Title: Birthday Blues
Author: Canis
Date: 03.28.06
Rating: G (K)
Warnings: I wrote it... that should be enough warning... T-T
Spoilers: up to 2.10, just to be safe
Pairing: Lee/Kara most likely
Disclaimers: Standard disclaimers apply.
Summary: It's his birthday.
Author's Note: Because I was bored in expos.
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He is twenty nine today.
It's his first birthday as captain. It's his first birthday as CAG. It's his first birthday on board the Galactica.
No one says anything.
Had it been a year ago, he would have been onboard the Atlantia. He would have been with friends whom he had made over three years of serving on the same ship together. He would have been clapped on the back and been wished happy birthday. He would have been told he was a big boy now. He would receive gifts, many trinkets and then some. He would have had a party thrown for him that lasted late into the night. His shipmates would party, make sure the birthday boy got well and truly drunk before getting drunk themselves, and then they would party some more. Long into the night they would pass out on the floor of the rec room. Then he would get up even later into the night and drag his fellow shipmates to quarters.
But his shipmates were gone now, along with the rest of the Atlantia. The only people left in the world who might remember what day it was were his father and Kara.
He hasn't seen his father all day. He's had to fly CAP, and then work furiously on the backlog of paperwork, and then attend a meeting with the president before flying out in a Viper to patrol for the second time that day. It's the ritual stuff. To them, nothing is special about today except for the fact they managed to survive another day.
He misses his mother. He misses Zak.
In the past, every year there would be a special ritual on every single birthday of his. Zak would be the first one in his room - jumping up and down on his bed when they were younger and tackling and squishing him in his sleep when they were older - to wake him up and wish him a happy birthday.
By the time Zak finally managed to get his brother awake and drag him out of bed (by the hand and down the hall while Lee was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, now that he remembered), a special birthday breakfast would be prepared on the table. With bacon and sage sausage and perfectly circular eggs and golden french toast, and of course Mom's Sticky Cinnamon Bun that she made only for special occasions. Mom never made anything less than a picture perfect meal. After breakfast she would bring out a big blueberry muffin, with a blue candle (she always remembered blue was his favorite color) stuck onto it for him to blow out. And that would be breakfast. Later at dinner there would be another feast (the menu changed every year), and at the end there would be a cake, baked by none other than by Mrs. Adama herself.
But there would be no Mom this year. No Zak.
Those days were long gone now.
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Lee sighed as he prepared his Viper for landing. It was the end of the shift, and the end to another day full of mundane work in his life now. He had had to pull a second shift because Constanza had developed some kind of stomach flu the day before.
It wasn't that he minded covering for his pilots.
It was just that he felt slightly disappointed.
Maybe he was being petty, but he couldn't help feeling a bit hurt.
'Get over yourself, Lee. It's only a birthday,' he muttered to himself as he landed his Viper onto the deck. It wasn't until he was out of the cockpit and down the ladder that he saw Starbuck, who had obviously been waiting for him. A small burst of happiness erupted inside him, warming him up after the ever-freezing flying through space. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but he still felt touched that Kara had been waiting for him to come back from his shift.
"Hey," he greeted. Kara grinned.
"Hey, yourself. You took a bit longer on CAP than usual," she said as they began to trek across the hangar bay together.
"I know, I know."
"Anything different about today? Besides the obvious."
Lee looked at her.
Did she...?
"That nugget you took out today with you is about the greenest one I ever saw."
"...Nothing out of the ordinary."
Okay, maybe not.
"So, what are you going to do now?" Kara asked.
"Shower first, grab some clothes, then eat something before going to wade my way through some paperwork I guess," he answered, quickly masking the slight pang of disappointment he felt.
"You seem tired," she remarked.
"I am tired."
I'm also twenty nine today. But you don't need to know that.
"Right then. Well, see you later," she waved. He nodded back and continued his way to the showers.
He quickly stripped his clothes off when he reached the stalls and chucked them onto the counter on one wall. He figured he should at least be decent enough to throw it in a hamper, but it was laundry day tomorrow anyway, and they would come to take the towels in the showers for wash. They could just pick up the flight suit on their way.
