new fic - part the third
okay, before my computer packs it in and freezes me out like a moment ago...
He walks into the squad bunkroom at about 0900 with the new roster in his hand.
It’s about an hour before the changeover from earlies to mids, and the room is largely deserted. All except for Kat. The girl goes from sitting on the edge of her bunk to standing with a snap-salute in two seconds flat. It’s enough time for Lee to notice the tiny taper candle burning itself down in a cup of jello on the chair near her bed.
“At ease, cadet.” He tacks the roster to its board. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t, sir.”
He nods towards the candle, curious.
“Keeping watch, Kat?”
“Kind of, sir. It’s, uh, my birthday.”
He baulks, then grins, a bloom on his cheeks.
“Well, congratulations. How many years?”
“Twenty-five standard, sir.” Kat grins back, formality easing at last. “Can’t quite believe I made it this far, if you don’t mind me saying, sir.”
He’s about to reply when a noise at the hatch alerts him to Kara’s entrance. She closes the hatch behind her, and when she turns he can see from her face that she had no expectations of seeing him here at all.
“Oh. Uh, hi.” She recovers smoothly. “This a private party?”
“No, sir,” Kat says with a smile, and now Lee can see the lumpy parcel that Kara has half-hidden behind her back.
“Okay. Great.” Kara takes a breath like she’s steeling herself, then forces a wide grin, walks forward to Kat with the parcel stuck out in one hand. “Hey – this is for you. We wanted – I mean, I wanted to give this to you earlier, but you were on lates and we thought you’d prefer to sleep.” She gathers herself to make a proper heartfelt smile. “So, uh, happy birthday!”
Kat accepts the present, gratified, beaming her pleasure.
“Wow – thank you…”
And Lee just watches it all as Kat peels off enough of the scrap-paper wrapping to reveal a small unmarked bottle of ambrosia, the grey flash of a tanktop, the giveaway corner of a chocolate bar. Lee can feel his face freezing into neutrality, and when he glances at Kara she looks straight into his eyes before smiling back into Kat’s upturned face, the girl’s usual dark reserve dissolving into vivacity.
“This is great – thank you so much!”
“My pleasure,” Kara says. “But hey, I’m on mids, so I’ll, uh, see you later.”
She beats a retreat with polite haste and before Lee has a chance to open his mouth she’s gone.
It’s a running theme; after Lee extricates himself from the bunkroom, he discovers that Kara’s taken a quick turn through officer’s to grab her stuff before escaping to the flight deck. And by the time he makes it there, her Viper is already in the tube – prepped for launch, firing high, blasting, breaking free of inertia to expand, exhale, explode into space.
*
Post-shift. He steps through the hatch into the humidity of the bathroom and starts immediately.
“Kara, you really frakking kill me sometimes.”
“What?”
“What? What do you frakking think?”
Everyone else in the line of fire leaves. Sharon exits in a towel, Crashdown finishes his shave quickly. Kara stands there, looking angular and thinly-drawn in briefs and tanks, pretending to be nonchalant as she brushes her teeth, but he can see the jerkiness of her movements, the anger on her face.
“It was her birthday, okay? I don’t think a fifth of ambrosia and a chocolate bar is gonna deprive the fleet unnecessarily.”
“That’s not the point. I told you that if I –“
“You told me.” She scrubs furiously and spits, glaring at him in the mirror. “You told me, without even going through channels, without leaving any room to negotiate. If you had set limits, or even just –“
“Kara, I gave you a direct order.”
“Go to hell.”
She spits into the basin again and he sees a red plume amongst the white froth. This is not enough to give him pause, because the volcanic flare in his chest is rising, spreading its wings, making his speech clipped and sparing.
“Fine.” His teeth clamp together, he grinds out the words. “Fine. Consider yourself on report.”
She ignores him. He wrenches around, leaves the bathroom, notices Sharon sneak back in with her wetpack now the coast is clear.
