A Gift For Trappermcintyre
Jul. 17th, 2011 09:43 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
scifishipper.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
pilots_presentsTitle: Shards
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
embolalia
Summary: Lee reacts to Kara’s death in Maelstrom
Characters: Kara/Lee
Rating: R
Warnings: Character Death
***
Lee flips his Viper as he comes out of the launch tube and can just make out the fear in Kara’s eyes as she is flung out into space in turn. Sighing, he points his bird toward the side of the fleet furthest from the planet and begins the circuit. “Race you,” he says cheerfully into the mic. With a hint of her familiar laugh, Kara blasts past him. Lee grins and takes off.
By the time the race ends, Kara crowing about her superiority as a pilot, they’ve both relaxed. It's the first time they've flown together since their affair ended, and it's a beautiful thing. No matter how complicated the rest of their lives get, they’ve always been in love with this. For hours they fly loop-de-loops and play tag. Kara's raucous laugh restores them both.
When Tigh begins to gripe about them tying up the comm channel, Lee switches them to their own frequency. He makes sure it’s not one Dee usually listens to.
The fleet is beautiful by planetlight. The blues and reds of the clouds glimmer against the hulls, smoothing away blemishes and gouges from years of Cylon attacks. Lee hardly notices, he's so swept up in the grace of flying with Kara.
“Thank you,” Kara says quietly as they head back toward the planet.
“What was that?” Lee asks, surprised, teasing.
“You heard me,” she says, glancing at him through her canopy. Then her voice softens. “Thank you. For coming out here with me.”
His eyes lock on hers. She’s smiling, so serene, so lovely. Then Kara grins, twirls her Viper away from his in a double-barrel roll. Lee laughs, falls into sync with her. They dance across the stars.
“Faster,” Kara gasps into his ear, and Lee shivers. No matter what he said earlier about Dee, it's going to take all his self-control not to frak Kara senseless when they get back on Galactica.
As they descend into the clouds around the planet, Kara looks over at him, assures him she’s copacetic. There’s a glint of pure happiness in her eyes that radiates through Lee. As he listens to her laughter over the comm, Kara is so completely the woman that Lee loves that he can hardly contain it. She waves at him from her cockpit, full of light and spirit and joy. He can hardly wait the forty minutes until they're done so he can have her in his arms.
And then another perfect moment is destroyed.
She’s flying away from him, even as he tries to get on her wing, tries to reach her over a radio signal propelling his voice through space. “Kara! Kara, come back!”
Her voice finally comes through, asking for one thing as she hurtles away from him: for him to let her go. The only thing he’s never known how to do. Screams are wrenched from Lee’s throat as he struggles to catch her.
Debris flies out at him, all that's left.
Lee gasps to Galactica what’s happened, then turns off his mic and sits in his cockpit, hovering over the storm that’s taken her away. He waits for her to emerge from the clouds. She’s tempted fate and won so many times.
Kara doesn’t come. His face is streaked with tears he can’t reach through his helmet. He can’t go back to Galactica without her, can’t walk across the deck or choke down algae or play a hand of triad if she never will again. He’d rather follow her in. Lee reengages his Viper, points its nose downward.
And then his father's voice comes over the short wave, the first thing to register in ages.
“Please, Lee...Not you, too.” He sounds so completely lost that duty settles back onto Lee’s shoulders, a familiar tether. He turns back toward Galactica.
***
The deck seems emptier as he staggers out of his bird, or maybe it's just the silence. Cally looks up dolefully as she passes Lee his post-flight checklist.
He’s numb to the people watching him, his mind shutting down against the pain. Helo’s arm weighs down his shoulders, steering Lee away. The others erupt into murmurs, hugging, some crying. They lose pilots, friends, all the time, but not like this. Not on a day without a fight, not a pilot like Starbuck.
Lee follows Helo to the head and mechanically strips off his flightsuit.
“How--” Helo begins, then clamps his jaw shut against his voice breaking.
Lee shakes his head, focuses intently on pulling on clean tanks.
“Can I get you anything?” the other pilot asks, his voice calmer.
Finally raising his eyes, Lee simply stares at him, then leaves the room.
He doesn’t know where he’s going, but his feet seem to. It takes barely a minute to reach the senior officers’ bunkroom, which is empty as usual at this time of day. Lee rests his hand on the wheel of the hatch and a keening noise escapes him. He forces it down, pushes his way in.
He crosses to her bunk, as if she'll just be there, sleeping. As if this place is still hers without her in it. Not as if. It is still hers; there's no part of him that can imagine otherwise. The blankets are tangled, the curtain hanging askew. This is where Kara Thrace lives.
Lee opens her locker. A picture is hanging there, unfolded long ago. He traces his fingers over her face. Would she want him to do this? But then, who else?
With shaking hands Lee takes down the cigar box with her pictures, her wrapped idols. He wants to hurl them against the wall. There are a few books, a few tapes. Hanging behind her uniforms is a man’s coat, streaked with paint: the one she brought back from Caprica. And at the bottom of the locker, a half-full bottle of something dark. For a moment Lee thinks he shouldn't drink it because she'll be pissed, and then he remembers again.
That’s all that she owned. That and him.
Lee takes the photographs and the idols and sits on her bed, lies down in the last place to cradle her body. He turns his head and inhales the scent of Kara’s hair on the pillow. Recognition tears through him. Knowledge of her, desire, complete and undeniable love. Kara's dead. In hours or days this will be gone, too. And he's still here, for however long this lasts, without her. It's so much worse than loving her from afar.
