sangga (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} sangga) wrote,@ 2005-05-17 23:44:00 |
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new fic - part the second
thanks for reading.
on another note, i noticed i got a mention in the BSG awards (thanks, whoever), although my name got spelt wrong (oh well, you can't have everything). btw, ancarett's cunning plan to get good fic on the lists of the awards? i'm all for it. am supporting it. nominating now. go vote, you guys (god, it feels like october all over again).
He’s in the bunkroom, dressing after a rationed shower. He tugs a pair of workpants, a tank and some socks out of his locker, pushes the door shut. Stops. Opens the door again. Looks inside the small metal compartment that holds almost everything he owns. Examines the contents.
One remaining pair of workpants. A dress uniform and shoes. One pair of civvy pants and a t-shirt, rarely used. Running shorts and shoes. An empty wire hanger. Flight gear. Clean socks at the bottom. And on the shelf – a spare blanket. Underwear. Two folded tanks. Toiletries in a bag. A pen and a few pencils. Stopwatch. His wallet, stuffed at the back, with spare cubits and some papers and a picture of his mother and Zak. A few other photos. Patches from the Atlantia. On the door of the locker, a mirror.
He knows that when he boarded the ship it was only supposed to be short term, a whirlwind tour. Most of his personal effects were left behind, and subsequently lost. But this still doesn’t explain the fact that, in the months he’s been working here, living here, he’s acquired absolutely zero shit.
He closes the door and stands there in a towel, feeling the water drying on his skin and wondering why his life is so spartan.
*
Music, tinny and very quiet. He’s about to turn the corner when he hears it. For some reason he’s reminded of the beach in summer - sea breezes, sand, salt, alcoholic beverages, and…laziness.
All four of them, congregated in the supply room around a little jerry-rigged portable Player. Sharon is sitting on a crate, knees forward and apart, looking up and smiling. Evans is tooling with the leads on something. One of the deck crew, Tris, is standing next to Kara, and the two of them are getting down to some song that involves them laughing low and singing sotto voce and then laughing again.
Sharon claps her hands and urges them on, eyes crinkling up. Lee hasn’t seen her smile so broadly for some time. Evans makes a half-hearted attempt to fiddle with whatever he’s repairing in his hands, but his head is nodding in time.
Lee watches from around the corner. He’s debating with himself whether to step forward and break up the party – Kara, Boomer and Evans are all off, ostensibly making fuses. Tris is supposed to be on mids. She probably just came to fetch something and got dragged in. The prospect of seeing the look in her face – surprise, embarrassment, guilt – is putting him off.
As he watches, Kara’s hands go out like she’s balancing herself. She pouts her lips and shimmies. Sharon laughs. Kara tilts her body, rolls one hip to the music – one, two, three rolls. Her work pants hang loosely, and her tanks have ridden up on one side. Then she sways over and rolls the other hip – one, two, three. Tris is encouraged to follow, and suddenly the two of them are entertaining the others with some sort of half-assed dance number, mouthing lyrics and giggling. Evans grins and shakes his head, picks up his pliers.
Lee backs off a step and stands for a moment, letting his head rest against the bulkhead, feeling the slow pulse of the music reverberate inside him. Kara’s hips roll in front of his eyelids, the bare skin above the waistband of her pants shimmering.
He opens his eyes quickly, and then he walks away.
*
He’s in the corridor.
Running is what he uses to take the edge off. The hot steady pump of his own blood, the flush, the stretch and the gasping breath – no one can buy that feeling.
He sees two people ahead at the next turn, and slows down when he realises who they are. Chuckles is standing with his back to the bulkhead, a tray in his hands. Tigh, hands on hips, leaning from the shoulders in the position of accosting, looms in front of the young pilot. The height difference lends the tableau an amusing poignancy – a solid six-foot kid being monstered by a man more than twice his age and five inches shorter.
Lee jogs to a halt, still puffing.
“Is there a problem here?”
Tigh turns and takes a half step back, involving the CAG in the latest dilemna.
“What an excellent question.” He frowns at Chuckles again. “Well, what do you say, son? Is there a problem? Something you’d like to explain to your captain?”
“No, sir. No problem, sir.”
Chuckles looks strained. The crockery on his tray – a covered plate, a glass of fake milk and a cup of coffee – rattles as he shifts his feet. Tigh glowers again. Lee, feeling the chill of drying sweat, decides to intervene.
“Something wrong with eating in the mess, cadet?”
“Uh, no – no, sir.”
“So…who’s the tray for?”
Chuckles blinks nervously.
“Sir?”
“The tray, cadet,” Lee says, enunciating carefully. “If you’ve already eaten in the mess, then who’s the tray for?”
Chuckles glances from Colonel to Captain, then mumbles his reply.
“It’s for, uh…”
“Speak up, son,” Tigh grinds out impatiently. “Who’s the tray for?”
“It’s for Crashdown, sir. I mean, Lieutenant –“
“We know who you mean,” Lee says with a sinking feeling.
“And is there a reason why the lieutenant isn’t getting his own meals?” Tigh drawls with a grimace, like this is giving him a headache. The top fastening of his uniform jacket is loose, and Lee guesses he’s just come off shift. “Is the man ill?”
“No, sir,” Chuckles says.
“Then why are you fetching him breakfast?” Lee asks quietly, drawing the younger man’s attention. “Did you lose a bet? Is that what this is about?”
“No, sir,” Chuckles says. He looks vaguely confused, as if he thinks Lee should know all this. “It’s…it’s a trade, sir.”
As soon as the kid says the words, Lee’s stomach does a nasty slide. His gaze flattens.
