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letterstonorahTitle: Other Halves
Author: letterstonorah
Pairings: Kara/Lee (mentions of Lee/Dee, Kara/Sam)
Summary: Even after recommitting to their partners in "Taking A Break from All Your Worries", Lee and Kara can't let each other go.
Rating: NC17, but the smut is not up to my usual hotness, and for that -- all the apologies.
Warnings: infidelity, smut
Word Count: 3650
Disclaimer: Not mine, obvi.
Author's Note: Written for for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sci_fi_shipper as part of the no_takebacks wishing well. I hope this is close to what you had in mind, Heather! It ended up being a lot harder to write than expected.
Kara hops off the Raptor, tucks strands of bobbed hair behind her ears, and looks for the boy who’s going to help her reclaim a part of herself.
Around her, masses of people stand in line for rations, the familiar stink of unwashed bodies very much present. Just another day in the Fleet, and for the briefest of moments, Kara misses the shithole planet that was New Caprica.
Kara focuses her attention on finding her way. The windowless deck, unpolished metal, and lack of furnishings give the space a severe and unwelcoming effect. The ship is the cheapest of the cheap when it comes to transport vessels, the same kind that Kara used to ride with her mother for interplanet moves.
Reaching around in her back pocket, she finds the small sheet of crumpled paper she’s looking for and pulls it out, reading the messy note from Helo:
This is Kara’s second errand of the day. Her first stop had been to the Prometheus, getting a gift for Kacey’s upcoming birthday. Six crayons, a sketchbook, and a crappy children’s book cost her a can of shaving cream, floss, and two pair of socks—and now she’s regretting the book she purchased, some turd fest called The Adventures of Dick and Jane. Kara had the chance to peruse it while on the Raptor. Jane. See Jane. See Jane play. Doll. See Jane play with doll.Kara’s all like—the frak? She’d wanted something more along the lines of See Jane fly Vipers.
It’s sad some of the things that made it through the initial attacks. Not a single copy of the The Absolutely True Adventures of Alexandria, Dragon Thief left on the fleet, but this drivel masquerading as a book for children remains unscathed?
Kara slings the backpack carrying her few possessions over her shoulder and makes her way off the deck, following the directions Karl laid out so meticulously. Beggars surround her, filling up the halls, and Kara wishes she’d brought that half jar of peanut butter she’s been stashing.
When she finds the correct cabin, she knocks in the appropriate rhythm, then waits.
“What?” she hars, through the shut hatch.
“Someone said I could see you about a tattoo,” says Kara.
“I don’t do tattoos,” the voice says.
Kara hears the sound of shuffling feet inside.
“I don’t want you to do a tattoo,” she says. “I want you to undo one.”
Inside, someone undogs the hatch and pushes it open, a teenage boy with smudged features. He eyes her cautiously, looks either way down the hall, then steps out to meet her. The boy keeps his hands on his waist, sizing her up.
“You got the payment?”
Kara searches inside her backpack and removes the half bottle of booze, handing it to him.
“You got anything else?” he asks.
She considers the dimebag of weed wrapped in the pair of briefs at the bottom of her locker.
Kara shrugs, keeps her face straight. “This is all I got. Either it’s enough or it isn’t.”
He grunts, sighs, rubs his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand.
“Look, I don’t have all day,” says Kara, though she does; she has exactly all day. Her R&R started only a few hours ago, and she’s not due back on Galactica until oh-eight-hundred tomorrow. Regardless, she’s tired as frak, and this godsforsaken ship—the Citerra or something—is the last place she wants to be. She rubs her eyes, heavy from lack of sleep. and longs to lie down in her rack, pull back the curtain, and tug the sheet over her face.
Lee is off-duty, too, had probably planned it that way—back when he was okay with frakking around on his wife, before his ethics caught up with his body.
Right about now he’s probably in the gym, socking a punching bag into oblivion. Then he’ll be headed to the showers; after that, the racks. He’ll crawl into bed with Kara, slip his fingers into her briefs and under her tank, and they’ll both promise themselves that this is the last time, though, of course, it won’t be. Even so, each of their thrusts will be more needy than the last, both of them frightened that they may have to give up the other.
“You sure you don’t have anything else to trade?” the boy asks, “because if this is all you got, it won’t be enough to cover the anesthetic.”
“What?” says Kara. She’s wearing civvies: a pair of faded blue jeans two sizes too big that sag at the waist, a black tank, and a dark grey hoodie. She tucks her hands up into the arms of the jacket, crosses them over her chest so the fabric of the sleeves falls limply at her sides. “My friend told me you’d do the whole thing no-questions-asked for a half bottle of hard A. What the frak is this shit, then?”
The boy shrugs and leans against the frame of the hatch. Strands of greasey, blonde hair fall down past his forehead, obscuring his eyes. “Times are hard,” he says, his face smug, his bottom lip poking out. “I raised the price.” He smiles at her like a goddamn cocky bastard, and Lords, she wants to hit him.