Lee can't breathe, he's crying so hard.
He clutches her gods in his hands. “Please,” he begs, gasping for air. “Please.” He doesn’t even have the words for what he wants.
The hatch clanks open and Lee turns, buries his face in the pillow.
Behind him he hears a chair pull out from the table and someone sit down heavily. A hand rests on his shoulder.
“I know,” says a voice, high-pitched with age and grief.
Lee rolls over to find Tigh sitting beside him, a tear in his own eye, for Ellen, for Kara. Lee shakes his head. “I can't...” He can't do anything. He doesn't know what he can do, what he'll ever be able to do again, without her. “I love her,” he says, because it's the only thing that makes sense, it's the only thing that's still true in the world.
Tigh nods. “I know.” He opens Kara’s locker and gets out her bottle, takes a swig, then extends it to Lee.
The ambrosia burns its way down his throat, forcing the tears back. “Shouldn't you be with my father?” he asks hoarsely.
“The President's with him.” Tigh watches him sadly. “She's lost someone she loved like a child before.”
Lee nods.
“And I lost the woman I loved.” His voice sounds strangled.
Lee's eyes flare in surprise.
“She told me once. Down on New Caprica.” Tigh drinks deep.
He's startled and happy and the first thought that flickers through his mind is that he'll have to ask Kara how the frak that happened. His jaw starts to tremble with the force he’s exerting not to give himself up to the sobs that racked him a minute ago. “It got her killed,” Lee manages. “Loving me. Trusting me.” When he looks up there are Tigh looks near tears again. “She didn’t want to fly, but I made her.” He’s crying again himself. He swallows down more ambrosia. It’s good stuff; he can’t imagine how Kara has any left after all this time.
“Nobody ever made that woman do anything,” Tigh tells him.
It’s the past tense that’s too much: made, not makes. Lee flips open the box beside him, needing to see her. Kara grins up at him, eyes bright as she raises them to the camera. So alive that for a second he can’t see the explosion superimposed on everything else. Lee holds her gaze, fights as hard as he can to remember this morning, to hold on to that truth instead of this one.
Tigh looks down at the photos he’s holding. “Sam will want those,” he says softly.
Lee's hands recoil. Gods, just like always he's forgotten Kara isn't really his. He looks harshly at Tigh, chokes out, “Right. You lost your wife, like him.” There’s old anger in his voice.
The older man gapes for a minute, then clears his throat. “That morning, when she told me she loved you.”
Lee shakes his head, confused.
“After Founder’s Day.”
Suddenly he blinks, the world shifting. “She told you then?”
Tigh closes his eye. “I told her she had to choose what she could survive and not look back.”
He doesn’t understand.
“She didn’t think she could survive losing you.”
It rips through him. They made their peace after the dance, but Kara was never the type to say the words. If this pain is what she was running from, he understands.
“Sometimes you think you can't live without them either.” Tigh’s voice warbles tearfully, and Lee’s cheeks are wet again. “But you can. There’s still fighting to be done. And your father needs you.”
He doesn’t know how to respond. Out there in his Viper, it was enough to turn him around, but right now Lee can’t bring himself to care. Kara is dead.
“You should go to him,” Tigh says softly.
Lee half nods, takes another long drink from the bottle. It’s nearly empty; Tigh leaves it for him to finish off as he rises and leaves.
For a long time, Lee doesn’t move. He has no momentum, no purpose. The alcohol begins to reach him, numbing the pain, blurring the clarity of Kara’s Viper exploding.
Finally a klaxon sounds, alerting the squadrons to the shift change. Lee rises, not wanting to deal with the other pilots returning. He pulls Kara’s curtain closed and leaves the box of photos for Helo to gather along with her other things; he’ll get them to Sam or auction them off. He takes only the top picture: Kara before the apocalypse. He takes the picture from the locker door, too--Sam would never understand all that it means. As he slips out, Lee gathers the bundle of her icons close to his chest. They were hers, and that’s something.
***
As Lee stumbles through the halls of Galactica, he thinks of the first time he was sure Kara was dead. Somehow it’s the last time he can remember feeling this tired. She was crashed on a rocky moon, and Lee wasn’t sure what anything meant without her.
That day he also got reassurance that his father loved him. He clings to that now, to his father’s voice saying, Not you, too.
The hatch is closed, but Lee can hear voices. He hesitates, then enters when the marines wave him in. And stops short as he takes in the room’s occupants.
Along with his father and Roslin, there’s a third person raising his eyes to Lee: Sam, his posture crumpled under the weight of grief, his eyes red and heartbroken.
Lee staggers back against the hatch; the marines have shut it again.
“Come in,” his father murmurs, but as Sam looks up at him Lee feels suddenly how much he doesn’t belong here. Doesn’t have a right to be here.
“It’s okay,” Sam mumbles.
Lee nods jerkily and steps forward, is suddenly pulled into his father’s arms. Bill holds him so tightly Lee can feel his heartbeat against his own chest. His father is crying. His own tears threaten to fall again.
Laura speaks, easing the intensity of the moment, slowly drawing Bill back into himself, into the crook of her arm as she sits on the couch. It takes Lee a moment to make sense of her words.
“We were discussing what kind of service Kara would want.”
