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lady_bug_kayTitle: like never, and like always (Karl and Kara; friends) Part 2/7
Author: ladybugkay
Fandom: BSG
Characters/Pairings: Kara, Karl, Kara/Zak, Kara/Lee
Summary: Everything around them has changed, but it's still easy and relaxed and familiar between them, and Karl follows Kara's lead, like always. Karl’s POV of his friendship with Kara from the time they first meet.
Disclaimer: Not mine! Not mine! This is just for fun and because I like to make the characters do things Ron won’t let them do.
A/N: Title from a sonnet by Pablo Neruda. And no, there won’t be anything romantic or sexual between Karl and Kara.
The next time Karl sees Kara, she’s nineteen and they’re in a lecture hall at the Academy. She’s not so skinny, anymore, but her blonde hair is still the lightest he’s ever seen and it’s still in a messy ponytail. He’s so happy to see her he completely ignores the rest of the lecture, impatiently waiting for it to be over so he can say hello.
As the other students pour out of the hall, Karl threads his way through the crowd until he’s right behind her. He throws his arms around Kara’s waist, trapping her hands against her thighs, and lifts her off the ground into a spinning bear hug. She’s cursing at the top of her lungs and everyone is staring when he finally puts her down, blocking her right hook instinctively when she whirls around and lets it fly.
He can’t help laughing at the expression on her face when she recognizes him.
“Asshole!” And she jumps on him, her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. The gawking people around them are backing away slowly, expressing obvious doubts about their sanity.
“Frak, Karl! What are you doing here? Lords, it’s good to see you.”
And she’s smiling when he sets her down, and she looks thirteen again because her split lip is bleeding and he can see a faint bruise on her jaw. But she’s here, now, not home, and the marks must be ones she asked for or at least fought for, so maybe it’s okay. And Karl’s here, now, so someone will have Kara’s back.
They head off-campus to a nearby café for lunch, and they talk about classes and dorm-mates and professors, now. Kara had never answered his letters, and when he’d tried to call, he’d been told the number was no longer in service, so he’d figured she’d moved, too, eventually. When he asks, she says casually that she left home shortly before her eighteenth birthday, and Karl learns that she applied to the Academy instead of accepting the offer to join the Caprican Buccaneers, because of a frakked-up knee.
She doesn’t say how the injury occurred, and Karl very carefully does not ask. He doesn’t think he wants to know.
Karl mentions Raptor training, and the outraged look on her face tells him Kara’s going for Vipers, and he feels that familiar lack of surprise. Of course she’ll be a Viper jockey, if she can stop brawling long enough to stay out of hack.
“I’ve been sent to the brig three times, already,” she announces proudly. “Apparently, it’s some kind of record. I’ve asked if they could look into making a plaque.”
“Frak, Kara. You might want to take it easy. They won’t hesitate to throw you out, you know.”
She spares him a withering glance.
“As long as it doesn’t interfere with my classes and I don’t hit any superior officers, they can’t do anything to me. And you’ll keep me out of the hospital, right, Karl?” She actually attempts to flutter her eyelashes, and he pushes her face away with the palm of his hand.
“Yeah, I’ll patch you up. It’s what I do.”
“Well, of course it is. Now, come on, asshole,” Kara tugs at his arm, “I’ve got a lab to attend, and you’re about two seconds away from being devoured by that trashy redhead in the corner. Let’s get out of here before I lose my personal physician to skanky sex in an alley.”
Everything around them has changed, but it’s still easy and relaxed and familiar between them, and Karl follows Kara’s lead, like always.
He keeps up.
They go their separate ways once they reach the campus, again, but Kara doesn’t let him walk away until they have solid plans to meet up that night at a notorious bar six blocks away. Karl heads off to meet up with a friend before his next class and realizes that the last four years feel suddenly like a half-forgotten story someone once told him. Kara has a way of making the present just a little more present.
* * *
That night, he is barely through the front door of the bar when Karl hears Kara. She’s laughing, loud and raucous and just a little bit obnoxious, and he’s smiling just from hearing it. When she’s really laughing, there is no one who can resist Kara Thrace; the sound is irresistibly infectious, in no small part because of how unrestrained and sincere it is. Because he knows exactly how difficult it is to get Kara to laugh just like that, in absolute and un-edged happiness, listening to that laugh is one of Karl’s favourite things, and it’s been too long since he’s indulged.
He can see her standing at the bar, and when she turns her head and catches his eye, she grins broadly and waves a drink at him, motioning him toward a crowded table in the corner.