He stands at his locker, jerking out necessaries without thinking. He feels the burn of cold, like white heat, such an ache behind his ribs that it’s a numbing pain. If he was alone, if he wasn’t in a room with other people, he could hit something, he could lash out, bruise his knuckles and bellow, he could… It takes him a second to hear Sharon calling out to him.
“Apollo.”
“What?”
“You better come.”
Confused, he walks back into the bathroom. Kara has one hand propped against the mirror, keeping herself upright. He head hangs low over the basin, and she has a towel pressed to her mouth. Sharon wets another towel and pushes it into Kara’s hand to replace the bloody one she drops into the sink.
What the… He moves to Kara’s shoulder, but all he can see is the nape of her neck as she keeps her face low. Her supporting arm is trembling. He addresses Sharon, speaks softly.
“What is it?”
“Bleeding from the mouth. She’s dizzy – let’s move her out of here, the floor’s hard if she falls.”
He takes a breath, takes Kara’s arm and pulls it over his shoulders. Now she looks up, and he can see how pasty she is, white and peaked, unhealthy.
“Come to get the last word in, huh?” she gasps, and he can see red on her teeth.
Then her head lolls back a little, and she droops, and he concentrates on helping Sharon get her into quarters, onto a bunk. When they lay her down on the nearest rack Kara puts her head back on the pillow, and her eyes close, and he pushes her legs onto the mattress and sits gingerly on the metal edge of the bunk. Someone gives him a penlight so he can check her over.
It seems intrusive – two minutes ago they were fighting, he wanted to punch her lights out. Now he’s touching her face with the lightness and precision of a lover. His fingers feel the clamminess of her cheek, and he checks the inside of her lower eyelids before taking her pulse. Then he rolls back her bottom lip with his thumb to look at her gums. His thumb tip comes away scarlet.
She looks at him like she’d be glaring daggers if she only had more energy.
He plays the beam of the penlight over her face, making her wince and squint, before clicking it off. He knows what this is, he’s seen it before, in other crewmembers. He sighs, because she sure knows how to put the finishing touches on an argument.
“This the first time, the mouth bleeding?”
She shakes her head, big eyes and concealed anxiety.
“Not like this,” she mumbles. The creases of her lips are red, making her look gothically cosmeticised.
He nods once, totting up symptoms in his head.
“Okay. What about lethargy? Tiredness –“ He cuts himself off before her acknowledgement. “What am I talking about, you already said you were tired the other day.”
She looks blank-faced, swallows before speaking, and he knows she’s tasting blood and toothpaste.
“I thought it was normal. I thought - I thought everyone was tired…”
He raises his eyebrows sympathetically.
“Well, looks like you’re just a little bit more normal than the rest of us.” He dabs with the towel at a line of red on her lip. “You have scurvy, Kara. That’s the bleeding. And the tiredness is from iron-deficiency anemia – it’s cross-symptomatic.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” He gives her a long look. “You’ve been skipping meals again.”
Bald statement of fact. She blinks, defensive.
“Only the plastic ones.”
“Well that’s about forty percent of them. You know, most of your dietary supplements come through the plastic ones.”
“So?”
“So you’ve been scraping most of your vitamin C and iron ration down the disposal chute.”
“Oh.”
He doesn’t say ‘That was stupid, Kara’, or ‘What were you thinking, Kara?’ or anything like that because he knows that he’ll only be pre-empting what Cottle will repeat, and because he can see from her face how she feels about this. And there’s other people in the room, watching the bunk diorama cautiously, casting the odd surreptitious glance their way, and Sharon kneeling there on the floor beside the Kara’s head, and there’s only so much embarrassment you can lay on someone. And what he might have to do next is going to be embarrassing enough.
He extends a hand, relaxed but firm.
“C’mon. Medical.”
She takes his hand, pulls herself to sitting, but she’s still looking ashen and Sharon has an arm around her shoulders.
“Pants,” she mutters around her towel, frowning, and Lee realises she’s still bare-legged, goose-bumped.
He looks up, casts around, snags a pair of grey sweats off Kara’s own bunk. There’s a bit of awkward maneouvering when she steps into the sweats and he has to help her rise so that Sharon can slip them up around her, but at the end of it all she’s standing - upright, wobbly, obviously still light-headed.
