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flowrs4opheliaTitle: Aerilon Girls Are Easy
Author: Sara C. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Lee/Kara(/Zak)
Rating: R
Summary: Without a war to bring them back together, it takes a lot for Kara and Lee to be able to forgive each other. And themselves.
Previous parts: I | II
When Lee wakes up the next morning, the first thing he's aware of is his knee stinging hotly and it takes him a moment for the memories of the previous day to emerge clearly from the drowsy sludge in his head. Then his stomach drops a little as it all comes back.
Kara.
He realizes he has no memory of her leaving or finding anywhere to sleep here, and part of him expects her to have vanished and left no solid proof of her presence besides his bandaged knee. But after he gets up and looks outside his room, he can see her sitting on the couch with the TV on at a low volume. She is sitting with a hand to her face, two fingers touching her temple, and doesn't seem to really be paying close attention to the television. She is wearing one of his shirts that is now a little wrinkled. Even as the sight is familiar, it takes him a second to remember the exact explanation for that, too.
As he starts crossing the room, the broken pieces of the bottle on the floor catch his eye. Before he can ask what happened there, Kara says something without looking up at him.
"You slept like a frakking rock."
Still trying to grasp everything he sees, he joins her in the next room and then looks at her closely. "Did you sleep on the couch?" he asks.
She glances over at him then, raising her brow like she fails to see why it matters. "Yeah."
"Sorry," he says, feeling a little stupid. "I could have found you a pillow and..."
She laughs. "No, believe me, in your condition you couldn't. It's okay, I passed out so cold that sleeping in the bathtub would have sufficed."
He smiles a little, going over to sit on the couch on the opposite end from her. "You want some coffee?"
"No. I'll just go soon."
"How long have you been up?"
"Not long. Half an hour." She hesitates, fiddling with one of the buttons of his shirt, and then adds, "I was almost going to just leave."
His face goes serious, understanding her meaning. "And hope I wouldn't hunt you down again."
"I thought you just ran into me."
"Yeah...I...got lucky," he says slowly and with some difficulty, making it sound clearly like some kind of confession.
"You really think so?" Kara asks with some attempted humor in her tone. "Don't you think it would be better if I left you in peace?"
Lee doesn't smile, hesitating a long time before answering. "It's not like that would bring him back, Kara."
She blinks slowly. "I know that," she says a little severely. She doesn't want to touch this anymore.
He sighs. "Look...I think I said some kind of crazy things last night."
Kara crosses her arms and keeps looking forward, staying silent as if she isn't hearing him.
"But the truth is...when I saw you on the Galactica five months ago I really did want to talk to you, and then I just frakked it up by acting like a stubborn dickhead again."
Kara actually loses enough of her discomfort to snort with laughter for a second, her mouth tightening in a small smile which she instantly covers with her hand.
He grins a little and goes on, "And I know you think I'm finally apologizing to the wrong person, but ever since then I've felt this nagging need to apologize to you...Just like you tried to tell me, Zak wouldn't want it this way. Right after we lost him my only instinct to deal with it was to find who and what to put the blame on, and I've let it go on so long that I've been torn apart from the only people who are my remaining connections to him. And wouldn't he want us to just be happy?"
When she just stays silent as he looks at her, he moves to sit closer to her. This makes her look up at him and pull back from him a barely perceptible fraction of an inch, immediately taking on a guarded and ready look like someone going into a fight.
"Don't you think we need to finally move on?" he says quietly.
She sighs, throwing her hands up in the air a little. "Okay, I get the point," she says, standing up. "I'll call you sometime then, we'll do this again."
He grips her wrist to stop her before she can walk away, stands up and then makes her freeze in surprise when he takes her face in his hands to make her look at him. "Kara," he says softly. "I'm serious. I think we need to forgive ourselves."
"What are you doing?" she says softly, instantly uncomfortable and trying to back away a little as he just follows her movement.
"What, am I finally doing something that surprises you?" he says with a slightly challenging look. "Is this scaring the hell out of you?"
She forcefully pulls his hands away from her and starts to sound a little panicked. "My gods, Lee—You don't even have any idea—"
He grabs her shoulders to keep her facing him, pulling her much too close to him. "What? What? Maybe this will surprise you: I went to Ken Cage's wedding two months ago. I'd barely even spoken to the guy in years. I only went because I thought you might be there."
"Ken's wedding?" she says a little breathlessly, shaking her head. "What the frak are you talking about?"
"I...don't really know..." His expression becomes intensely conflicted as he looks at her face, and suddenly his hands aren't grabbing her shoulders as tightly, touching her too gently and familiarly, and she can feel something in the small space in between them about to snap but can't bring herself to move to make him let go of her again.
Instead she says, "Zak failed basic flight."
In Lee's car they used to drive out to isolated roads that went over lots of hills, and Kara would lean forward from the back seat where she was sitting with Zak and crank his music up very loud before they sped over the hills to make their stomachs drop like in a roller coaster. Once it was the middle of summer and there were fireflies all over the place, illuminating the night everywhere they looked like electric blinking lights at a carnival. Zooming past the windows in little blurs of bright yellow they looked like stars and it was like flying in a Viper.
They were young and stupid. Reckless. They stopped to go far out into a field one night and tossed bottles high up in the air to try shooting them. Kara always insisted on staying turned away from Lee or Zak while they threw a bottle up for her to see if she could spin around and aim quickly enough to get it. She was the only one who could do it this way and still hit it.
She wasn't paying attention to where Zak was. Lee threw the last bottle they had lying around in his car and she turned a little slowly, automatically aiming lower than usual in hopes to still get it, and found herself pointing her gun right toward Zak's chest.
Losing her breath for a second, she quickly lowered the gun and then heard the glass shattering on the ground where the bottle landed far away from them.
She always remembers what it looked like when a firefly would hit the front window of the car and splatter. A light abruptly going out, in one tiny doomed instant in the center of time, forever.
Something leaves Lee's face very quickly. Then he just stares at her like he doesn't understand and says quietly, "What?"
"He failed his flight test," she says. "Or he should have." She has to stop a moment to collect herself before she can keep grinding through it, lowering her eyes from his face. "He had no feel for flying and couldn't do most of the basic maneuvers."
