cybermathwitch | 12 Days of Ficmas - Day Seven: Dreams Crack Imperfect (Reply)

Title: Dreams Crack Imperfect

Author: Koren M.

Rating: R

'Ship: Kara/Lee

Disclaimer: Not mine. They're Ron Moore, David Eick, and the SciFi Channel's

Warnings: mild sexual references

Spoilers: through the first half of season 3

Summary: champagne, intercourse, deep, supple

Notes: Thanks to ez_as_pi for the beta.

Dreams Crack Imperfect

champagne

When Kara hugged him in her drunken joy after she came back from Caprica with Sam, she smelled like the fancy champagne she'd brought back too. He watches her bounce back across the room and into Sam's lap, and feels something deep inside himself break into pieces.

On his wedding night, several months later, Ana produces a bottle of good Caprican champagne she's managed to get through some friends on another passenger ship. He grits his teeth and manages to choke down half a glass before he decides that it would really be better (and cause fewer questions) if he moves on to the latter portion of their evening, and he takes her to bed, the alcohol momentarily forgotten.

It's the last time he'll ever touch the stuff, and he's more than okay with that.

intercourse

He can only think of what he does with Ana as intercourse. He can't think about it as making love, because he realized quite a while ago that he doesn't love her, and he probably never really has. He doesn't want to call it frakking, because it doesn't have any of the hard edge to it that he has always associated with that particular term. While he supposes that technically, it is sex, he doesn't even like to think about it that way, because that just doesn't have the same distance or clinical detachment that he feels when he's with her now.

If he has to think about what changed in their relationship, he might say that he stopped pretending to have feelings for her. But the reason he stopped pretending, that's another question entirely. So many things changed in such a short period of time that it's hard to pin it down to just one. And maybe it isn't just one - maybe it's a whole host of the things going on all together. For a while, he got to pretend that he was the Commander of a Battlestar, that the world was back to a boring normalcy that in reality it's never going to be again. His relationship with Ana was a part of that. She was the perfect girl for the perfect officer, on the perfect ship in a reality that is about as far from perfect as can be. And he's not really the perfect officer - he's too angry, too possessive, too jealous and too vicious, with too little control no matter how hard he tries. And she's not really the perfect girl, at least not for him, because she doesn't really see him and won't call him on his shit when he does something stupid. She doesn't challenge him or excite him or frustrate him and she never makes him angry. He needs someone to make him angry sometimes, because if no one does, that anger, ever present and bubbling under the surface will strike out at someone or something that doesn't necessarily deserve it.

He thinks that he's an imperfect officer, but maybe that makes him a damn good one, too, and maybe he needs an imperfect girl so that he can have an imperfect frak every now and then. Rather than the boringly perfect intercourse he has left to him.

deep

It's getting too deep to get out of easily, is all Kara can think as Lee leads her back to the CAG's office. For the third afternoon in a row. They can't keep this up forever, even if he's working quietly to get his marriage to Dee dissolved. They can't keep sneaking around anymore, because what should be thrilling and clandestine is scaring her to death. What's between them is too important to screw up for just a few quick fraks - and even as she's thinking that she knows that's not what's really going on. Not this time. Not for either of them. It's why it's taken them so bloody long to get to this point. Because they've both known deep down that once they cross that line between them nothing will ever be able to be the same.

"I want more than this, Lee." And oh, but she feels the irony there. That she, miss frak them and leave them and never even stay the night if you can help it, is the one asking for more.

"I'm working on that, Kara. I swear I am. But... Dee's touchy," and she's pleased that he's back to calling her "Dee" when he's around her, "and I don't want to just spring it on her the wrong way."

"I know, I just... I don't want to frak this up. Period. I’ll admit it. I'm scared, alright?."

supple

His hand traces supple skin that's stretched taut over her growing belly. She's asleep for once, and he has the unique opportunity to look at her without her realizing what he's doing. He knows she's upset about this, and that it's the last thing she's wanted. He knows she resents the hell out of having to carry the child to term, and that she keeps insisting that once it's born she wants nothing to do with it.

He's hoping she'll change her mind. Cottle has already confided in him that she'll likely have to take care of the baby the first few weeks regardless, because they're almost out of formula and can't afford to spare any if there's any other way to nourish the child. Wet nurses are a possibility, but it'll take time to try and track one down, and they won't be able to even get started until after the baby's born and they know for sure the blood type and RH factor. He hasn't mentioned any of this to Kara yet because he's hoping against hope that when she sees their son she'll forget about wanting to give him up.

It would be so much easier to let her do this her way. Ana's finally passed being pissed and is starting to prepare surreptitiously for the child, she's excited because she knows she can't have one of her own. It should work out better if they could just take the child, raise it as theirs, and he could just cut Kara out of his life.

But it's not what he wants he's realized. What he wants is to raise their son or daughter together, himself and Kara, to make a real family rather than the make believe house he's tried to create with his wife. He doesn't think he can go on pretending that it's where he wants to be for much longer, not when he's so close and so far away from another more perfect future right here, lying in his arms in this one small slice of time out of time.