He felt marginally better when he felt the lukewarm spray of the spigot hit his bare body. He made a point of taking a shower after every grueling shift he had, no matter how exhausted he was. It just didn't seem right to hit the sack before cleaning himself up, if only a bit (Lords, what he wouldn't give for a bath right now...). Call it the neatfreak in him, but at least it was far better than jumping into unmade beds reeking of sweat every night.
He stepped out of the showers and wrapped a towel around his waist. He was about to leave when he nearly crashed into his friend.
"Kara?"
"Oh, hey! I was just gonna drop these off so you won't have to run to lockers and back again," she said, handing him a bundle of clothes.
"New tanks?" he asked. They were crisp, fresh out of the laundry. In fact, it was still warm. Kara shrugged.
"They took all our other ones for laundry today," she explained.
"I thought that was tomorrow-," Lee frowned, thinking of the tanks he had shucked earlier on. He wasn't about to go and fetch them again though. Let someone else throw them in the hamper. Gods knew he'd done so for lazy nuggets countless times.
All right, so maybe he did that because he didn't like messy. The point was, he still picked up after others.
"Yeah, well, apparently they didn't think so."
"Kara, these are warm."
"I stole them from the laundry room. You of all people wouldn't want to wear dirty and cold underwear right out of the shower, do you?"
He laughed at that.
"How considerate of you."
"I do try to remember."
Lee smirked and pulled on the regulation underwear she had brought over with the clothes. After months of living together in what was the human equivalent of sardine cans, he was used to seeing her naked, and vice versa. Dressing in front of the other was no problem.
"So what's with the sudden bout of kindness?" he asked after his head popped out of the neck hole of the darker top tank.
"Just thought I'd do something for you," she answered simply. He felt a swell of hope.
Maybe she remembers...
"And since I was already stealing back my underwear, I figured I might as well grab something for you. Do you know how hard it is to find small sized underwear after laundry day?"
...Or maybe she doesn't.
He sighed inwardly.
'It's only a birthday, Lee... Only a birthday...'
"Anyway. You're going to mess hall now, right?"
"Yeah."
"Mind if I tag along?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You haven't eaten yet?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Wasn't hungry."
"Sure, Kara," he said. She socked him on the arm. He stuck out his tongue before running away, with a certain Kara Thrace hot on his tail.
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They were halfway down the corridors when Kara suddenly halted. Lee looked over his shoulders to see what was wrong, but she appeared to be just fine.
"What is it?" he asked, jogging back (but keeping an arm's length away in case it was a trick to catch him and beat him).
"I forgot something in the quarters."
"Oh. What did you forget?"
She gave him The Look. He held up his hands. When a girl - especially Kara - gave him The Look, it usually meant he didn't want to know whatever it was the girl was talking about (or not talking about, in this case).
"Ugh. Come with me?" She asked. It was more a demand than a request. Lee raised his eyebrows.
"Why?" he asked warily.
"Because I said so? Come on. You don't want to let a poor, defenseless little girl walk around such a big ship so late into the night, do you? Oh no, Lee Adama would never do that," she taunted, batting her eyelashes. Lee rolled his eyes and reached over to lightly punch her in the arm.
"Come on, let's go get whatever you forgot. Then this wretch here shall escort Your 'defenseless' Highness to the mess hall and back," he said, stooping in a ridiculous bow that was depicted only in picture books and romance novels. Both long gone from their lives now. Kara giggled.
"How gallant of you, sir knight," she cooed. Lee snorted, and that set them both off laughing. Passersby stopped to shoot them strange looks before continuing on their merry ways.
"Lords, Kara, I never thought of you as the darling princess type."
"Yeah, well you were never exactly the knight in shining armor either. What's with the sudden Caprican romance gabble?"
"You were acting like a royal pain in the ass... It was only fitting."
Punch.
"Ow!"
"You deserved that, flyboy."
"Did not."
"Did too."
"Did not."
"Lee, how old were you again?"
"Twenty-ei..." he began to answer immediately, then stopped.
"Twenty nine," he answered, a little belatedly. Kara noticed. She raised her eyebrow. He shrugged. If she didn't remember, it was fine with him. All right, maybe not fine. But he could understand. Because Lee Adama was just the basic, normal, caring guy, no matter what day it was and how old he is.
Yeah, right.
"What?" Kara asked. Lee shrugged again.
"Nothing."
"Whatever," she replied. He managed a sheepish duck of his head as he walked past her and pulled open the hatch to the quarters first.