“But--” Lee’s not sure what protest he’d like to make. She’s not dead? We don’t have her body, her ashes?
“She went to one of the Athenian academies,” Sam says hoarsely. “As a kid. She said she always like the chapel services there, the way they made her feel quiet.”
He can’t breathe. How is it possible that Sam knew this about her when he didn’t? The world is spinning around him. While he sinks into his father’s chair, gasping and light-headed, Laura is calmly taking over, outlining on a pad of paper what Sam and Bill are describing in terms of a ceremony. Full military honors. Prayer. Memories.
“Do you want to speak, Lee?” Sam asks, insistently, as if it’s not the first time he’s asked.
Lee blinks.
“At the service.” There’s bitterness in Sam’s face for a moment, and regret, but they fade quickly. “Do you want to say something?”
Kara’s funeral. A funeral for Kara. A eulogy for Kara. He can’t fathom it. Lee finds himself on his feet, backing toward the hatch. “I can’t,” he says tightly, his throat aching. “I just--”
“It’s alright.” Laura moves toward him slowly, tears trembling in her eyes in spite of her composure a minute ago. She slides her arms around his neck, lets him cling to her. “I know,” she whispers as Lee falls apart again. “I know.”
When he finally releases her, turning away from his father and Sam as he wipes at his face, Laura leans in close for a moment, speaks too low for them to hear. “The funeral is for us, not for her, Lee. If you can’t...it’s not for Kara.”
He looks at her sharply for a moment. Her eyes stare off at something else. Then they flicker back to his. “I’m so sorry.” She wipes at her own cheeks.
He has nothing to say to that. Lee leaves, can’t hear his father calling out behind him.
***
Lee’s not sure what time it is by now, but he needs to be alone. Pilots and knuckle-draggers are passing him in the halls, reaching out to lay a hand on his arm or trying to engage him in conversation.
His quarters are blessedly empty, though Kara lingers in the corners like she has every day since their affair ended, since he promised himself he would never drag her down into these sheets for a stolen hour of pleasure again. All those hours went wasted instead.
Lee is shaking. He sinks onto the bed, pulling their picture out of his pocket. The idols are piled beside him. “I miss you,” he whispers, flooded with deja vu as he remembers saying the same thing, to the same picture, after Zak died, on the nights when he’d get too drunk over triad to remember to hold it together. Now the alcohol is lulling him to sleep. He lies down shakily, allows himself to fall into the void.
He’s running across a beach, naked, screaming out his love to the night sky. Happier than he’s ever been in his whole life. At the sound of her laugh, he turns. She’s not there. He whirls again. He can feel her presence, feels like if he closed his eyes and reached out, she’d be close enough to touch. She’s not. She’s gone. He’s screaming.
He wakes thrashing beneath Dee's touch.
"Lee!" she's shouting. "Lee!"
He blinks at her in confusion, looks around for Kara. "Where is she?"
His wife sits on her knees beside him, her eyes filled with pain and sympathy. "You don't remember?"
And then he does. It's no less painful this time. His own screams in his ears, Kara's Viper in fragments.
Dee sees it in his face, lays a hand gently on his arm. "I'm sorry she's gone, Lee."
Lee's eyes leap to hers. By tacit agreement Kara is one of the things they don't ever discuss.
She shrugs away his surprise, looks past him to the clock. "The service is in an hour. I was coming to wake you anyway."
"What?" He shakes his head.
"We've gotten pretty good at making arrangements quickly." She shrugs. "Your father wanted to do it while we're still here, before the fleet moves on."
He half nods as he swings his legs off the side of the bed. His head spins. He hasn't had anything but ambrosia since he left on CAP...yesterday? Yesterday he ate breakfast with Kara.
"Here." Dee's busily moving about their quarters, handing him a cup of coffee, setting out his dress grays. "Lee," she says loudly when he doesn't move. "Lee, it's time to get ready now."
He goes through the motions so she won't remind him time for what. When he's ready, dressed and numbly eating an algae bar that Dee hands him, she stops near the hatch, posture tense. "I'm on duty," she says haltingly. "And I thought--unless you want me there--"
Lee looks up at her, breaks free of the numbness long enough to admire her, not for the first time, for all the ways she's forgiven him.
"I am sorry about Kara, Lee." She's charitable. It's easier now.
He nods and she smiles tightly, heads off for her shift.
***
The halls are empty and quiet as Lee finally heads toward the former meeting room now designated a temple. There's a crowd already gathered; words drift out. The priestess is speaking the familiar prayer service for the dead. Tyrol, standing just inside the door, meets Lee's eyes with understanding, gestures for him to go in. Lee shakes his head.
The priestess' voice is lilting, her language ornate. Lee can hardly discern words. Kara's gods are still in his quarters and he wonders if he should have brought them, but the thought drifts away.
Laura begins to speak. "I knew Kara best when we were down on New Caprica. Not during the hard times, but during the good ones. In the mornings before school I'd come to the temple to pray, and Kara would join me. I had always known her as a warrior, as a pilot and brilliant strategist, but I got to know her as a person during that year, someone who trusted the gods and who worked tirelessly to build a better life there alongside the rest of us...I always believed she’d be with us all the way to the end of our journey..." She trails off and Lee can hear the rumble of his father's voice offering support as she steps off the platform.