"What are you talking about?" he says as he slowly drops his hands from her shoulders and shakes his head just a little, not letting himself register what she means. But there is an edge of desperation in his voice and his face, begging her not to make it real even as he's starting to see the pieces fit together.
"Come on, Lee," she says. "You're smart, I'm sure you can figure it out. It wasn't your dad. Wake up."
"Frak you," he says breathlessly, aimlessly turning away from her and raking his hands in his hair like he doesn't know what to do. "Why are you telling me this?"
The words pull something apart in her, bringing the moment into focus, and suddenly she can only sadly look at his back. Then she sounds much less hardened and cold than before when she says very softly, "It wasn't your dad. And it wasn't...It was me. I'm responsible."
She hears Lee let out a long, shaky breath. He moves to the side a little and sinks down to sit on the edge of the coffee table, still facing away from her, grabbing hold of the edges of the table like he just needs to hold onto something right now.
Kara looks away from him, crossing her arms tightly and practically holding herself as if she's cold, and then turns and goes to the door with her head hanging down. The sound of the door shutting pulls Lee out of the haze, and he looks over at the door and the suddenly empty room. And all he can process is a strange feeling of abandonment like a blanket being yanked off of him, the instability, no longer knowing cause and effect and what is what.
She knows how this works. The trick is to just keep moving. Don't touch it again, don't think, just move on, leave behind.
The bright sun above is scalding pain in her temples as she walks back to the bar where her car is still parked, hung over and stretched thin. She passes a news stand and sees a headline on a magazine cover about "former star Pyramid player Liz Teller" and laughs darkly, almost hysterically, to herself. The threat is banished.
The next day is the last whole day Kara has to be at home. In the morning the voice on her radio chipperly wishes everyone a happy Mars Day before she turns it off and saunters tiredly over to the fridge for some juice. Then she sees the note she left for herself there two days ago that just says "RENT" in bold marker.
"Frak," she whispers to herself with her hand still on the handle of the refrigerator door, rolling her head back to stare with self-annoyance at the ceiling for a second.
Kara shoves a mess of mail and books off her table before she finds her checkbook at the bottom of it and quickly writes out a check for her landlord. When she is about to leave to go put it in his mailbox, she opens her door and then freezes in surprise.
Lee is standing right outside her door, now looking at her with an alarmed face that mirrors hers. It might be her imagination that he looked a little like he was turning to leave when she first opened the door, as if he was changing his mind.
After the awkward initial surprise, he finally recovers from the moment first and speaks unsurely. "Um...here." He takes something gray out of his back pocket and holds it out to her. "I washed it."
It's her shirt that she let him use to wrap around his knee, now clean and folded into a small square. She takes it and lets it fall out from the folded shape, still surprised and disoriented as she stares at it a second.
"You didn't have to do that," she says. Not coldly. Then she takes a closer look at it and raises an eyebrow. "Wow. You actually got all the blood out of it."
He just shrugs. "Cold water is the trick."
She smirks. "I'll have to remember that," she says, her tone a little sarcastic to imply how likely that is.
Then another stretch of silence. Lee nobly saves it again, leaning against her doorway and awkwardly shoving his hands in his pockets as he talks again. "So. When do you leave again?"
"Tomorrow," she says.
He nods, looks away from her eyes for a second. "Well...I'm supposed to be at the festival for a while with some friends tonight..."
Her brow raises slightly. "So am I."
He registers that for a second and then nods again. "Alright. So maybe I'll see you there."
She nods slowly. "Okay."
Lee turns away, and as he starts leaving down the hall she stays standing still in the doorway like she isn't sure what just happened. Before he gets far enough to be out of view he slows to a stop, turns his head around, and just looks at her with an easy and slightly mischievous smile. It's the kind of look he once would have often given her when they were with a group of people and they knew they were both seeing the humor in something that nobody else there understood.
After he then keeps walking and disappears down the hall, Kara just shakes her head, grinning only a little. Suddenly it seems like she should have figured it would be like this. Of course he will just act as if nothing has happened. For Lee, anything else would just make too much sense.
Later as Kara changes into an old, faded band T-shirt and some jeans, her mind just barely brushes against the secure thought that the odds of happening to see Lee tonight when thousands of people will be at the Mars Day festival are quite small. All she knows right now is she's going back to the Atlantia tomorrow and that will be somewhat of a relief in some ways, but she's determined to have a good time first.
The park is tightly crowded and nearly unrecognizable when she gets there, decorated with colorful banners and streamers everywhere and packed full of vendors selling food, balloons, and firecrackers. As she approaches the edge of the park, walking the few blocks from the closest parking spot she could find, she can hear a band nearby playing jigs and the distant thrilled screams from the area where some rides are set up.
She makes her way to the fountain in the center of the park and sits waiting on the edge, idly touching the backs of her fingers to the surface of the water and looking up at the goddess statue far above her with the wings and arms stretched wide and face looking upward hopefully. Kara thinks about how people say washing your hands in the Aurora Fountain will cleanse you of any past sins and burdens so you can start anew. Except for people who actually live in Caprica City, who will tell you this water is filthy as frak and not even at all pretty to look at.
"I hope you're praying it won't rain."
She jumps in alarm at the sound of the voice, looking down to see Lee standing right next to her. "Holy crap," she says as she recovers from the surprise.
"Sorry," he says, smiling a little as he sits down next to her.
Kara shakes her head, looking at him like it makes no sense for him to be here. "Am I really that hard to miss whenever I set foot in this park?" she asks.
"I should be asking you. I'm only here to meet a friend and his sister."
She slowly smirks as she understands. "Right. At the fountain. At seven-o-clock. Good idea."
He grins. "You're meeting somebody here right now, too, aren't you?"
Her giggling gives him the answer.
Now smiling wide, Lee holds up his phone he has in his hand and says, "But I just now got a call and found out they'll be late. Or might not be coming at all."
She gives him an exaggerated frown and then looks up again, this time past the statue at all the heavy gray clouds gathering above. "Look at that sky."
"Yeah," he says. "I'm surprised they didn't cancel the whole thing."