“A trade?”
“Uh, yes, sir. I mean, I thought… I mean, I didn’t know it wasn’t –“
Lee nods, cutting off Chuckles abruptly, aware that Tigh is staring.
“It’s okay, private. I understand. A trade.”
“Yes, sir.” Chuckles is in a hurry to explain now. “Crashdown, he traded me a tank and a pack of razors, sir. And I thought I had a book and some other stuff to make it stick, sir, but I forgot that I’d already –“
“We get the picture, cadet,” Tigh says heavily.
Lee, wishing he wasn’t wearing his running shorts, draws himself up a bit.
“So Crashdown’s got you bringing him breakfast in bed to make it up, is that how it goes?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chuckles just looks relieved. Lee can feel his own cheeks starting to colour. He clenches his jaw, then lets go to speak. His voice is firm and deadly quiet.
“Okay, cadet. This is what’s going to happen. You are going to take the tray back to the mess. Then you are going to go to the bunkroom and tell the lieutenant to see me, at his earliest…convenience.” Lee checks Tigh quickly – the man is standing, watching it all with a sour expression. Lee looks back at Chuckles and continues. “I am not going to write this up – on the condition that you spread the word: crew trading is now over. Finished. Do we understand each other?”
“Uh, yes – yes, sir.”
“Good. That’s it. I’ll deliver more details at briefing.” He looks at Chuckles, who is now glancing around like he’s not sure of the next move. “You’re free to go, cadet.”
“Uh, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The tray rattles again as Chuckles salutes clumsily, then belatedly remembers to salute Tigh as well. “Uh, sir.”
The kid collects himself and hurries off. Tigh holds himself stiffly as he faces Lee.
“”I don’t suppose you’d like to explain to me what the hell that was all about?”
Saul Tigh is a bastard, Lee thinks, because as the Commander’s eyes and ears he’s sure to know exactly what it was all about. Lee just gives him a small tight smile.
“Nothing. I mean, nothing I can’t handle, sir.”
At least Tigh respects Lee’s attempts to deal with his own problems. The colonel nods his head shortly.
“Fine.” His hand reaches up to undo the next jacket fastening, shoulders sinking a little, crisis averted. “Fine then. Well, I think we were both interrupted mid-action, so if you don’t mind…”
The colonel turns towards his quarters, and Lee knows he’s being dismissed. He salutes smartly.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
He sounds like Chuckles, he thinks. He watches Tigh walk away, and then starts jogging off, feeling stiff and a bit cold, knowing that the feeling in his body will pass, knowing that he’s committed himself to putting words into action now, knowing exactly what - if worst came to worst – Colonel Tigh would be trading his cubits for.
*
Word, of course, gets around before briefing.
Kara bursts through the hatch as he’s dressing. Her eyes practically jump out of her face when she’s angry, but he’s noticed this before.
“I can’t frakking believe this! I thought we discussed this!”
Sliding on his socks, keeping his face neutral.
“You’re talking about the trading.”
“No – my frakking Cylon love-child – yes, the frakking trading, Lee!”
He pulls on his boots meditatively.
“Cool down, Kara. It’s done.”
“It’s done???…”
She spins and sputters for a moment, incensed, raising a fist in the air, it hovers there a moment as she watches him stand to his full height…
Sanity prevails. She drops her hand. He can see in her face how much this costs, but she has opted for staying out of hack, and yelling at him instead does have its advantages.
“You didn’t even ask! You didn’t even negotiate. Just Mister-High-And-Mighty-I-Make-The-Orders,
He slaps his palm onto the locker with a satisfying crack, stopping her before she falls right over the precipice, says something that he’ll want to hit her for.
“Enough, Kara. It’s done. I’m giving the order. The cash register is closed.”
“I don’t believe you. This is totally unfair, Lee, and you know it –“
He finds her attitude about this both immature and perverse, and with the way she’s cranked this up so quickly he’s having trouble staying calm enough to argue the point.
“Unfair? To who? To you? Or is it unfair to Evans, whose been trading his underwear for music chips? Or is it unfair to the people on the other ships, who seem to be selling off their supplies for our cast-offs? Who, exactly, is losing out here?”
“This is frakked. You’re being an asshole -”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to protect people – the people in the fleet, the people in my squad. That’s my job.”
“Protect them?” Her eyebrows skyrocket. “Protect them from what? Their own self-interest? These people you’re talking about are trying to scrape together lives for themselves –“
“And do these lives involve slaving inferior personnel to pay off their debts? Or trading their essentials for novels and hand-creme?”
He’s surprised at her – can’t she see, can’t she understand? But her next move takes him off-guard. She masters herself with great effort, lowers her voice to plead her case.
Gods, he thinks, she’s that committed?
“Then…then set rules. Lay down boundaries. Don’t just forbid it altogether.” Her face screws up with the difficulty of explaining. “People need this, Lee – you just don’t see how –“
“I see, okay?” he snaps. “I see military personnel getting distracted by cigarettes and shaving soap.”
Kara bounces back a step, appalled.
“They’re not distracted! Gods, they’re so damned focused they’re going crazy! They can’t just shoot down Cylons-eat-sleep-shoot down Cylons forever and ever so say we all! Life isn’t just work, Lee, life is in the details –“
And it is at this point, this moment, the way she uses his name perhaps, or the dogged tone of her voice, that his face contorts and he loses it all – self-control, impassivity, blown into the universal void. How can she be so blind? He thought they were friends, he thought they were a team…how the frak can they even breathe the same air when their philosophies are so different?