Next is Sam. “I fell in love with Kara during a time when I was fighting for my life, for my friends’ lives. We lost people every day. It almost seemed normal when she left. And then...” His voice nearly breaks. “She came back. She freed us from that hell. And I got a year with her. A year of finding out who we were together, of building a marriage.” His eyes meet Lee’s through a gap in the crowd. “We faced a lot of challenges after the Cylons found us again, but I loved my wife every moment, and I know she loved me.”
He continues but Lee turns away. He can’t bear this. He stumbles blindly down the corridor away from the temple. He’s not sure what he’d say if he went up there. Maybe that he loved her in a way he’s never loved anyone else. Or that the happiest he’s ever been was watching her shout to the sky on a starry night that she loved him. Or that for the second time in his life he doesn’t know how to live. The first time he was lost, felt that the world around him was broken and all the points on the compass were places he didn’t want to be. This time the problem is that Kara was his compass all along.
Lee finds himself suddenly in the Memorial Hall, surrounded by pictures of the dead. Screams well up in his throat; she doesn't belong here with them! How dare the universe take her, too! The words come out as harsh sobs, tearing out of his mouth as he crumples to the ground, here in the place where she sat just a day ago, smiling up at him.
On the floor beside him candle wax has dripped into the shape of the storm. He blinks, horrified, then rips off his dogtags, uses the edge to scrape frantically at the deck, forcing the cool wax to buckle and fragment. He's left with shards of red and blue in the letters of his dog tags as he finally thrusts them back over his head.
"There you are," his father says, emerging from the end of the corridor, his voice icy cold.
Lee looks up. Laura is trailing behind Bill, reaching for his arm, but he doesn't notice.
"You owed it to her to be there. She was your responsibility!"
"Bill--" Laura starts to interrupt.
Lee rises to his feet. “You want to blame me for this one, Dad? Go ahead. It’s what we do at funerals.”
“I don’t blame you,” he bites out.
“You said it was my call.”
His father rears back for a moment, then his eyes narrow. "You should never have let her fly."
Lee half-sobs. "You made it my call because you couldn't tell her no either."
"And you should have," he snarls.
"I know." The words are torn out of Lee as certainty of his guilt forces its way through him, displacing grief and love. He drowned this knowledge last night, but it’s the truth. Kara is dead when he could have saved her.
His father starts toward him, furious now that Lee has made himself a willing target.
"Bill!" Laura orders, wrenching at his arm, pulling him back. She glances frantically at Lee. "Not now. You can deal with this later."
For a moment Bill's eyes turn their rage on her, and then it fades. He nods, looking suddenly terribly old, and allows himself to be drawn away.
Lee stands frozen, panting as wave after wave of pain washes over him. Kara loved him, and this was how he repaid her: by not trusting her fears, by taking her to her death. She was right, Tigh was right. There's no living with this.
He begins to run down the corridor, through the ship. Suddenly he's turned around, though, is stumbling not onto the flight deck but into Dogsville. He's on the wrong side of the ship somehow. Here in the slot where Kara's Viper should be there's a tent instead.
"Welcome, Lee Adama."
The voice startles him out of his stupor and he whirls, finds a woman draped in scarves and veils gesturing him inside. His begins to refuse.
"I think you know Kara would be glad to see you here."
He jerks in surprise, and this time when she gestures Lee ducks into the tent.
The oracle settles herself on a pillow and waits until he joins her before speaking. "If you think you can join her in death, you misunderstand," she says, her voice oddly flat. "And if you think that you could have prevented Kara from fulfilling her destiny, you are wrong."
"There's no such thing as destiny," he snaps. "Kara never believed in it."
She smiles fondly. "There is a great difference between resistance and disbelief. She knew, when it came, what she was called to do."
"To die?" His voice breaks on the words.
"What did she say to you?" The oracle asks instead of answering.
He gasps for breath remembering. Lee, Lee, just let me go! They're waiting for me, Lee! "She didn't want to die," he begs.
"The things we choose are not always the things that we desire."
He swallows hard at that, thinking of Tigh's story.
"The thing you desire right now--it would be the wrong choice."
Lee shakes his head. "I don't believe in this." He waves his hand at her incense, her artifacts. "Not any of this. There are no gods, no one was waiting for her, Kara flew into a storm and died for nothing."
She smiles teasingly, is for an instant a painful reminder of Kara. "You believe it was for nothing. She believed it was for something. Who can say which is true?"
"I loved her," he says roughly. "That's true. And she's gone."
"She still needs you, though." Suddenly her voice is different, her Gemenese accent traded for a Caprican one as she speaks: "Being forgotten. Being forgotten scares me."
His heart pounds at the words. "Did she tell you that?"
"She told you."
For the first time Lee searches her face, his eyes wide in wonder as faith ignites painfully in his chest. "Were they really? Waiting for her?"
The oracle smiles.
***
Lee unwraps the bundle gently, sets out the statues on a crate between a few half-melted candles. For a long time Lee sits back on his heels, looking at them in the flickering light. They seem almost in motion, possessed of some sort of life beyond human understanding.
"Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer." He stops a moment, trying to swallow back his tears and then giving in and letting them fall. "Take the soul of your daughter Kara Thrace...into your hands...and give her peace.”
He stays there a long time.
As he finally rises, Lee rests his hand over her picture in his pocket, takes it out and stares into Kara's eyes. Hopes that this is what she wanted, that she’s in the heaven she’s always believed in. Then he tucks it away. He can’t leave her here yet, not while she still needs him. Not while he still needs her.