Karl is in the midst of a discussion with one of the table’s more garrulous occupants, about a mutual lecturer’s unfortunate tendency to spit while talking, when he finds himself, abruptly, with a lap full of Kara. Before he can say anything, she’s holding a drink to his lips and tilting the glass, and the next thing he knows, he’s chugging ambrosia like it is Kara’s mission in life to see him passed out on the floor of the bar.
When Kara takes the empty glass from his lips and Karl doesn’t bring anything immediately back up, she claps him enthusiastically on the arm and rewards him with a smacking kiss that lands somewhere between his jaw and his cheekbone.
“I knew you had it in you, Karl. There are distinct advantages to being such a big boy,” she announces grandly to the others at the table, shoving another glass into Karl’s hands. “And you certainly didn’t stop growing, did you, asshole? What are you, nine feet tall?”
“Yeah, well. You weren’t around to beat me up and stunt my growth. What else was I supposed to do?”
Kara’s still sitting in his lap, her arm around his neck, and she shows no inclination or intention to move any time soon. Part of Karl’s mind is noting the significant glances going around the table, telling him exactly what the rumour mill will make of the two of them, and he just knows his sex life will suffer because of tonight, but he can’t make Kara move.
They both know there’s nothing remotely sexual going on between them, but he’s missed her even more than he thought he had, and it’s clear the feeling is mutual. So Kara stays in Karl’s lap the whole night as they drink and catch up and tell anyone willing to listen about old pyramid plays they’d made together and just how many times he’s backed her up in a fight. And before they know it, it is last call and the lights are coming on and Karl’s agreeing to crash in Kara’s room because hers is closer.
He feels fifteen again.
* * *
Karl’s intuition is correct. After that night in the bar, it takes four months before he can get a date; Kara’s right hook is legendary, and Karl is widely considered to be her property. It doesn’t bother him. Most of his time outside of class is spent with Kara, anyway. They drink, play triad now instead of pyramid in deference to her knee, talk all through the night sometimes, and get in far too many fights—Karl is always ready to join in and help Kara, but he is never the one to instigate a confrontation.
Kara still prefers knocking down the assholes and bullies, and her instincts are nearly always accurate. More than one of the newest students is absolutely devoted to her for rescuing them in one way or another, and Karl takes endless delight in teasing her about her growing entourage of worshippers, calling her Artemis behind her back and occasionally to her face. When she finally gets her call sign—not that anyone knows what it means, even the instructor who bestows it—Karl is vaguely disappointed his choice didn’t stick.
But ‘Starbuck’ suits Kara, too, and eventually Karl gives up calling her Artemis. It isn’t long before he’s the only one who still calls her Kara; ‘Starbuck’ catches on so well no one even knows to whom he’s referring when he calls her by her name, so he saves it for when they’re alone. In fact, ‘Starbuck’ becomes so familiar and well-known a personality on campus and in off-campus Academy hangouts that Karl wonders if anyone even knows ‘Kara’ exists.
And every time the holidays roll around, Karl takes Kara home with him. His mother puts clean sheets on the couch that’s absurdly too short for Karl, and Kara sleeps in his bed. She’s always quiet, almost reserved, the whole time she’s there, and Karl changes the subject quickly whenever the conversation starts to turn toward her family.
As far as he knows, she hasn’t spoken to her mother since she left home.
* * *
The first time some guy cheats on Kara and Karl finds her curled up on his bed is the first time Karl starts a fight and the first one he fights alone. The news covers the entire campus by noon the next day, but no one knows why he did it, and neither Karl nor Kara—and certainly not the student who shows up in class with a broken nose and two vivid black eyes—volunteers any information. Kara never says thank you, but when they go out the next night, she buys Karl an enormous slice of chocolate cake and lets him win at darts, and when he gets back to his room he finds two bags of lollipops on his bed with all the green ones missing because he thinks they taste like dirty socks.
Kara manages to avoid any major incidents for the next few months until his roommate wakes Karl up the morning after he breaks up with his girlfriend to tell him Kara is in hack. She’s tight-lipped about the whole thing when he bails her out, and it isn’t until classes start again after break that he finds out why she’d been arrested. She’d vandalized his ex-girlfriend’s car and beaten the crap out of the guy who’d slept with her.