“Don’t you get it?” he yells into her face. He slams open the locker, grabs a handful of something - toiletries, clothes – thrusts them in front of her before throwing them to the floor. “This…all this…” A half-full bottle of shampoo spills its contents at their feet, unnoticed. “…it’s not life! It’s just stuff, Kara. Stuff. Life is - life is…”
Words dry up suddenly. He wants to say life is this, us, standing here, your flushed face and your anger, this interaction, this energy… He can’t say that. He just stares at her, as her breathing settles and she sighs heavily, losing her animation, her eyes going dark as she swallows. Finally she opens her mouth, but her voice is low and unhappy.
“Life is what we left behind, is that it, Lee?”
He doesn’t know how to reply. He can only watch as she skirts around him and leaves the room.
*
He’s in the ready room, standing in front of the mic.
Last order of business over, he folds his notes down and looks up.
Words into action.
“One final thing. As of this moment, there will be no more inter-ship or inter-crew trading outside of official channels.”
There’s a ripple, and he’s aware that he sounds dry, authoritarian, like his father, but he ploughs on.
“This includes food, clothing, personal items. From now on if you want something, you buy it on your own time on the market days, or you go to the quartermaster and you order it – just like everyone else. No one gets ripped off, no one gets burnt. Everything’s fair.”
He pauses for emphasis.
“And anyone – anyone - discovered trading outside of these regulations will go on report.”
He catches as many eyes as he can. Kara glares dully at him from the second row. He straightens his back and concludes the pitch.
“We’re warriors, people. We have a job to do. Let’s focus on that, and not on our own personal requirements. That’s it. Next patrol report in after briefing, and good hunting. Dismissed.”
Collective muttering is a subdued hum as people file out. Kara stands and drags her heels, making her the last to leave. He stops in front of her, aware that she’s desperate to make some final statement. Let her make it, he thinks. Let her make it and be done, and then let this all be over.
“Happy now?” she says coldly, helmet tucked under her arm.
“Let it go, Kara.”
But letting it go runs right against the grain.
“They’re warriors, Lee, not machines,” she says, clipped and careful and expressionless. “The machines are the ones we’re supposed to be fighting.”
And then she turns and walks out.
Damn her. Damn her and her last word to hell.
*
There’s no need for wishful thinking. And he realises later that, if nothing else, hell is extremely obliging.
For at least two weeks they do nothing but fend off attack. There’s a Jump every day, or every other day, and the CAP is scrambled so often he loses track of when he’s sitting in the cockpit or standing in the ready room. Agonising over soap and music chips feels like a dream to him now, something trivial and tantalisingly far away.
He rushes by Kara in the corridors, sees her passed out on her rack, and can’t remember when she stops smelling of incense and vanilin.
*
Two weeks after that a semblance of normalcy is returning, although he thinks that his ideas of normalcy got shot all to frak some time ago. Normalcy is the period after the last Raider incursion and before the next emergency. Normalcy is when you get to eat sitting down, or when you get to shower every day, or allow yourself to contemplate the concept of ‘between shifts’.
There’s something wrong here, but he can’t figure out what it is.
He feels jumpy. He goes off mids, has a shower, gets dressed. Stands in quarters and looks around and doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Just…can’t put his finger on it.
He goes to the flight deck, confident that Tyrol will give him something to do. His confidence is not misplaced; there is, in fact, plenty to do, because the deck crew is short-staffed.
Cally has reported to medical with bleeding dermatitis on her hands.
*
It’s not until Evans trashes the rec room that Lee starts noticing again.
He doesn’t know how the fight started, and it’s largely immaterial. He sees the man in the brig, but not before he sees Kara signing out.
“Go easy on him,” she says. “He’s strung out.”
It’s not their first conversation in a month, but there’s still the sense of treading on eggshells. Lee nods carefully.
“Well he’s doing his time. I’m still going to have to dock him for the stuff he broke.”
She lifts her eyebrows half-heartedly.
“Whatever,” she breathes, brushes past him to leave, and he doesn’t have the guts to pull her up on it, not when she’s looking so worn, so weary, so thin around the edges.
*
He notices. It’s still his job, to notice.
No more excess hair conditioner, no candles, no packs of cards. Crashdown, along with most of the other men in the squad, goes back to shaving once a week. Chuckles is no longer ferrying breakfast trays. Hotdog avoids tinia, but remains (it must be noted) crap at cards. Some things never change. Gaeta attends to duties in the CIC with scuffed boots, and the world keeps turning.
Some things never change, but some things…
Some things are worth noticing.
At the end of a double shift Sharon flakes, screams her head off at one of the deck personnel over a minor repair problem. Lee misses the blow-up, only catches the aftermath – the Raptor repair crew muttering darkly among themselves, the Chief’s confused frustration, the flash of Boomer’s flight-suit as she storms out.
It’s a far cry from beach music and dance routines.
Lee rearranges the schedule to give Sharon a break, juggling the vacancies left by two nuggets down with nervous exhaustion and the death of an ECO during the last attack. The end result looks like a patchwork, something cobbled together with fuse-wire and string. His head is swimming with the idea of doling out more double shifts, or the prospect of pulling more triples for himself.
Between finishing the flight roster and the start of his stint on CAP, he goes to the CIC to report.
“How’re they going?” his father asks, and Lee feels the pressure of wanting to be candid yet being obliged to spin some optimism into the mess. It’s not, after all, like those first disastrous days. The world doesn’t come to an end every other week.
“They’re tight – everyone’s tight,” he admits, then tempers, pragmatic. “But they’ll hold.”
“Mm,” his father says.