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"SURPRISE!"
The senior officers' quarters was packed. Members from all over the ship were there, from pilots to CIC officers to knuckledraggers from the deck gang...
"Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear Apollo, Happy Birthday to you."
...and half of them couldn't sing for life.
Callt stepped forward with a platter on her hands. On the platter was a cake - nothing immensely eyecatching and rather simple, but it was cake, something that was harder to come across than the winning lottery number - with the words 'Happy Birthday, Lee' written on it in blue icing. On the cake were twenty nine blue candles.
"Make a wish," Kara said softly as she placed a hand on an awestruck Lee's back. Lee blinked. He looked at Kara, looked at the cake, looked around the room at the people who had gathered, and back at the cake.
I wish we find home again... or at least can keep what part of home we still have with us.
He blew the candles out in one breath. The guests in the room gave a cheer, and Cally was quickly ushered over to a table where she could begin cutting the cake in pieces for those gathered.
"We would have done the whole 'yell surprise when light is on' trick, but we couldn't turn the lights out. And I thought a blueberry muffin would have been more fitting, except I don't think any of us can hold a candle to your mom's cooking," Kara said semi apologetically.
"It's fine. It's... great," Lee said, with a small, shy smile. He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly.
That was all the time he had to do, though, for the next instant he was pulled by his friend's side into the mass of people insisting that he cut the cake himself.
It was a while later when the quarters were finally emptied out. Cally had dragged Jammer into taking the trash out with her, the rest of the deck crew had gone back to their racks, Dualla to take some cake back to CIC for the Commander and his XO, and all other officers had decided to head down to the rec room to watch the drinking match between Hot Dog and Kat (the former had made the mistake of saying Kat couldn't hold her liquor if her life depended on it... Kat, being Kat, had accepted the challenge heatedly). Lee and Kara were left behind straightening things out.
They worked in companionable silence for a while, picking up the scraps of "confetti" - or shredded pieces of old paperwork - and tossing them into the trash bag, hanging up the Happy Birthday Banner on the outside frame of Lee's bunk (Kara's idea) and putting the two collapsible tables in the corner of the room they had come from. They sat down on the floor across from their bunks, side by side and just smiling from the bit of distraction they had had from the harsher reality of their world.
"...Thought you'd forgot," Lee said quietly, looking up at the banner under his mattress. Kara turned her head to look at him, her eyebrow raised.
"I may be getting old, Adama, but I'm not that old," she joked. Lee smiled and shrugged.
"No, really. Even Dad didn't say anything. I didn't remind him. I kind of felt bad to do that in front of the whole CIC. Plus he has enough things to keep himself occupied."
"Hey, you could afford to get a little selfish, you know. It's your birthday, after all. Will continue to be for the next fourteen minutes," Kara said. She smirked.
"Anyway, I still have to give you your birthday gift," Kara said mischievously.
"But the party..."
"Everyone pitched into that. It was only my idea to actually pull it off."
Lee looked rather bashful.
"You've already done enough, Kara."
"Just as much. Here."
The box she handed him wasn't all that big, hardly the size of his palm. It was, however, neatly wrapped with blue tissue paper, quite the extravagance given the circumstances nowadays. He carefully undid the tape holding the wrap together before finally opening the lid of the box.
A small lighter lay there, the light overhead reflecting and winking off its smooth surface innocently. He looked at Kara, one eyebrow raised in question.
"Kara...?"
"I saw you tossing back that lighter to the old man. I asked about it, a long time ago. He kind of implied it was some sort of lucky charm... I figured this might do the same trick for you. Or... I hope it does, at least. Though we're not married, so I don't know how much that takes it out of the magic."
"..."
He quietly stared at the lighter on the palm of his hand. On one stainless steel side of the lighter was engraved the insignia of a Viper pilot. On the other side was, in quite simple lettering, the name 'Apollo.'
"How in the world did you manage to get something like this?" Lee asked, astonished.
"Hey, I may not be the CAG, but I can still pull a few strings of my own," Kara said with a mock frown. Lee rolled his eyes, then smiled warmly.
"Thanks, Kara," he said quietly, pocketing the lighter. Kara smiled and leaned over to lightly kiss his cheek.
"Happy Birthday, Lee."
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Fin