His dark brown eyes are narrow and squinted. His nose is flat and stout. His arms—covered in black tribal tattoos—are skinny and fleshy, with seemingly no underlying muscle. Kara guesses that he’s sixteen, seventeen at the very most. Shouldn’t he be in school or something, not here here ripping her off? The Fleet has schools, yeah?
She leans her weight onto one foot, arms still crossed, wishing she’d thought to bring her sidearm—not to actually use it on this twirp, obviously; but sometimes, wrapping a palm around the handle of a piece is all the persuation people need. “Gods, frak you,” Kara says.
“Sorry,” he says, even though he’s obviously not, “but I don’t take payment in frakking.” His eyes linger at her neck, wander down to her chest, before flashing back up to her face—suggesting that maybe he actually does take Kara for a prostitute.
Then there’s that smile again, like he thinks he really is something special, like he thinks his joke is anything other than tired, old, and juvenile.
“Kid, I wouldn’t frak you even if it meant we could go back in time and stop the cylons. I would not frak you for a million cubits. I would not frak you for ten bars of chocolate—and that’s saying something, because there’s a whole lot of gals and guys on this fleet who I’d frak for even a centimeter of a Mars bar. So I’m sure as hell not going to frak you to remove a godsdamn tattoo.”
She’d take the damn thing off herself if she had to—burn away the black ink of the wing and constellation etched into her arm. Kara’s no masochist, but she’s been alive long enough to understand that most good things come with a little bit of pain, whether deserved or not.
“Whatever you say, but if this is all you got,” the boy says, holding up the bottle of whiskey Kara procured, “then no anesthetic. I got a business to run, lady.”
So, yeah, of course, this asswipe has it coming. Maybe not right this second. Maybe not even tomorrow. But sometime soon, Kara’s going to have a very good time working out some of her anger issues on his face. She’d bust his lip, blacken at least one of his eyes, chip one of his teeth. One—he called her ‘lady’. Two—no anesthetic? What the frak is that? Three—his haircut, his frakkin haircut.
“Okay,” Kara says. She grabs his collar and yanks him toward her before shoving him into the metal wall surrounding the hatch. “But you’re a frakking asshole.”
She lets him go and pushes into his quarters, taking a seat on a stool, shrugging off her jacket. She shows him the tattoo on her bicep—half a wing pair, half a constellation. Kara’s not sure how she ever consented this. It’s not that she hates the way it looks, but she would’ve had to be drunk out of her mind to get a tattoo that suggested she was only part of something. Kara is two wings. Kara is an entire constellation.
The boy closes the hatch then ambles around the room, gathering supplies.
“That won’t be too bad,” he says. “I’ve had people come to me wanting to get whole sleeves removed. This one guy, he had this epic portrait that covered all of his back—”
“Did you give him anesthetic?” Kara interrupts.
He laughs, unfazed. “Can you blame me for being an arse? Come on. The last shower I took was, I don’t know, a month ago? I have no shampoo, no soap. Barely enough water a day to keep the thirst at bay, and my stomach is always growling. You don’t know what it’s like here.”
“Right,” says Kara, “and maybe you don’t know what it’s like to wake up everyday and risk your life for a frakker like you. By the way, it sucks.”
The boy takes a seat next to her, puts on a pair of glasses, and grabs her arm, laying it gently on a cold, metal table. He squeezes cream onto the skin, rubs it in, and the sensation is cold and numbing.
“I thought you said no anesthetic,” says Kara, not that she’s complaining.
“This is just topical; it’ll knock off some of the pain, but it’s certainly not the good stuff. I don’t have enough of that to be using it for everyone.”
“So you got a lot of folks coming here during the end of the worlds looking to get tattoos removed?” Kara asks.
“Fair point,” he says, shrugging. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s gonna hurt like a bitch, you know.”
“I’m used to things hurting like a bitch,” says Kara, her muscles tensing, anticipating the burn she’ll feel when the machine takes off bits of her skin.
“You’re gonna have to stay real still, okay?”
“Just do it, asswipe, or am I gonna have to do it myself?” she asks.
Nodding, he rigs up what looks like an electronic sandpaper brush and turns it on, bringing it down to her tattoo. Word says that it hurts ten times more than old school laser removal technology, but it only takes one treatment and leaves very little scarring.
It’s not the worst pain she’s ever felt, not even close, but it’s close. It’s like she’s being peeled open one layer of skin at a time, and involuntary tears begin to slide down her cheeks.
“Don’t worry, the ink’s not too deep at all,” he says. “It’ll heal up nice.”
He scrapes off her skin with the device for nearly an hour, making petty conversation. Kara would blow him off, but talking helps to distract her from the pain.
“So what happened?” the boy asks.
Kara grits her teeth, tries to focus enough to let a coherent thought form. “Happened?”
“Yeah, what happened to make you want to subject yourself to this torture? Maybe I’d get it if your tattoo said, ‘I’m in love with an cylon asshole named blah blah’ or whatever, but this is fairly innocuous—could be anything.”