Lee waits to see if there’s more but there’s nothing forthcoming. The old man is cogitating over something – he’ll only reveal when he’s thought it through. Lee hopes this means that his father trusts his judgement on the state of the squad, but there’s no way to tell. There’s no sign of agreement, no endorsement or praise – his father’s lack of involvement is the only mark of his respect for Lee’s decisions. It’s both liberating and oppressive. When he accepted the role of CAG, he never realised that so much of the job would be bound up in knots with the desire for his father’s approval.
Lee sighs imperceptibly and turns to leave.
The movement bumps him into Dualla, who’s just walked on deck. He’s in the act of apologising when he realises what’s wrong with the picture.
“Hey – you’re early.”
She nods and shrugs. “Thought I’d get a headstart, sir.”
“What happened?” he ribs her gently. “You already finish your book?”
Her reaction is immediate – standing straighter, face proper, limned with frost.
“Well, you can only read the same book so many times, sir. I didn’t want to get…distracted.” She nods towards her station. “If you’ll excuse me, sir…”
And she skirts around him. Lee stares at the air she’s abandoned, blinks for a second, and exits CIC before his urge to hit something becomes a reality.
*
He comes off an uneventful shift, goes straight to the training room and punches the heavy bag for an hour and a half, and then goes to find Kara.
She’s supposed to be in the repair bay, filling Cally’s duty, but he’s hit the bay at the start of her break. He’s almost resigned himself to hunting her down in the mess when another tech points him in the direction of the old museum hangar next door.
Lee slips through the hatch into a cavern of quiet. Scheduled for a refit (if they ever get time, equipment or crew to spare), the hangar is cool, dark, and above all, empty. If he took two steps back outside he’d return to the maelstrom of the Galactica – but the hangar is like a space between worlds. He can see why Kara finds the place appealing.
The campfire plume of smoke gives away her position. She’s sitting on an enormous parts crate, her arms slipped out of her orange coveralls and the sleeves tied around her waist. She’s just kicking her feet, and smoking – when she lifts her gaze from the floor she notices him.
“Hey”
“Hey.” He wanders closer, lets her see him perusing the place with his eyes. “Very nice.”
“Thanks.” She ashes on the floor and inclines her head. “It’s off-limits, of course. You here to bust me?”
“No. Thought you were supposed to be in the mess.”
“Not hungry.”
“You replacing nutrients with nicotine again?”
“My favourite food group.” She smirks, then sighs. “Look if you’ve come to ride me about - ”
“No – no. I’m not here to ride you about anything.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I was going to talk to you about the schedule, but…” He realises only at the moment of speaking. “Actually, I don’t want to talk about that either.”
The quiet and the calm are soothing, like an anaesthetic. He puts his hands in his pockets and leans against the crate. She takes a quick drag and regards him, sardonic.
“So what do you wanna talk about?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “How’re you going?”
She snorts at the fresh approach.
“How am I going? I’m…” She searches, comes up blank, lifts a shoulder. “…going. I guess. Tired. How about you?”
“Yeah. Tired.” He exhales hard. “Go to bed tired. Wake up tired.”
“Vicious circle.”
“Yup.”
And they grin at each other, because at least they have this in common. She flicks ash at her feet.
“I kinda figure that tired has become the social norm, so I quit complaining about it.”
He takes a long glance of her face, side-on in the dim light, and thinks she looks exhausted. Brown hooded eyes. Sallow skin. He doesn’t want to say it straight out like that.
“You’ve been pulling a lot of doubles. And now the fills in maintenance –“
“Ha. Listen to you. You do any more triple shifts and we may as well put you on 24 hour rotation.”
He grins helplessly, lopsided. But his candour seems to have softened her, because she looks away and keeps talking through a cloud of smoky exhaust.
“…ah, I dunno. I feel like I’m kind of…running on automatic. Something like that. You get that feeling?”
“Sometimes,” he nods. All the time, his brain says.
“Well if we’re feeling like this, then…”
She doesn’t have to continue the thought. He frowns, because they’re circling back to the issue of the squad, and he really doesn’t want to rehash that all over again. He pushes off the crate and scuffs the floor stubbornly.
“Everyone’s tired, Kara. But this won’t last forever – there’ll be time soon, I really believe that. Everything cycles around. If we can all just stay focussed, remember why we’re fighting –“
“Yeah, that,” she interrupts curtly, sliding off the crate, stubbing out her cigarette butt under one booted toe. “The why. You wanna remind me every now and then? Cos I keep forgetting.”
He flares with a sudden anger, and an almost overwhelming urge to grab her, slap their hands together palm to palm, let her feel skin, sweat, pulse, pressure – his existence, his reality, and is that enough of a reminder for you? Would you like another reminder, lieutenant? before pulling her around face-to-face, and …
He closes his eyes for a second. His brain is doing funny things to him lately. He touches his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and when he opens his eyes she is running a hand through her hair, in preparation for leaving.
“You still got time to eat?” he asks, because that’s all he can think of or trust himself to say.
“Nope. I wasted my break inhaling.”
He wants to make an offer, a gesture, something to consolidate that fact that they just conversed without arguing.
“You go back. I’ll get you something from the mess.”
“Thanks,” she says, and she means it, she’s appreciative. But she can’t resist a wayward impulse to grin at him and tease. “Hey, what happened to ‘no slaving other personnel’, huh?”
“Yeah, but I don’t owe you anything,” he reminds her.
She smiles broadly - even through the gauntness of her face it sparkles out - and then licks the tip of one finger, ticks off a mark in the air.
“Oh, Apollo – you owe me,” she says knowingly. “You always owe me.”
And she shoots him with the same trigger finger as she walks away, laughing.