"Whatever. Nothing like a little lightning with the bonfire."
"That's the spirit," says a new voice behind her.
She turns to find Karl standing by them and immediately jumps to her feet with excitement. Somehow she forgot all about him for a moment.
"Helo!" she says, drawing his name out in an excited growl as she hugs him. "It's great to see you."
"Look at your hair!" he says with surprise at how different she looks, pulling at a lock of it as he pulls away. "Has it really been that long since I've seen you?"
Lee has now stood up to join them, and Karl finally looks over at him questioningly.
"Right. Um..." Kara gestures toward him a little awkwardly. "Karl, this is Lee."
He raises an eyebrow. "Lee...As in Captain Adama?"
"Not anymore," Lee answers, smiling and holding a hand out.
"Good to meet you, man," Karl says, shaking his hand. As Kara looks on, she has to grin at how well he hides his surprise. "Leave it to Starbuck to neglect to mention I'd get to today."
Lee starts looking even more awkward and says, "Oh, well...It was kind of a last-minute—"
"We just ran into each other," Kara says, her words overlapping his last ones and cutting him off.
Karl just looks at them with some confusion for a silent moment and then says, "Okay."
"I thought you were bringing someone with you," Kara says.
"Yeah, she's in line for drinks."
"Which is where we should be," she says, her expression brightening as she turns and the others start following her.
"You don't waste any time, do you?" Lee says with a laugh, and then he and Karl exchange an understanding grin of amusement.
When they reach the nearest stand selling drinks, Karl introduces them to his new girlfriend, a short girl with brown hair in a smooth ponytail named Rhea. She flashes her and Lee a blindlingly earnest and sweet smile that makes Kara unable to help but not like her right away. Then she and Karl go to wait at a table while Lee and Kara get in line.
They end up waiting behind three obnoxiously loud guys who are all wearing Caprica Buccaneers shirts and caps and don't stop complaining the whole time they're in hearing range of their conversation.
"This is frakking bullshit. It's not even raining yet and that dumbass closes it right after we've been in line for twenty frakking minutes."
"Shoulda just punched the frakker in the face. Frakking hell, if there weren't cops all over the place here..."
As they keep cursing loudly about it and only seem to keep getting more pissed, Kara and Lee finally look at each other like they're trying hard not to laugh. Then when the first of them gets to the front, he only starts holding up the line by arguing with the vendor.
"Look, lady, I bought these tickets and now they aren't letting anyone on the rides, so can't you—?"
"I'm sorry," says the woman he's yelling at for the third time, "but you can't buy anything here with tickets. You'll have to get a refund for them and come back."
"Fine, you know what? Frak you, okay? I got—"
"Excuse me," Lee interrupts, forcefully pushing him aside to come forward and then giving the woman an apologetic smile as he starts to order.
The man looks lividly at him and moves to get back in his way, but Kara casually moves beside Lee to block him, looking up at him a second to give him her most threatening smile and wink. He finally gives up and storms off with his friends.
When they rejoin Karl and Rhea, Kara immediately says, "I hope you guys didn't buy any tickets. Word on the street is they've closed the rides, apparently."
Lee starts laughing and then he and Kara both proceed to crack up uncontrollably for a moment as the others just look confused, missing what's so funny. Then Karl takes a long string of eight tickets out of his pocket to show them, and they all laugh.
He looks to the side at Rhea and asks, "How'd you like a teddy bear?"
Lee and Kara stand by watching and drinking from their bottles of cheap Tauron brew while Karl and Rhea both try shooting at targets with toy guns to win a prize.
"So you really don't have any kind of a plan?" Kara asks him. "Isn't there anything you want to do?"
"Sure, I have ideas," Lee says. "I'm thinking I'll go back to school. Study law, maybe. That's something I always considered."
"Law?" she says. "Well, okay. Now I guess I can understand why you're so nervous about coming clean with your dad about this."
He chuckles. "Shut up."
Lee stays silent in thought for a while as she takes a cigar out of her pocket and lights it. She takes one puff and then passes it to him.
"You know what I used to think I'd like to do?" he says before putting it in his mouth. "As just a sort of crazy fantasy?"
"What?"
"I thought it would be nice to just open up a bar."
She smiles. "A bar?"
"Yeah, on a beach. Someplace where it's warm year round. I hate winters here."
Kara shrugs and says, "So do it. Why not?"
He shakes his head a little, seeming somehow disturbed. "Do it..."
"Yeah. For gods' sakes, Lee, you should have something you've always wanted but would never go after because of your enormous sense of responsibility."
He takes a long swig from his bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and finally replies in a pensive tone. "Yeah. That's what I've been thinking. It's funny. I think sometimes, maybe living the way you think you should be living for other people...like when I felt like I needed to set a good example for Zak...Sometimes it's not responsible. Being self-interested and just going for what you want isn't necessarily unkind. It's...honest. You know?"
She looks at him and very slowly smiles wide. "Okay, so which is it then? Are you a nice guy today or aren't you?"
Lee looks at her seriously a moment, and then his face just cracks into a slightly nervous-looking smile like he's been caught off guard.
Before he can respond they hear Karl saying to them, "Am I good or what?" They finally look away from each other to see him holding a giant stuffed seal he just won.
"You're a dork," Kara says in a flat tone, making Rhea snort with laughter.
It is getting very dark by the time they find a table to sit at near where the band is playing next to a huge bonfire.
"Aw, that sucks," Karl says after they see a little girl in the distance lose hold of her balloon and start crying as it floats away.
"She's still probably having ten times more fun than we are," Rhea says, the stuffed animal now held in her lap. "Remember what a big deal Mars Day was when you were a kid?"
"And we had no idea it's a holiday honoring the god of war," Kara says.
"It's a celebration of peace time," Lee says. "And our past victories that have brought us here. Come on, you should know that," he adds teasingly, nudging her in the side.
"I know, I'm just saying," she says. "So does that mean it would be kind of morbid to celebrate it if we were at war right now?"
"Well, I imagine we'd acknowledge it pretty differently. That's what it was like during the Cylon War."
"Let's just be grateful we're not at war and leave it at that," Karl says.