He purses his lips.
“Can you –“
“I can walk,” she says stiffly, and he can tell that if she wasn’t so anemic her cheeks would be colouring.
“Uh-huh.”
“I can walk,” she insists, and to prove it she presses the towel to her mouth and takes one, two, three tottering steps towards the hatch, before her hand goes out and Sharon has to grab her around the waist.
“Uh-huh,” Lee says again.
Pretty much what he anticipated. He takes a moment to wonder how she’s been getting through the days before making an executive decision. He can do that – he’s the CAG.
“Wait. Here –“ Kara makes a jerk and a strange explosive gasp when he scoops her up, into his arms. “This will be quicker, I think.”
“Lee –“
He ignores her, ignores the looks he’s getting, and goes to the hatch, which Sharon opens obligingly. The Raptor pilot looks half-concerned, half-amused.
“Don’t drop her.”
“I’ll do my best. She’s no lightweight.”
“Oh, ha ha…” Kara mutters into his shoulder, eyes averted, mortified. She presses the handtowel back to her lips.
Getting out the hatch is hardest, and then he’s just walking along, carrying his lead pilot, who’s bleeding from the mouth.
Kara’s hip curves softly into his abdomen, and she has one arm around his neck. His earlier anger seems to have evaporated somehow, and a quietness has descended to take its place. He’s struck by the bizarreness of it all. Obviously he’s not the only one – the occasional crewmembers they pass volunteer some strange glances. At the halfway mark Kara still has the towel up to her face. He wonders if the bleeding has stopped, suspects she’s just shielding herself, has his suspicions confirmed when she starts wriggling in his grasp.
“Stop that,” he says absently.
“Boot me darn.”
“I don’t think so.”
She pulls the towel away.
“Put me down. Frak, Lee. I can walk by myself.”
“So you said.”
“You’re doing this on purpose,” she mutters.
He chooses not to reply to that. He hears her sigh into his shoulder.
“Frak…”
Nearly there. He hefts her a bit higher, feels her arm tighten around him, decides to ask now, before they reach the hum and buzz of Medical.
“Kara, do you know why you’ve got scurvy?” he starts softly.
He feels her shrug.
“Because I don’t like the taste of plastic?” She sighs agin, and her head settles onto him. “Lords – enlighten me, if you’re so smart.”
He blinks and stares straight ahead.
“You work shift after shift –“
“So do you –“
“You don’t eat. You don’t take care of yourself –“
“What? Frak, Lee –“
She struggles now, hard enough that he can’t hold her, has to set her down near the wall of the corridor, where she puts one hand onto the metal to steady herself. They’re only a corner away from Medical and she straightens as much as she can, all wan ivory and steel, and the towel in her hand is red wadding, and her lips are pink-stained as she stares him down.
“What am I taking care of myself for, Lee? We’re warriors, remember? Cylon-food.”
He feels a chill on his skin without her close against him.
“Kara, you don’t believe that. You don’t. We’re survivors – if we survived Caprica, we can survive anything. And your life is just as important as –“
“What?”
She barks out an awful, choking laugh, and holds up one thin hand. He notices how her short-nailed fingers spread out, and how her skin seems papery and insubstantial in the acid light of the corridor, and how her ire keeps her standing, balanced carefully on her own open feet.
“This? Are you talking about this?” She takes a shaky step towards him – he reaches out involuntarily, but she’s just beyond his grasp, eyes dashed hollow. “This is all just a dream, Lee. Nothing more. You said it yourself – life is what we left behind. This is just the vacuum between two worlds. Between Caprica and Earth...”
She stops, closes her eyes for a second, flagging out. He waits for the end, hating it, not wanting to know what she’s going to say but guessing already from the expression on her face.
“Between Caprica and Earth there’s only empty space.”
Then energy deserts her and she reels a little, and his hands reel her in, and she still has enough left inside to walk, on her own feet, in her own time, in her own way, to Medical.
*
He’s walking.