*
part three
cheers
thanks for reading.
on another note, i noticed i got a mention in the BSG awards (thanks, whoever), although my name got spelt wrong (oh well, you can't have everything). btw, ancarett's cunning plan to get good fic on the lists of the awards? i'm all for it. am supporting it. nominating now. go vote, you guys (god, it feels like october all over again).
He’s in the bunkroom, dressing after a rationed shower. He tugs a pair of workpants, a tank and some socks out of his locker, pushes the door shut. Stops. Opens the door again. Looks inside the small metal compartment that holds almost everything he owns. Examines the contents.
One remaining pair of workpants. A dress uniform and shoes. One pair of civvy pants and a t-shirt, rarely used. Running shorts and shoes. An empty wire hanger. Flight gear. Clean socks at the bottom. And on the shelf – a spare blanket. Underwear. Two folded tanks. Toiletries in a bag. A pen and a few pencils. Stopwatch. His wallet, stuffed at the back, with spare cubits and some papers and a picture of his mother and Zak. A few other photos. Patches from the Atlantia. On the door of the locker, a mirror.
He knows that when he boarded the ship it was only supposed to be short term, a whirlwind tour. Most of his personal effects were left behind, and subsequently lost. But this still doesn’t explain the fact that, in the months he’s been working here, living here, he’s acquired absolutely zero shit.
He closes the door and stands there in a towel, feeling the water drying on his skin and wondering why his life is so spartan.
*
Music, tinny and very quiet. He’s about to turn the corner when he hears it. For some reason he’s reminded of the beach in summer - sea breezes, sand, salt, alcoholic beverages, and…laziness.
All four of them, congregated in the supply room around a little jerry-rigged portable Player. Sharon is sitting on a crate, knees forward and apart, looking up and smiling. Evans is tooling with the leads on something. One of the deck crew, Tris, is standing next to Kara, and the two of them are getting down to some song that involves them laughing low and singing sotto voce and then laughing again.
Sharon claps her hands and urges them on, eyes crinkling up. Lee hasn’t seen her smile so broadly for some time. Evans makes a half-hearted attempt to fiddle with whatever he’s repairing in his hands, but his head is nodding in time.
Lee watches from around the corner. He’s debating with himself whether to step forward and break up the party – Kara, Boomer and Evans are all off, ostensibly making fuses. Tris is supposed to be on mids. She probably just came to fetch something and got dragged in. The prospect of seeing the look in her face – surprise, embarrassment, guilt – is putting him off.
As he watches, Kara’s hands go out like she’s balancing herself. She pouts her lips and shimmies. Sharon laughs. Kara tilts her body, rolls one hip to the music – one, two, three rolls. Her work pants hang loosely, and her tanks have ridden up on one side. Then she sways over and rolls the other hip – one, two, three. Tris is encouraged to follow, and suddenly the two of them are entertaining the others with some sort of half-assed dance number, mouthing lyrics and giggling. Evans grins and shakes his head, picks up his pliers.
Lee backs off a step and stands for a moment, letting his head rest against the bulkhead, feeling the slow pulse of the music reverberate inside him. Kara’s hips roll in front of his eyelids, the bare skin above the waistband of her pants shimmering.
He opens his eyes quickly, and then he walks away.
*
He’s in the corridor.
Running is what he uses to take the edge off. The hot steady pump of his own blood, the flush, the stretch and the gasping breath – no one can buy that feeling.
He sees two people ahead at the next turn, and slows down when he realises who they are. Chuckles is standing with his back to the bulkhead, a tray in his hands. Tigh, hands on hips, leaning from the shoulders in the position of accosting, looms in front of the young pilot. The height difference lends the tableau an amusing poignancy – a solid six-foot kid being monstered by a man more than twice his age and five inches shorter.
Lee jogs to a halt, still puffing.
“Is there a problem here?”
Tigh turns and takes a half step back, involving the CAG in the latest dilemna.
“What an excellent question.” He frowns at Chuckles again. “Well, what do you say, son? Is there a problem? Something you’d like to explain to your captain?”
“No, sir. No problem, sir.”
Chuckles looks strained. The crockery on his tray – a covered plate, a glass of fake milk and a cup of coffee – rattles as he shifts his feet. Tigh glowers again. Lee, feeling the chill of drying sweat, decides to intervene.
“Something wrong with eating in the mess, cadet?”
“Uh, no – no, sir.”
“So…who’s the tray for?”
Chuckles blinks nervously.
“Sir?”
“The tray, cadet,” Lee says, enunciating carefully. “If you’ve already eaten in the mess, then who’s the tray for?”
Chuckles glances from Colonel to Captain, then mumbles his reply.
“It’s for, uh…”
“Speak up, son,” Tigh grinds out impatiently. “Who’s the tray for?”
“It’s for Crashdown, sir. I mean, Lieutenant –“
“We know who you mean,” Lee says with a sinking feeling.
“And is there a reason why the lieutenant isn’t getting his own meals?” Tigh drawls with a grimace, like this is giving him a headache. The top fastening of his uniform jacket is loose, and Lee guesses he’s just come off shift. “Is the man ill?”
“No, sir,” Chuckles says.
“Then why are you fetching him breakfast?” Lee asks quietly, drawing the younger man’s attention. “Did you lose a bet? Is that what this is about?”
“No, sir,” Chuckles says. He looks vaguely confused, as if he thinks Lee should know all this. “It’s…it’s a trade, sir.”
As soon as the kid says the words, Lee’s stomach does a nasty slide. His gaze flattens.
“A trade?”
