DAY ONE
Three vipers went out. Two came back. It wasn't a new development, and ninety percent of the people on the ship barely paused more than a second to reflect on what it meant.
Death was a part of war.
Starbuck and Apollo came back. Stepchild didn't. No big deal.
And it wasn't. Nothing on the ship stopped because Stepchild wouldn't be asleep in her rack tonight. Her death wasn't a big deal.
Unless you were there to witness it.
Tigh was waiting on the hangar deck when Apollo's feet hit the ground.
"What the hell happened?"
"Nothing happened." Apollo said coldly, looking over something that he saw on his wing.
"So one of our pilots is dead for no reason?" Tigh screamed.
Apollo's eyes snapped up. "That's right." Apollo replied, getting in Tigh's face. "Cylon raider came, one of us got killed. It's S.O.P. Nothing new. Maybe if you took your head out of the bottle once and a while you'd notice." And with that, Apollo walked off the deck, leaving a gobsmacked X.O. in his wake.
Starbuck had been listening in her cockpit, waiting until the desire to set fire to everything around her passed so that she could walk to the showers without committing heinous acts of violence along the way. Upon seeing Tigh, she realized that desire would not fade anytime soon. So she shoved it down into that secret place that she shoved everything else that she wanted to do but couldn't.
"Starbuck, you wanted to check that guidance system before your next CAP?" Cally questioned as Starbuck made her way down the ladder.
"Starbuck?" Cally said again as she continued walking, paying the young specialist no mind.
"Cally." Tyrol interjected. "Leave it alone for now. It can wait." He said as he watched Starbuck walk numbly away.
As Kara walked in the head she noticed that Lee was already in there. She could see the top of his head over the shower stall, and as the water fell down over him she noticed that it was bent down as if he was praying. But that couldn't be. Apollo didn't pray. So she figured he was just punishing himself.
Sometimes that was the same thing.
She walked into the stall next to him and as she turned on the water she realized that she hadn't bothered to take off her clothes. So she just stripped out of her flight suit and let it fall to the floor, not caring that it would be dirty and damp when someone finally picked it up and brought it back to her. The water fell all over her poor, exhausted, hurting body and she sunk to the floor, suddenly not having the energy to hold herself upright. As she curled her arms around her knees, she listened for the sound that always seemed to give her a moment's peace: the sound of Lee Adama breathing. Air rushing in and out of his lungs, confirming to her that he was still alive. She noted that the fact that she was listening for it meant that she was alive too. But that mattered less to her.
His breath was steady and even, if harsh. But it was constant. That was funny to her. She had to force herself to breathe, and it was as if he couldn't stop.
"DAMN IT!" She was jerked out of her trance by his yell and the sound of a crash and something falling to the floor.
Now the breath was hissing through his teeth.
Yep. Definitely punishing himself.
She heard him turn the water off and she stayed there on the floor, slowly tracing circles on her kneecap until she was sure that he had left. She finally got herself up off the floor, not really caring that she still wasn't particularly clean, and made her way to leave as well. As she walked by his vacated stall and noted the hole in the tiled wall where his fist had made contact, she tried with all her might to remember Stepchild's real name. She was sure it was something with an 'R'.
DAY TWO
Rachel Tate.
Starbuck noted as she sat in Lee's office going through the dead pilot's file. That was her name. 20 years old, and her only experience had been four months as a co-pilot on a Picon oil transport. Apparently that was enough to be a Colonial warrior these days, she noted with faint disgust.
It wasn't that Stepchild was a bad pilot, it's just that some people aren't meant to fly vipers. She knew that all too well. And given a couple of years and a flight simulator, Stepchild could have been decent. But they didn't have either of those two things.
She looked across the desk at Lee, reading his report and still breathing steady and even.
She tried to find his breaths comforting, like she did yesterday. But today, all that consistency did was make her want to strangle those breaths right out of him.
Actually, she still wanted to hear him breathe, just differently, like she sometimes hears it. Moaning, gasping, and hissing in her ear. But she wouldn't think about that now. She would shove that desire down to her secret place too.
Now she just wanted him to look at her, acknowledge that she existed. But he was intently reading his file. Other people admired that he could do that, show such dedication to one particular task and shut out all other distractions. But since she usually was the distraction, it just pissed her off.
