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padmeonpaper2009-05-02 12:05 am
padme_kenobi) wrote in padmeonpaper2009-05-02 12:05 am
Entry tags:
Fic: "The Sound of One Hand Clapping" (Battlestar Galactica, Lee/Kara, 11/11)
Title: The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Author:padme_kenobi
Previous Chapters: Can be read here.
Characters/Pairings: Lee/Kara with mentions of Lee/Dee, Sam/Kara and Zak/Kara
Status: Complete. One chapter will be posted per day.
Word Count: 1,073 this chapter
Rating: PG this chapter - references to intimacy, but nothing graphic
Spoilers: Through S3's "Crossroads, Part 2"
Summary: Four weeks following, Helo shows her a supernova’s scan, and everything falls to pieces.
Author's Notes: And so we come to the end of this fic, yikes! It seems amazing to me, because I literally spent three very intense weeks writing it. (Good thing for me I was on vacation from work, although I'm not exactly sure how to explain to my boss what I did on said vacation. "Yeah, I wrote a 23,000-word fanfic, how about you?" Heh.) Anyway, it seems like you have all enjoyed it, a fact which I'm obviously very thrilled with and surprised at. Thank you all so very much for reading! As always, more extensive author's notes can be found here.
One day following Kara’s latest encounter with Lee, Ishay gives her splints to wear. Kara obeys because she wants her hands back, wants her life back, wants to really touch Lee, wants to be restored to flight status and feel the G-forces pressing her into her seat. She wants to do barrel rolls and shoot Raiders and laugh across the comm. She wants to be Starbuck again, and that night in his arms she dreams of flight.
One week following, the bandages come off. Kara still needs to be careful, but it feels like she’s free again, like she’s been released from a sort of prison. She runs back to the bunkroom and drinks a glass of water and uses the head and showers and by the time Lee comes in from patrol she is leaning against the side of her rack spooning algae with her Starbuck grin firmly in place. And she runs up to him and kisses him and drifts her fingers through his hair, not caring that the rest of the pilots are standing behind him and especially not when he deepens the kiss.
Two weeks following, they frak again. Her hands are healed fully now, and she can finally be as impulsive as she’s been before. Kara surprises Lee in the shower, darting into the head with only a towel around her middle and wrenching aside the door. The look on his face is worth it, shifting from abject shock to open arousal to desperate desire as she pins him up against the wall with a series of kisses. And he whispers, “Welcome back” as he slides inside and she knows exactly what he means. Welcome back to being you.
Three weeks following, her flight status is restored. Thriving on freedom and the knowledge that Oh gods, I’m not going to frak it up this time is wonderful, but there’s one crucial part of her life that’s missing, and that’s the part she lives inside her Viper. Sitting in the launch tube waiting feels like returning from the dead, and hearing Apollo’s voice on comm as she loops around him feels like that first heady breath of air. And they’re both laughing, they’re all laughing, Hotdog and Racetrack and Helo and Lee and Kara, and Dee asks what’s so funny and no one can tell her. Something just seems … complete.
Four weeks following, Helo shows her a supernova’s scan, and everything falls to pieces.
***
Afterwards Lee wonders if he should have seen it coming. He knows that Kara walks an unusual path. He’s seen that her life is a series of trials and that times when she’s calm, okay, happy are merely punctuation marks. But this time he was fooled. This time she seemed to have recovered, to have accepted that she could have love and be content and most importantly, that she deserved those things. She’d done all she could to push him away but this time, he was having none of it. And this time it finally felt as though he might have won, might have conquered the foul spirit inside her.
He sits in the screening room and watches. Over and over, he watches as she flies into the cloud. He watches as he follows. He hears the desperation in his own voice as he calls for her, over and over, much as she called for him in her nightmares. He sees himself spot her – too far too far too far his mind sings – and she turns to him and there’s a look of perfect contentment on her face and those words, those words that he hears in nightmares and in the daytime when he wakes in the empty rack.