“Uh, yes, sir. I mean, I thought… I mean, I didn’t know it wasn’t –“
Lee nods, cutting off Chuckles abruptly, aware that Tigh is staring.
“It’s okay, private. I understand. A trade.”
“Yes, sir.” Chuckles is in a hurry to explain now. “Crashdown, he traded me a tank and a pack of razors, sir. And I thought I had a book and some other stuff to make it stick, sir, but I forgot that I’d already –“
“We get the picture, cadet,” Tigh says heavily.
Lee, wishing he wasn’t wearing his running shorts, draws himself up a bit.
“So Crashdown’s got you bringing him breakfast in bed to make it up, is that how it goes?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chuckles just looks relieved. Lee can feel his own cheeks starting to colour. He clenches his jaw, then lets go to speak. His voice is firm and deadly quiet.
“Okay, cadet. This is what’s going to happen. You are going to take the tray back to the mess. Then you are going to go to the bunkroom and tell the lieutenant to see me, at his earliest…convenience.” Lee checks Tigh quickly – the man is standing, watching it all with a sour expression. Lee looks back at Chuckles and continues. “I am not going to write this up – on the condition that you spread the word: crew trading is now over. Finished. Do we understand each other?”
“Uh, yes – yes, sir.”
“Good. That’s it. I’ll deliver more details at briefing.” He looks at Chuckles, who is now glancing around like he’s not sure of the next move. “You’re free to go, cadet.”
“Uh, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The tray rattles again as Chuckles salutes clumsily, then belatedly remembers to salute Tigh as well. “Uh, sir.”
The kid collects himself and hurries off. Tigh holds himself stiffly as he faces Lee.
“”I don’t suppose you’d like to explain to me what the hell that was all about?”
Saul Tigh is a bastard, Lee thinks, because as the Commander’s eyes and ears he’s sure to know exactly what it was all about. Lee just gives him a small tight smile.
“Nothing. I mean, nothing I can’t handle, sir.”
At least Tigh respects Lee’s attempts to deal with his own problems. The colonel nods his head shortly.
“Fine.” His hand reaches up to undo the next jacket fastening, shoulders sinking a little, crisis averted. “Fine then. Well, I think we were both interrupted mid-action, so if you don’t mind…”
The colonel turns towards his quarters, and Lee knows he’s being dismissed. He salutes smartly.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
He sounds like Chuckles, he thinks. He watches Tigh walk away, and then starts jogging off, feeling stiff and a bit cold, knowing that the feeling in his body will pass, knowing that he’s committed himself to putting words into action now, knowing exactly what - if worst came to worst – Colonel Tigh would be trading his cubits for.
*
Word, of course, gets around before briefing.
Kara bursts through the hatch as he’s dressing. Her eyes practically jump out of her face when she’s angry, but he’s noticed this before.
“I can’t frakking believe this! I thought we discussed this!”
Sliding on his socks, keeping his face neutral.
“You’re talking about the trading.”
“No – my frakking Cylon love-child – yes, the frakking trading, Lee!”
He pulls on his boots meditatively.
“Cool down, Kara. It’s done.”
“It’s done???…”
She spins and sputters for a moment, incensed, raising a fist in the air, it hovers there a moment as she watches him stand to his full height…
Sanity prevails. She drops her hand. He can see in her face how much this costs, but she has opted for staying out of hack, and yelling at him instead does have its advantages.
“You didn’t even ask! You didn’t even negotiate. Just Mister-High-And-Mighty-I-Make-The-Orders,
He slaps his palm onto the locker with a satisfying crack, stopping her before she falls right over the precipice, says something that he’ll want to hit her for.
“Enough, Kara. It’s done. I’m giving the order. The cash register is closed.”
“I don’t believe you. This is totally unfair, Lee, and you know it –“
He finds her attitude about this both immature and perverse, and with the way she’s cranked this up so quickly he’s having trouble staying calm enough to argue the point.
“Unfair? To who? To you? Or is it unfair to Evans, whose been trading his underwear for music chips? Or is it unfair to the people on the other ships, who seem to be selling off their supplies for our cast-offs? Who, exactly, is losing out here?”
“This is frakked. You’re being an asshole -”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to protect people – the people in the fleet, the people in my squad. That’s my job.”
“Protect them?” Her eyebrows skyrocket. “Protect them from what? Their own self-interest? These people you’re talking about are trying to scrape together lives for themselves –“
“And do these lives involve slaving inferior personnel to pay off their debts? Or trading their essentials for novels and hand-creme?”
He’s surprised at her – can’t she see, can’t she understand? But her next move takes him off-guard. She masters herself with great effort, lowers her voice to plead her case.
Gods, he thinks, she’s that committed?
“Then…then set rules. Lay down boundaries. Don’t just forbid it altogether.” Her face screws up with the difficulty of explaining. “People need this, Lee – you just don’t see how –“
“I see, okay?” he snaps. “I see military personnel getting distracted by cigarettes and shaving soap.”
Kara bounces back a step, appalled.
“They’re not distracted! Gods, they’re so damned focused they’re going crazy! They can’t just shoot down Cylons-eat-sleep-shoot down Cylons forever and ever so say we all! Life isn’t just work, Lee, life is in the details –“
And it is at this point, this moment, the way she uses his name perhaps, or the dogged tone of her voice, that his face contorts and he loses it all – self-control, impassivity, blown into the universal void. How can she be so blind? He thought they were friends, he thought they were a team…how the frak can they even breathe the same air when their philosophies are so different?