“Innocuous,” she repeats, smiling. “Did you learn that word at the Tattoo Academy?”
“Come on. Tell me,” he says.
“Had a change of heart. I don’t want to be tied to it anymore. Don’t want to be tied to anything right now.”
The boy nods, his attention set on the work he’s doing, his brow scrunched. “I get that. Got to be free. Got to be your own persn.”
Kara rolls her eyes. “Right. We almost done here?” she asks.
“Yep,” he says, switching off the machine.
Where her tattoo used to be is just a patch of red, raw skin. Now that he’s stopped, the pain is hardly noticeable, like a healing burn.
“Looks good,” he says, admiring his work, rubbing some sort of gel over the abrasions. “Soap it every day. You guys actually got soap on Galactica, right?”
“Uh huh,” she says. “So we got soap. We’re a regular luxury liner, aren’t we?”
“Whatever. Just change the bandages a couple times a day, at least. Let it get some air when you’re having rack time. If it starts to get really painful and oozy, come see me, okay? If you don’t mess with it, it’ll look pretty close to normal in a few weeks—better than normal, even. Think of it as really good exfoliation.”
Kara stands, puts on her jacket, uses the sleeves to wipe off her still-wet eyes.
“You okay?” asks the boy.
“You’re an asshole,” is all Kara says as she ducks under the hatch, shuts it behind her, and heads off to Galactica.
#
Lee pulls on a pair of briefs, some jeans, and a t-shirt and checks to make sure the racks are empty. It’s that time of day where pilots are either just starting their shifts or have woken up and are enjoying their small amount of free time. Lee dogs the hatch even though that’s a no-no. He doesn’t give two fraks.
“Kara?” he says.
He hears a grunt emitting from her bunk, pulls back the curtain, and slides in with her.
She’s in a bra and her briefs, facing him, lying on her side, her knees curled into her chest. Seeing her like this, the edges of her muscles peeking through her skin, the smoothness of her stomach and legs, the curve of her ass—he already feels the tug of arousal, his length hardening.
“You don’t waste time,” Kara says, and she’s smiling, but he can sense it’s not real. “What? You meeting Dee later, or something?” she says.
He lets out a long, heavy breath and closes his eyes—like he needs the reminder that even after Dee agreed to give him another chance, he can’t stay away from Kara, can’t ever have enough of her, can’t let all of her go.
“You spoiling for a fight? What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Nothing.” She turns away so that her back is facing him, and he sees her body stiffen momentarily as if overtaken with pain.
“Kara.”
“What?”
“Talk to me. Come on,” he says, propping himself up over her—and then he sees it, or rather, he doesn’t see it.
“Kara?”
“Mm?”
“Did you,” he starts, unable to find his words, “where is—what happened to your tattoo?”
“It’s gone,” she says. She rolls from her side onto her back, looks up at him, the barest trace of a tremor on her lips.
“It’s gone?”
“I got rid of it. But don’t get excited, Lee. I didn’t do it for you. I did it for myself.”
He smiles down at her, enjoys the view of her face. He’ll never get tired of it, will never find anything more beautiful. “What’s Sam think about it?”
“Who cares what Sam thinks about it?” she says, turning her head away. “I just thought it might be nice to have my own body back, and I don’t give a frak about what Sam has to say—or you, for that matter.”
Lee leans down and kisses the tender, red skin where the tattoo used to be, being as gentle as he can. “It hurt?”
“Not too much, no,” she says, shifting again so that she’s facing him. “It’s mostly numb.”
Lee runs a finger along her bare sides, letting his thumb dip under the fabric of her briefs, touching her thigh, her ass. Kara scoots closer to him, pushing his hand farther down into her underwear. “How come you did it?” Lee asks her. “I know you said you did it for yourself, but what does that actually mean?
“It’s like cutting your hair, Lee. Sometimes you need the reminder of who you are—and that who you are isn’t a fixed thing. Even the things that seem really permanent aren’t. You know?”
He nods, kisses her on the lips. “I know.” He can’t get over looking at it—the new skin, fresh and pink as if baptized by fire. The tattoo never bothered him much, but it’d been a symbol of something—that she belonged to someone else, that someone else completed her. And now here she is. Just Kara. Just herself. Maybe willing to let someone fly her wing.
“So how long do we have?” Kara asks.
“Until?” says Lee, pressing himself closer to Kara, his hand still tucked into her briefs, palming her ass.
“Until you have to go,” and she pauses briefly, “home?”
Her voice cracks a little as she pushes the words out. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, Kara,” Lee says, using his free hand to cover her cheek. “I can stay. All day, if you want.”
“Yeah, now, maybe. What about next time?”
Lee starts to respond, but Kara puts up her hand, stopping. “Look. Forget it. I got to go.” She rolls over him and hops out her bunk onto the floor.
“Kara, get back up here,” says Lee, swinging his legs around the side of the rack, watching her as she goes to her locker, pulls out a tank top and some gym shorts.