He’s walking, and he doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s left Medical, and some internal clock registers that he’s due on CAP in three hours and he’s had no sleep, but he’s walking.
And he keeps walking until his feet figure it out, take him to where he needs to go, and he finds himself walking onto the flight deck and walking up to Galen Tyrol, who is splicing wires over a trolley of handmade fuses. The Chief appears almost as surprised to see Lee as Lee is surprised to be there.
“Captain?” The Chief frowns gently. “Can I, uh, help you with something, sir?”
Lee wets his lips and opens his mouth, and surprises himself again with what comes out.
“I need oranges.”
“Pardon?”
“Oranges.” Now he’s said it, it seems so obvious. “I need you to get me oranges. You can do that, right?”
Tyrol wipes his hands on his overalls and squints.
“Uh, Captain Adama, I don’t know what you think I –“
“Chief –“ Lee feels like he’s exhausted his vocabulary. He can only set his face and stare. “Just tell me you can get me oranges.”
Tyrol opens his mouth, closes it. Looks to his left, looks to his right. Grimaces, then decides.
“Okay. I can get you oranges. Provided that I’m not gonna end up on report for getting you oranges – sir.”
“Oh, I think I can guarantee that the CAG will turn a blind eye.”
They exchange dry looks. The Chief nods slowly.
“Well then, there shouldn’t be any problem.”
Lee’s shoulders sink in release. He was worried that this would be more difficult.
“When can you get them?”
“When do you need them?”
“About 2 months ago.” Lee grins sadly at the look on Tyrol’s face before reneging. “Just…as soon as you can.”
The Chief frowns and considers.
“Tomorrow sound okay?”
“Tomorrow sounds great.”
And Lee tries so hard to suppress his smile that Tyrol has to grin.
“Great.”
Such a simple thing. Just a few minutes negotiation, Lee thinks, to bring somebody back to life. He feels so light and airy that he can hardly feel his own feet as he turns to walk away. The Chief’s voice turns him back around.
“Oh, uh, Captain…” Tyrol frowns uneasily. “There’s just the question of…”
They’re standing far enough away from each other that their voices carry. Lee is aware of this. He’s aware of other people listening, and that this is important, so he nods, makes his face serious.
“There’s the question of what do I have to trade.”
“Uh, yeah.” The Chief masks his surprise well.
Lee has to think for a moment.
“I don’t,um… What are oranges worth?”
Tyrol looks like he’s about to say something, then changes his mind. Good, Lee thinks. Let this be a regular transaction. No special treatment, no half-price deals.
“Fresh fruit is expensive, sir,” Tyrol says at last.
Lee muses.
“Then, how about…one pair of civvie pants and a stopwatch?”
“Sounds like a good trade, sir.”
And the Chief grins, and Lee grins, and the spring in his step as he strides off the deck must be from relief.
*
Relief, or whatever it is, carries him for quite a while. Combined with two hours sleep, it gets him through most of his first shift. Between first and second shift he drops off the civvies and the stopwatch. His third shift is filling Kara’s spot in maintenance. He wakes himself up at 2200 with a shower before taking lates.
Kara, he realises, was surprisingly prophetic. Twenty-four hour rotation. He hasn’t done this since the days of thirty-three-minute Jump intervals, and when he finally gets back to his rack his face is taut, lips dry, eyes scoured with weariness.
And there are oranges on his bed.
He leans against the ladder to the bunk, flight jacket open haphazardly, and reaches up to fumble open the bag they’re in. It’s an old pillow-case – the soft thin cloth flops over his fingers. And then he has one in his hand. An orange. He rubs his thumb against it, looking at the vibrancy of the colour – the fruit is heavy, fat and full and real. Gods, he never realised… He brings it up to his nose, pushes a nail into the thick dimpled skin, inhales deeply, closes his eyes and smiles.
There’s a cough from the hatch.
“Oh.” Lee’s too tired to straighten completely, even for his father. “Hi.”
His dad doesn’t seem to mind the lack of ceremony.
“Hello, son.”