Author:
embolaliaSummary: Lee reacts to Kara’s death in Maelstrom
Characters: Kara/Lee
Rating: R
Warnings: Character Death
***
Lee flips his Viper as he comes out of the launch tube and can just make out the fear in Kara’s eyes as she is flung out into space in turn. Sighing, he points his bird toward the side of the fleet furthest from the planet and begins the circuit. “Race you,” he says cheerfully into the mic. With a hint of her familiar laugh, Kara blasts past him. Lee grins and takes off.
By the time the race ends, Kara crowing about her superiority as a pilot, they’ve both relaxed. It's the first time they've flown together since their affair ended, and it's a beautiful thing. No matter how complicated the rest of their lives get, they’ve always been in love with this. For hours they fly loop-de-loops and play tag. Kara's raucous laugh restores them both.
When Tigh begins to gripe about them tying up the comm channel, Lee switches them to their own frequency. He makes sure it’s not one Dee usually listens to.
The fleet is beautiful by planetlight. The blues and reds of the clouds glimmer against the hulls, smoothing away blemishes and gouges from years of Cylon attacks. Lee hardly notices, he's so swept up in the grace of flying with Kara.
“Thank you,” Kara says quietly as they head back toward the planet.
“What was that?” Lee asks, surprised, teasing.
“You heard me,” she says, glancing at him through her canopy. Then her voice softens. “Thank you. For coming out here with me.”
His eyes lock on hers. She’s smiling, so serene, so lovely. Then Kara grins, twirls her Viper away from his in a double-barrel roll. Lee laughs, falls into sync with her. They dance across the stars.
“Faster,” Kara gasps into his ear, and Lee shivers. No matter what he said earlier about Dee, it's going to take all his self-control not to frak Kara senseless when they get back on Galactica.
As they descend into the clouds around the planet, Kara looks over at him, assures him she’s copacetic. There’s a glint of pure happiness in her eyes that radiates through Lee. As he listens to her laughter over the comm, Kara is so completely the woman that Lee loves that he can hardly contain it. She waves at him from her cockpit, full of light and spirit and joy. He can hardly wait the forty minutes until they're done so he can have her in his arms.
And then another perfect moment is destroyed.
She’s flying away from him, even as he tries to get on her wing, tries to reach her over a radio signal propelling his voice through space. “Kara! Kara, come back!”
Her voice finally comes through, asking for one thing as she hurtles away from him: for him to let her go. The only thing he’s never known how to do. Screams are wrenched from Lee’s throat as he struggles to catch her.
Debris flies out at him, all that's left.
Lee gasps to Galactica what’s happened, then turns off his mic and sits in his cockpit, hovering over the storm that’s taken her away. He waits for her to emerge from the clouds. She’s tempted fate and won so many times.
Kara doesn’t come. His face is streaked with tears he can’t reach through his helmet. He can’t go back to Galactica without her, can’t walk across the deck or choke down algae or play a hand of triad if she never will again. He’d rather follow her in. Lee reengages his Viper, points its nose downward.
And then his father's voice comes over the short wave, the first thing to register in ages.
“Please, Lee...Not you, too.” He sounds so completely lost that duty settles back onto Lee’s shoulders, a familiar tether. He turns back toward Galactica.
***
The deck seems emptier as he staggers out of his bird, or maybe it's just the silence. Cally looks up dolefully as she passes Lee his post-flight checklist.
He’s numb to the people watching him, his mind shutting down against the pain. Helo’s arm weighs down his shoulders, steering Lee away. The others erupt into murmurs, hugging, some crying. They lose pilots, friends, all the time, but not like this. Not on a day without a fight, not a pilot like Starbuck.
Lee follows Helo to the head and mechanically strips off his flightsuit.
“How--” Helo begins, then clamps his jaw shut against his voice breaking.
Lee shakes his head, focuses intently on pulling on clean tanks.
“Can I get you anything?” the other pilot asks, his voice calmer.
Finally raising his eyes, Lee simply stares at him, then leaves the room.
He doesn’t know where he’s going, but his feet seem to. It takes barely a minute to reach the senior officers’ bunkroom, which is empty as usual at this time of day. Lee rests his hand on the wheel of the hatch and a keening noise escapes him. He forces it down, pushes his way in.
He crosses to her bunk, as if she'll just be there, sleeping. As if this place is still hers without her in it. Not as if. It is still hers; there's no part of him that can imagine otherwise. The blankets are tangled, the curtain hanging askew. This is where Kara Thrace lives.
Lee opens her locker. A picture is hanging there, unfolded long ago. He traces his fingers over her face. Would she want him to do this? But then, who else?
With shaking hands Lee takes down the cigar box with her pictures, her wrapped idols. He wants to hurl them against the wall. There are a few books, a few tapes. Hanging behind her uniforms is a man’s coat, streaked with paint: the one she brought back from Caprica. And at the bottom of the locker, a half-full bottle of something dark. For a moment Lee thinks he shouldn't drink it because she'll be pissed, and then he remembers again.
That’s all that she owned. That and him.
Lee takes the photographs and the idols and sits on her bed, lies down in the last place to cradle her body. He turns his head and inhales the scent of Kara’s hair on the pillow. Recognition tears through him. Knowledge of her, desire, complete and undeniable love. Kara's dead. In hours or days this will be gone, too. And he's still here, for however long this lasts, without her. It's so much worse than loving her from afar.