The image of a girl so much smaller than he is defending his honour so savagely makes Karl smile and love Kara just that much more and his mind files it alongside the memory of a barely teenaged girl smiling through blood. It doesn’t surprise Karl when he learns that word has gotten around that anyone who screws with Karl will face the wrath of Starbuck. His dating prospects get a lot fewer at the same time as they get a lot more promising. He supposes he should thank Kara for thinning the herd.
* * *
At Karl’s graduation, Kara persuades a cadre of Viper pilots to streak across the stage shouting “Raptors suck!” and he laughs until he thinks he might be sick or wet his dress uniform. And when he receives his wings, he can hear her whooping and screaming, and it’s embarrassing as all hell, but he can barely keep himself from laughing right in the face of the Major in front of him. After the ceremony, he tosses her over his shoulder and jogs toward the fountain, threatening to throw her in while she shrieks and smacks his ass with her fists. He’s going to miss her so much.
* * *
Karl’s first assignment is to the Battlestar Galactica, under Commander Adama, and it’s here he meets
It seems Kara’s found someone new to watch her back in bar brawls, be a partner in pranks, and bail her out of hack on occasion, although from the number of times ‘repressed bastard’ and ‘anal frakker’ appear in conjunction with Lee’s name, Karl can’t quite get a handle on what the guy is like. While Karl is glad she’s not on her own, he’d be worried Kara’s replaced him with a new best friend if not for the fact that he knows he’s still the only one she’ll let see her vulnerable. He’s known her too long and too well to be thrown over for anyone; he also knows too many of her secrets, even if she has a thousand more he’ll never know.
Kara never writes anything to suggest she and Lee are dating or even that she’s interested, but his name keeps appearing in every letter, with increasing frequency, and far more often and with greater regularity than anyone else’s. It’s also clear Kara respects him, which is unusual in itself, and Karl grows accustomed to reading the words “Lee and I” at least twice in every letter Kara sends him.
The first forty-eight hour leave Karl gets, he heads back to the Academy to surprise Kara. As he waits for her to show up at her favourite bar, he overhears several different conversations recounting various infamous exploits of Starbuck and Apollo, and he (correctly) assumes Apollo to be Lee’s call sign. From the way the girl at the next table sighs blissfully over a detailed and loving description of Apollo’s biceps, he thinks he understands how the moniker came into being.
Then there is a piercing shriek overriding the habitual noise of the crowd, and Karl turns his head to see Starbuck laughing and racing toward him. She hugs him so tightly he makes a thoroughly undignified squeak he later refuses to admit to, and his ears go red when she laughs so hard she chokes. He asks about Apollo—and it turns out she’s responsible for the call sign because she called Lee that in front of a huge crowd of people before she ever met him or knew his name—and she tells him Lee went home to visit his brother for the weekend.
“So, I’m all yours, Helo.”
“That’s as it should be.”
“How long have I got you for?”
Karl slings an arm around her. “Forty-eight hours. Aren’t you the lucky little cadet?”
“Fantastic. You can start by buying me a drink.”
At some point during their conversation, after they’ve made it back to her room and are curled up on her bed, still talking and munching on pretzels they stole from her roommate’s desk drawer, she lets slip Lee’s last name.
“Commander Adama’s son?”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t like to draw attention to it.”
“Kara. You’re getting into bar fights with my commander’s son?”
“Well, actually, Lee prefers to avoid hitting people if he can help it. Not that he doesn’t enjoy it or won’t join in, but he doesn’t go out looking to get into anything.”
“Kara.”
She gives him a dirty look. “We’re friends. He’s a good guy, even if he does ride my ass, sometimes. And he flies better than anyone else here except me. You’d like him, Karl.”
“He taking care of you?”
“I don’t need a babysitter, asshole!” And Karl knows that look and that tone of voice; Kara’s pissed and ready to throw punches.
“I mean, does he have your back?”
The tension in her body relaxes a notch. “Yeah. He’s around when I need him. And I’ve got him covered, too.”
“Of that, I have no doubt,” he laughs.
“Shut the frak up,” her roommate yells suddenly from underneath her blankets. “Some of us would like to get some sleep before dawn!”
Kara throws her pillow with deadly accuracy and elicits another outraged shout from her roommate.
Karl staggers upright and heads for the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Kara.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Karl. You’re staying here.” Kara grabs his wrist and yanks him back down onto the bed. When he starts to protest, she claps her hand over his mouth and warns him not to steal the covers. She curls into Karl’s side and falls asleep before he can say anything else, so he gives up and relaxes against her. It’s good to see her.
Continued in Part Three