“I, uh…” Lee’s brain is both foggy and sharp. He glances from the fruit in his hand, back to his commander, and he’s not sure what to say. “I was going to come and talk to you about the flight roster, but –“
“It’s fine.” His father steps into the bunkroom, almost ambling, it seems. “I wasn’t going to talk to you about that.”
“No?”
“No.” His father frowns at him a little. “Except to say that you can’t fly every vacant shift yourself.”
“Oh.” Lee looks away. “Yeah. I know.”
He does know. This can only be short term. When he looks at his father again, they’re in agreement.
“Good,” his father says.
Lee’s left wondering, why the visit. He barely has time to prepare himself for a talk about the trading when his dad speaks again.
“Actually, I came by…to see if I could get an orange.”
Lee’s head jerks up.
“What?”
“An orange.”
His dad nods at the pile on the bed. There’s a curious expression on his face, and Lee thinks it might be…amusement. He has a sudden urge to laugh out loud. He remembers his father’s contemplation three days before, and feels something like an unexpected dawn in his brain.
“Uh, sure…”
The bag holds about a kilo and a half, he estimates. Enough joy to share around. He shuffles one orange into each hand before turning back to his dad.
“So…what’ve you got to trade?”
Bill Adama’s eyebrows lift, and his glasses tilt further down his nose. Then he smiles.
“How does a couple of glasses of cold ambrosia sound?”
“Sounds like a good trade, sir.”
They’re grinning at each other when Lee remembers.
“You want to tell the crew at briefing?”
“No. You should do it. Just give me a list of trading regulations beforehand.”
“Sure.”
Lee notices how the feeling inside him makes his body less sore, less achey. The grime and sweat on his face feels like light decoration. He sees his dad tip his head to one side.
“So…can I have my oranges now?”
Lee grins, tosses them one at a time. Perfect throws, perfect catches. He and his dad were always good at that.
*
He was hoping to sneak into Medical while she was still asleep. It’s still very early, so he thought there’d be a chance, but he’s reckoned without her good hearing.
“Hey…” She swims alert quickly, and he’s pleased to see some colour returning to her face. “What are you doing here? Gods, Lee – you look like shit.”
“Well, you’re obviously feeling better if you’re up to insulting me again.”
“Seriously…”
She struggles onto her elbows to have a good squint at him. Now he’s regretting not having a shower or changing his clothes.
“I’m fine.”
“Did you do lates?” She realises something, covers her mouth with her fingers. “Oh, frak – the maintenance fills… Damnit. I forgot we were –“
“Kara, relax.” He comes closer, perches himself carefully on the edge of the bed. “It’s okay. Sharon’s back on rotation and Cottle’s cleared Stepchild for duty, so we’re nearly out of the woods. And a couple of extra shifts won’t kill me.”
“Right. I forgot.” She pushes back into the pillows and studies her hands. “You’re made of sterner stuff.”
He watches her for a second, the way the dim light touches her face, before he opens his mouth to speak.
“Not as stern as you.” And because the quiet and his happiness and his weariness have made him careless, he reaches out and tucks a strip of blonde back behind her ear. “You’ve been sick for weeks, and you kept going.”
“Yeah,” she says, looking elsewhere, shrugging.
"Scurvy.” He bites his bottom lip, leaving a mark. “I never even noticed.”
“It’s okay,” she says, but now she’s staring at his face.
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” she whispers.
He thinks he might go a little crazy if she keeps looking at him like that, so he glances away to the bag in his other hand.
“Hey. Got you something.”
She sits up a bit higher on the pillows, flustered wriggling.
“You got me something? Gods, this being sick thing might turn out to be my regular gig. What did you –“
Then she stops talking, because he’s put an orange in her lap. And he smiles and puts down another. And another, and another, and another, until –
“Oh, frak –“ He goes from smiling to pale-faced in a heartbeat, dumping the bag on the bed as he grabs for her shoulders. “Gods, are you – I’ll call the doc, just gimme –“
But she’s shaking her bowed head madly from side to side, and one of her hands is clutching an orange, the other hand locked around his forearm for support. He grimaces in confusion.