Lee can't breathe, he's crying so hard.
He clutches her gods in his hands. “Please,” he begs, gasping for air. “Please.” He doesn’t even have the words for what he wants.
The hatch clanks open and Lee turns, buries his face in the pillow.
Behind him he hears a chair pull out from the table and someone sit down heavily. A hand rests on his shoulder.
“I know,” says a voice, high-pitched with age and grief.
Lee rolls over to find Tigh sitting beside him, a tear in his own eye, for Ellen, for Kara. Lee shakes his head. “I can't...” He can't do anything. He doesn't know what he can do, what he'll ever be able to do again, without her. “I love her,” he says, because it's the only thing that makes sense, it's the only thing that's still true in the world.
Tigh nods. “I know.” He opens Kara’s locker and gets out her bottle, takes a swig, then extends it to Lee.
The ambrosia burns its way down his throat, forcing the tears back. “Shouldn't you be with my father?” he asks hoarsely.
“The President's with him.” Tigh watches him sadly. “She's lost someone she loved like a child before.”
Lee nods.
“And I lost the woman I loved.” His voice sounds strangled.
Lee's eyes flare in surprise.
“She told me once. Down on New Caprica.” Tigh drinks deep.
He's startled and happy and the first thought that flickers through his mind is that he'll have to ask Kara how the frak that happened. His jaw starts to tremble with the force he’s exerting not to give himself up to the sobs that racked him a minute ago. “It got her killed,” Lee manages. “Loving me. Trusting me.” When he looks up there are Tigh looks near tears again. “She didn’t want to fly, but I made her.” He’s crying again himself. He swallows down more ambrosia. It’s good stuff; he can’t imagine how Kara has any left after all this time.
“Nobody ever made that woman do anything,” Tigh tells him.
It’s the past tense that’s too much: made, not makes. Lee flips open the box beside him, needing to see her. Kara grins up at him, eyes bright as she raises them to the camera. So alive that for a second he can’t see the explosion superimposed on everything else. Lee holds her gaze, fights as hard as he can to remember this morning, to hold on to that truth instead of this one.
Tigh looks down at the photos he’s holding. “Sam will want those,” he says softly.
Lee's hands recoil. Gods, just like always he's forgotten Kara isn't really his. He looks harshly at Tigh, chokes out, “Right. You lost your wife, like him.” There’s old anger in his voice.
The older man gapes for a minute, then clears his throat. “That morning, when she told me she loved you.”
Lee shakes his head, confused.
“After Founder’s Day.”
Suddenly he blinks, the world shifting. “She told you then?”
Tigh closes his eye. “I told her she had to choose what she could survive and not look back.”
He doesn’t understand.
“She didn’t think she could survive losing you.”
It rips through him. They made their peace after the dance, but Kara was never the type to say the words. If this pain is what she was running from, he understands.
“Sometimes you think you can't live without them either.” Tigh’s voice warbles tearfully, and Lee’s cheeks are wet again. “But you can. There’s still fighting to be done. And your father needs you.”
He doesn’t know how to respond. Out there in his Viper, it was enough to turn him around, but right now Lee can’t bring himself to care. Kara is dead.
“You should go to him,” Tigh says softly.
Lee half nods, takes another long drink from the bottle. It’s nearly empty; Tigh leaves it for him to finish off as he rises and leaves.
For a long time, Lee doesn’t move. He has no momentum, no purpose. The alcohol begins to reach him, numbing the pain, blurring the clarity of Kara’s Viper exploding.
Finally a klaxon sounds, alerting the squadrons to the shift change. Lee rises, not wanting to deal with the other pilots returning. He pulls Kara’s curtain closed and leaves the box of photos for Helo to gather along with her other things; he’ll get them to Sam or auction them off. He takes only the top picture: Kara before the apocalypse. He takes the picture from the locker door, too--Sam would never understand all that it means. As he slips out, Lee gathers the bundle of her icons close to his chest. They were hers, and that’s something.
***
As Lee stumbles through the halls of Galactica, he thinks of the first time he was sure Kara was dead. Somehow it’s the last time he can remember feeling this tired. She was crashed on a rocky moon, and Lee wasn’t sure what anything meant without her.
That day he also got reassurance that his father loved him. He clings to that now, to his father’s voice saying, Not you, too.
The hatch is closed, but Lee can hear voices. He hesitates, then enters when the marines wave him in. And stops short as he takes in the room’s occupants.
Along with his father and Roslin, there’s a third person raising his eyes to Lee: Sam, his posture crumpled under the weight of grief, his eyes red and heartbroken.
Lee staggers back against the hatch; the marines have shut it again.
“Come in,” his father murmurs, but as Sam looks up at him Lee feels suddenly how much he doesn’t belong here. Doesn’t have a right to be here.
“It’s okay,” Sam mumbles.
Lee nods jerkily and steps forward, is suddenly pulled into his father’s arms. Bill holds him so tightly Lee can feel his heartbeat against his own chest. His father is crying. His own tears threaten to fall again.
Laura speaks, easing the intensity of the moment, slowly drawing Bill back into himself, into the crook of her arm as she sits on the couch. It takes Lee a moment to make sense of her words.
“We were discussing what kind of service Kara would want.”
“But--” Lee’s not sure what protest he’d like to make. She’s not dead? We don’t have her body, her ashes?