So she decided to take matters into her own hands. That and the stapler. And she smiled a satisfyingly dazed smile as it flew across the room and crashed against the wall above Lee's head.
"FRAK. Kara!" He screamed as he jumped out of his chair, suddenly scared of the crazy look he saw in her eyes.
"Oh. That got your attention, I see." She replied.
"What the hell! Are you crazy!"
She sat calmly. Alternating between relieved and calm that she had finally gotten a reaction out of him. "Why, yes. I am crazy. And what's more, you know I'm crazy. You know that I have no problems going to extremes to get something to happen, so why you continue to force me to do so is just beyond my comprehension."
"And just what the frak is it that you want to happen?"
"I want you to deal with what happened yesterday."
"And you throwing heavy objects at me, that's how you're dealing with it?"
"Yeah, well. We can only punch so many holes in shower walls before the maintenance crew starts to get mad." She looked pointedly at him. "Besides, I didn't throw it at you. If I'd wanted to hit you with it, you'd be sprawled out on the floor."
"Yeah, and you just love having me sprawled out on floors. Don't you, Lieutenant?" He sneered, slowly waking towards her. 'If this is what she wanted, he'll give it to her.' He thought.
She got right in his face. "Careful, Captain. I've already resorted to hurling things at walls. That should tell you that I'm not in the mood for our verbal sparring, or the non-verbal stuff that inevitably comes after it."
'This isn't the way it's supposed to go.' He thought. "What is it you want?" He sighed.
"I want us to talk without screaming at each other. I want us to be in the same room with each other without punches being thrown or angry fraks up against a wall occurring. I want you to stop punishing me for sleeping with Baltar and going back to Caprica. I want it to be okay to stop this self-destructive 'take-what-you-can-get-and-don't-think-about-what-you-really-want' roller coaster that we seem to be on."
"That's not what you want. I know that's not what you want." He whispered harshly, stroking her upper arm.
"Cause you're so attuned to what I want?" She hissed.
He laughed. Sick to his stomach that he had to reveal this to her. "More than you are."
She closed her eyes as she felt the tears well up in them. She roughly shoved his hand off of where it lay on her bicep and walked away from him.
He hated that he was doing this, but he had to. This had to get out. "Angry is the only way you'll have me, Kara." His eyes flashed sad for a split second. "And it's the only way you'll let me have you. You want us to stop punishing each other? We're not. We're punishing ourselves and it spills out onto the other person because we both feel each other in our bones. You want us to have an honest conversation? We can't. The lies that we tell each other are so ingrained that we don't know what the truth is anymore. You want us to be normal and healthy with each other? That's not gonna happen because we're both emotional frak-wits."
"Stop."
He laughed, his blue eyes boring a hole in her heart. "Hell, some of us were that way even before the end of the world."
"Frak you." She seethed out. He closed his eyes, the thoughts screaming in his head.
"You know what? I'm done with this." He said as he raised his hand and tried to walk away.
The gesture of him silently dismissing her was the last and final insult.
"Oh, no you don't. Don't you dare." She spat as she got back into his face when he turned around to look at her. "If anger is the only interaction we can have then we're gonna have it. Because it's better than the frakking alternative!" She screamed.
On the other side of the door, several people had gathered outside, waiting for the storm to pass. It had gotten to be a ritual. Many times throughout the workday, everything came to a standstill as Starbuck and Apollo worked out whatever it was that was between them.
Helo walked down the corridor obliviously, bypassing all the others as he made a move to knock on the hatch door.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you. Starbuck and Apollo are at it again." One of them said.
"At what?" Helo asked exasperated. "Fighting or frakking?"
"What's the difference with those two?"
Back in the office, they weren't screaming anymore.
"What do you want me to say, Kara?" He asked, his thumb stroking her cheek. He desperately wanted to see some sort of answer staring back at him.
"Say anything." She whispered sadly as she sat down. "Say something totally insignificant if you want."
"Alright." He said sitting down next to her. "I'm glad it wasn't you. I'm glad that you weren't the one to die." He let his head fall back to the wall behind him with a thud. "That insignificant enough for you?"
DAY THREE
'Quiet.' She thought. 'Why do things always scream louder in the quiet than they do in the noise?' She sat in the empty maintenance bay and felt the desire to cry. Again, that was a desire she shoved down inside. 'Don't get all philosophical, Thrace. You know what a mess you make when that happens.'