“Kara, I didn’t mean to… Oh lords, Kara, don’t…”
She’s already started breathing again, blinking hard like she’s got something in her eyes, swallowing to draw everything in. It takes her a moment to get self-contained again, but by then he’s seen it all anyway. Without any conscious thought he stops clutching her shoulders and starts smoothing them gently with his hands. He gives her a moment before he speaks.
“You okay?”
She mashes her lips together, closes her eyes tight, opens them again.
“I’m…fine. I’m fine. It’s okay. Really.” She blinks about a million times, takes a shaky breath, then nods at the fruit in her lap. “Oranges.”
He’s still taken aback by her reaction. Lets her go, tries to grin.
“With pith. And actual taste.”
She nods, bottom lip still quivering. She runs one finger over the orange in her hand, struggles again, then swipes a hand across her eyes. He can’t imagine why this would make her feel embarrassed.
“This is wonderful.” Clears her throat to stop the wobbles. Smiles up at him at last. “Thank you.”
He smiles back, because this is an improvement on crying. Kara crying is the last thing he expected. He sits back, keeping an eye on her, keeping his tone light.
“You have to promise me you’ll eat one every day. I went to a lot of trouble to get these.”
“I bet.” She grins, pink in her cheeks returning. “You go through Tyrol?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” They share a look, and then Kara strokes her orange again, looks dazedly happy at the pile of vibrant citrus starbursts in her lap. Sighs. “They’re almost too pretty to eat.”
He frowns at her gently.
“No way. Here. Number one.” He taps the orange in her hand meaningfully.
“You gonna time me to see how fast I put these away?” she laughs.
“Can’t. I traded my stopwatch for them.”
“Oh, Lee…”
Kara shakes her head, he can see her checking out his slightly sheepish expression. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if she starts crying again, so he grabs the orange out of her hand and tears into it with his fingernails.
“Gods, Lee, that’s gonna drip everywhere…”
The skin, all pliant rindy whiteness and organic texture, peels away into his palm – he holds up the husked orange, breaks it open, the two halves floating sticky in his grasp.
“Smell this.”
He holds it under her nose. Her eyes close and her chin lifts. The look on her face makes him shiver.
“Take some,” she says at last, lifting the fruit out of his hand.
“Not a chance.”
He looks away, pulls the bag over and tips the rest of the contents into her lap. Oranges roll sedately on the blanket over her legs. He smiles at them.
“You were right, you know,” he begins. “About the details.”
She nods slowly.
“You tell the crew yet?”
He shakes his head, and rolls an orange over her knee.
“At briefing.”
He remembers that briefing is four hours away, and sighs out. Exhaustion suddenly sinks over him like a heavy membrane, something gelatinous and metallic-tasting. He rubs a hand – not the sticky one – over his face, his chin, and grins at her with half his mouth.
“At briefing,” he repeats. “If I can stay awake that long.”
“Here.” She peels a segment of the orange away – he can see the tiny glossy pips inside the flesh – and hands it to him. “This will wake you up.”
He looks at the piece of orange, considers, and then stuffs it into his mouth all in one, the way he used to when he was ten, and oranges meant nothing. The taste of it explodes on his tongue. Kara is talking.
“I was wrong about one thing though,” she’s saying.
He chews and swallows, sorry to feel the last of it go down his throat.
“Yeah?”
“The empty space.”
She has the segmented orange in one hand, juice in tempting drops on her fingertips, and with the other hand she is rolling the oranges back and forth over legs.
“It’s not empty, Lee. Not at all.” She looks up at him finally. “See? Stars – moons – planets…”
Kara smiles and holds up an orange in demonstration, spinning it in orbit between them. Then she sees the orange itself, regards the splash of colour with laconic surprise, suspends it next to her face.
“And hey, look. Suns.”
Lee laughs softly, there on her bed.
“And suns,” he agrees.
And he smiles, because he’s not looking at the orange.
Fin
if anyone is interested, this fic has a soundtrack - 'satisfy my soul' by bob marley, and 'private road' by bent.
thanks all, for reading. have a good night.
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sangga) wrote,