“She went to one of the Athenian academies,” Sam says hoarsely. “As a kid. She said she always like the chapel services there, the way they made her feel quiet.”
He can’t breathe. How is it possible that Sam knew this about her when he didn’t? The world is spinning around him. While he sinks into his father’s chair, gasping and light-headed, Laura is calmly taking over, outlining on a pad of paper what Sam and Bill are describing in terms of a ceremony. Full military honors. Prayer. Memories.
“Do you want to speak, Lee?” Sam asks, insistently, as if it’s not the first time he’s asked.
Lee blinks.
“At the service.” There’s bitterness in Sam’s face for a moment, and regret, but they fade quickly. “Do you want to say something?”
Kara’s funeral. A funeral for Kara. A eulogy for Kara. He can’t fathom it. Lee finds himself on his feet, backing toward the hatch. “I can’t,” he says tightly, his throat aching. “I just--”
“It’s alright.” Laura moves toward him slowly, tears trembling in her eyes in spite of her composure a minute ago. She slides her arms around his neck, lets him cling to her. “I know,” she whispers as Lee falls apart again. “I know.”
When he finally releases her, turning away from his father and Sam as he wipes at his face, Laura leans in close for a moment, speaks too low for them to hear. “The funeral is for us, not for her, Lee. If you can’t...it’s not for Kara.”
He looks at her sharply for a moment. Her eyes stare off at something else. Then they flicker back to his. “I’m so sorry.” She wipes at her own cheeks.
He has nothing to say to that. Lee leaves, can’t hear his father calling out behind him.
***
Lee’s not sure what time it is by now, but he needs to be alone. Pilots and knuckle-draggers are passing him in the halls, reaching out to lay a hand on his arm or trying to engage him in conversation.
His quarters are blessedly empty, though Kara lingers in the corners like she has every day since their affair ended, since he promised himself he would never drag her down into these sheets for a stolen hour of pleasure again. All those hours went wasted instead.
Lee is shaking. He sinks onto the bed, pulling their picture out of his pocket. The idols are piled beside him. “I miss you,” he whispers, flooded with deja vu as he remembers saying the same thing, to the same picture, after Zak died, on the nights when he’d get too drunk over triad to remember to hold it together. Now the alcohol is lulling him to sleep. He lies down shakily, allows himself to fall into the void.
He’s running across a beach, naked, screaming out his love to the night sky. Happier than he’s ever been in his whole life. At the sound of her laugh, he turns. She’s not there. He whirls again. He can feel her presence, feels like if he closed his eyes and reached out, she’d be close enough to touch. She’s not. She’s gone. He’s screaming.
He wakes thrashing beneath Dee's touch.
"Lee!" she's shouting. "Lee!"
He blinks at her in confusion, looks around for Kara. "Where is she?"
His wife sits on her knees beside him, her eyes filled with pain and sympathy. "You don't remember?"
And then he does. It's no less painful this time. His own screams in his ears, Kara's Viper in fragments.
Dee sees it in his face, lays a hand gently on his arm. "I'm sorry she's gone, Lee."
Lee's eyes leap to hers. By tacit agreement Kara is one of the things they don't ever discuss.
She shrugs away his surprise, looks past him to the clock. "The service is in an hour. I was coming to wake you anyway."
"What?" He shakes his head.
"We've gotten pretty good at making arrangements quickly." She shrugs. "Your father wanted to do it while we're still here, before the fleet moves on."
He half nods as he swings his legs off the side of the bed. His head spins. He hasn't had anything but ambrosia since he left on CAP...yesterday? Yesterday he ate breakfast with Kara.
"Here." Dee's busily moving about their quarters, handing him a cup of coffee, setting out his dress grays. "Lee," she says loudly when he doesn't move. "Lee, it's time to get ready now."
He goes through the motions so she won't remind him time for what. When he's ready, dressed and numbly eating an algae bar that Dee hands him, she stops near the hatch, posture tense. "I'm on duty," she says haltingly. "And I thought--unless you want me there--"
Lee looks up at her, breaks free of the numbness long enough to admire her, not for the first time, for all the ways she's forgiven him.
"I am sorry about Kara, Lee." She's charitable. It's easier now.
He nods and she smiles tightly, heads off for her shift.
***
The halls are empty and quiet as Lee finally heads toward the former meeting room now designated a temple. There's a crowd already gathered; words drift out. The priestess is speaking the familiar prayer service for the dead. Tyrol, standing just inside the door, meets Lee's eyes with understanding, gestures for him to go in. Lee shakes his head.
The priestess' voice is lilting, her language ornate. Lee can hardly discern words. Kara's gods are still in his quarters and he wonders if he should have brought them, but the thought drifts away.
Laura begins to speak. "I knew Kara best when we were down on New Caprica. Not during the hard times, but during the good ones. In the mornings before school I'd come to the temple to pray, and Kara would join me. I had always known her as a warrior, as a pilot and brilliant strategist, but I got to know her as a person during that year, someone who trusted the gods and who worked tirelessly to build a better life there alongside the rest of us...I always believed she’d be with us all the way to the end of our journey..." She trails off and Lee can hear the rumble of his father's voice offering support as she steps off the platform.
