A/N: Thank you to everyone for all of your feedback! Sorry to be so lame in posting chapters: a mean spell of illness nabbed me, but I am on the upswing now. Chapter 3 is still angsty, but I swear it is the last bit of angst for a good long while! Chapter 4 will be WAY MORE FUN, I swear!
Title: Chasm and Flood, Part 3?
Author: abelard
Rating: M
Spoilers: Mentions of stuff through S2, pure spec on my part
Summary: Lee loses Kara, and finds her again. Speculation on why the Cylons keep telling Starbuck she has a "special destiny." LeeKara, of course.
Feedback: Please!
Archive: Yes, just let me know.
Disclaimers: Not mine, etc.
Part 3
Starbuck showed up every now and then, and it alternately put Lee's broken soul back together, and tore it apart all over again.
One morning, Lee went running and she joined him. She appeared from nowhere and kept pace at his side just like she sometimes did when she was alive. She cracked jokes in her acerbic way, making fun of everyone, teasing Lee about his tightass love of regulations and his overly precise stride. Lee only stopped laughing at her barbs when he saw Gaeta looking at him like he'd lost his mind. Which of course he had, going for his morning jog with a specter of his best friend.
Starbuck's appearances were fine with Lee – more than fine, completely frakking welcome and Lee reveled in her – when Lee was all by himself, but when she sat next to him in the mess, or started talking to him while he was conversing with other people, it made him fear that he'd never be functionally sane again. He tried to ignore her sly, suggestive taunting, her sarcastic jabs, but when the hell had Starbuck ever been easy to ignore? She was larger than life. Even now that she was dead – she was larger than life itself, more present and more real to Lee than any other person on the Galactica.
He made love to her more than once in the CAG office. He couldn't help himself. There she was and sometimes she was naked, sometimes she was wearing nothing but one of his tanks...She was always so willing and wanting...Lee let himself sink into her warmth and wetness and find paradise for the few moments he had after he got off duty and before he got some sleep...And she was always gone when he awoke, drowsy and sated and even more alone, and even more mad, than he'd been before...
He didn't question that. He refused to. At the worst, it was his imagination fulfilling his longest-held fantasy: a sexual relationship with Kara that was loving, not confusing or angry or tormented. As long as his grief-driven imagination didn't hurt anyone or affect his ability to do his jobs, Lee felt he was well within his rights to enjoy his ghost lover.
But one day, she showed up in the war room. Lee was with Adama, Tigh, Gaeta, and Chief Tyrol, planning out another raid for tylium on another Cylon-held planet, this one even better secured than the last one that Lee had effectively infiltrated and overtaken, and Tigh was running the show, suggesting a detachment of five Vipers break off from engaging the defending raiders head-on to make a run for the planet. Lee had a gut feeling Tigh's plan wouldn't work, but was waiting to hear out his plan. But Starbuck had no such patience.
"Oh my Gods," she said from the corner of the room. "That moron is going to get five pilots killed and five birds destroyed for nothing. Lee, you have to stop him."
The meeting went on, Lee biting his lip to keep from responding to Starbuck's prompts.
"Lee, you know he's completely off his frakking rocker. Come on, be a CAG, hell, be a man!" In a flash, she wasn't in the corner of the room, but right beside him, yelling in his ear. "Major Adama, I request that you do your duty and put an end to this bullshit, Sir!"
"Starbuck, that's enough!" Lee shouted back.
Even before he finished shouting, he felt the appalled stares of the others. Lee looked around the room and saw shock, pity, and heartbreak staring back at him.
"Son...?" Adama began.
Lee left the room without excusing himself.
Starbuck appeared to him again in the corridor. "You shouldn't let Tigh get away with foisting his half-assed ideas on you and the Admiral. Especially not on this mission, it's too important."
Lee wanted desperately to argue with her; it was just like the old days (The days when she was alive to be argued with, Lee thought), but he fought hard not to say a word to the shadow of Kara that kept on haunting him. He couldn't help but throw her a murderous glare at one point, though, and that shut her up. Just as it had before. She disappeared.
Fine, good, Lee thought, but didn't feel it. He never really felt relieved when GhostKara left him, even now when he was furious with her. He was still frowning when he turned away from the empty spot she'd been and saw Gaius Baltar staring at him with a quizzical and alarmed expression on his face.
"Something you wanted, Doctor?" Lee asked in a tone that meant Frak off.
Baltar never had been great at picking up on Lee's signals. "Yes, actually, Major, I...This may be a very strange question," Baltar said, drawing close enough to Lee so that no one could readily hear their conversation, "but just now, were you...did you happen to...see, or...or hear someone who...wasn't...entirely, or, exactly...really there?"
Lee felt the breath go out of his body. How did you know? he thought, but he didn't say it. Though he may as well have said it – the doctor's face registered comprehension and understanding.
Baltar said, "Was...The person you saw, or thought you saw...Was it a woman? Was she a...a lovely blonde, by any chance?" This last, he asked in a tortured whisper.
