Word Count: 5,677
Date:11/22/05
Series: One
Rating:T
Category: Relationships
Pairing/Focus: Cally, Lee
Warnings:
Summary:
Spoilers/Disclaimers:
Chapter 1
Her head was going to explode. That was all there was to it. Despite catching up on a few hours sleep, and finally slowing down enough to catch her breath, Cally still couldn’t shake the persistent, plaguing headache that had been following her around since somewhere around the fifteenth hyper-light jump. She had always hated the frakking things – the sickening sensation of being pulled and pushed in all directions at once – but somewhere in the multiple jumps she had managed to tolerate them. Now she almost wished that the stupid things had pulled her completely apart, because if her head were disconnected from the rest of her, it just might not hurt quite so damned much.
She’d already been to see Doctor Salik, and she had given her a mild pain reliever that hadn’t touched the pain. It was all that the physician could manage without her supervisor’s approval, and Doctor Connell wasn’t nearly as accommodating as Doctor Salik. Crusty, rude, and smelling of foul cigar smoke, the eldest physician was supposed to be long retired. He had only remained with the Galactica because he refused to pass her on to the competent – but female – physician who had relieved him. The result was that Cally’s headache wouldn’t be going anywhere in the near future. It didn’t matter though; they were all hurting, either inside, outside, or otherwise.
In all though, the young Specialist thought that they were doing better than could probably be expected given the circumstances. In the last two weeks, they had lost their world, bounced all over their solar system and many others with little or no sleep, lost and searched for water, lost and searched for the fleet’s foremost hero, and now they were stuck sitting like ducks waiting for a hunter while prisoners processed water for the fleet’s very survival. Oh yes, it had been a fun-filled couple of weeks; weeks she would love to forget.
But she wasn’t forgetting much of anything with the persistent throb behind her eyes. Her attention was almost unnaturally acute, each sound boring into her mind with painful clarity. Her vision was the same, with every light glaring and each shift in motion making her want to moan at the vertigo it caused. It was hard enough managing her job – a conglomeration of hammering, adjusting, wrestling, and lifting various parts of various planes – without having the entire bay shifting haphazardly around her. Lords, she hurt.
But whining wasn’t going to get the job done. In order to finish what she had planned, she was going to need to keep her head as clear as possible. This was a hard enough task to manage with the dull thud of Socinus’ rubber hammer attempting to take out the miscellaneous dents along the fuselage of the Viper they were repairing. It wasn’t noise exactly, but she was touching the bird as well, and the vibration seemed to travel up her arm and join with the shattering pain in her head to make the bay sway dizzily around them.
“Can you ease up on that,” she requested in a faint voice, just one side of whining. She hated how she sounded, but she couldn’t help it. Even her own voice caused her pain.
“Has to get done,” he countered, pounding a few more times on the firm metal Viper. “If we don’t get these squared away, Tyrol’s gonna shit a brick.”
Cally knew that her friend was right, but that didn’t ease her frustration – or her pain. “Can you do it a little more softly?” she requested.
It wasn’t until then that Soc turned sideways to flash his brown eyes at her. They widened slightly, as though he was just now realizing that something was amiss with her. “You okay, Cal?”
She shook her head, then grabbed at the wing of the Viper to maintain her balance on the ladder. “Headache,” she muttered, hoping he had missed the wobble. The last thing she needed was to get pulled off duty and accused of not pulling her weight. She’d already spent nearly a week on light duty following the whole Astral Queen incident and the surgery that had followed. She was healed now – mostly – and she had a job to do. As much as she would prefer to be lying down in her rack, she couldn’t let the rest of her team carry her weight. There were too few of them as it was.
With no more explanation than the single word, Cally went back to trying to tighten a nut that had been cross-threaded. Realizing belatedly why the damned thing wasn’t moving, she flipped the switch on her ratchet, used as much strength as she could to loosen the nut, and then groaned as she realized that the bolt itself had been ruined. They were short on spare parts, and wasting even one small bolt – however insignificant it seemed in the grand scheme of things – was unforgivable. But what was done was done. She shucked the bolt into her toolbox for later deposit in the melting bins, and then dug another out of her work vest. She had to get this frakking thing done, or she would never get off shift.