Next is Sam. “I fell in love with Kara during a time when I was fighting for my life, for my friends’ lives. We lost people every day. It almost seemed normal when she left. And then...” His voice nearly breaks. “She came back. She freed us from that hell. And I got a year with her. A year of finding out who we were together, of building a marriage.” His eyes meet Lee’s through a gap in the crowd. “We faced a lot of challenges after the Cylons found us again, but I loved my wife every moment, and I know she loved me.”
He continues but Lee turns away. He can’t bear this. He stumbles blindly down the corridor away from the temple. He’s not sure what he’d say if he went up there. Maybe that he loved her in a way he’s never loved anyone else. Or that the happiest he’s ever been was watching her shout to the sky on a starry night that she loved him. Or that for the second time in his life he doesn’t know how to live. The first time he was lost, felt that the world around him was broken and all the points on the compass were places he didn’t want to be. This time the problem is that Kara was his compass all along.
Lee finds himself suddenly in the Memorial Hall, surrounded by pictures of the dead. Screams well up in his throat; she doesn't belong here with them! How dare the universe take her, too! The words come out as harsh sobs, tearing out of his mouth as he crumples to the ground, here in the place where she sat just a day ago, smiling up at him.
On the floor beside him candle wax has dripped into the shape of the storm. He blinks, horrified, then rips off his dogtags, uses the edge to scrape frantically at the deck, forcing the cool wax to buckle and fragment. He's left with shards of red and blue in the letters of his dog tags as he finally thrusts them back over his head.
"There you are," his father says, emerging from the end of the corridor, his voice icy cold.
Lee looks up. Laura is trailing behind Bill, reaching for his arm, but he doesn't notice.
"You owed it to her to be there. She was your responsibility!"
"Bill--" Laura starts to interrupt.
Lee rises to his feet. “You want to blame me for this one, Dad? Go ahead. It’s what we do at funerals.”
“I don’t blame you,” he bites out.
“You said it was my call.”
His father rears back for a moment, then his eyes narrow. "You should never have let her fly."
Lee half-sobs. "You made it my call because you couldn't tell her no either."
"And you should have," he snarls.
"I know." The words are torn out of Lee as certainty of his guilt forces its way through him, displacing grief and love. He drowned this knowledge last night, but it’s the truth. Kara is dead when he could have saved her.
His father starts toward him, furious now that Lee has made himself a willing target.
"Bill!" Laura orders, wrenching at his arm, pulling him back. She glances frantically at Lee. "Not now. You can deal with this later."
For a moment Bill's eyes turn their rage on her, and then it fades. He nods, looking suddenly terribly old, and allows himself to be drawn away.
Lee stands frozen, panting as wave after wave of pain washes over him. Kara loved him, and this was how he repaid her: by not trusting her fears, by taking her to her death. She was right, Tigh was right. There's no living with this.
He begins to run down the corridor, through the ship. Suddenly he's turned around, though, is stumbling not onto the flight deck but into Dogsville. He's on the wrong side of the ship somehow. Here in the slot where Kara's Viper should be there's a tent instead.
"Welcome, Lee Adama."
The voice startles him out of his stupor and he whirls, finds a woman draped in scarves and veils gesturing him inside. His begins to refuse.
"I think you know Kara would be glad to see you here."
He jerks in surprise, and this time when she gestures Lee ducks into the tent.
The oracle settles herself on a pillow and waits until he joins her before speaking. "If you think you can join her in death, you misunderstand," she says, her voice oddly flat. "And if you think that you could have prevented Kara from fulfilling her destiny, you are wrong."
"There's no such thing as destiny," he snaps. "Kara never believed in it."
She smiles fondly. "There is a great difference between resistance and disbelief. She knew, when it came, what she was called to do."
"To die?" His voice breaks on the words.
"What did she say to you?" The oracle asks instead of answering.
He gasps for breath remembering. Lee, Lee, just let me go! They're waiting for me, Lee! "She didn't want to die," he begs.
"The things we choose are not always the things that we desire."
He swallows hard at that, thinking of Tigh's story.
"The thing you desire right now--it would be the wrong choice."
Lee shakes his head. "I don't believe in this." He waves his hand at her incense, her artifacts. "Not any of this. There are no gods, no one was waiting for her, Kara flew into a storm and died for nothing."
She smiles teasingly, is for an instant a painful reminder of Kara. "You believe it was for nothing. She believed it was for something. Who can say which is true?"
"I loved her," he says roughly. "That's true. And she's gone."
"She still needs you, though." Suddenly her voice is different, her Gemenese accent traded for a Caprican one as she speaks: "Being forgotten. Being forgotten scares me."
His heart pounds at the words. "Did she tell you that?"
"She told you."
For the first time Lee searches her face, his eyes wide in wonder as faith ignites painfully in his chest. "Were they really? Waiting for her?"
The oracle smiles.
***
Lee unwraps the bundle gently, sets out the statues on a crate between a few half-melted candles. For a long time Lee sits back on his heels, looking at them in the flickering light. They seem almost in motion, possessed of some sort of life beyond human understanding.
"Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer." He stops a moment, trying to swallow back his tears and then giving in and letting them fall. "Take the soul of your daughter Kara Thrace...into your hands...and give her peace.”
He stays there a long time.
As he finally rises, Lee rests his hand over her picture in his pocket, takes it out and stares into Kara's eyes. Hopes that this is what she wanted, that she’s in the heaven she’s always believed in. Then he tucks it away. He can’t leave her here yet, not while she still needs him. Not while he still needs her.
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