Chapter 2
As soon as Lee disappeared, Kara took her anger out on his chair, kicking it over viciously. She then swept the neat pile of his precious reports on to the floor where they scattered into a satisfying mess. Looking around the office for her next victim she realised that people were staring at her through the still open hatch.
"What? What? Haven't you ever seen a married couple fighting before? Frak off the lot of you!" she screamed at them and everyone scampered away. Her anger at Lee was only growing, not abating and she knew that she needed to get away from this room. Without thinking too hard about what she was doing, she grabbed a flight suit from the locker. A couple of minutes later she stormed on to the flight deck like a whirlwind.
"Specialist, get that viper ready for me." The specialist in question just stared at her like a rabbit caught in the headlights. "Move!" she yelled and he jumped to it.
"Sir, what are doing?"
"Don't try to stop me chief."
"With all due respect sir, I have to. Your flight status for vipers has been revoked, not to mention that the commander would have my ass if I didn't."
"Feel free to tell him you tried." With that she swung a right hook and decked the chief with one blow before sprinting up the ladder into the cockpit. Before anyone could react she had manoeuvred the viper into the tube and launched.
As the viper shot out of Galactica, Kara gave the engines full throttle and powered away from the fleet. After the first few minutes of exhilarating flying, the red mist that had descended over her during her fight with Lee started to clear from her mind, and the kind of calm that she only got from flying returned. She knew that she shouldn't be in this viper, but this was what she needed right now; she had missed it so much in the three weeks since she had discovered that she was pregnant. She had a momentary twinge of guilt, knowing that she could be endangering the baby, but the well-being of the mother was pretty important too wasn't it? Come to think of it, this little jaunt was probably quite important for the well-being of the father as well because if she'd stayed on Galactica she probably would have killed him!
With the first need for the freedom of flying assuaged, she switched off the radio so that she couldn't be disturbed and let her mind wonder to the problem at hand. She thought back to how they had ended up married. It was all Lee's fault she decided. It had started on the Astral Queen when she had returned, bruised and broken, from Caprica. He had found her playing with her pyramid ball, feeling sorry for herself, and had tried to do his best agony aunt impression. Thinking back to his words to her then still made her smile.
"I'm your friend, I love you," he had said. She was just digesting these words and figuring out a way to tease him about them, when he had come round and sat next to her on the bench. He had taken her hand in his, stroking his thumb across her palm. The instant comfort she had felt from that simple gesture had given her pause.
"Come on Kara, talk to me."
"Did you just say that you love me?"
"Course I love you; you're the best friend I have left in the whole damned universe. Actually, after what I've done in the past weeks you're probably the only friend I have left. You're hurting and I can't bare that."
He had looked at her with such a mixture of sadness, remorse and love in his beautiful blue eyes that the whole sorry story had come pouring out, from moaning his name with Baltar, to her treatment by the Cylons and her promise to Sam. When she had managed to stop sobbing she realised that telling him had given her a cathartic sense of relief. It felt immeasurably better to have shared these painful experiences with someone, instead of bottling them up as she would normally have done. It was especially true when that someone was Lee: she couldn't really imagine herself opening up to anyone else in the same way. Each comforting stroke of his hand up and down her back had given her back a little bit more peace.
"Oh Gods Kara, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. What can I do? How can I make it better?" he had asked.
"Hold me Lee, just hold me."
He had kissed her then and the Gods help her she had kissed him back with everything that she had. She had let him take control for once and he had lead her to his quarters. Without saying a word he had stripped off her dirty clothes and scrubbed every inch of her under the shower, almost instinctively knowing that she needed to wash away every last speck of Caprican dirt to start the healing process. The wounds on her abdomen were still raw and his hand trembled as he cleaned them. After he had towelled her dry he had lead her to his rack. They had lain together for sometime, just holding each other. The holding had turned to touching and kissing and then he had made love to her with such gentle tenderness that she couldn't stop crying for ten minutes after it was over, until he joked lightly that he'd never had quite such a negative effect on a woman before. The barriers that she had put up around her heart to protect herself from feeling too much for Lee Adama had come crashing down: She knew that she was in serious trouble from that moment on.