“Let me go. Just let me go.”
And the explosion.
Lee sees it every time he closes his eyes. It plays on the ceiling of the rack that still smells like her. It hovers on the fringes of his dreams. But he keeps watching it, keeps loading the gun camera film into the projection machine because maybe if he watches it just one more time he can find a reason why. Just one more. Just … one … more.
He is eventually forced to conclude that there is no answer.
He wants there to be. But there isn’t.
There just … isn’t.
More than once his father calls Lee into his office. The elder Adama seems to understand – perhaps even more than his son – that the time Lee spent with Kara while she was recovering from her injuries changed something about their relationship. But of course, his father can offer no further solace. Lee knows Dad’s grieving as much as he is. But neither of them show it, because this is what Adama men do. They conceal. They hold in.
Lee stops watching the footage. It’s just too frakking painful now.
Instead he sits in his rack, no, in the rack they shared, clutching her picture. Helo wants him to put it up on the memorial wall, but he can’t. As long as he’s got the picture he still has a small piece of her. He still has the woman he comforted, the woman whose hands he healed, the woman with whom he fought and frakked and laughed and who could be unbelievably tender and astoundingly abrasive all in one breath. He has a sense he changed her, that being completely dependent on him altered something fundamentally within her. That in his arms she learned to let go.
Just let me go.
Maybe it was too much freedom.
Lee works security for Baltar and helps to defend him and thinks of the irony were Kara there to see what he was doing. It’s a distraction, anyway, and it’s something to do besides fly CAP and give flight briefings and sit in his rack and stare at her picture when he’s off-duty.
She’s free. But he’s more shackled than ever.
Shackled to her.
He needs her.
Everyone tells him he should be proud of the speech he gave when called to the witness stand at the trial. They may not necessarily agree with the verdict – many are vehemently opposed, in fact – but they respect what Lee had to say. They congratulate him for it. They tell him he should be pleased with himself.
He accepts their accolades. He nods. He is polite.
Then he arrives at the bunkroom. Sits in his rack. Clutches her picture.
Cries.
Author:
padme_kenobiPrevious Chapters: Can be read here.
Characters/Pairings: Lee/Kara with mentions of Lee/Dee, Sam/Kara and Zak/Kara
Status: Complete. One chapter will be posted per day.
Word Count: 1,073 this chapter
Rating: PG this chapter - references to intimacy, but nothing graphic
Spoilers: Through S3's "Crossroads, Part 2"
Summary: Four weeks following, Helo shows her a supernova’s scan, and everything falls to pieces.
Author's Notes: And so we come to the end of this fic, yikes! It seems amazing to me, because I literally spent three very intense weeks writing it. (Good thing for me I was on vacation from work, although I'm not exactly sure how to explain to my boss what I did on said vacation. "Yeah, I wrote a 23,000-word fanfic, how about you?" Heh.) Anyway, it seems like you have all enjoyed it, a fact which I'm obviously very thrilled with and surprised at. Thank you all so very much for reading! As always, more extensive author's notes can be found here.
One day following Kara’s latest encounter with Lee, Ishay gives her splints to wear. Kara obeys because she wants her hands back, wants her life back, wants to really touch Lee, wants to be restored to flight status and feel the G-forces pressing her into her seat. She wants to do barrel rolls and shoot Raiders and laugh across the comm. She wants to be Starbuck again, and that night in his arms she dreams of flight.
One week following, the bandages come off. Kara still needs to be careful, but it feels like she’s free again, like she’s been released from a sort of prison. She runs back to the bunkroom and drinks a glass of water and uses the head and showers and by the time Lee comes in from patrol she is leaning against the side of her rack spooning algae with her Starbuck grin firmly in place. And she runs up to him and kisses him and drifts her fingers through his hair, not caring that the rest of the pilots are standing behind him and especially not when he deepens the kiss.