“Kara,” he repeats.
She pretends not to hear. He sighs and rolls his eyes, and climbs out the bed, meeting her by the lockers. “Hey,” he says, trapping her inside his arms, propped up against the wall. Kara makes a move to duck under, but he pushes himself up harder against her, pressing his cock into her. “Look,” he says. “I’m staying, okay? Now you stay, too, all right? I’m here. You’re here. Do you get that? I’m standing right here, and I’m not going anywhere. We’ll figure this out, I promise you that.”
Kara lifts her head and meets his eyes. “What’s there to figure out? I frakked it up. Case closed.”
He leans down and presses his lips against her forehead, his eyes closed. “What is it you said about your tattoo? Even the things we think are permanent, aren’t? Maybe we can change things together—with us, I mean. Gods, I don’t know.”
Kara dips her head down, intakes a sharp breath. Lee lifts up her chin, kisses her softly, coaxing her to relax, to believe that this is really happening. She’s hesitant at first, but opens her mouth, letting their tongues meet.
“Gods, Kara,” he says, tasting her, his body already mad for her. He wraps a hand around her waist and pulls her tight against him, drags her to a rack—anybody’s rack—and falls onto the mattress, pulling her on top of him. She lifts up, her legs straddling him, and pulls off her bra. Lee watches as her breasts fall free from the fabric. Despite how gorgeous she looks, her top half bare for him, he pulls her back down, unable to handle the lack of contact.
Their lips are pressed together in seconds, hot and tugging, demanding and unsatiated. Kara rubs herself against Lee’s cock, still confined in his trousers, dry frakking him. “Need you,” she says, and Lee grabs her and flips them around so he’s on top.
He undoes his jeans, lets his length out the fly of his briefs, and storkes it as he watches Kara pull down her underwear so that she’s completely naked. He can’t wait—doesn’t bother removing his shirt or jeans, just pushes his cock into her.
He stills himself for a moment, tries to cool down and get used to the feel of her tight around him, but Kara is jerking her hips up, her hands on his ass directing him in and out of her body.
Bending his head down, he licks his tongue along Kara’s neck, down to her collar bone, and uses one hand to rub her clit as he grinds his hips up and down.
Kara’s movements become jerkier, more desperate, and Lee quickens his pace to help her get there. Her nails dig into ass as her legs squeeze over his hips, and she moans his name, her eyes closed, her mouth open. He finishes soon after, his teeth biting into her neck, bruising her skin, and lets the feeling of ecstasy tide over his body.
After curling into each other’s bodies and falling asleep—they’d both really needed the shut-eye—they wake up and head to the mess together.
“I got a run an errand, Kara,” Lee says, “meet you in a little bit?”
She nods, hesitant.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m coming back, just need to go take care of something first.”
He heads to his quarters where he knows Dee will be waiting, prepares to do what he was too cowardly to do before, when he was afraid that he’d never have Kara—not for real, and when he thought that meant he’d lose the one person who’d stuck by him, fearless—Dee. He’s been half a man, split in two, cheating her out of the full person she deserves. He reaches his cabin and spins the handwheel to open the hatch. Today he becomes whole.
Author: letterstonorah
Pairings: Kara/Lee (mentions of Lee/Dee, Kara/Sam)
Summary: Even after recommitting to their partners in "Taking A Break from All Your Worries", Lee and Kara can't let each other go.
Rating: NC17, but the smut is not up to my usual hotness, and for that -- all the apologies.
Warnings: infidelity, smut
Word Count: 3650
Disclaimer: Not mine, obvi.
Author's Note: Written for for
sci_fi_shipper as part of the no_takebacks wishing well. I hope this is close to what you had in mind, Heather! It ended up being a lot harder to write than expected. Kara hops off the Raptor, tucks strands of bobbed hair behind her ears, and looks for the boy who’s going to help her reclaim a part of herself.
Around her, masses of people stand in line for rations, the familiar stink of unwashed bodies very much present. Just another day in the Fleet, and for the briefest of moments, Kara misses the shithole planet that was New Caprica.
Kara focuses her attention on finding her way. The windowless deck, unpolished metal, and lack of furnishings give the space a severe and unwelcoming effect. The ship is the cheapest of the cheap when it comes to transport vessels, the same kind that Kara used to ride with her mother for interplanet moves.
Reaching around in her back pocket, she finds the small sheet of crumpled paper she’s looking for and pulls it out, reading the messy note from Helo:
Port side, deck 6a, last cabin near the bow on your right side. Knock 3 times on the hatch, pause, then knock 1 more time. And K, be careful. Word is, the dude’s kind of a seeping dick. Don’t kill him, okay? I don’t think even Papadama could overlook a corpse. Lee’s gonna ask me where you are in that way he thinks is casual but is totally not. Are you two still frakking? Not judging you, but you can’t keep living like this. Didn’t he call it off, anyway? Love you. Karl.xoxotackle-glomp, back slap. .