Oh, what is this, another way to twist the knife in me over Kara? Lee thought with disgust. He'd never forgotten or forgiven Baltar over that Colonial Day incident. "You know perfectly well which lovely blonde I saw," Lee spat out. He started to stride away from the Doctor's distasteful mockery of him, but Baltar's next words stopped him.
"Ah – Starbuck. Yes, of course," Baltar said without a hint of antangonism. "That's...quite interesting."
"Interesting?" Lee asked Baltar over his shoulder. "Interesting in what way?"
"Well, of course, it could be your grief. Which I completely and totally understand, and my sympathies, naturally," added Baltar hastily. "Or...it could mean something very interesting about Starbuck." Baltar walked off, frowning as if in serious thought, and left Lee puzzled and annoyed.
The next time Starbuck appeared to him was the breaking point.
It was in a firefight. Lee managed to blow a raider apart just in time to fly through the wreckage and Starbuck's voice sounded clear as crystal in his comm: "Apollo, pull up hard, now, now, now!" Apollo did as Starbuck said – he knew better than to disobey her in a battle – and saw that he'd avoided crashing into another raider by inches. He flipped his ship around and shot the second raider out of the sky and Starbuck said, "Good shot, Apollo!"
"All thanks to you, Starbuck," he answered, high over the kill.
Then he remembered he was on an open channel.
When he got back into the hanger and out of his Viper, his father was waiting for him on the deck.
"I'm taking you off active duty," the Admiral said somberly. "You'll still be CAG, but no flying until..."
"Fine," Lee said, too embarrassed and angry at himself to protest. He thrust his helmet at Tyrol and marched back to his office without waiting for words of comfort and empathy to pour out of his father.
He waited for her to appear again. Waited for it and dreaded it.
It happened a few hours later. He was trying, and failing of course, to catch some sleep. He felt her arm drape over him from behind, her legs curl behind his legs. Her hair teased his ear and the side of his face; her voice, mesmerizing as always, murmured, "Sorry if I got you in trouble today, Major." Then she planted a kiss on his neck, bit his lobe just enough to get him hard in a flash.
He clambered out of the cot. He hoped when he was standing that when he turned back she would be gone, but he wasn't that lucky. He never was, when it came to her.
"Oh, come on," she said. She was only wearing her tanks and her panties. Her legs were bare, stretched out like that, her head propped up on her hand, a welcoming smile on her face. She looked sexy and seductive on his cot – Gods, he'd pictured her being there, just like that, a thousand times when she was alive. He'd jerked off more times than he could count to that very image. That was probably why his imagination conjured up this picture of her.
"You look so glum" she said. "I can fix that." When Lee didn't go any closer to her, her smile went away. "What is it?" she asked, concerned.
"You can't keep coming to me like this," Lee said. His voice was raspy. His heart was beating so fast – triple time. How could he be so ripped up about this, about breaking up with a ghost?
"Why not? Because of one slip-up? Okay, maybe two," she admitted, in that way Starbuck had of only admitting she might be wrong in the most grudging way.
Lee said nothing. She got up from the cot and came closer to him. When she would have embraced him, Lee stepped – more like stumbled – away from her.
"I, I mean it," he said haltingly. "This has, it has to stop."
"Are you serious?" she asked. When he met her eyes, it almost sent him to his knees to see that she was on the verge of tears. "Are you really sending me away?"
Lee looked down and told himself not to look in her eyes again. He nodded, deciding speech at this point would be too much to manage.
"Lee Adama, are you really turning me away when...when this is all we can have?" Oh Gods, Gods, there it was, that note in Kara's voice that made him want to kill whoever was hurting her. More often than not, though, that person was himself, and it was still true now, even though she was dead. "Lee, why? Why do you keep rejecting me?"
Oh, Kara, I'm not, I could never reject you, I could never reject you when you were really here...But even as Lee thought the words, he knew they weren't really true. Even though she'd never openly offered herself to him, there were a million ways in which she left the door open just a crack to him, and he'd always refused to walk through...
"You wouldn't let us be together when I was...before," she said, "and even now...even now you don't want me?" Her voice was very small, and wounded, like an injured animal...Gods, it was murder to hear.
"That's not it, that's not it," Lee said, unable to help himself from saying it aloud. "You never knew how much I wanted you...too much for our own good..."
"You never knew what was good for you, and certainly not what was good for me." Another bout of silence, then she said, "Fine. Fine. After this, you'll never see me again. I hope you'll be happy when you've gotten your wish."
I wish for you to be alive... "Kara," Lee said, his voice breaking. He thought he owed it to his own memory of her, if this was the last time he'd ever see even a ghost image of her before him, that he owed it to her to make this his final declaration to her: "Kara, I love you."
He looked at her and she'd never looked more devastated. The tears spilled out of her eyes as she said, "I don't see how that could possibly be true." Then she was gone. As if she'd never been there.
That was when Lee began to drink.