Kara laughs. "Like there's any threat of that happening. As long as there's no inter-Colonial conflict..."
"As long as?" Lee echoes with a look of disbelief. "What, you think there isn't any? Don't you pay any attention to politics? The news?"
She shrugs. "No."
"I hardly see it getting violent any time soon," Karl admits.
"Sure, but to say there's nothing wrong?" Lee says. "I mean, the economic situation on Gemenon right now? On Aerilon? When we depend on the poorer Colonies like them for most of our resources? It's—"
"Okay, okay," Kara says, giggling and covering her hand over Lee's mouth to make him stop as she looks at Karl. "Trust me, you do not want to get him started."
Lee just hits her hand away and starts laughing with her. Kara just barely registers it the brief moment Karl looks at the two of them a little strangely, and then she draws both her arms closely back into her own personal space, hunching over the table and picking up her drink.
"Hey, you never know," Karl says in a light tone. "Nobody knows exactly what happened to the Cylons. They could just show up in the sky again some day."
Kara laughs loudly. "Yeah, right! They'll just get bored and decide to come frak us up some more. And we'll be out in our birds getting to shoot at toasters instead of just doing CAPs all day." She pauses to laugh even more with a sudden realization and then says, "Oh my gods...That would be frakking awesome."
The others all crack up laughing.
"You would think that sounds like fun," Karl says.
Lee shakes his head. "Yeah, just don't ever say anything like that around the old man."
"Oh, don't worry, I know," she says. "He'll get that deadly serious look on his face like he does and plunge into telling all these scary war stories."
"How it took him years before he stopped having bad dreams about that heavy, mechanical sound the Centurions made—"
"—when they walked," she finishes along with him, going into giggles again.
Karl asks Rhea if she wants to go dance for a while, and as they stand up to go join the large gathering of people dancing by the fire he holds his seal prize out to Kara.
She raises her brow and says, "No frakking way am I carrying that thing around."
Lee takes it and sets it on the table. "But you can watch it while they dance and I go get another drink."
Kara rolls her eyes, turning around to sit with her back against the table as they all leave.
It ends up taking Lee over twenty minutes to get through the line again. When he finally gets back to the bench table where they were, he finds Kara still alone and the stuffed seal gone.
"I bring offerings," he says, holding up the four bottles he bought.
"I see," she says. "Took you long enough."
He gestures toward the bare tabletop. "Did you let it run away?"
"Seals can't run."
He shakes his head with mild annoyance as he comes forward and sets all the drinks down.
"They just left," she explains. "Karl had to take that sweet thing home."
"She didn't say much, did she?" he says as he sits down next to her.
"Well, Helo's like you. He likes them nice. Easy to get along with. The quieter the better."
"See, now you're making me not like him as much somehow," he says, grinning. "A perfectly friendly guy. How do you do that?"
She laughs and says, "I'm kidding." Then she turns around to take one of the bottles and opens it as she says, "Oh well. I guess we'll just have to drink these all by ourselves. Unless you've heard something from your friends again."
"Nope. They don't seem to be coming."
She takes a long drink and then stares away at the fire-lit dancers nearby. "Guess it's just you and me then."
"Yep," Lee says quietly. He looks at all the drinks and says, "And we better finish these fast."
"Why?"
"Because I just saw some lightning. And we still haven't danced."
She slowly smiles, taking the challenge, and then grabs her drink to start chugging. As they each try to finish their two bottles quickly, they keep laughing in between drinks because this seems like such a stupid idea. Then they finally finish and slam their second empty bottles back down on the table at nearly the exact same time, and he immediately stands up and offers her his hand. "Shall we?"
When they join the dance, it quickly becomes hard for them not to keep laughing because they're both now just tipsy enough that it's hard for their feet to keep up with everyone else. Every time one of them switches to a new partner and starts spinning around it makes them so dizzy and disoriented they almost don't make it to the next one at the right time. They've just made it back to each other and sloppily grasped hands again when someone trying to pass right through the area where everyone is dancing knocks right into Kara and pushes her over onto the ground.
"Hey!" she hears Lee say as she sits back up and sees the back of the person who ran into her as he just keeps going with no apology, followed by two friends. It's the Buccaneers fans again. Great.
She jumps back onto her feet and grabs the guy's shoulder to stop him and make him face her. "What's your frakking problem?"
They all stop and look at her, only then recognizing her and Lee.
"Not you two assholes again," says the one who pushed her over.
"That's right," she says, threateningly coming very close to him.
"Lay the frak off," he says, pushing against her chest so roughly she falls back against Lee, who she didn't even realize had come up that close behind her. Then she springs right back forward and punches him hard across the face.
There are many gasps and even a few cheers from the surrounding crowd of people who are now all watching them. All three of the guys are now looking at Kara furiously, and she just stands her ground as they start inching back toward her like she's ready to take all three of them.
"Uh, Kara?" says Lee, who has only now noticed the police officer nearby whose attention they've definitely caught. "Let's go."
She is still so angry he has to grab her around the chest to stop her from going back at them again.
"And frak the C-Bucs!" she yells at them as he starts to drag her away. Then she finally also notices the cop and mutters after reacting with a thrilled kind of giggle, "Oh shit..."
Lee is now smiling too as he grabs her hand and they run off quickly, weaving their way through gaps between the tight crowds and finally taking refuge behind a tent.
"Thanks," Kara says, catching her breath. "Last thing I need is to get arrested again right before I have to report back to my battlestar."
He looks at her with a raised brow. "Again?" he asks.
Right then they feel the first rain drops and they both look up at the dark sky.
"Well, crap," Kara says with a careless grin.
"Let's get out of here," Lee says, and without any verbal agreement to they start running off together in the right direction to leave the park and get to his apartment.
Go to part IV.
Author: Sara C. (
flowrs4ophelia)Characters & Pairings: Lee/Kara(/Zak)
Rating: R
Summary: Without a war to bring them back together, it takes a lot for Kara and Lee to be able to forgive each other. And themselves.
Previous parts: I | II
When Lee wakes up the next morning, the first thing he's aware of is his knee stinging hotly and it takes him a moment for the memories of the previous day to emerge clearly from the drowsy sludge in his head. Then his stomach drops a little as it all comes back.
