Kara had lost feeling in the whole bottom half of her body. Her feet were bare, her sweatpants had a large rip down the side, and the bruises on her ankles were turning black. She couldn't force herself to sit down. She knew that if she sat down, her thoughts would turn to Lee, and she just couldn't imagine what the pilots had done to him.
He was only trying to protect her.
For the hundredth time, Kara pushed the tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand and began to pace. She had known Lee for years. He was tough, maybe even more so than she was. He could handle anything. He was strong.
It was a simple mantra she just kept repeating in her head until the urge to cry fizzled out. She hoped to the gods she was right.
"Why the frak am I here?" Kara yelled to no one in particular. The brig on Pegasus was different than Galactica. There was no guard there to engage in idle conversation. There were no visitors, and there was definitely no chance of coercing someone to bring her a deck of cards. Still, there was one difference that stood out above all the others. On Pegasus, you didn't actually have to commit a crime to end up here.
A Marine had grudgingly read Kara her rights along with the charges when Siren threw her in the cell. Charges of indecent behavior unbecoming an officer of the Colonial Fleet were being brought up against her. It was ironic how she practically had her clothes ripped off her by force and it turned out it was her fault.
Kara was furious, and that satisfied her to no end. She had felt herself give up in that bunkroom, and it was something she hadn't come close to doing since she was fifteen. She had been weak once, but that chapter of her life had been left behind the day she found an escape from her mother. Her life had been going full throttle since her mother's disappearance, and she refused to let herself go backwards. She was strong now.
Her thoughts were so focused on pushing back the memory of the horrors she had endured as a child that she didn't hear the hatch unlock or the cell door slid open until two Marines were already dropping something into a pile on the floor in front of her. The abruptness of the action kept her from realizing what that pile was until the Marines were safely out in the corridor, or maybe it was she simply couldn't handle knowing it was him unless she could break down in private.
Kara threw herself down to the ground and gathered Lee into her arms. Her hands were already trembling as they closed around Lee's back. She had this silly idea that holding him close to her might heal what was broken. The tears she had been holding in for hours slid down her face.
Even as sobs shook her to the core, she felt her military training kick in. She forced herself to look over Lee's injuries, and when she did, it made her cringe. If not for the gentle movement of his chest against hers, she would have feared the pilots had taken it too far. "Lee?" she whispered quietly into his ear. Her hand moved to smooth the hair back from his face, and she ignored the wet feel of blood on her hands. "Lee, I need you to open your eyes for me."
She wasn't sure if Lee knew he was responding to her plea, but his eyes did slide slowly open after a moment. "Kara…" His voice was barely a whisper.
There was too much blood, too many bruises. Again, she found herself thinking it was too much. Biting down on her lip, she forced herself to focus on Lee's eyes. Those baby blues had pulled her back from a lot of dark places when all she wanted to do was let go. "Tell me what they did, Lee," she demanded.
"You're safe," he said softly.
As her heart tightened, her arms followed suit. "Yes, I'm safe, Lee, but you are majorly frakked up right now, mister. You need to tell me what hurts so I can fix it."
Kara saw him lick his lips as he gathered his strength. He was shifting into survival mode. The Academy had taught them the importance of having a good identification of strengths and weaknesses, no matter how much it hurt. Lee would know exactly what was wrong with him, and he would report it to her like a good soldier. He had always been textbook when it came to that.
"My head… it feels like someone ran over it with a Viper. My side aches something fierce. My head feels… sticky. I can't figure out why."
Kara nodded. It was maybe a concussion, broken ribs, nasty cut on his forehead. She could handle all that with ease except for the cut. That would need stitches, which she had no way of getting. If she was lucky, the blood would clot by itself. "Guys with scars are hot," she teased, shifting his body in between her legs as she pulled them to the wall. She needed to feel grounded if she was going to get through this.
"Kara…" Lee's voice caught in his throat, and she could feel the worry begin to filter its way back into her mind. "Something's wrong with my hands."
Kara glanced down, and it took all her might not to gasp or start swearing in anger. Lee was right. Something was wrong with his hands. She did a quick visual inventory and took a deep breath before speaking, "Lee, five of your fingers are broken."
"Frak," he sighed and rested his head back against her body. "That's a lot, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it's a lot." Kara took another deep breath and tried to check her emotions. She needed to be calm if she was going to get through this. She studied his hands for a moment before probing each of the breaks with her own fingers. She tried to be gentle, but she could still feel him stiffen in pain. "We both know why they did this to you. They made one mistake, though. Those breaks are clean." She nodded before placing a light kiss on the side of Lee's head. "It's going to be okay, Lee. I will not let them ground you."
"Oh gods, you're going to…" His voice trailed off.
"I'm going to reset them," she finished, hoping her voice was strong enough to reassure him. "You and I both know we're not going to get any medical attention down here in the brig for at least a few days."
"That doesn't make me feel any better."
"Don't worry, Lee. You'll pass out from the pain as soon as I get to work on the first one."
"That's a real nice thought, Kara." He let out a small laugh, which Kara figured was all he could muster right now. She was about to start the painful process when Lee started coughing. Her hands tightened around his shaking body until the fit had subsided. Lee's head fell back to rest against her again, and he whispered, "I'm scared, Kara. I can't… I can't figure this out on my own. Please don't leave me."
