[AO3 Crosspost] Oily Night

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Battlestar Galactica
SERIES: -
RATING: Teen & Up
WORDCOUNT: 500
PAIRING(S): Kara/Sam/Lee/Dee
CHARACTER(S): Dee Dualla, Kara Thrace, Sam Anders, Lee Adama
GENRE: Snapshot
TRIGGER WARNING(S): -
SUMMARY: Kara isn’t quite the same when she paints.


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“How did you even manage to get paint though?” Dee wonders as she watches Kara press dots of black into the wall of her bunk, “I thought the Demetrius stocks were off limits?”

“They are,” Sam says, “she’s just messing with dirt and engine grease.”

Dee vaguely hears Lee mutter something about Kara and dirt, but it sounds like an old joke and Dee decided long ago not to worry too much about the parts of their history she wasn’t privy to. This thing between the four of them—this incredibly unexpected and marvelous thing—is fragile enough as it is, there’s no need for any of them to go pry at their history.

She’d rather focus on the present.

“How does it hold though—it’s not just the grease, is it?”

“There’s glue in it.”

Dee stares at Lee in disbelief, but he’s slumping against Sam’s shoulder and making his ‘I swear I’m not making this up’ face—the one he usually keeps for Kara’s wildest antics—and Dee finds herself blinking to assimilate the knowledge. The things this woman comes up with will never stop surprising her.

Mostly though, she’s surprised she hasn’t heard a word from Kara herself in over half an hour—anyone would be, really, if they’d known her for ten minutes. It’s not that Kara is a chatterbox per se, she just…well, she likes to make sure people know she’s here.

Dee watches Kara’s fingers tap against the wall in increasingly regular touches, almost like a machine, and before she even realizes it the skyline of Arrowhead—the Sagittaron capitol—blinks at her from over her bunk in various shades of grime, and she stares.

“That's—”

Several words come to mind, none of them feeling quite appropriate for the bizarre thought of something so delicate made by Kara Thrace of all people—they may not have spoken much before, but even that was more than enough for Dee to have trouble reconciling the two notions. In the end, what she says is:

“I’m not sure if it’s beautiful or gross.”

She gasps when Kara smears some of her oily mixture across her face, bursting in laughter at Dee’s reaction:

“You’re gross,” she exclaims, a child getting her revenge, and while Lee has the good grace to disguise his laughter as coughing, Sam doesn’t even try to mask his guffaw.

Dee glares at the three of them—grunts about her uniform needing yet another washing and honestly, don’t they think the stupid things are tattered enough already?—but to be honest her annoyance starts to ebb the moment Kara promises to make it up to her.

(It vanishes entirely less than five minutes later, when Sam’s boots get tossed in the corridor and the door locked while Kara drags her pants down. Starbuck is still an infuriating little shit, but at least now Dee can enjoy the perks of it and, really, at this point she doesn’t event want to ask for more.)