This is Kara’s second errand of the day. Her first stop had been to the Prometheus, getting a gift for Kacey’s upcoming birthday. Six crayons, a sketchbook, and a crappy children’s book cost her a can of shaving cream, floss, and two pair of socks—and now she’s regretting the book she purchased, some turd fest called The Adventures of Dick and Jane. Kara had the chance to peruse it while on the Raptor. Jane. See Jane. See Jane play. Doll. See Jane play with doll.Kara’s all like—the frak? She’d wanted something more along the lines of See Jane fly Vipers.
It’s sad some of the things that made it through the initial attacks. Not a single copy of the The Absolutely True Adventures of Alexandria, Dragon Thief left on the fleet, but this drivel masquerading as a book for children remains unscathed?
Kara slings the backpack carrying her few possessions over her shoulder and makes her way off the deck, following the directions Karl laid out so meticulously. Beggars surround her, filling up the halls, and Kara wishes she’d brought that half jar of peanut butter she’s been stashing.
When she finds the correct cabin, she knocks in the appropriate rhythm, then waits.
“What?” she hars, through the shut hatch.
“Someone said I could see you about a tattoo,” says Kara.
“I don’t do tattoos,” the voice says.
Kara hears the sound of shuffling feet inside.
“I don’t want you to do a tattoo,” she says. “I want you to undo one.”
Inside, someone undogs the hatch and pushes it open, a teenage boy with smudged features. He eyes her cautiously, looks either way down the hall, then steps out to meet her. The boy keeps his hands on his waist, sizing her up.
“You got the payment?”
Kara searches inside her backpack and removes the half bottle of booze, handing it to him.
“You got anything else?” he asks.
She considers the dimebag of weed wrapped in the pair of briefs at the bottom of her locker.
Kara shrugs, keeps her face straight. “This is all I got. Either it’s enough or it isn’t.”
He grunts, sighs, rubs his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand.
“Look, I don’t have all day,” says Kara, though she does; she has exactly all day. Her R&R started only a few hours ago, and she’s not due back on Galactica until oh-eight-hundred tomorrow. Regardless, she’s tired as frak, and this godsforsaken ship—the Citerra or something—is the last place she wants to be. She rubs her eyes, heavy from lack of sleep. and longs to lie down in her rack, pull back the curtain, and tug the sheet over her face.
Lee is off-duty, too, had probably planned it that way—back when he was okay with frakking around on his wife, before his ethics caught up with his body.
Right about now he’s probably in the gym, socking a punching bag into oblivion. Then he’ll be headed to the showers; after that, the racks. He’ll crawl into bed with Kara, slip his fingers into her briefs and under her tank, and they’ll both promise themselves that this is the last time, though, of course, it won’t be. Even so, each of their thrusts will be more needy than the last, both of them frightened that they may have to give up the other.
“You sure you don’t have anything else to trade?” the boy asks, “because if this is all you got, it won’t be enough to cover the anesthetic.”
“What?” says Kara. She’s wearing civvies: a pair of faded blue jeans two sizes too big that sag at the waist, a black tank, and a dark grey hoodie. She tucks her hands up into the arms of the jacket, crosses them over her chest so the fabric of the sleeves falls limply at her sides. “My friend told me you’d do the whole thing no-questions-asked for a half bottle of hard A. What the frak is this shit, then?”
The boy shrugs and leans against the frame of the hatch. Strands of greasey, blonde hair fall down past his forehead, obscuring his eyes. “Times are hard,” he says, his face smug, his bottom lip poking out. “I raised the price.” He smiles at her like a goddamn cocky bastard, and Lords, she wants to hit him.
His dark brown eyes are narrow and squinted. His nose is flat and stout. His arms—covered in black tribal tattoos—are skinny and fleshy, with seemingly no underlying muscle. Kara guesses that he’s sixteen, seventeen at the very most. Shouldn’t he be in school or something, not here here ripping her off? The Fleet has schools, yeah?
She leans her weight onto one foot, arms still crossed, wishing she’d thought to bring her sidearm—not to actually use it on this twirp, obviously; but sometimes, wrapping a palm around the handle of a piece is all the persuation people need. “Gods, frak you,” Kara says.
“Sorry,” he says, even though he’s obviously not, “but I don’t take payment in frakking.” His eyes linger at her neck, wander down to her chest, before flashing back up to her face—suggesting that maybe he actually does take Kara for a prostitute.
Then there’s that smile again, like he thinks he really is something special, like he thinks his joke is anything other than tired, old, and juvenile.
“Kid, I wouldn’t frak you even if it meant we could go back in time and stop the cylons. I would not frak you for a million cubits. I would not frak you for ten bars of chocolate—and that’s saying something, because there’s a whole lot of gals and guys on this fleet who I’d frak for even a centimeter of a Mars bar. So I’m sure as hell not going to frak you to remove a godsdamn tattoo.”