Kara.
He realizes he has no memory of her leaving or finding anywhere to sleep here, and part of him expects her to have vanished and left no solid proof of her presence besides his bandaged knee. But after he gets up and looks outside his room, he can see her sitting on the couch with the TV on at a low volume. She is sitting with a hand to her face, two fingers touching her temple, and doesn't seem to really be paying close attention to the television. She is wearing one of his shirts that is now a little wrinkled. Even as the sight is familiar, it takes him a second to remember the exact explanation for that, too.
As he starts crossing the room, the broken pieces of the bottle on the floor catch his eye. Before he can ask what happened there, Kara says something without looking up at him.
"You slept like a frakking rock."
Still trying to grasp everything he sees, he joins her in the next room and then looks at her closely. "Did you sleep on the couch?" he asks.
She glances over at him then, raising her brow like she fails to see why it matters. "Yeah."
"Sorry," he says, feeling a little stupid. "I could have found you a pillow and..."
She laughs. "No, believe me, in your condition you couldn't. It's okay, I passed out so cold that sleeping in the bathtub would have sufficed."
He smiles a little, going over to sit on the couch on the opposite end from her. "You want some coffee?"
"No. I'll just go soon."
"How long have you been up?"
"Not long. Half an hour." She hesitates, fiddling with one of the buttons of his shirt, and then adds, "I was almost going to just leave."
His face goes serious, understanding her meaning. "And hope I wouldn't hunt you down again."
"I thought you just ran into me."
"Yeah...I...got lucky," he says slowly and with some difficulty, making it sound clearly like some kind of confession.
"You really think so?" Kara asks with some attempted humor in her tone. "Don't you think it would be better if I left you in peace?"
Lee doesn't smile, hesitating a long time before answering. "It's not like that would bring him back, Kara."
She blinks slowly. "I know that," she says a little severely. She doesn't want to touch this anymore.
He sighs. "Look...I think I said some kind of crazy things last night."
Kara crosses her arms and keeps looking forward, staying silent as if she isn't hearing him.
"But the truth is...when I saw you on the Galactica five months ago I really did want to talk to you, and then I just frakked it up by acting like a stubborn dickhead again."
Kara actually loses enough of her discomfort to snort with laughter for a second, her mouth tightening in a small smile which she instantly covers with her hand.
He grins a little and goes on, "And I know you think I'm finally apologizing to the wrong person, but ever since then I've felt this nagging need to apologize to you...Just like you tried to tell me, Zak wouldn't want it this way. Right after we lost him my only instinct to deal with it was to find who and what to put the blame on, and I've let it go on so long that I've been torn apart from the only people who are my remaining connections to him. And wouldn't he want us to just be happy?"
When she just stays silent as he looks at her, he moves to sit closer to her. This makes her look up at him and pull back from him a barely perceptible fraction of an inch, immediately taking on a guarded and ready look like someone going into a fight.
"Don't you think we need to finally move on?" he says quietly.
She sighs, throwing her hands up in the air a little. "Okay, I get the point," she says, standing up. "I'll call you sometime then, we'll do this again."
He grips her wrist to stop her before she can walk away, stands up and then makes her freeze in surprise when he takes her face in his hands to make her look at him. "Kara," he says softly. "I'm serious. I think we need to forgive ourselves."
"What are you doing?" she says softly, instantly uncomfortable and trying to back away a little as he just follows her movement.
"What, am I finally doing something that surprises you?" he says with a slightly challenging look. "Is this scaring the hell out of you?"
She forcefully pulls his hands away from her and starts to sound a little panicked. "My gods, Lee—You don't even have any idea—"
He grabs her shoulders to keep her facing him, pulling her much too close to him. "What? What? Maybe this will surprise you: I went to Ken Cage's wedding two months ago. I'd barely even spoken to the guy in years. I only went because I thought you might be there."
"Ken's wedding?" she says a little breathlessly, shaking her head. "What the frak are you talking about?"
"I...don't really know..." His expression becomes intensely conflicted as he looks at her face, and suddenly his hands aren't grabbing her shoulders as tightly, touching her too gently and familiarly, and she can feel something in the small space in between them about to snap but can't bring herself to move to make him let go of her again.
Instead she says, "Zak failed basic flight."
In Lee's car they used to drive out to isolated roads that went over lots of hills, and Kara would lean forward from the back seat where she was sitting with Zak and crank his music up very loud before they sped over the hills to make their stomachs drop like in a roller coaster. Once it was the middle of summer and there were fireflies all over the place, illuminating the night everywhere they looked like electric blinking lights at a carnival. Zooming past the windows in little blurs of bright yellow they looked like stars and it was like flying in a Viper.
They were young and stupid. Reckless. They stopped to go far out into a field one night and tossed bottles high up in the air to try shooting them. Kara always insisted on staying turned away from Lee or Zak while they threw a bottle up for her to see if she could spin around and aim quickly enough to get it. She was the only one who could do it this way and still hit it.
She wasn't paying attention to where Zak was. Lee threw the last bottle they had lying around in his car and she turned a little slowly, automatically aiming lower than usual in hopes to still get it, and found herself pointing her gun right toward Zak's chest.
Losing her breath for a second, she quickly lowered the gun and then heard the glass shattering on the ground where the bottle landed far away from them.
She always remembers what it looked like when a firefly would hit the front window of the car and splatter. A light abruptly going out, in one tiny doomed instant in the center of time, forever.
Something leaves Lee's face very quickly. Then he just stares at her like he doesn't understand and says quietly, "What?"
"He failed his flight test," she says. "Or he should have." She has to stop a moment to collect herself before she can keep grinding through it, lowering her eyes from his face. "He had no feel for flying and couldn't do most of the basic maneuvers."
"What are you talking about?" he says as he slowly drops his hands from her shoulders and shakes his head just a little, not letting himself register what she means. But there is an edge of desperation in his voice and his face, begging her not to make it real even as he's starting to see the pieces fit together.
"Come on, Lee," she says. "You're smart, I'm sure you can figure it out. It wasn't your dad. Wake up."