"Hey." He said as she looked up at him from his place on the floor. "I figured you'd be here."
"You figured I'd be in the place where everybody knows I always go? Your powers of deduction are astounding, CAG."
"Do you wanna be a brat, or do you want to be the girl with the surprise?"
"Can't I be both?"
"I've seen no evidence to the contrary. You can be a brat at anytime. You're a very gifted woman, Kara."
"Everyone has a skill." She smiled at him. "What's my surprise?"
He handed her a bottle of liquid as he sat down next to her.
"What is it?"
"Drink it."
"It's not poison, is it?" She eyed him.
"You think I'd poison you?"
"After yesterday, I'm not sure what you'd do."
"Nah. Can't afford to lose good pilots." He spotted her sniffing the bottle. "Will you just drink the damn thing already?"
She took a sip. "Hey! Where'd you get juice?"
"Cloud Nine. The head maintenance guy offered us a whole case if we gave him one of our 'oh so valuable' nesium O-rings. I had Tyrol set it up."
" 'Oh so valuable' Lee Adama! Galactica switched over to bronium O-rings seven weeks ago! The nesium ones are worthless to us now."
"He doesn't know that." He replied as she looked at him, eyes wide in shock. "What? I'm not the first person to overstate the value of something in order to get something in return."
"That's almost slightly immoral of you, Sir. I'm impressed."
"Nice to know that something of you rubbed off on me. Other than the obvious." He grinned behind his bottle.
"Right." She smiled.
"You wanna talk about Stepchild?" He asked quietly.
"Nope. Stepchild's dead. End of story."
"Zak's dead too." He looked at her sadly. "End of story?"
"Lee…."
"I know you're angry."
"I'm not though. That's the thing. I wish anger was the predominant emotion in me right now."
"What emotion is?"
"There are two that are fighting to be number one right now." She stated.
"And they are?"
"Sadness." She closed her eyes. "And confusion."
"About what?" He whispered.
"Hard to pin it down. I've felt them in general my whole entire life. It's kind of an all-encompassing thing."
"Alright. Well, let's try to get down to the bottom of this thing."
"You a shrink now?" She grinned at him.
"No."
"Really? Maybe you should give it a try. Cause you're a really shitty CAG."
"Watch it, Lieutenant." He laughed. "In the last three days, what have you been sad and confused about?"
"Stepchild." She said softly.
"Yeah. She shouldn't have died." He put the bottle to his lips.
"Or she should have." She said as he looked up at her, startled, his eyes demanding explanation. "Welcome to the confusion part of our program. It wouldn't have happened to us, Lee. To Starbuck and Apollo. We're too good. We don't get shot down by a single Cylon raider on a lone recon patrol. It just doesn't happen."
They were both silent for a long time.
"What about the last week? What was sad and confusing?"
"You kissed my neck in the locker room." She said. "It confused me because it wasn't a preamble to anything. And it made me sad because I thought it was weird, and I thought it was weird because it was so sweet. And we don't do sweet." She took a sip. "Why'd you do it?"
"I don't know. Just something I wanted to do, and I didn't have it in me to walk away to keep from doing it." He paused as she smiled at him. "What's happened in the last three weeks?"
She looked down. "Maybe we shouldn't do this."
"Too late, already doing it. C'mon. Last three weeks, Starbuck?" He prodded her.
"I went to see the Cylon." She whispered.
"Oh."
"I'm confused because I want to kill Cylons. All of them. Every single one. Except for her. And Leoben. And that doctor on Caprica that I actually did kill but who was also actually pretty nice to me. So that got me thinking that maybe I'm not as fully entrenched in the whole 'Kill All Cylons' philosophy as I thought I was. And that confuses me because I thought that was one of the things that I was sure of."
"Cylons are masters at frakking with our heads." He whispered.
"And I'm sad because I miss her." Tears welled up in her eyes. "And I know I shouldn't because she's a machine, and she wasn't even real. Except she was, Lee. She was real. To me, to Helo, to Tyrol, to everybody on this boat, she was real. And you can't just stop everything that we felt just because….. It would be like if we found out that you were a Cylon, Lee."
"Don't be stupid. I'm not a Cylon." He paused. "Everybody knows it's Sgt. Hadrian."
She laughed. She laughed one of those laughs that was so close to a sob, that it made it that much more funny.