“Don’t you get it?” he yells into her face. He slams open the locker, grabs a handful of something - toiletries, clothes – thrusts them in front of her before throwing them to the floor. “This…all this…” A half-full bottle of shampoo spills its contents at their feet, unnoticed. “…it’s not life! It’s just stuff, Kara. Stuff. Life is - life is…”
Words dry up suddenly. He wants to say life is this, us, standing here, your flushed face and your anger, this interaction, this energy… He can’t say that. He just stares at her, as her breathing settles and she sighs heavily, losing her animation, her eyes going dark as she swallows. Finally she opens her mouth, but her voice is low and unhappy.
“Life is what we left behind, is that it, Lee?”
He doesn’t know how to reply. He can only watch as she skirts around him and leaves the room.
*
He’s in the ready room, standing in front of the mic.
Last order of business over, he folds his notes down and looks up.
Words into action.
“One final thing. As of this moment, there will be no more inter-ship or inter-crew trading outside of official channels.”
There’s a ripple, and he’s aware that he sounds dry, authoritarian, like his father, but he ploughs on.
“This includes food, clothing, personal items. From now on if you want something, you buy it on your own time on the market days, or you go to the quartermaster and you order it – just like everyone else. No one gets ripped off, no one gets burnt. Everything’s fair.”
He pauses for emphasis.
“And anyone – anyone - discovered trading outside of these regulations will go on report.”
He catches as many eyes as he can. Kara glares dully at him from the second row. He straightens his back and concludes the pitch.
“We’re warriors, people. We have a job to do. Let’s focus on that, and not on our own personal requirements. That’s it. Next patrol report in after briefing, and good hunting. Dismissed.”
Collective muttering is a subdued hum as people file out. Kara stands and drags her heels, making her the last to leave. He stops in front of her, aware that she’s desperate to make some final statement. Let her make it, he thinks. Let her make it and be done, and then let this all be over.
“Happy now?” she says coldly, helmet tucked under her arm.
“Let it go, Kara.”
But letting it go runs right against the grain.
“They’re warriors, Lee, not machines,” she says, clipped and careful and expressionless. “The machines are the ones we’re supposed to be fighting.”
And then she turns and walks out.
Damn her. Damn her and her last word to hell.
*
There’s no need for wishful thinking. And he realises later that, if nothing else, hell is extremely obliging.
For at least two weeks they do nothing but fend off attack. There’s a Jump every day, or every other day, and the CAP is scrambled so often he loses track of when he’s sitting in the cockpit or standing in the ready room. Agonising over soap and music chips feels like a dream to him now, something trivial and tantalisingly far away.
He rushes by Kara in the corridors, sees her passed out on her rack, and can’t remember when she stops smelling of incense and vanilin.
*
Two weeks after that a semblance of normalcy is returning, although he thinks that his ideas of normalcy got shot all to frak some time ago. Normalcy is the period after the last Raider incursion and before the next emergency. Normalcy is when you get to eat sitting down, or when you get to shower every day, or allow yourself to contemplate the concept of ‘between shifts’.
There’s something wrong here, but he can’t figure out what it is.
He feels jumpy. He goes off mids, has a shower, gets dressed. Stands in quarters and looks around and doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Just…can’t put his finger on it.
He goes to the flight deck, confident that Tyrol will give him something to do. His confidence is not misplaced; there is, in fact, plenty to do, because the deck crew is short-staffed.
Cally has reported to medical with bleeding dermatitis on her hands.
*
It’s not until Evans trashes the rec room that Lee starts noticing again.
He doesn’t know how the fight started, and it’s largely immaterial. He sees the man in the brig, but not before he sees Kara signing out.
“Go easy on him,” she says. “He’s strung out.”
It’s not their first conversation in a month, but there’s still the sense of treading on eggshells. Lee nods carefully.
“Well he’s doing his time. I’m still going to have to dock him for the stuff he broke.”
She lifts her eyebrows half-heartedly.
“Whatever,” she breathes, brushes past him to leave, and he doesn’t have the guts to pull her up on it, not when she’s looking so worn, so weary, so thin around the edges.
*
He notices. It’s still his job, to notice.
No more excess hair conditioner, no candles, no packs of cards. Crashdown, along with most of the other men in the squad, goes back to shaving once a week. Chuckles is no longer ferrying breakfast trays. Hotdog avoids tinia, but remains (it must be noted) crap at cards. Some things never change. Gaeta attends to duties in the CIC with scuffed boots, and the world keeps turning.
Some things never change, but some things…
Some things are worth noticing.
At the end of a double shift Sharon flakes, screams her head off at one of the deck personnel over a minor repair problem. Lee misses the blow-up, only catches the aftermath – the Raptor repair crew muttering darkly among themselves, the Chief’s confused frustration, the flash of Boomer’s flight-suit as she storms out.
It’s a far cry from beach music and dance routines.
Lee rearranges the schedule to give Sharon a break, juggling the vacancies left by two nuggets down with nervous exhaustion and the death of an ECO during the last attack. The end result looks like a patchwork, something cobbled together with fuse-wire and string. His head is swimming with the idea of doling out more double shifts, or the prospect of pulling more triples for himself.
Between finishing the flight roster and the start of his stint on CAP, he goes to the CIC to report.
“How’re they going?” his father asks, and Lee feels the pressure of wanting to be candid yet being obliged to spin some optimism into the mess. It’s not, after all, like those first disastrous days. The world doesn’t come to an end every other week.
“They’re tight – everyone’s tight,” he admits, then tempers, pragmatic. “But they’ll hold.”
“Mm,” his father says.
