All the Inches
Author's Note: This is a series of one-sentence ficlets inspired by the community on LiveJournal. It isn't an official entry in that community at all, but just a fun little project that I thought might boost my fiction-writing creativity (and it really did, so I suggest trying it!). Each sentence is based off of one of 50 words, and each features the pairing of Kara Thrace/ Lee Adama, and none are meant to affect another (each might follow a seperate storyline). Anyways, enough explanation-- on with the stories!
WARNING: Some minor spoilers through the end of Season 2.5, "Lay Down Your Burdens Pt. 2"
Disclaimer: All rights to BSG, of course, belong to Ron Moore, the Scifi Channel, et al. I am only using characters and events for personal entertainment.
Comfort
There is nothing behind them as they fall back onto his bunk; a hard mattress and a copy of the day's flight plan, and it is all nothing as she sighs in his ear.
Kiss
Lee knew from the first day of their acquaintance (when Kara Thrace proved she could blow a kiss and flip the bird simultaneously) that their love would be the worst thing to ever happen to him.
Soft
There isn't a soft inch on her body except for her neck, and Lee only knows because his hand is keeping her from bleeding out.
Pain
Kara wishes she were a Cylon, and then punishes herself for hours in the gym for thinking so, but it won't make her stop wishing for all her pain to be impossible.
Potatoes
"I liked the French Fries," she said to him (he liked the way she crossed her arms), "but I otherwise never believed in New Caprica."
Rain
She hated him, then, because sometimes a little rain must fall (it was an uncommonly stormy season in the first year of New Caprica).
Chocolate
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Commanders are supposed to trade," she said, eyeing the bar of chocolate, but shut up when she saw him stow it behind his back without a smile.
Happiness
He told her once that he didn't believe in happiness, because it was too extreme, ideological and dangerous in its connotations, and that he preferred contentment, such as it was—she stared at him for a while before slowly grinning over her tumbler.
Telephone
She told him that he was obsolete, like those telephones with the cords attached to the walls, and he told her to cool off by training up the fighter pilots.
Ears
"Do you think they hear us?" he asked drunkenly into the dark, while she lay on top of him, murmuring, "do you think they listen to all of it?" but she stopped his words with her mouth.
Name
After the first time they were together, they stopped referring to Zach beyond the fact that he was Lee's brother; they felt it was an improvement in all aspects of their frakked up familial relationships.
Sensual
He didn't feel much of anything during that year, and it wasn't just the dreary broken promise of New Caprica's fog that made him feel like half of himself.
Death
Kara had never really considered the full import of it (the end) until she watched Lee Adama be cut down right before her eyes; what happened next was entirely her fault.
Sex
He broke something inside of her the day he turned her away and left her to think her dark memories of Zach and of Anders.
Touch
His worst day, without question, was after he was restored to life, and yet felt utterly and irreproachably disconnected, even from Kara.
Weakness
When she grabbed Anders, ran her hands up and over his arms, and met his eager gaze with her own, she didn't have to look at Lee to know that she had hit him where it hurt, and no matter how many punches she had landed in their gym spars, she knew it was the first time she had done so.
Tears
Their hands gripped the other tightly, until they could not tell whose tears made their fingers slide together.
Speed
She ignored his clipped, "Then that's how it'll be," because she didn't care that they were competing against each other so hard that it didn't make sense for two people together.
Wind
Kara shouted (I love you) and smiled and reached for Lee, but she was carried away from him as New Caprica was finally blown away.
Freedom
Sometimes Kara wondered if it would have been a fair trade (never having been an officer, never having watched Zach fall, never having known Lee Adama).
Life
"Here," she said, and placed his hand on her belly.
Jealousy
She didn't care about Zach, when he mumbled complaints even as she kissed him, or Sam's quiet and loud rages, but she cried in her bunk alone when Lee Adama started treating her like an officer of the Galactica.
Hands
She was pleased to wash up her knuckles, because it was a lesser injury than the one they had caused.
Taste
"There's no accounting for your taste in women," he said to Baltar, but kept his gaze on Kara Thrace as she stalked from the triad game.
Devotion
"I've missed you," he said, and even the weight he had put on and the haggard expression she had permanently adopted couldn't keep them from each other's arms.
Forever
He was never going back; watching Kara and Sam walk off the Galactica together had been enough to convince that his call back to Caprica was the right choice to make.
Blood
She never thought of Lee when she was with Zach, and she never thought of Zach when she was with Lee, but when she was with Sam he counted the times she accidentally called him "Adama."
Sickness
"There is something deeply and troublingly wrong with you, and I think you should be concerned," he says to her, and she proceeds to laugh right in his face.
Melody
The soft tinkling of a pianoforte could be heard coming from the head; Kara never thought to pursue the source because she was too busy seizing the opportunity to have a romantic moment with Lee Adama.
Star
Lee stared where Admiral Adama had indicated he look to see a falling star smolder in the blue sky, and he thought she had never burned so bright.
Home
They made a noble effort at being domestic for a while, but it was only a matter of months before Kara was taking Max to watch the drill team fly in formation, and Lee had Max meeting all the right people at the embassy.
Confusion
He held tight to her hand—he didn't know what the blood meant, either.
Fear
She feared losing Lee more than she feared losing her own life (he feared, among many things, losing everything for his love of her).
Lightning/Thunder
She waited for the thunder to crash; lightning was striking all too often.
Bonds
Her debt was repaid (good gods, she shot him in the back) on the day she chose Sam Anders and severed her ties from Lee (she could never hurt him again).
Market
"Kara… what can I get for you?" he spoke a little too loudly into the phone, and he could watch her face falling in his mind's eye.
Technology
She had thought so long and quiet about a little house in the mountains, with smudgy windows and a wood-burning stove, that its silence began to haunt her dreams.
Gift
Kara hadn't cried since the day they lowered Zach into the ground, but she sobbed for hours when Lee called her passing Zach out of flight school "a frakking gift."
Smile
He likes the way her smile has something bad behind it, and she likes the way his smile makes him look about twelve years old.
Innocence
He used to think she was more of a "boy" than he was, but he realized it was her open winsome expressions, her honesty, her hardscrabble, frakked-up life, and mostly her ultimate innocence, because he wondered if he had any.
Completion
"It's done," he said (he clipped), but then she threw right back at him, "Lee, I'm pregnant."
Clouds
He was a different person when he came back from the dead, which she might have expected, but she cannot cry for the clouds in his eyes, the closure in his lips.
Sky
Everyone is falling when they are in space, and that is why Kara likes it: an endless tumult of the hopeless, and she can fly among them.
Heaven
They had an hour together, and they lay the whole time, wrapped up in each other without moving at all, alone in his bunk.
Hell
They put each other through hell, back when they were still on Caprica, but it was the time they looked back to with greatest fondness.
Sun
"How would you do it?" he asked her (the tone in his voice was too dry for a living man), and she looked him in the eye when she responded, "I would go straight into the Sun."
Moon
There is a bright light in the Caprican sky many months before the Cylons attack, and it is hidden behind clouds, and that is how he thinks of their relationship, sitting on the veranda sipping coffee with her (and the rest of the Galactica flight team).
Waves
She had run through the pecking order of the battlestar like a typhoon and made him think he was obsolete, until the whole world fell out from under them and the only way to survive was to cling to one another.
Hair
He runs his hand through her blonde hair, tracing the lines he used to know so well, feeling the longer strands slide over and down his fingers, and he thinks of all the time he lost, all the inches.
Supernova
He once asked her, "Do you think we have much left to live?" and she said, "No," and then they both smiled and went back to what they had been doing for far too long.