Series of fics based on prompts from lj user"challengethe" 's Table A, each one of the seven deadly sins, prompts 114-120.
Spoilers for all seasons. Kara-centric, but K/L. Vaguely.
Summary: She was never perfect, and maybe that was just as well.
Sins
---Intemperance
Kara is quite aware that she's not a particularly patient person. She never has been, and it's very likely that she never will be. She's also not forgiving. It's an accepted fact that for all the flaws she freely admits in herself, she suffers imperfections far less gracefully in other people.
Colonel Tigh is no exception. In fact, she thinks that he might have his very own Starbuck rule all to himself. It involves him being the person she despises most in the universe, and vice versa if his petty treatment of her was any indication.
So today she's engaging in her favourite sport of Tigh baiting. It's like bear baiting, only more dangerous. For an old guy, he can be a vicious beast when cornered, but Kara has always lived for danger and biting off more than she can chew.
The players at the triad table are filled with a strange combination of nonchalance and tension. Kara and Tigh glare at each other, barbs flying and mentally circling the other like fighters in a ring. Helo notices but tries to laugh it off, and Boomer is as clueless as ever.
Starbuck leans back in her chair, cocky grin plastered from ear to ear in a way engineered precisely to piss Tigh off. Her comment about his wife is only part of the process, she knows. It's her posture, that just screams insolence and insubordination, that's the clincher in situations like this.
When she rakes in her winnings and crows over the rest of the triad players, she thinks he's calm enough. Pissed, but not raging.
She knows she's wrong when he throws the table over. He's snapped. Part of her wants to leap around in victory, but her fist hits his jaw before she even realises she's moving. The ache in her knuckles and Tigh's sprawled form is the first clue that things might have gone a little awry.
"You have finally gone too far."
He says the words with relish, rolling them around his mouth like a fine wine he's bee saving for that special occasion, and Kara has to grudgingly admit he's won this round.
But he doesn't have to know that. She picks up her cigar, affects her mocking grin once more with a casual, "Gentlemen," and saunters off to the brig.
She makes sure Tigh sees just how she dawdles, but inside she's swearing. Damn her frakking temper, anyway. She'd nearly had him.
Maybe she should work on the patience thing.
---Wrath
She can feel the trigger under her finger no matter where she is; she thinks it's burned into her. Shower. Eat. Nap. Brief. Launch.
Launch 278. Maybe, she can't quite be sure. Three days. 72 straight hours. The seconds tick by, and the cylons come. The hum of her ship around her keeps her awake, that and the stims.
There's no chatter; everyone else just gets down to business, flying, firing, and waiting for the Fleet to get out of here, just for them to do it all again thirty three and a half minutes later.
The cylons swarm around her, scything through space to reap the latest harvest of lives. A scream, abruptly cut off, from a pilot somewhere on Starbuck's six is the latest catch.
On a whim, she switches her helmet mike off. A war-cry bursts from her, primal and raw and liberating, and she can feel her bullets as they rip through metal and false flesh. She's a demon, something sent from Hades to drag these toasters back where they belong.
She doesn't think she's ever been this angry.
The bullets spray, she screams long and loud, and the cylons feel how great is the wrath of Starbuck.
She counts her kills in her head, sadistic glee running through her at the way she imagines each of them spiralling into flame and oblivion.
Five. Seven. Twelve. Fourteen. Eighteen. Twenty one. Twenty five.
"All vipers, report back to Galactica." Dee's voice cuts through the fury. There's a pull to keep going, to ignore the call to retreat and just fly on, visiting destruction on all in her path, but Lee's voice returns a confirmation and he forms up on her wing.
She gives him a sideways glance at him through their canopies. He smiles, gives a thumbs-up, and she knows she can't. Wrath or no wrath, she has someone to keep safe.
She turns her bird around and heads for the coop.
---Pride
The way Adama stares at her, eyes filled with contempt, is nearly enough to make Kara go to pieces. Nearly, but not quite.
"Do your job." His voice could slice granite, and it does a pretty good job on her. She gives up explaining herself and lifts her chin ever so slightly. She'll see this through. It's her mess. One of the many.
"Yes sir."
"And walk out of this cabin… while you still can," he orders, so abrupt and cruel that Kara can't help but feel tears sting her nose.
She walks out of there, her back bent and soul bruised, but she swallows her emotions. She has a job. Once, she failed at it, and it cost a life that was worth so, so much more than her own. She won't do that again.
Adama might hate her, and that might kill her, but it damn sure won't be anyone else who suffers her incompetence.
Her back straightens, she shakes her head a little, and takes a deep breath. She has a job, and she'll do it.
---Lust
She knows he watches her, even if he thinks he's subtle about it. He doesn't seem to know that his gaze has always scorched her skin, and it's no different now he's a husband and she's a wife, both to different people.
Though now she thinks about it, it's never really mattered what was going on in the world around them. There was always something between them, and that scared the crap out of her enough to send her running full tilt. Across a whole galaxy to a man she barely knows.
Now they're both married. To other people. Yet it seems so natural, one day when she feels his gaze blaze over her naked back in the head, to turn and meet his with one just as heated of her own.
The bruises he left on her skin in the boxing ring are faded, but still visible, and his pupils dilate to see his marks on her skin.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law, after all, and there's nothing quite like branding flesh to scream possession to the world. That was her plan with the tattoos she and Sam shared.
Strange, she thinks. Here she is, staring at a man with naked desire writ all over her, and thinking of her husband seems natural. Shouldn't she feel guilty, or ashamed?