"Frak you," he says breathlessly, aimlessly turning away from her and raking his hands in his hair like he doesn't know what to do. "Why are you telling me this?"
The words pull something apart in her, bringing the moment into focus, and suddenly she can only sadly look at his back. Then she sounds much less hardened and cold than before when she says very softly, "It wasn't your dad. And it wasn't...It was me. I'm responsible."
She hears Lee let out a long, shaky breath. He moves to the side a little and sinks down to sit on the edge of the coffee table, still facing away from her, grabbing hold of the edges of the table like he just needs to hold onto something right now.
Kara looks away from him, crossing her arms tightly and practically holding herself as if she's cold, and then turns and goes to the door with her head hanging down. The sound of the door shutting pulls Lee out of the haze, and he looks over at the door and the suddenly empty room. And all he can process is a strange feeling of abandonment like a blanket being yanked off of him, the instability, no longer knowing cause and effect and what is what.
She knows how this works. The trick is to just keep moving. Don't touch it again, don't think, just move on, leave behind.
The bright sun above is scalding pain in her temples as she walks back to the bar where her car is still parked, hung over and stretched thin. She passes a news stand and sees a headline on a magazine cover about "former star Pyramid player Liz Teller" and laughs darkly, almost hysterically, to herself. The threat is banished.
The next day is the last whole day Kara has to be at home. In the morning the voice on her radio chipperly wishes everyone a happy Mars Day before she turns it off and saunters tiredly over to the fridge for some juice. Then she sees the note she left for herself there two days ago that just says "RENT" in bold marker.
"Frak," she whispers to herself with her hand still on the handle of the refrigerator door, rolling her head back to stare with self-annoyance at the ceiling for a second.
Kara shoves a mess of mail and books off her table before she finds her checkbook at the bottom of it and quickly writes out a check for her landlord. When she is about to leave to go put it in his mailbox, she opens her door and then freezes in surprise.
Lee is standing right outside her door, now looking at her with an alarmed face that mirrors hers. It might be her imagination that he looked a little like he was turning to leave when she first opened the door, as if he was changing his mind.
After the awkward initial surprise, he finally recovers from the moment first and speaks unsurely. "Um...here." He takes something gray out of his back pocket and holds it out to her. "I washed it."
It's her shirt that she let him use to wrap around his knee, now clean and folded into a small square. She takes it and lets it fall out from the folded shape, still surprised and disoriented as she stares at it a second.
"You didn't have to do that," she says. Not coldly. Then she takes a closer look at it and raises an eyebrow. "Wow. You actually got all the blood out of it."
He just shrugs. "Cold water is the trick."
She smirks. "I'll have to remember that," she says, her tone a little sarcastic to imply how likely that is.
Then another stretch of silence. Lee nobly saves it again, leaning against her doorway and awkwardly shoving his hands in his pockets as he talks again. "So. When do you leave again?"
"Tomorrow," she says.
He nods, looks away from her eyes for a second. "Well...I'm supposed to be at the festival for a while with some friends tonight..."
Her brow raises slightly. "So am I."
He registers that for a second and then nods again. "Alright. So maybe I'll see you there."
She nods slowly. "Okay."
Lee turns away, and as he starts leaving down the hall she stays standing still in the doorway like she isn't sure what just happened. Before he gets far enough to be out of view he slows to a stop, turns his head around, and just looks at her with an easy and slightly mischievous smile. It's the kind of look he once would have often given her when they were with a group of people and they knew they were both seeing the humor in something that nobody else there understood.
After he then keeps walking and disappears down the hall, Kara just shakes her head, grinning only a little. Suddenly it seems like she should have figured it would be like this. Of course he will just act as if nothing has happened. For Lee, anything else would just make too much sense.
Later as Kara changes into an old, faded band T-shirt and some jeans, her mind just barely brushes against the secure thought that the odds of happening to see Lee tonight when thousands of people will be at the Mars Day festival are quite small. All she knows right now is she's going back to the Atlantia tomorrow and that will be somewhat of a relief in some ways, but she's determined to have a good time first.
The park is tightly crowded and nearly unrecognizable when she gets there, decorated with colorful banners and streamers everywhere and packed full of vendors selling food, balloons, and firecrackers. As she approaches the edge of the park, walking the few blocks from the closest parking spot she could find, she can hear a band nearby playing jigs and the distant thrilled screams from the area where some rides are set up.
She makes her way to the fountain in the center of the park and sits waiting on the edge, idly touching the backs of her fingers to the surface of the water and looking up at the goddess statue far above her with the wings and arms stretched wide and face looking upward hopefully. Kara thinks about how people say washing your hands in the Aurora Fountain will cleanse you of any past sins and burdens so you can start anew. Except for people who actually live in Caprica City, who will tell you this water is filthy as frak and not even at all pretty to look at.
"I hope you're praying it won't rain."
She jumps in alarm at the sound of the voice, looking down to see Lee standing right next to her. "Holy crap," she says as she recovers from the surprise.
"Sorry," he says, smiling a little as he sits down next to her.
Kara shakes her head, looking at him like it makes no sense for him to be here. "Am I really that hard to miss whenever I set foot in this park?" she asks.
"I should be asking you. I'm only here to meet a friend and his sister."
She slowly smirks as she understands. "Right. At the fountain. At seven-o-clock. Good idea."
He grins. "You're meeting somebody here right now, too, aren't you?"
Her giggling gives him the answer.
Now smiling wide, Lee holds up his phone he has in his hand and says, "But I just now got a call and found out they'll be late. Or might not be coming at all."
She gives him an exaggerated frown and then looks up again, this time past the statue at all the heavy gray clouds gathering above. "Look at that sky."
"Yeah," he says. "I'm surprised they didn't cancel the whole thing."
"Whatever. Nothing like a little lightning with the bonfire."
"That's the spirit," says a new voice behind her.
She turns to find Karl standing by them and immediately jumps to her feet with excitement. Somehow she forgot all about him for a moment.
"Helo!" she says, drawing his name out in an excited growl as she hugs him. "It's great to see you."
"Look at your hair!" he says with surprise at how different she looks, pulling at a lock of it as he pulls away. "Has it really been that long since I've seen you?"