She’d take the damn thing off herself if she had to—burn away the black ink of the wing and constellation etched into her arm. Kara’s no masochist, but she’s been alive long enough to understand that most good things come with a little bit of pain, whether deserved or not.
“Whatever you say, but if this is all you got,” the boy says, holding up the bottle of whiskey Kara procured, “then no anesthetic. I got a business to run, lady.”
So, yeah, of course, this asswipe has it coming. Maybe not right this second. Maybe not even tomorrow. But sometime soon, Kara’s going to have a very good time working out some of her anger issues on his face. She’d bust his lip, blacken at least one of his eyes, chip one of his teeth. One—he called her ‘lady’. Two—no anesthetic? What the frak is that? Three—his haircut, his frakkin haircut.
“Okay,” Kara says. She grabs his collar and yanks him toward her before shoving him into the metal wall surrounding the hatch. “But you’re a frakking asshole.”
She lets him go and pushes into his quarters, taking a seat on a stool, shrugging off her jacket. She shows him the tattoo on her bicep—half a wing pair, half a constellation. Kara’s not sure how she ever consented this. It’s not that she hates the way it looks, but she would’ve had to be drunk out of her mind to get a tattoo that suggested she was only part of something. Kara is two wings. Kara is an entire constellation.
The boy closes the hatch then ambles around the room, gathering supplies.
“That won’t be too bad,” he says. “I’ve had people come to me wanting to get whole sleeves removed. This one guy, he had this epic portrait that covered all of his back—”
“Did you give him anesthetic?” Kara interrupts.
He laughs, unfazed. “Can you blame me for being an arse? Come on. The last shower I took was, I don’t know, a month ago? I have no shampoo, no soap. Barely enough water a day to keep the thirst at bay, and my stomach is always growling. You don’t know what it’s like here.”
“Right,” says Kara, “and maybe you don’t know what it’s like to wake up everyday and risk your life for a frakker like you. By the way, it sucks.”
The boy takes a seat next to her, puts on a pair of glasses, and grabs her arm, laying it gently on a cold, metal table. He squeezes cream onto the skin, rubs it in, and the sensation is cold and numbing.
“I thought you said no anesthetic,” says Kara, not that she’s complaining.
“This is just topical; it’ll knock off some of the pain, but it’s certainly not the good stuff. I don’t have enough of that to be using it for everyone.”
“So you got a lot of folks coming here during the end of the worlds looking to get tattoos removed?” Kara asks.
“Fair point,” he says, shrugging. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s gonna hurt like a bitch, you know.”
“I’m used to things hurting like a bitch,” says Kara, her muscles tensing, anticipating the burn she’ll feel when the machine takes off bits of her skin.
“You’re gonna have to stay real still, okay?”
“Just do it, asswipe, or am I gonna have to do it myself?” she asks.
Nodding, he rigs up what looks like an electronic sandpaper brush and turns it on, bringing it down to her tattoo. Word says that it hurts ten times more than old school laser removal technology, but it only takes one treatment and leaves very little scarring.
It’s not the worst pain she’s ever felt, not even close, but it’s close. It’s like she’s being peeled open one layer of skin at a time, and involuntary tears begin to slide down her cheeks.
“Don’t worry, the ink’s not too deep at all,” he says. “It’ll heal up nice.”
He scrapes off her skin with the device for nearly an hour, making petty conversation. Kara would blow him off, but talking helps to distract her from the pain.
“So what happened?” the boy asks.
Kara grits her teeth, tries to focus enough to let a coherent thought form. “Happened?”
“Yeah, what happened to make you want to subject yourself to this torture? Maybe I’d get it if your tattoo said, ‘I’m in love with an cylon asshole named blah blah’ or whatever, but this is fairly innocuous—could be anything.”
“Innocuous,” she repeats, smiling. “Did you learn that word at the Tattoo Academy?”
“Come on. Tell me,” he says.
“Had a change of heart. I don’t want to be tied to it anymore. Don’t want to be tied to anything right now.”
The boy nods, his attention set on the work he’s doing, his brow scrunched. “I get that. Got to be free. Got to be your own persn.”
Kara rolls her eyes. “Right. We almost done here?” she asks.
“Yep,” he says, switching off the machine.
Where her tattoo used to be is just a patch of red, raw skin. Now that he’s stopped, the pain is hardly noticeable, like a healing burn.
“Looks good,” he says, admiring his work, rubbing some sort of gel over the abrasions. “Soap it every day. You guys actually got soap on Galactica, right?”
“Uh huh,” she says. “So we got soap. We’re a regular luxury liner, aren’t we?”
“Whatever. Just change the bandages a couple times a day, at least. Let it get some air when you’re having rack time. If it starts to get really painful and oozy, come see me, okay? If you don’t mess with it, it’ll look pretty close to normal in a few weeks—better than normal, even. Think of it as really good exfoliation.”
Kara stands, puts on her jacket, uses the sleeves to wipe off her still-wet eyes.
“You okay?” asks the boy.
