One or the Other Emptiness
Everyone thinks his wife is dead. No one says it out loud but Sam can hear it in the pregnant pauses, the comforting hands brushed across his shoulders, the way no one will look him in the eye when her name is spoken.
Sam tries not to think about it. He stays busy, because there's always something to do when you're a guerilla resistance leader. After those first few weeks of searching and asking every colonial that crossed his path if they'd seen Kara Thrace, he stopped saying her name. Now when he has to refer to her, her calls her my wife because she would have hated it and it makes it easier to pretend that it isn't Kara who's gone.
Besides, Kara Thrace was the most violent force of nature he'd ever met. She didn't just disappear without a fight, without a struggle and a mess and a few dead bodies. She sure as hell didn't get taken by the frakking cylons without anyone seeing or hearing a damn thing. Sam can't reconcile her disappearance with what he knows of the woman he married, and he sure as hell can't believe she would die without a frakking show seen for miles around.
As the weeks turn into months with no word, even that buffer of denial wears thin and transparent. He stops referring to her at all, unless someone asks. And though he doesn't ever, ever say it out loud, there's a traitorous voice in his head that tells him he thinks maybe his wife is dead, too.
On the day that marks their first anniversary, Sam takes Tyrol and Jean and they blow up a cylon base. Sam watches the flame blaze and the smoke curl into the sky and he says happy anniversary, babe.
That night he leaves Tyrol with his wife and takes Jean back to his tent, ignores the sympathy that floods her features and touches her until there's nothing but blush and want on her skin and in her eyes. He lays Jean down on his bed on course sheets that once held a woman uncontained and he kisses her, guides himself inside her and buries his face in her neck so he can breathe in the scent of his past. They've been here before, once as teammates and a few times after there was no team left, only a few humans stuck on an irradiated planet with a frak load of machines. This is familiar, though not enough; comforting, but only a little. Jean wraps herself around him, arms and legs and scent and Sam moves, slow and careful like she's the one about to break. He's gentle with her (she's not his wife), touches her everywhere he can reach, touches her until she tenses and sighs.
When Sam comes, he bites back the name on his lips, and he says goodbye.
It feels like a betrayal.
*
The first time he sees her in over a year, she's standing alone next to a Raptor, fist to her mouth and eyes shimmering with tears. She's so frakking alive that he has to remind himself that it doesn't matter, that she's still dead to him in all the ways that matter. He turns to Dee, buries his nose in her hair and breathes her in and refuses to think about all of the things that he has loved that have been blown into broken, dead pieces.
For a while, Lee manages to completely avoid her. Since she seems to spend most of her time in the rec room, drinking, it isn't that difficult. He has a job to do and more pilots than he's used to doing it with, not to mention helping the Commander deal with all of the issues of reintegrating the civilians with the fleet. Then comes to day when she shows up for his morning briefing, hair shorn and standard issue clothing that look like a second skin. For the briefest of moments he allows himself to look at her, can't help noticing the dark circles under her eyes and he feels a flash of concern before he can steel himself against her.
Day after day she sits in the back row, on the aisle with an easy exit path to the hatch. No one ever dares sit in the seat next to her and she's always the first one out when they're finished, a ball of angry, resentful energy that sets his teeth on edge. She vibrates with it, everything about her in perpetual motion even as she sits sprawled in her seat like she doesn't give a frak about any of it. He feels drawn to it, to her, just like always. He hates her for it, hates himself even more for being so frakking weak and pathetic for a woman who is broken and incapable of reciprocating even a fraction of what he's felt for her, love and hate.
Then she goads him into the ring, into her space and just like that, they're in orbit around one another again.
The next morning he wakes up to the alarm, tired and sore and not at all looking forward to the CAP he has to fly in just under two hours. Being stuck in his flight suit with g-forces pressing against his bruises sounds like punishment, and in the hour that passes after he climbs out of bed and kisses Dee, the bone deep ache has only gotten worse.