Lee waits to see if there’s more but there’s nothing forthcoming. The old man is cogitating over something – he’ll only reveal when he’s thought it through. Lee hopes this means that his father trusts his judgement on the state of the squad, but there’s no way to tell. There’s no sign of agreement, no endorsement or praise – his father’s lack of involvement is the only mark of his respect for Lee’s decisions. It’s both liberating and oppressive. When he accepted the role of CAG, he never realised that so much of the job would be bound up in knots with the desire for his father’s approval.
Lee sighs imperceptibly and turns to leave.
The movement bumps him into Dualla, who’s just walked on deck. He’s in the act of apologising when he realises what’s wrong with the picture.
“Hey – you’re early.”
She nods and shrugs. “Thought I’d get a headstart, sir.”
“What happened?” he ribs her gently. “You already finish your book?”
Her reaction is immediate – standing straighter, face proper, limned with frost.
“Well, you can only read the same book so many times, sir. I didn’t want to get…distracted.” She nods towards her station. “If you’ll excuse me, sir…”
And she skirts around him. Lee stares at the air she’s abandoned, blinks for a second, and exits CIC before his urge to hit something becomes a reality.
*
He comes off an uneventful shift, goes straight to the training room and punches the heavy bag for an hour and a half, and then goes to find Kara.
She’s supposed to be in the repair bay, filling Cally’s duty, but he’s hit the bay at the start of her break. He’s almost resigned himself to hunting her down in the mess when another tech points him in the direction of the old museum hangar next door.
Lee slips through the hatch into a cavern of quiet. Scheduled for a refit (if they ever get time, equipment or crew to spare), the hangar is cool, dark, and above all, empty. If he took two steps back outside he’d return to the maelstrom of the Galactica – but the hangar is like a space between worlds. He can see why Kara finds the place appealing.
The campfire plume of smoke gives away her position. She’s sitting on an enormous parts crate, her arms slipped out of her orange coveralls and the sleeves tied around her waist. She’s just kicking her feet, and smoking – when she lifts her gaze from the floor she notices him.
“Hey”
“Hey.” He wanders closer, lets her see him perusing the place with his eyes. “Very nice.”
“Thanks.” She ashes on the floor and inclines her head. “It’s off-limits, of course. You here to bust me?”
“No. Thought you were supposed to be in the mess.”
“Not hungry.”
“You replacing nutrients with nicotine again?”
“My favourite food group.” She smirks, then sighs. “Look if you’ve come to ride me about - ”
“No – no. I’m not here to ride you about anything.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I was going to talk to you about the schedule, but…” He realises only at the moment of speaking. “Actually, I don’t want to talk about that either.”
The quiet and the calm are soothing, like an anaesthetic. He puts his hands in his pockets and leans against the crate. She takes a quick drag and regards him, sardonic.
“So what do you wanna talk about?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “How’re you going?”
She snorts at the fresh approach.
“How am I going? I’m…” She searches, comes up blank, lifts a shoulder. “…going. I guess. Tired. How about you?”
“Yeah. Tired.” He exhales hard. “Go to bed tired. Wake up tired.”
“Vicious circle.”
“Yup.”
And they grin at each other, because at least they have this in common. She flicks ash at her feet.
“I kinda figure that tired has become the social norm, so I quit complaining about it.”
He takes a long glance of her face, side-on in the dim light, and thinks she looks exhausted. Brown hooded eyes. Sallow skin. He doesn’t want to say it straight out like that.
“You’ve been pulling a lot of doubles. And now the fills in maintenance –“
“Ha. Listen to you. You do any more triple shifts and we may as well put you on 24 hour rotation.”
He grins helplessly, lopsided. But his candour seems to have softened her, because she looks away and keeps talking through a cloud of smoky exhaust.
“…ah, I dunno. I feel like I’m kind of…running on automatic. Something like that. You get that feeling?”
“Sometimes,” he nods. All the time, his brain says.
“Well if we’re feeling like this, then…”
She doesn’t have to continue the thought. He frowns, because they’re circling back to the issue of the squad, and he really doesn’t want to rehash that all over again. He pushes off the crate and scuffs the floor stubbornly.
“Everyone’s tired, Kara. But this won’t last forever – there’ll be time soon, I really believe that. Everything cycles around. If we can all just stay focussed, remember why we’re fighting –“
“Yeah, that,” she interrupts curtly, sliding off the crate, stubbing out her cigarette butt under one booted toe. “The why. You wanna remind me every now and then? Cos I keep forgetting.”
He flares with a sudden anger, and an almost overwhelming urge to grab her, slap their hands together palm to palm, let her feel skin, sweat, pulse, pressure – his existence, his reality, and is that enough of a reminder for you? Would you like another reminder, lieutenant? before pulling her around face-to-face, and …
He closes his eyes for a second. His brain is doing funny things to him lately. He touches his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and when he opens his eyes she is running a hand through her hair, in preparation for leaving.
“You still got time to eat?” he asks, because that’s all he can think of or trust himself to say.
“Nope. I wasted my break inhaling.”
He wants to make an offer, a gesture, something to consolidate that fact that they just conversed without arguing.
“You go back. I’ll get you something from the mess.”
“Thanks,” she says, and she means it, she’s appreciative. But she can’t resist a wayward impulse to grin at him and tease. “Hey, what happened to ‘no slaving other personnel’, huh?”
“Yeah, but I don’t owe you anything,” he reminds her.
She smiles broadly - even through the gauntness of her face it sparkles out - and then licks the tip of one finger, ticks off a mark in the air.
“Oh, Apollo – you owe me,” she says knowingly. “You always owe me.”
And she shoots him with the same trigger finger as she walks away, laughing.
*
part three
cheers
