive, like he felt cornered. “Don’t.”
Her mouth shaped around the words, I’m sorry, but they couldn’t get out of her, her body couldn’t produce the sound. Not against the feeling flooding through her that she hadn’t only betrayed Zak the night before. And here was Lee denying her calling him a brother, squirming out of that sloppy word she’d just let slip as a rushed plea. Later, in the lowest mood, her jaw would tense up at the way she recalled his voice.
Because the way she would replay it, Lee was wanting to say, You are not my family. You are just messing with my family, and right now you are messing with me.
Lee finally straightened out his anger with a final sour glance at her and a shake of his head. He reached and took her cigarette from between her fingers, walking a few steps out into the parking lot and taking a couple draws on it. Without turning back to face her, he said, “Get back in there. I’m gonna be a couple minutes.”
Every time Lee visited her and Zak in the next couple months he was perfectly back to normal around Kara, but he no longer stopped by when Zak wasn’t around and seemed to diligently avoid being alone with her. If Zak was in the can, he rarely said anything at all. At the end of the weekend he would call a cab instead of letting Kara give him a ride to the bus station.
She didn’t sense that he was doing this to punish her. She started to realize this was what he’d meant by cleaning up his own act. She’d been demoted back to just being an attachment of his brother’s. He was angry at himself for what he hadn’t done; no good could come any more of them being friends.
One week the two of them were invited by a common acquaintance along with a good percentage of their graduating class to the kind of birthday party where everybody forgets whose birthday it is beyond one or two beers; even though Zak wasn’t technically invited he seemed to make pretty quick friends as soon as he got there.
Kara on the other hand had a migraine within the first hour and ended up tiredly sitting behind the secluded bar in the corner of the basement, playing with the straw in her too-weak cocktail and watching Ken Cage get his ass handed to him by Zak in a game of table court. People knew by now she wasn’t feeling very well and only occasionally went over to talk to her. When Lee eventually walked up, probably to pour himself another drink, she sunk farther down on her elbows.
On his way going over to the mini fridge under the bar, Lee tossed a white box that landed next to her arm. Realizing it was a package of pain killers, she groaned in relief. She’d attempted looting the host’s disaster zone of a medicine cabinet earlier to no success.
“Don’t mention it.” He really meant, don’t mention it. After swallowing down a couple of the pills with an arching back of her head, she stole a glance over at Lee. He was leaning against the bar without sitting down, wanting to get away from the crowds but still padding a space around her.
She sighed, nearly rolling her eyes. “Lee.”
“What.”
Her fingers twisted the stem of her glass back and forth. “When are you going to stop hating me?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Lee-” she shook her head, the hesitant repetition of his name feeling ineffectual. “Zak proposed to me yesterday.”
Lee’s face immediately went into a raw shock; after a second, he cooled to simple confusion.
“What? Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know he was going to do that.”
Kara blinked. “Oh.”
“...Did you say yes?”
Kara’s jaw went out in irritation. “...I told him I only like blond guys.”
“You know what, frak you. That’s not funny.”
She returned his same look of slight unhinged disgust. “Seriously? You’re telling me that it’s not funny?”
“Kara, I know you want me to be able to act like this isn’t a big deal, but I can’t. I won’t. Zak’s my brother, and I’d like to tell you that I’m going to kill you if you do it again, but I can’t do that either.”
“Oh. See, I wasn’t aware that you’re the only one who’s allowed to feel like shit about this.”
“Would you even feel bad about it if I hadn’t found out?”
Her entire body seemed to scoot in a little farther from him at that. She closed her eyes for a second and then stood up, walked a few steps over to Lee so that she could more quietly reply, “Listen to me. You know...you do, you know, without having known me before, that this is the only time I’ve really been happy. And maybe I never planned on getting married, maybe I’m doing this just so I don’t lose him. So what? If anyone can understand why it doesn’t matter...” With an uncomfortable, self-resistant shake of her head, she looked him more directly in the face, her expression showing an abandonment of her next thought. There was an indirect echo of a previous conversation, but she wasn’t sure of which one it had to be.
Lee’s eyes faltered into a swallowing sadness, looking down and somewhere around her fingers.
“But there’s another thing,” Kara said, a defensive and flat finality now in her tone. “I don’t want to be a part of Zak’s family if his brother won’t even frakking talk to me.”
She turned and left the bar. Ten minutes later she managed to run into one of the evening’s temporary buddies in the upstairs kitchen and say, “Hey, if Zak asks, I went home. He seems to be having a good time and I know he’d feel bad not leaving with me, so...”
It was almost an hour’s walk to the nearest shuttle station and the whole idea quickly seemed pretty stupid when she hadn’t walked for more than ten minutes and it started raining, soaking quickly through to chill her skin all over. She kept walking, saying to herself it wasn’t so bad even though her head didn’t feel much better and her thin jacket wasn’t nearly enough to keep her from shivering in the wet breeze.
She didn’t get very far out of the neighborhood before an approaching car pulled over to the shoulder of the road and honked. She turned to see a white Satyr and her heart sort of passed out, plummeting and landing.
She came over slowly and leaned to glance into the window across the empty passenger seat to see Lee at the wheel giving an impatient gesture and mouthing, “Would you get in?”
It was so much warmer inside she could’ve cried. She was dripping all over the leather, apologizing, “I’m gonna ruin your seats...”
“Frak the upholstery. Are you insane? You’re completely soaked-Zak worries about stupid things, it’s frakking freezing outside...”
“Gods.” She laughed, interrupting him. “What are you, my-”
But she couldn’t finish that sentence because nothing worked right, nothing was the right size. It would never even work as a joke. She looked over and saw a calm understanding in Lee’s eyes as her trailing off punctuated some undefinable affection between them.
“Did you even tell Zak before you took off?”
“No. I’m sure he’ll assume I gave you a ride home. I couldn’t even find him...”
They were both laughing in admiration then, Kara saying, “I bet Ken got him in the backyard to go play with the four wheelers.”
“Can you believe, I think he met more people tonight than I did in my whole time at the school...”
"Yeah,” Kara replied, chuckling tiredly. “I can believe it.”
When they were done laughing, Kara rested her head down on the back of the seat and began nodding halfway to sleep, felt the tranquil rocking and jilting of the car’s motion through the pattering rain. Part of her dreamt, and the part of her that was still awake seemed to feel the warming weight of an occasional lingering glance along with the vague glow of the stop light bleeding through her lashes.
Everything was back to before, pulling at her with a brisker clarity. Zak and Lee, Lee and Zak; they connected in her mind now as the only future she could really breathe with, everything outside of that possibility simply unthinkable. She knew then that she would either have or lose both, and it made the present so frighteningly fragile, so balanced on a fine edge, that maybe even then she felt the lie beginning to form inside her before it even needed to be told.
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