Kara is already there when he gets to the briefing; same place as always, sprawled and humming with an energy that always, always draws him in. His eyes skip over her out of habit, but he can feel her there, behind him and beside him and inside, too, no matter how hard he tried to scrub her out. He steps to the board, makes a few changes in the rotation that were necessitated by last night's activities. Hot Dog is out for at least his next three shifts and Lee can't decide who he blames more for Costanza's concussion. Starbuck landed the blows, but Hot Dog was stupid enough to challenge her in the first place. Lee avoids thinking about his own stupidity as he steps back to the podium, and when he looks up to begin the morning briefing his eyes land on Kara and she's staring right back.
It catches him off guard—not the first time she's looked at him, but it's the first time in a long while that her gaze isn't challenging or mocking or quickly diverted to the empty space over his shoulder. She's got a strip of tape on the bridge of her nose and florid bruise streaking along her left cheekbone and maybe he should be disgusted with himself at how beautiful he finds her with the evidence of his pain painting her face. But then he sees the corner of her mouth twitch, not even a ghost of a smile but he can read it anyway and he knows that she sees the marks she's left on him, and approves.
He wants her then, as much as ever, and he has to look away so that she won't see. She could always read him, too, even when she refused to acknowledge what she saw.
Lee makes it through the briefing, dismisses his pilots and turns his back to the room so that he doesn't have to watch Kara run from him again. When he turns back around he's expecting the room to be empty, and it's close, one last pilot stepping through the hatch and Kara, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and a look on her face that promises trouble.
Another round in the ring, then, but this time he doesn't want an audience. At least that's what he tells himself, later, the justification he makes for moving to the doorway with her eyes burning into his back. The excuse he allows himself for closing the hatch, then dogging it for good measure. Right then he isn't thinking at all, just concentrating on the heat her attention sparks. Lee ignores the fact that he has a wife and she has a husband and that nothing good can come of this (nothing ever has, nothing ever will), and when he turns he's not surprised to see that she's out of her seat and coming towards him.
She has a smirk on her face, like whatever is about to happen is an extension of the night before, but there's something else as well, something more soft and vulnerable and it makes his heart beat with wild recognition. "Lee, I. . . "
And whatever it is she's about to say, he doesn't want to hear. Everything he wants to hear is written on her face, things she might never say aloud again and he wants to drink it in, wants to make her say things with her hands and her lips but not her voice. Over a year apart, of denial and repression and frakking missing her and he thinks he might explode if he can't let a little of it out. If he can't touch her.
Lee grabs her wrist, rings it with bruises that will match the rest, and pushes her against the wall. He expects her to fight him, push him away at the very least but when she twists her body it isn't to get away. They collide, hip to hip and he feels it jolt through him, aching and shooting with a hundred different kinds of pain. She bucks into him, smiles at the hiss that slips through his teeth like she understands what he needs and maybe needs it too. Then her mouth is on his, hot and hard like her fists and something needy and violent inside of him takes over.
His hands are greedy for her, free of gloves this time and Lee takes advantage, lets go of her wrist to trail fingers up her bare arms, over her throat. His palm finds her cheek and he buries his fingers in the hair behind her ear, tilts her face and tastes her as deeply as she's tasting him. And it's good, eases one ache inside him as it ignites another and soon he doesn't have to try to forget Dee because she's gone, gone with one taste of Kara, one touch of her hands at his waist.
Later, as Lee steps into the confines of his flight suit, he thinks of the punishment that's coming in the next few hours, alone and broken and bruised in his cockpit with only the lingering taste of her to keep his thoughts company.
He knows it's less than what he deserves, but he can't bring himself to care. Not yet.
*
Kara tells Lee she loves him and Lee tells Kara he wants to make his marriage work.
Because they are who they are, they do it in actions instead of words, but the outcome is the same. It's exactly what she expected, maybe just a little sooner than she expected it. There's a part of her that admires him for getting out before he was in too deep; Sam certainly hadn't and now he's paying the price, tangled up in the mess of her. But she's not a frakking martyr so mostly she's just pissed at herself, and him, and it doesn't even frakking matter which him.
The bitch of it is, the mess of her love life isn't even the most frakked up thing in her life. That award goes to her supposed destiny and Kara can't stop thinking about patterns drawn on walls and in streams, about her place at the end of the worlds. She feels trapped, used—like she's coming apart at the seams.