Lee has now stood up to join them, and Karl finally looks over at him questioningly.
"Right. Um..." Kara gestures toward him a little awkwardly. "Karl, this is Lee."
He raises an eyebrow. "Lee...As in Captain Adama?"
"Not anymore," Lee answers, smiling and holding a hand out.
"Good to meet you, man," Karl says, shaking his hand. As Kara looks on, she has to grin at how well he hides his surprise. "Leave it to Starbuck to neglect to mention I'd get to today."
Lee starts looking even more awkward and says, "Oh, well...It was kind of a last-minute—"
"We just ran into each other," Kara says, her words overlapping his last ones and cutting him off.
Karl just looks at them with some confusion for a silent moment and then says, "Okay."
"I thought you were bringing someone with you," Kara says.
"Yeah, she's in line for drinks."
"Which is where we should be," she says, her expression brightening as she turns and the others start following her.
"You don't waste any time, do you?" Lee says with a laugh, and then he and Karl exchange an understanding grin of amusement.
When they reach the nearest stand selling drinks, Karl introduces them to his new girlfriend, a short girl with brown hair in a smooth ponytail named Rhea. She flashes her and Lee a blindlingly earnest and sweet smile that makes Kara unable to help but not like her right away. Then she and Karl go to wait at a table while Lee and Kara get in line.
They end up waiting behind three obnoxiously loud guys who are all wearing Caprica Buccaneers shirts and caps and don't stop complaining the whole time they're in hearing range of their conversation.
"This is frakking bullshit. It's not even raining yet and that dumbass closes it right after we've been in line for twenty frakking minutes."
"Shoulda just punched the frakker in the face. Frakking hell, if there weren't cops all over the place here..."
As they keep cursing loudly about it and only seem to keep getting more pissed, Kara and Lee finally look at each other like they're trying hard not to laugh. Then when the first of them gets to the front, he only starts holding up the line by arguing with the vendor.
"Look, lady, I bought these tickets and now they aren't letting anyone on the rides, so can't you—?"
"I'm sorry," says the woman he's yelling at for the third time, "but you can't buy anything here with tickets. You'll have to get a refund for them and come back."
"Fine, you know what? Frak you, okay? I got—"
"Excuse me," Lee interrupts, forcefully pushing him aside to come forward and then giving the woman an apologetic smile as he starts to order.
The man looks lividly at him and moves to get back in his way, but Kara casually moves beside Lee to block him, looking up at him a second to give him her most threatening smile and wink. He finally gives up and storms off with his friends.
When they rejoin Karl and Rhea, Kara immediately says, "I hope you guys didn't buy any tickets. Word on the street is they've closed the rides, apparently."
Lee starts laughing and then he and Kara both proceed to crack up uncontrollably for a moment as the others just look confused, missing what's so funny. Then Karl takes a long string of eight tickets out of his pocket to show them, and they all laugh.
He looks to the side at Rhea and asks, "How'd you like a teddy bear?"
Lee and Kara stand by watching and drinking from their bottles of cheap Tauron brew while Karl and Rhea both try shooting at targets with toy guns to win a prize.
"So you really don't have any kind of a plan?" Kara asks him. "Isn't there anything you want to do?"
"Sure, I have ideas," Lee says. "I'm thinking I'll go back to school. Study law, maybe. That's something I always considered."
"Law?" she says. "Well, okay. Now I guess I can understand why you're so nervous about coming clean with your dad about this."
He chuckles. "Shut up."
Lee stays silent in thought for a while as she takes a cigar out of her pocket and lights it. She takes one puff and then passes it to him.
"You know what I used to think I'd like to do?" he says before putting it in his mouth. "As just a sort of crazy fantasy?"
"What?"
"I thought it would be nice to just open up a bar."
She smiles. "A bar?"
"Yeah, on a beach. Someplace where it's warm year round. I hate winters here."
Kara shrugs and says, "So do it. Why not?"
He shakes his head a little, seeming somehow disturbed. "Do it..."
"Yeah. For gods' sakes, Lee, you should have something you've always wanted but would never go after because of your enormous sense of responsibility."
He takes a long swig from his bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and finally replies in a pensive tone. "Yeah. That's what I've been thinking. It's funny. I think sometimes, maybe living the way you think you should be living for other people...like when I felt like I needed to set a good example for Zak...Sometimes it's not responsible. Being self-interested and just going for what you want isn't necessarily unkind. It's...honest. You know?"
She looks at him and very slowly smiles wide. "Okay, so which is it then? Are you a nice guy today or aren't you?"
Lee looks at her seriously a moment, and then his face just cracks into a slightly nervous-looking smile like he's been caught off guard.
Before he can respond they hear Karl saying to them, "Am I good or what?" They finally look away from each other to see him holding a giant stuffed seal he just won.
"You're a dork," Kara says in a flat tone, making Rhea snort with laughter.
It is getting very dark by the time they find a table to sit at near where the band is playing next to a huge bonfire.
"Aw, that sucks," Karl says after they see a little girl in the distance lose hold of her balloon and start crying as it floats away.
"She's still probably having ten times more fun than we are," Rhea says, the stuffed animal now held in her lap. "Remember what a big deal Mars Day was when you were a kid?"
"And we had no idea it's a holiday honoring the god of war," Kara says.
"It's a celebration of peace time," Lee says. "And our past victories that have brought us here. Come on, you should know that," he adds teasingly, nudging her in the side.
"I know, I'm just saying," she says. "So does that mean it would be kind of morbid to celebrate it if we were at war right now?"
"Well, I imagine we'd acknowledge it pretty differently. That's what it was like during the Cylon War."
"Let's just be grateful we're not at war and leave it at that," Karl says.
Kara laughs. "Like there's any threat of that happening. As long as there's no inter-Colonial conflict..."
"As long as?" Lee echoes with a look of disbelief. "What, you think there isn't any? Don't you pay any attention to politics? The news?"
She shrugs. "No."
"I hardly see it getting violent any time soon," Karl admits.