Lee was obviously delirious because he would never let himself beg like that. It scared her as she felt the little control she had slipping away. She tightened her hold around his body, having no idea what to say. He was cradled between her legs, but she still wished there was a way she could pull him closer. She did her best to wipe the blood away from his face with one hand. His concussion might be bad, but she knew there was no way she could keep him awake. The pain was too great. She leaned her head back against the wall and started whispering stories of her time on Galactica before Lee showed up. She figured if she just kept talking, he wouldn't worry about whether she was going to leave him. Maybe he would even forget where he was for a moment. He deserved that much.
"You're really good at this," Lee whispered.
Kara could feel him begin to shake and prayed to the gods that he was not going into shock. Her mind was too preoccupied to think twice about the words coming out of her mouth. "It was my father."
Lee had known she had an atypical childhood, but Kara had never gotten into the details. It wasn't just with him either. Helo, the Commander, Sharon when she was still a human, even Zak, they all knew her early years had pretty much sucked but Kara refused to explain the exact reasons why. Sometimes she had been pushed to open up, particularly by Zak, but it never felt right. Her childhood was private. It was a burden she did not like to share with anyone. She had let those close to her know a little here and there when it was necessary, but Kara had never wanted to talk about it until now. Maybe it had something to do with Lee's opening up to her a week before. Maybe it was because he was so vulnerable right now. Maybe she was just tired of keeping it hidden. Either way, she found herself talking for the first time.
"He used to hold me like this after I made my mother mad."
"I'm sure you never made your mother do anything," Lee objected.
"Oh, believe it, Lee. I was a terror when I was young."
Kara could feel Lee try to shift to look at her before flinching and settling himself back down against her. "Kara, I've seen firsthand what you look like as a terror. At the worst, you made me want to slap you across the face."
"Well, my mother had the same urges, I guess." Kara sighed. "I know you want to think the best of me, but I deserved it, Lee. I wasn't the kind of child a woman dreams of having."
Lee's mind immediately pictured a little girl with blonde pigtails and skinned knees. She would be the little girl in the pink dress beating up all the boys on the playground. It was that vision he saw when he thought of having children, and he would have told her so if he wasn't sure she would completely flip out.
"Gods, that woman has you brainwashed," he whispered. "I can imagine you when you were little, the little tomboy daughter of a Fleet reject, and it breaks my heart that anyone could treat you as anything short of the little princess I'm sure you were."
"Lee, you're going to make a girl blush," she teased, running her hand through his hair lightly before resting it on his chest. His breathing was deep enough to calm some of her worries, but she could still feel him struggling.
"Don't shrug off what I said as me being the stupid, sensitive man you always criticize me for being."
"I'm not," Kara insisted even though she knew it was a lie. Lee had always made her uncomfortable when he said things like that. It was as if he was on a one-man mission to try to repair all the damage her mother had caused in her. Fortunately, she was the queen of subject changes. She just hoped Lee forgave her for what she was about to do. "You know my father taught me some other tricks to help the pain. For instance, he always loved to-"
Lee heard the dull thump before he felt his right pinkie shift back into place.
Kara immediately started apologizing even though she knew he had passed out from the pain. This was how her father had set her fingers when she made the "mistake" of having them in the doorframe when her mother wanted to leave the house. It suddenly occurred to her that she had never found out why her father knew how to set a broken bone. There hadn't been time to ask. The pain had made Kara pass out just as quickly as Lee.
She woke up in her bed, slightly cloudy from the pain, and she turned her little seven-year-old head to see the sheet music of a new lullaby waiting for her on the nightstand night stand. She wished she could give Lee a present that would mean as much to him as her father's songs meant to her. Maybe, if she was lucky, someday she could figure out what exactly that would be.
Kara tried to forget both the past and the future as she went to work properly setting all five of Lee's fingers. The pilots wanted to make it impossible for him to ever fly again, and that wasn't something she was going to let happen. She was tough as nails, and she could set broken fingers in her sleep. After all, she been fixing her own since her father left when she was ten. The breaks were clean. She could do this. More than that, she needed to do this. Lee would have pain for the next few weeks, but his hands would have the sensitivity and precision required of a Viper pilot. He would not be grounded.
"Frak every single one of you," she growled to the absent pilots.
The fingers were swollen and she had to spend way too long feeling for the last bone in his left hand, but after two hours, the job was finished. Kara took the time to place a feather light kiss on each swollen joint and bruised knuckle. She pulled at the rip in her sweats until a large piece of the puffy material came free. That was quickly torn up into smaller pieces, and she did her best to support his fingers. The material was not easy to work with, but after a little struggle, she had created a rather dysfunctional form of mittens. It looked ugly but would do the trick of keeping his fingers relatively stable while allowing him to use what little range of motion he still had. She wished to the gods she had real medical supplies. They would have been a help, even if in the end, they didn't matter. Supplies or not, she would kill everyone on this ship before any other part of Lee was harmed because of her.
Kara eased herself down to lay out on the ground and pulled Lee in tight against her once more. She wished that they could be on the semi-comfort of the small cot in the cell, but she didn't want to jolt Lee while he was still in such an unstable condition. Her jaw tightened as she tried to push all the pain and trauma of the past few hours away. It was time to start forcing herself to be strong.
Her ears focused in on the gentle wheeze of his steady breathing, and before long, she could feel her eyes begin to droop. Something suddenly occurred to her. "Hey, Lee. We finally got the off-shift we deserved," she whispered, nuzzling in against the back of his neck. As she slipped off to sleep, she could have sworn she felt his lips turn up in a smile.