“You’re an asshole,” is all Kara says as she ducks under the hatch, shuts it behind her, and heads off to Galactica.
#
Lee pulls on a pair of briefs, some jeans, and a t-shirt and checks to make sure the racks are empty. It’s that time of day where pilots are either just starting their shifts or have woken up and are enjoying their small amount of free time. Lee dogs the hatch even though that’s a no-no. He doesn’t give two fraks.
“Kara?” he says.
He hears a grunt emitting from her bunk, pulls back the curtain, and slides in with her.
She’s in a bra and her briefs, facing him, lying on her side, her knees curled into her chest. Seeing her like this, the edges of her muscles peeking through her skin, the smoothness of her stomach and legs, the curve of her ass—he already feels the tug of arousal, his length hardening.
“You don’t waste time,” Kara says, and she’s smiling, but he can sense it’s not real. “What? You meeting Dee later, or something?” she says.
He lets out a long, heavy breath and closes his eyes—like he needs the reminder that even after Dee agreed to give him another chance, he can’t stay away from Kara, can’t ever have enough of her, can’t let all of her go.
“You spoiling for a fight? What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Nothing.” She turns away so that her back is facing him, and he sees her body stiffen momentarily as if overtaken with pain.
“Kara.”
“What?”
“Talk to me. Come on,” he says, propping himself up over her—and then he sees it, or rather, he doesn’t see it.
“Kara?”
“Mm?”
“Did you,” he starts, unable to find his words, “where is—what happened to your tattoo?”
“It’s gone,” she says. She rolls from her side onto her back, looks up at him, the barest trace of a tremor on her lips.
“It’s gone?”
“I got rid of it. But don’t get excited, Lee. I didn’t do it for you. I did it for myself.”
He smiles down at her, enjoys the view of her face. He’ll never get tired of it, will never find anything more beautiful. “What’s Sam think about it?”
“Who cares what Sam thinks about it?” she says, turning her head away. “I just thought it might be nice to have my own body back, and I don’t give a frak about what Sam has to say—or you, for that matter.”
Lee leans down and kisses the tender, red skin where the tattoo used to be, being as gentle as he can. “It hurt?”
“Not too much, no,” she says, shifting again so that she’s facing him. “It’s mostly numb.”
Lee runs a finger along her bare sides, letting his thumb dip under the fabric of her briefs, touching her thigh, her ass. Kara scoots closer to him, pushing his hand farther down into her underwear. “How come you did it?” Lee asks her. “I know you said you did it for yourself, but what does that actually mean?
“It’s like cutting your hair, Lee. Sometimes you need the reminder of who you are—and that who you are isn’t a fixed thing. Even the things that seem really permanent aren’t. You know?”
He nods, kisses her on the lips. “I know.” He can’t get over looking at it—the new skin, fresh and pink as if baptized by fire. The tattoo never bothered him much, but it’d been a symbol of something—that she belonged to someone else, that someone else completed her. And now here she is. Just Kara. Just herself. Maybe willing to let someone fly her wing.
“So how long do we have?” Kara asks.
“Until?” says Lee, pressing himself closer to Kara, his hand still tucked into her briefs, palming her ass.
“Until you have to go,” and she pauses briefly, “home?”
Her voice cracks a little as she pushes the words out. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, Kara,” Lee says, using his free hand to cover her cheek. “I can stay. All day, if you want.”
“Yeah, now, maybe. What about next time?”
Lee starts to respond, but Kara puts up her hand, stopping. “Look. Forget it. I got to go.” She rolls over him and hops out her bunk onto the floor.
“Kara, get back up here,” says Lee, swinging his legs around the side of the rack, watching her as she goes to her locker, pulls out a tank top and some gym shorts.
“Kara,” he repeats.
She pretends not to hear. He sighs and rolls his eyes, and climbs out the bed, meeting her by the lockers. “Hey,” he says, trapping her inside his arms, propped up against the wall. Kara makes a move to duck under, but he pushes himself up harder against her, pressing his cock into her. “Look,” he says. “I’m staying, okay? Now you stay, too, all right? I’m here. You’re here. Do you get that? I’m standing right here, and I’m not going anywhere. We’ll figure this out, I promise you that.”
Kara lifts her head and meets his eyes. “What’s there to figure out? I frakked it up. Case closed.”
He leans down and presses his lips against her forehead, his eyes closed. “What is it you said about your tattoo? Even the things we think are permanent, aren’t? Maybe we can change things together—with us, I mean. Gods, I don’t know.”
Kara dips her head down, intakes a sharp breath. Lee lifts up her chin, kisses her softly, coaxing her to relax, to believe that this is really happening. She’s hesitant at first, but opens her mouth, letting their tongues meet.
“Gods, Kara,” he says, tasting her, his body already mad for her. He wraps a hand around her waist and pulls her tight against him, drags her to a rack—anybody’s rack—and falls onto the mattress, pulling her on top of him. She lifts up, her legs straddling him, and pulls off her bra. Lee watches as her breasts fall free from the fabric. Despite how gorgeous she looks, her top half bare for him, he pulls her back down, unable to handle the lack of contact.