Two weeks following, they frak again. Her hands are healed fully now, and she can finally be as impulsive as she’s been before. Kara surprises Lee in the shower, darting into the head with only a towel around her middle and wrenching aside the door. The look on his face is worth it, shifting from abject shock to open arousal to desperate desire as she pins him up against the wall with a series of kisses. And he whispers, “Welcome back” as he slides inside and she knows exactly what he means. Welcome back to being you.
Three weeks following, her flight status is restored. Thriving on freedom and the knowledge that Oh gods, I’m not going to frak it up this time is wonderful, but there’s one crucial part of her life that’s missing, and that’s the part she lives inside her Viper. Sitting in the launch tube waiting feels like returning from the dead, and hearing Apollo’s voice on comm as she loops around him feels like that first heady breath of air. And they’re both laughing, they’re all laughing, Hotdog and Racetrack and Helo and Lee and Kara, and Dee asks what’s so funny and no one can tell her. Something just seems … complete.
Four weeks following, Helo shows her a supernova’s scan, and everything falls to pieces.
***
Afterwards Lee wonders if he should have seen it coming. He knows that Kara walks an unusual path. He’s seen that her life is a series of trials and that times when she’s calm, okay, happy are merely punctuation marks. But this time he was fooled. This time she seemed to have recovered, to have accepted that she could have love and be content and most importantly, that she deserved those things. She’d done all she could to push him away but this time, he was having none of it. And this time it finally felt as though he might have won, might have conquered the foul spirit inside her.
He sits in the screening room and watches. Over and over, he watches as she flies into the cloud. He watches as he follows. He hears the desperation in his own voice as he calls for her, over and over, much as she called for him in her nightmares. He sees himself spot her – too far too far too far his mind sings – and she turns to him and there’s a look of perfect contentment on her face and those words, those words that he hears in nightmares and in the daytime when he wakes in the empty rack.
“Let me go. Just let me go.”
And the explosion.
Lee sees it every time he closes his eyes. It plays on the ceiling of the rack that still smells like her. It hovers on the fringes of his dreams. But he keeps watching it, keeps loading the gun camera film into the projection machine because maybe if he watches it just one more time he can find a reason why. Just one more. Just … one … more.
He is eventually forced to conclude that there is no answer.
He wants there to be. But there isn’t.
There just … isn’t.
More than once his father calls Lee into his office. The elder Adama seems to understand – perhaps even more than his son – that the time Lee spent with Kara while she was recovering from her injuries changed something about their relationship. But of course, his father can offer no further solace. Lee knows Dad’s grieving as much as he is. But neither of them show it, because this is what Adama men do. They conceal. They hold in.
Lee stops watching the footage. It’s just too frakking painful now.
Instead he sits in his rack, no, in the rack they shared, clutching her picture. Helo wants him to put it up on the memorial wall, but he can’t. As long as he’s got the picture he still has a small piece of her. He still has the woman he comforted, the woman whose hands he healed, the woman with whom he fought and frakked and laughed and who could be unbelievably tender and astoundingly abrasive all in one breath. He has a sense he changed her, that being completely dependent on him altered something fundamentally within her. That in his arms she learned to let go.
Just let me go.
Maybe it was too much freedom.
Lee works security for Baltar and helps to defend him and thinks of the irony were Kara there to see what he was doing. It’s a distraction, anyway, and it’s something to do besides fly CAP and give flight briefings and sit in his rack and stare at her picture when he’s off-duty.
She’s free. But he’s more shackled than ever.
Shackled to her.
He needs her.
Everyone tells him he should be proud of the speech he gave when called to the witness stand at the trial. They may not necessarily agree with the verdict – many are vehemently opposed, in fact – but they respect what Lee had to say. They congratulate him for it. They tell him he should be pleased with himself.
He accepts their accolades. He nods. He is polite.
Then he arrives at the bunkroom. Sits in his rack. Clutches her picture.
Cries.