She takes it out on the cylons when they're unlucky enough to jump into their space, and she takes it out on the newest nuggets when there's nothing else. Lee narrows his eyes and hisses at her when she comes in from CAP a little hot, tells her she's being too reckless, even for Starbuck. She knows he's worried about her, thinks that maybe he's just as uncertain about how to navigate this thing between them when they aren't friends or enemies or lovers. The Commander mostly ignores her (not his daughter, anymore) but Kara can tell she's on thin ice, hovering just inside the line that allows her a place in the Colonial Fleet, a bunk on Galactica, access to a Viper.
Kara really only cares about the last one.
After she ignores an order to retreat so she can take out one last Raider, Lee pulls her aside to find out what's going on. She doesn't give, makes a crack about her balls just being bigger than his, and he sighs, disappointment pulling at his face as he grounds her.
Tigh grants her twenty-four hours leave, tells her to get her head on straight in a gruff but kind voice. Kara knows exactly when Tigh changed from nemesis to sort-of-friend, but she doesn't like to think about it and definitely doesn't want to frakking talk about it. She doesn't bother with civie clothes, just rakes a hand through her hair and gets herself added to the flight list on a Raptor headed toward Sam. When she gets to his room, he answers on the first knock. His surprise at seeing her flashes across his face, but when she pushes him back onto his small bed and starts stripping off both their clothes with quick, efficient movements, he doesn't protest.
Sam is solid and warm beneath her, big hands that know her body almost as well as she does and it isn't long until she's sinking down over him, pulling his palms to her breasts and closing her eyes. He groans, squeezes her flesh and rocks up into her like this means something.
She's pretty sure he's been frakking someone else and that might bother her if she didn't know he'd stop the second she asked him. But she won't, because that would mean giving him something she can't, a promise or a commitment that goes beyond the one they already share. Kara's given as much of herself as she can handle, more, really, which is why she's in this frakking mess of love and hate and unhappiness.
Kara knows she can manage, compartmentalize and ignore the things she doesn't want to think about, doesn't want to feel in any given moment. She's used to this mire (feels like home), but she can see the toll it's taking on everyone around her. Sam is quieter, more resigned and the quick easy smiles that made her fall in love with him aren't so quick anymore, aren't so easy. At least he'll still touch her which is more than she can say for Lee, who looks at her with a mixture of regret and pity when he even bothers to look at her at all.
That leaves Kara mostly alone, and she tells herself that's the way she likes it. The way it should be. Nobody but herself to disappoint.
It's too much thinking when she came here to frak away her thoughts so Kara shuts of her head, slides her hands up Sam's chest and shoulders until she can touch her mouth to his. He kisses back, cups the nape of her neck to draw her even closer and instinctually, she pulls away. She thinks she sees hurt, or maybe anger, flash across his face and then he's gripping her hips so hard she has to bite her lip to keep her moan inside.
When they're finished, skin soaked with sweat in spite of the chill between them, Kara climbs out of his bed and into her clothes as fast as she climbed out of them and for once, Sam doesn't ask her to stay.
Her trip back to Galactica is filled with silence, with thoughts of a hot shower and maybe a trip to the bags to work off the rest of the energy that buzzes through her, keeping her awake at night. When she moves down the ramp, Lee is there talking to Chief and he glances up at her, eyes catching hers and following her across the hangar even as he continues to speak. Tyrol is looking at her too, the lines around his mouth and eyes a tense condemnation and Kara can't figure out why until she remembers that he and Sam were friends. Maybe they still are.
She can tell the exact moment when Lee must realize where she's been because the stick up his ass works its way up his spine and the ridge of his jaw goes hard. He looks away from her then, but Kara catches the shift in his face before he can hide it, the way he looks like his heart is breaking and she feels a mixture of guilt and shame bubble into a sour lump in her throat. Stupid, frakking stupid, because he didn't want her when it came right down to it and she thinks she shouldn't blame him but she does. He chose his wife, and it was the smart choice, the Lee choice, but he still thinks she belongs to him somehow.
She turns her back on him, makes her way back to her locker and the showers, and refuses to think about how she got to a place where every move she makes is a betrayal of someone.
Herself, most of all.
********
Title from Boy on the Step by Stanley Plumly.