Their lips are pressed together in seconds, hot and tugging, demanding and unsatiated. Kara rubs herself against Lee’s cock, still confined in his trousers, dry frakking him. “Need you,” she says, and Lee grabs her and flips them around so he’s on top.
He undoes his jeans, lets his length out the fly of his briefs, and storkes it as he watches Kara pull down her underwear so that she’s completely naked. He can’t wait—doesn’t bother removing his shirt or jeans, just pushes his cock into her.
He stills himself for a moment, tries to cool down and get used to the feel of her tight around him, but Kara is jerking her hips up, her hands on his ass directing him in and out of her body.
Bending his head down, he licks his tongue along Kara’s neck, down to her collar bone, and uses one hand to rub her clit as he grinds his hips up and down.
Kara’s movements become jerkier, more desperate, and Lee quickens his pace to help her get there. Her nails dig into ass as her legs squeeze over his hips, and she moans his name, her eyes closed, her mouth open. He finishes soon after, his teeth biting into her neck, bruising her skin, and lets the feeling of ecstasy tide over his body.
After curling into each other’s bodies and falling asleep—they’d both really needed the shut-eye—they wake up and head to the mess together.
“I got a run an errand, Kara,” Lee says, “meet you in a little bit?”
She nods, hesitant.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m coming back, just need to go take care of something first.”
He heads to his quarters where he knows Dee will be waiting, prepares to do what he was too cowardly to do before, when he was afraid that he’d never have Kara—not for real, and when he thought that meant he’d lose the one person who’d stuck by him, fearless—Dee. He’s been half a man, split in two, cheating her out of the full person she deserves. He reaches his cabin and spins the handwheel to open the hatch. Today he becomes whole.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2012-03-10 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 12:35 am (UTC)And I love the ending, the idea of Lee becoming whole by being with Kara, lovely. :)
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Date: 2012-03-11 02:06 am (UTC)Lol. Yes. So true. Oh, Kara, you're a Lee fangirl at heart. Get over it.
Thank you so much for reading and commenting, love. cheers :p
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Date: 2012-03-11 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 02:07 am (UTC)Anyway. Yes! Thanks so much for commenting. What I was trying to get across that Kara (and Lee, too) can only be ready to be in a healthy relationship if she comes to a good place emotionally with herself, and I think she's really working toward that here. Re: the children's books. Hee! that was a fun detail. I'm so glad you noticed it. Thank you, thank you, Em!
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Date: 2012-03-11 02:43 am (UTC)Lovely ending lines too.
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Date: 2012-03-11 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 05:08 am (UTC)And the last line? Helluva good one. I'm always a sucker for a good last line. ;)
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Date: 2012-03-11 09:36 pm (UTC)Hee, and I'm glad you appreciated the various throwaway bits. Thank you so much again for your comment, love!
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Date: 2012-03-11 10:23 pm (UTC)I completely understand. It's why I shy away from it myself. I feel like that whole period is spent looking at the worst versions of themselves. It's tough. But you did a great job with it here.
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Date: 2012-03-11 04:46 pm (UTC)I love the hesitancy between Kara and Lee here, where she already knows what's going to happen but she's changed the rules. Lee just can't help himself, can he? I guess the same is said for Kara. :) I like the place they get to, where they can make choices to get closer to being together. Great job.
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Date: 2012-03-11 09:39 pm (UTC)Hee, this made me blush. I'm so glad that some of my stories resonate with folks in fandom. Every time I think about moving on, it's comments like this that make me keep going -- so thank you so much for that.
AND YES. Kara IS two wings. What the frak, RDM? Sigh. I'm so glad you liked that bit in particular, because it's my favorite part of the fic.
My hope for this fic is that the ending wouldn't leave them perfect, but there's a chance for them if they're both willing to meet each other half way.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment. *tackle glomps you*
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Date: 2012-03-12 12:28 am (UTC)Thank you
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Date: 2012-03-12 01:00 am (UTC)You know, love, you are such a delightful, thoughtful commenter. I would love some time to write you a fic if you could tell me what you'd like? I notice you didn't put anything into the wishing well!
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Date: 2012-03-12 01:37 am (UTC)Kinda had a crazy week getting ready for my vacation. I love all your stuff and I enjoy IT ALL. For me, as long as Lee and Kara end up together I'm a happy person.
I love your writing, I really do
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Date: 2012-03-17 12:51 am (UTC)Wonderfully done! Thank for sharing!
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Date: 2012-03-17 04:30 pm (UTC)I love how things between her and Lee slowly come together and we see adults willing to try it out instead of running.
Yes! This is exactly what I was trying to show with this -- two mature adults willing to work on themselves so they could be in a healthy relationship together.
And hee! Karl :p
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Date: 2014-02-21 08:26 am (UTC)