They say that if you go without sleep for too long, you start to hallucinate. You see and hear things that aren't really there. That don't exist. He forgets what the exact number is, the sum of the seconds that march by, sleepless, but it feels like he's hit that point already. Five days with no sleep, running on stress and adrenaline and the voice in the back of his head that says survivesurvivesurvive. He thinks he has a right.
Knows it when he shuts his eyes and sees things that aren't really there. His mother. Zak. His CO on the Atlantia. The bar on Picon where he spent his last shore leave (three weeks and a lifetime ago). The last woman he fracked- a dark haired beauty who picked him up with some throwaway line. Things that don't exist. Not anymore.
When he finds her (if he was even looking for her, or wanted to find her) she's with her bird. Inspecting it, hands running over it as if she was looking for some invisible damage the post-flight has missed. He wonders if she hallucinates too.
She pauses at the wing, and slides her palms along the underside. She seems almost tender. Verging on sexual. In one delirious instant, he feels a flash of envy for the plane. She steps back a little, straightening her arms, stretching out the tendons and nerves that are wearing thin with this exhaustion. It's a common ailment among pilots- clutching the stick too tightly in the stress of battle. The myriad of bad puns that go along with it went out of style eighty-four jumps ago. With five solid days of stress and battle, he's surprised it's taken her this long to feel it. But then, knowing Kara, she's been feeling it for two days and hasn't done a fracking thing about it.
"Hey." He says abruptly. His voice sounds very far away.
She starts just a little, and he knows they're going to have to go on stims soon. She's as out of it as he is. Much as it kills him to admit it. Her hands come away from the plane hurriedly, almost of their own volition.
"Hi."
His eyes follow the path of her hands, down to the bunches of fabric at her waist where the top half of her flight suit hangs like some lifeless symbiote. Up her pale, bloodless arms, where the sweat has tracked strange patterns through the grime. It's been seventy-two jumps since her last shower, and it shows. She looks like hell. Her hands are twined together know, fingers kneading at her wrist, trying to relieve the ache.
"Sore hands?" Captain obvious. But his brain and his tongue aren't quite connected, and all he can think is salt.
"Yeah." That has him worried. This is not the Kara he knows.
Wordlessly, he steps closer to her, taking one of her hands in his own and kneading small circles on her wrist, bending her fingers back, trying to coax life back into the hands that are going to save them all. If she winces or hisses, he doesn't notice.
He works efficiently- he's good at this. They used to do this back at the academy- not the five-days-without-sleep-running-for-their-lives, but the hand stretching . When they were both green, even just being in a viper was enough to leave their hands cramped and sore for hours. Not that either of them would entirely admit it.
So it feels perfectly natural to bring her hand up to his mouth and slide her finger into his mouth. Her hands are cold and he thinks unwillingly of cadavers. There's grit and sweat and lords-know-what caked under her fingernails, but he's forty-eight jumps past caring. She tastes like sweat and fear and adrenaline. Like Kara. Familiar and utterly strange at the same time. Entirely unfathomable, in either case. His tongue wraps around her finger, slips down her hand. Flicks out briefly, tastes her palm. Further down, and his teeth sink into her wrist, into her pulse.
The real world elbows him gently in the eye as her distant, concerned "Lee?" reminds him of what he's doing. Or supposed to be doing. He's holding her hand, one hand pressing hard into the crossroads of veins in her wrist. Her eyes are huge and dark and endless, and he flounders for a moment, scrabbling at reality, before she saves him and pulls her hand away.
"You okay?" She sounds genuinely concerned, and he thinks he should get this recorded.
Salt. He thinks again, and doesn't realize he's said it out loud until she gives him the crazy look.
"What?"
"Nothing." He shakes his head as if to clear it, though only a week's worth of sleep would do that. "They say sleep dep makes you crazy." Tries to smile. He hits somewhere between wry grin and death grimace.
She raises an eyebrow, gives him the once over. "I believe it."
He grins again, gets a little closer to the mark this time. The five-minute bell abruptly drops a girder in front of whatever halfassed conversation they were trying to have. She's hauling her flight suit on, sweaty skin sticking in the heavy fabric. He hands her helmet to her, and tries to say something, but good luck and good hunting both try to force their way out, and get stuck somewhere in his throat. So he settles for what is probably a smile, and tries not to lick his lips as he turns away, and fails.
The salt is only his sweat.