"Sure, but to say there's nothing wrong?" Lee says. "I mean, the economic situation on Gemenon right now? On Aerilon? When we depend on the poorer Colonies like them for most of our resources? It's—"
"Okay, okay," Kara says, giggling and covering her hand over Lee's mouth to make him stop as she looks at Karl. "Trust me, you do not want to get him started."
Lee just hits her hand away and starts laughing with her. Kara just barely registers it the brief moment Karl looks at the two of them a little strangely, and then she draws both her arms closely back into her own personal space, hunching over the table and picking up her drink.
"Hey, you never know," Karl says in a light tone. "Nobody knows exactly what happened to the Cylons. They could just show up in the sky again some day."
Kara laughs loudly. "Yeah, right! They'll just get bored and decide to come frak us up some more. And we'll be out in our birds getting to shoot at toasters instead of just doing CAPs all day." She pauses to laugh even more with a sudden realization and then says, "Oh my gods...That would be frakking awesome."
The others all crack up laughing.
"You would think that sounds like fun," Karl says.
Lee shakes his head. "Yeah, just don't ever say anything like that around the old man."
"Oh, don't worry, I know," she says. "He'll get that deadly serious look on his face like he does and plunge into telling all these scary war stories."
"How it took him years before he stopped having bad dreams about that heavy, mechanical sound the Centurions made—"
"—when they walked," she finishes along with him, going into giggles again.
Karl asks Rhea if she wants to go dance for a while, and as they stand up to go join the large gathering of people dancing by the fire he holds his seal prize out to Kara.
She raises her brow and says, "No frakking way am I carrying that thing around."
Lee takes it and sets it on the table. "But you can watch it while they dance and I go get another drink."
Kara rolls her eyes, turning around to sit with her back against the table as they all leave.
It ends up taking Lee over twenty minutes to get through the line again. When he finally gets back to the bench table where they were, he finds Kara still alone and the stuffed seal gone.
"I bring offerings," he says, holding up the four bottles he bought.
"I see," she says. "Took you long enough."
He gestures toward the bare tabletop. "Did you let it run away?"
"Seals can't run."
He shakes his head with mild annoyance as he comes forward and sets all the drinks down.
"They just left," she explains. "Karl had to take that sweet thing home."
"She didn't say much, did she?" he says as he sits down next to her.
"Well, Helo's like you. He likes them nice. Easy to get along with. The quieter the better."
"See, now you're making me not like him as much somehow," he says, grinning. "A perfectly friendly guy. How do you do that?"
She laughs and says, "I'm kidding." Then she turns around to take one of the bottles and opens it as she says, "Oh well. I guess we'll just have to drink these all by ourselves. Unless you've heard something from your friends again."
"Nope. They don't seem to be coming."
She takes a long drink and then stares away at the fire-lit dancers nearby. "Guess it's just you and me then."
"Yep," Lee says quietly. He looks at all the drinks and says, "And we better finish these fast."
"Why?"
"Because I just saw some lightning. And we still haven't danced."
She slowly smiles, taking the challenge, and then grabs her drink to start chugging. As they each try to finish their two bottles quickly, they keep laughing in between drinks because this seems like such a stupid idea. Then they finally finish and slam their second empty bottles back down on the table at nearly the exact same time, and he immediately stands up and offers her his hand. "Shall we?"
When they join the dance, it quickly becomes hard for them not to keep laughing because they're both now just tipsy enough that it's hard for their feet to keep up with everyone else. Every time one of them switches to a new partner and starts spinning around it makes them so dizzy and disoriented they almost don't make it to the next one at the right time. They've just made it back to each other and sloppily grasped hands again when someone trying to pass right through the area where everyone is dancing knocks right into Kara and pushes her over onto the ground.
"Hey!" she hears Lee say as she sits back up and sees the back of the person who ran into her as he just keeps going with no apology, followed by two friends. It's the Buccaneers fans again. Great.
She jumps back onto her feet and grabs the guy's shoulder to stop him and make him face her. "What's your frakking problem?"
They all stop and look at her, only then recognizing her and Lee.
"Not you two assholes again," says the one who pushed her over.
"That's right," she says, threateningly coming very close to him.
"Lay the frak off," he says, pushing against her chest so roughly she falls back against Lee, who she didn't even realize had come up that close behind her. Then she springs right back forward and punches him hard across the face.
There are many gasps and even a few cheers from the surrounding crowd of people who are now all watching them. All three of the guys are now looking at Kara furiously, and she just stands her ground as they start inching back toward her like she's ready to take all three of them.
"Uh, Kara?" says Lee, who has only now noticed the police officer nearby whose attention they've definitely caught. "Let's go."
She is still so angry he has to grab her around the chest to stop her from going back at them again.
"And frak the C-Bucs!" she yells at them as he starts to drag her away. Then she finally also notices the cop and mutters after reacting with a thrilled kind of giggle, "Oh shit..."
Lee is now smiling too as he grabs her hand and they run off quickly, weaving their way through gaps between the tight crowds and finally taking refuge behind a tent.
"Thanks," Kara says, catching her breath. "Last thing I need is to get arrested again right before I have to report back to my battlestar."
He looks at her with a raised brow. "Again?" he asks.
Right then they feel the first rain drops and they both look up at the dark sky.
"Well, crap," Kara says with a careless grin.
"Let's get out of here," Lee says, and without any verbal agreement to they start running off together in the right direction to leave the park and get to his apartment.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:11 am (UTC)The "Teller" thing is going to come up again in a sort of funny way so I'm glad that seems to be sticking in everyone's memories.
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Date: 2009-04-02 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 08:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 09:21 am (UTC)The mood between them in the park is so perfect. Just enough tension and... anticipation. Possibility.
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Date: 2009-04-02 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:34 pm (UTC)Thanks, glad you're enjoying it. <3
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Date: 2009-04-02 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-03 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-03 11:49 pm (UTC)cant wait for you to finish it
so fabulouso
no subject
Date: 2009-04-04 05:29 am (UTC)The dialogue and little details of their lives (and Zak) are fantastic. Everything feels so natural and right--it's almost hard to believe this wasn't the show I watched. :}
(Edited cause I was too impressed to use verb tenses correctly. ;})
no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 04:25 am (UTC)