"Are we almost done with this?" Starbuck asked, clicking her tongue as she watched Apollo working diligently underneath her Viper.
"You bored, Lt?"
"A little bit, yeah."
"I don't care."
"You don't care? But Captain Adama, sir. All good CAGs are supposed to be attuned to their pilot's feelings." She joked at him.
There was something about watching him like that, focused so intently on the amazingly complex piece of machinery above him, moving his hands through the inner-workings with such admiration and care, that made her shiver in her place on the floor of the maintenance bay.
"It's possible to be attuned to someone's feelings without actually caring about what they feel." He answered absently.
"Leeeeeee. I'm BORED."
"Kara! For frak's sake, this is your viper I'm working on!"
"I never asked you to work on it." She pouted.
"Yeah, but you only let four people touch your ship. And since Tyrol is busy, and Cally is still in the brig and you're too lazy and self-important to do it right now, that just leaves me." He craned his neck to look up at her as she stuck out her tongue.
"You could just not fix it. Then maybe it would explode with me in it. Then you wouldn't have to put up with me being an insubordinate brat anymore."
"True. But it also might explode here on the deck, hurting other people who haven't done anything to deserve it, and that just wouldn't be right."
"And you're all about doing what's right, aren't you, Adama?" She asked breathily.
She asked it so breathily in fact that he had to stop for a moment and harness a certain emotion before he could make his hands grip the tool in them again without shaking. "Yes. I am."
"Are we almost done with this?" She asked again.
"Kara, you just asked me that ten seconds ago. The answer is no. We are not anywhere near close to done." He paused to work the pliers around a particularly stubborn bolt. "But I suppose you could leave, if there is somewhere else you would rather be."
"No." She answered honestly. If you're not there, there really isn't anyplace else I would rather be. "Except…..there is a marathoncard game going on in the rec room right now."
"Well, why don't you go? Leave me the hell alone?" Please don't leave, please don't leave, please don't leave.
"Actually I was thinking about going back to the bunk room. Everybody is at the game. It's really quiet in there."
He got out from under the plane and walked over to the table that held the torch that he had been looking for. "Why don't you go back there, then. Get some sleep?"
She paused before answering. "Don't think I'd sleep. Not actually all that tired. Kind of wired actually, like I've been jumping out of my skin all day. Sleep wouldn't help with that." She whispered huskily.
He closed his eyes, his back still turned to her, trying to harness that certain emotion again that kept popping up. When he thought he finally had, he turned back to her.
"Any suggestions about what I could do to maybe make some of that go away?" She asked feigning innocence. She wasn't innocent though, she knew exactly what she was doing.
Her words made him grip the torch so tightly that a burst of pressurized flame came out.
"Frak!" He shouted as he dropped the torch to the ground.
"Careful, Captain." She laughed as she knelt down at the same time as him, picking up the offending item. "You don't watch it, one of these days you're gonna cause this whole ship to go up in flames."
He gulped as he knelt in front of her, looking her square in the eyes.
She cast her gaze down at the torch as she turned it over in her, he imagined, quite talented fingers. "You know anything about spontaneous combustion, Captain?" She whispered.
He slowly shook his head.
"I read about it a little in high school. It's a fascinating phenomenon." She spoke as if she was a child, willing him to understand that she was talking about more than science. "Totally misunderstood, though. Most people think it's about heat. But it's not. It can happen in some of the coldest places."
He shivered as he realized how cool the metal maintenance bay could get.
"And it is about heat to a certain extent. But not external heat… internal heat. Not the kind of heat that comes from somewhere else, but from inside the human body." She noticed him close his eyes as she struggled within herself to continue. Good. Maybe this is affecting him as much as me. Despite the inner struggle she continued in an even voice. "The human body can radiate such heat. You know that heat that comes off the skin? Sometimes you can feel it if you stand too close to a person."
He nodded.
"Sometimes it doesn't get out. Sometimes it stays inside, cooking every single part of you, dying to get out. The human body can't live like that. You know what I mean?"
He willed himself to find the breath to answer her as she looked straight at him. "Yeah." He finally managed to whisper.
"But there are many factors that play a part in spontaneous combustion. Another one is pressure. Too much pressure can be just as dangerous as heat. It just builds, and builds, and builds, filling every part of your body, until sometimes you can't think about anything else. That's not healthy." She looked down at the tool again. "Pressure. Like this torch here. It has fire, sure. But without the pressurization element, it would just be like holding up a match. And there's a reason maintenance crews don't keep matches on stock."
Say something, say something.He thought.Hell, no! Just keep letting her talk.
She continued. "Another cause is emotion. In my school book I read that a lot of these cases happened to people who were incredibly upstanding. But also incredibly repressed. Know anybody like that?"
He felt the edges of his mouth twist up and he saw hers do the same.
"These poor people were fighting so hard to keep a rein on things, keep everything buried, never act on anything…. that they just burnt up." She paused, closing her eyes, hoping that she could just get to the damn point already. "Now that takes dedication." She whispered.
Touch her now. Touch her RIGHT NOW. But he found he couldn't move.
"So you've got these three things. Heat, pressure and emotion. By themselves, they really can be perfectly harmless. But put them all together and inevitably something's gonna burn."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. And here's the funny thing about spontaneous combustion. Once it happens, there's really nothing you can do to stop it. You can't put it out. The flame is too intense. So you just have to let it burn. And that's not safe."
"Very dangerous, in fact. Especially on a ship." He answered back at her.
She looked at him very intently, looked at him the way he always wished she would. "So maybe the best thing would have been to not let it get to that point. Maybe if you had vented some of that heat, relieved some of that pressure, released some of that emotion. It wouldn't have to explode in an all-consuming blaze that left a wake of total destruction. Maybe if you'd taken care of it ahead of time it wouldn't burn everything around it to a cinder. It would just……singe a little bit."
Now that she had made it perfectly clear what she wanted, he found his voice again. "You remember all this from high school?" He smiled slightly.
"Been thinking about it a lot lately, actually."
They bothstood up,and were both quiet.Staring at each other, wishing that they could find it uncomfortable, relieved that they did not.
"So this card game in the rec room, lot of people there?" He asked trying to make it sound off-handed, but failing at itmiserably.
"Everybody. I've never seen the bunk room so quiet."
"Not used to that, the quiet." He breathed. "Don't know that I'd be able to sleep."
She moved toward him a fraction of an inch, the move would have been unnoticeable if he hadn't been looking for it so intently. "No law that says that you have to sleep, Captain."
"Yeah." He whispered. "I guess I could find something else to do."
She looked down as she reached out her hand to put the torch back on the table. "We almost done with this?"
"Yeah." He said as he grabbed the tool from her hand before she could put it down. "I think it'd be safe to move on."
She looked back up. "Good then." She noticed how his hand still lingered on hers. "Better put that up." She nodded to the torch. "You know how the Chief hates it when you leave his stuff lying around." She smiled and turned to walk away.
He watched her leave, silently wondering what an appropriate length of time would be before walking after her.
You know anything about spontaneous combustion, Captain?
Why yes. He certainly did.
-finis
Three fics in less than 36 hours. I think I'm gonna go think about something else for a while.