"What about five weeks ago?" He elbowed her.
"This is kinda like a game." She grinned.
"Nah. Games are fun. Five weeks?"
"Five weeks ago. I was just leaving Caprica." She made a big show of thinking before answering. "Oh, you're gonna love this. I met someone."
His face fell and he looked at her deeply. "When you say 'met someone' I'm assuming that you don't mean Helo."
She looked back at him just as seriously. "No. I met someone. On Caprica."
"With the Resistance movement?"
"Yeah."
"You conveniently left that out of your report."
"No. I mentioned him. I just didn't mention that I was sleeping with him."
They were both quiet for a moment.
"Wait a minute. The head guy? The pyramid player?" He took a moment to drink as she nodded in affirmation. "Wow, Starbuck. You're moving up in the world."
"Actually it was kind of slumming for me."
"Yeah, I imagine after the Vice-President of the Colonies, everybody's kind of a let down."
She punched him in the arm. "Don't be a jerk. Besides, I was talking about you."
He looked like she smacked him in the head. Which, metaphorically she had.
"You never slept with me before either one of them."
"Sure I did. At the academy. You probably don't remember."
"Of course I remember." He whispered almost inaudibly.
"Everybody was slumming for me since then. Even your brother. Although I seriously wouldn't mind being in those gutters again." She smiled sadly.
"I didn't think you remembered that night. You were pretty drunk."
"It's hard to be so drunk that you forget something like that." She replied.
He gulped. He tried to turn all of this information over in his brain, but found he couldn't do it. So he changed the subject instead. "So this guy on Caprica. You liked him?"
"I must have. I promised I'd come back for him." She looked at him, his eyes wide with surprise. And she stood up and started pacing the floor. "So I must've liked him, right? To be willing to fly back into an enemy infested war zone that I just barely made it out of in one piece? That must mean that I liked him, right? That I have deep feelings for him? So answer me this Apollo. Why, when I stepped off that ship and onto the Astral Queen, and saw you walking towards me with your arms stretched out to hug me instead of to punch me, did I forget all about him? Why does everything that I felt for him seem so miniscule compared to what I feel for you?" She paused. "That's confusing, and sad, and maddening, and pathetic all wrapped up in a nice little package. Kind of outdid myself there, don't you think?"
He looked at her, and she looked right back at him, and he couldn't really blame her if she looked like she couldn't figure out what he was thinking, because he couldn't figure it out himself.
"And don't try and tell me that you're surprised at this." She said. "And don't try to tell me that you don't feel the same way about me."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"I'm sad and confused when I'm with you, Lee. I'm sad because I know that there are things that I shouldn't want, shouldn't expect, don't deserve. And I'm confused because I want them anyway." She looked down
He wished that what she said didn't hurt him so much. Because it only hurt so much because he knew what she was talking about.
She continued, knowing that she couldn't look him in the eye until she had finished. "There are things that mean pain to me. Things that keep coming at me, and they hurt so much that all I want is to be with you. And not in the sweaty, shattering, desperate-to-feel-anything way that I'm usually with you. But the real way, the right way, the way that we're supposed to do it. It hurts so much that I think the only way to stop it is to be with you." She paused finally looking at him. "But I can't be with you because it hurts too much. We're stuck, Lee. We're just stuck. Do you see why I'm confused?"
"Yeah."
She knelt down in front of him. "Do you see why I'm sad?"
"Yeah."
"Sad and confused is how I feel with you. And if angry comes through the most often it's just because it's the easiest for me to express, but don't believe it. I'm waiting for the day that I can feel for you what I know is really there." She looked down again.
He lifted her chin and drew her eyes back up to look at his. "Well, when that day comes, I'll still be here."
"You don't know that." She wiped away a traitorous tear that dared leak from her eye.
"Sure I do. I made a deal with the gods that the Cylons wouldn't get me before I tell you that I love you and you say it back." He took her hand and looked at the intertwined fingers. "So don't ever say it." He whispered.
"I won't." She leaned forward and kissed him. "I promise."
He smiled at her. "It's always gonna be you and me, Kara. And someday it will be the way it's supposed to be. Just not now."
"I know." She smiled back. "And tomorrow we can go back to normal."
He sighed. "I'm not sure that's a good thing."
"I know."
"So what do we do until tomorrow?"
"We drink our juice, Adama. We just drink our juice."
-finis