When they had gone down to Kobol she had kept as close to him as possible. The way he made her feel made her realise how superficial, though intense, her feelings for Sam Anders had been. Sam had been what she needed to relieve the tension of being on Caprica, but Lee was what she needed to rebuild her life after her experiences at the hands of the Cylons. He made her feel safe which was ironic really because their relationship had always been anything but 'safe': A relationship with Sam was safe, with Lee she knew that she was playing with fire. They had skirted around a deeper relationship than just friends for so long and for so many reasons, many of them relating to Zak, but also because their personalities were so different that she was scared that one or other of them, more probably both, was bound to get hurt. But she no longer had the strength, the willpower or indeed the desire to fight it or run from it any longer. She was just going to let herself feel and love and be loved in the way she'd always dreamed about, and frak the consequences.
After they had been reconciled with his father and returned to the fleet they let their feelings have free reign. They were totally caught up in the romance of finally getting past the past and giving in to their feelings for each other. Lee for once let go of his inhibitions and showed her what a wonderful, passionate man he could be and likewise she didn't pull away from their burgeoning relationship as it intensified. There was no question that they were completely in love with each other; nobody on Galactica could doubt it and they didn't really care about it being public knowledge. She was so drunk with happiness at finally being with him that when he proposed three weeks later, saying that there wasn't any point in waiting in their uncertain existence, she had said yes. The old man, still in the throes of his need to keep his family together after his near-death experience, had agreed and within a week they were married. Now here she was nine months later, married, pregnant and wondering where it had all gone wrong.
It wasn't that their marriage was all bad; there had been times when she had been so happy that she had to pinch herself to believe that it was true, but those times were getting rarer. The first year of marriage was supposed to be the hardest, but was it supposed to be this difficult? It was much harder than she thought it would be. It didn't help that, working as closely together as they did, they had to conduct their relationship in front of everybody, without the luxury of ever really being alone together outside of their bedroom. There was always someone demanding the CAG's attention or needing Starbuck to sort this or that out. It was like living in a goldfish bowl, a rusty metal goldfish bowl. In the seething maelstrom of bravado, fear and exhaustion that seemed to be the permanent state of existence for Galactica's air group, the differences in their personalities were starting to hold sway over their feelings for each other. What they needed was some quiet time to be able to talk to each other calmly and rationally about what was happening to their relationship, but it wasn't like they could just take a second honeymoon; they hadn't really even had a first one! Yet as Kara sat in her borrowed viper and thought about all that had gone wrong, her anger drained away because she also knew that there was a lot that was right. She felt deep within her that they were meant to be together and that didn't scare her any more the way that it used to. She wasn't about to give up on their relationship just because things were a bit rocky: she'd never given up on anything in her life because it was too hard. She resolved to fight as hard as she could to keep their marriage alive and to make it flourish, because at the end of the day she knew that it was worth it, that Lee was worth it. She just needed to be able to get him to acknowledge that there was a problem and not to ignore the emotional turmoil between them like he normally would, but to address it before it festered into something more damaging and destructive. She wondered if they could ever actually do that without resorting to arguing: maybe she should get the old man to referee. She smiled at the thought, but then the smile faded. He was going to be very disappointed in her for this little lapse in discipline and she hated that. Why did she always seem to do things that disappointed these Adama men? Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought but she quelled them ruthlessly. Frakking hormones! Adama was probably going to be so pissed off with her for this little viper trip that he would send her straight to the brig when she got back. Still, at least it was quiet there: may be they could work it out if she and Lee talked to each other with the bars in between them for protection!
Having resolved all this with herself she decided to forget about these problems for a few moments and just enjoy being in a viper for a little while longer: she expected it to be a long time before she got to fly one again.
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