But then Lee moves towards her. Stalks her, body coiled and quivering with energy just begging to be released. He touches the skin on her upper arm, above her wing tattoo, and tingles race over her body.
Slowly, almost painfully, she lifts a hand to his cheek. His skin is warm and rough with stubble, and it's the most erotic thing she's ever felt in her life. He presses his face into her palm, and she is lost.
Lee clasps her to him like he'll never let her go again. He fills his hands with her and if she thought his gaze was fire, she was wrong. Her breath is heavy on his skin, buried in his neck and she thinks that guilt and anger and shame can come later. For now, there is only this.
---Greed
Kara has never been one for possessions. Petty trinkets she wouldn't care about in a week. She thinks it might have stemmed from her mother's tendency to buy her things she wanted just to destroy them in front of her.
But there have always been some things she wanted so badly it hurt.
Right now she just wants it over. Here and now.
The colours swirl in and out of each other and her Viper rattles ominously.
Lee yells into her ear, desperation tinging his tone and she wonders what he'd say if she asked her to leave Dee now…
No. He's greedy and wants what he can't have: easy happiness. Dee is easier than her, as harsh as it sounds. Kara knows what she is. She's messy and confusing and moody and painful, and Lee wants more than that.
She shouldn't judge. She was the coward that night on New Caprica, but it doesn't really matter now, does it?
She hits the hard deck, light explodes around her and she thinks maybe this wasn't quite what she wanted, after all.
---Envy
Chief Tyrol helps her out of her shiny new plane, smile almost but not quite genuine. He's not sure about her yet, and he's always hated cylons worse than most, with the exception of his wife. She wonders what Cally will say when she finds out.
Tigh glares at her as she's marched past, her marine guard on high alert. They think she's a cylon and she wants to burst out laughing. If they only knew, but Tigh isn't going to let them find out. He's like a dog when he's cornered, and she knows he's never felt more exposed. As much as they never got along, she won't do that to him.
Sam can't quite look her in the eye, even as he holds her close, pretending not to notice that she doesn't hold him back. He whispers things into her ear, not sweet nothings but rather things that don't mean anything at all. "I'm glad you're home" and other nonsense. He's preoccupied with his own problems, and she can't quite blame him.
She doesn't even remember what the Tory woman was like before, but she reminds Kara now of a bird. Flitting, not quite sure and hopping from place to place, angle to angle. Uncertain and uncomfortable in her new role as undercover cylon.
She ignores them and some part of her is jealous. At least they know what they are. She still has no idea.
---Sloth
Waves crash and seagulls shriek in the background as she breathes in the warm salty air. Kara is lying on a towel on a beach with a bathing suit, sunglasses and wide-brimmed hat. The sun is beating down on her and she thinks that she could be quite happy to stay like this for the rest of time. When was the last time she sunbathed? Had she ever?
A child giggles somewhere to her left and Kara wonders how Kacey is. She would have loved this place. Kara and Julia could have made a sandcastle with her, and buried her in the sand, and taught her to swim.
She can't say she misses the fighting, the constant death, the nearly dying, but she misses people. The Fleet is scattered across the new world, a people adrift and anchorless. It's not that she doesn't know where they are, but it's different. On Galactica, it was a safe bet that she would run into certain people on a daily basis, and then there was the gossip hotline, with in-depth information on every person one could hope for. But now, here on Earth, they are disconnected. She knows the Chief and his family are scarcely 300 clicks from her, hardly a distance to someone billions of light years away from her home, but she hasn't seen them in a year. She vaguely remembers something about Hot Dog and an Earth girl, and she thinks Gaeta is in politics again, and similar insignificant tidbits of lives, but the other thousands of people she'd lived with on Galactica and across the Fleet are mysteries.
"Kara," a voice calls, and she amends that thought. Most people are mysteries. Lee might have been once, but now there is nothing he could hide from her, even if he tried.
"What?" she replies, not even opening her eyes. He sighs exasperatedly and suddenly her hat is whisked away.
"Hey!" she whines half-heartedly, too lazy to move but finally opening her eyes. The glare is almost painful, but she can see his maddening smirk perfectly.
Lee twirls the hat around his finger, lopsided smile not budging an inch at her glare. "You've been out here since morning. Are you ever going to come home?"
She grins and shakes her head. "Not if I can help it. Bring me food."
"Tut tut, Starbuck. You'll get fat."
"Maybe I will. Would you like that, Lee?"
He snorts. "Since when are you so lazy, anyway? I thought you would have been climbing the walls by now, looking for something to kill."
She sits up, wrapping her arms around her legs and fixing him with a challenging look. "You volunteering?"
He laughs the free, booming laugh that he could never quite let out before, and she thinks that there's something about this planet that has been good for both of them.
"Are you coming home for dinner, at least? Dad's cooking, and Sharon and Helo are coming. You want to see the kids, don't you?"
"Maybe," she replies lazily, lying back down and closing her eyes again, stretching out luxuriously on the sand. "If I can actually move by then."
There is silence for a moment and she nearly jumps out of her skin when a hand snakes around her waist beneath the sand and pulls her against a firm body.
"I'll lie here, too, then," Lee explains, smile wide and relaxed, and her heart aches just a little. In a good way.
"You'll get fat, too, Lee."
He rolls his eyes. "Done that already. You're behind me on that one, Kara."
Giving him a playful poke she rests her head on his chest. "You wish. I think I was a tubby kid once."
He just sighs and rubs her arm with his thumb. "I think I could get used to being lazy."
She grins and shuts her eyes, listening to the waves, the birds and Lee's heartbeat under her ears. "Me, too."