With one arm braced against the wing for continued support, her elbow keeping her steady while her hand was free to negotiate the tools, she managed to get the last couple of bolts in place without any further waste. That done, she checked her work the old fashioned way – by leaning on the repair and making sure that it held her weight. Later there would be stress tests, atmospheric confirmation, and a final check by the Chief. For now, this would do.
Gratefully, Soc had gotten his dents out and was moving off towards the next Viper in the long line in which they were completing repairs. They had forty of the damned things left, and she was grateful, but it was still a lot to do with half of their deck crews decimated and most of the Vipers in horrible shape following a couple hundred combat landings.
Cally moved to take a step down on the ladder and didn’t even notice when the dizziness seemed to overwhelm her. She shook her head, thinking that if she could just clear it then she would feel so much better, but the motion made the vertigo even more intense. It never occurred to her to call out, because even if anyone had really been in range, a show of weakness around her co-workers would have been a laughing matter for months to come. Cally had learned early on – one of her first lessons from the All Powerful Starbuck – that the best way to get along with the guys was to become one of them. As a rule, the men didn’t cry out for help when they got a little queasy… or downright nauseous.
But Cally’s thoughts didn’t get any further than that. With the ominous feeling of falling into a dark tunnel, she watched as every light in the bright landing bay faded. Momentarily, she was grateful that someone had dimmed the lights that had been causing her such discomfort, even as she was annoyed at the persistent buzzing in her ears, which was increasing the pain in her head to an intolerable level. Before she could react – or think – or anything, Cally lost all touch with reality. She never heard Socinus calling out her name, running back, or screaming for a medic.
Chapter 2
Lee heard the scream for a medic and took off at a dead run. While he wasn’t in charge of the entire bay – was actually only responsible for the pilots and general communication with the Flight Crews – leadership habits weren’t something that a man could turn off. He rounded a row of Vipers that were in various stages of repair, and for just a moment his heart ground to a halt. There was a girl on the floor – although he couldn’t see who – and the man above her looked frantic.
Visions of falling equipment and dreadful illness passed through his mind as he approached the scene and forced himself to slow down. He recognized the girl – woman – on the deck, and even remembered her name. Cally, he recalled. She was one tough kid, and she had a lot of spunk. He also knew that she’d been very recently injured, and had only been back on regular duty for two days, at least according to the rosters. What in the hell was she doing horizontal on the deck?
“Report,” he commanded as he knelt next to the Specialist who was patting her hand and looking absolutely stricken.
“She just… fell,” he said in a stammering voice. “She said she had a headache, but…”
“Cally?” This voice was the Chief’s, and he didn’t look all that much better than the young Specialist.
“What’s her duty status?” Lee inquired of Tyrol.
“Full duty,” he replied, placing a hand on Cally’s free wrist and checking for a pulse.
Lee absently thought that he should have done the same thing instead of kneeling there uselessly, but he’d been too stunned. This was the kid who had been tough enough to fight off an attacker twice her weight and regardless of being shot in the process. She had been the scrapper who held on without medical attention until they could get her back to the Galactica because the medics hadn’t been prepared for something as serious as a gunshot wound. She had been the girl with the pretty, wide brown eyes and ready smile. She sure as hell wasn’t smiling now, and why the frak he was feeling responsible was anyone’s guess.
His thoughts were interrupted by the rapid arrival of the medical team, who were far more competent than the group which had serviced the Astral Queen. Before Lee knew what was happening, they had an IV in place, had strapped her to a mobile table, and were headed for the stairway at a jog. Lee looked around the bay quickly for someone to cover him and spotted Kara standing beneath the wing of her own Viper, scrutinizing the work which had been done on it even as she rested part of her weight on the cane and the rest on her good leg. He gave a quick wave, received an acknowledging thumbs-up, and then he followed the team up the stairs. They were nearly out of sight, but it didn’t bother him. He knew very well where the medical station was; he’d been there more times than he cared to count.
His arrival might have raised a few eyebrows in the Sick Bay, but little more than that. He’d spent enough time visiting injured and ill pilots that his presence wasn’t unusual, nor precisely out of line. Still, he knew in his own mind that he didn’t strictly need to be there for a deck-hand to be checked. On the other hand, she’d been on one of his recent missions, she’d been injured while he’d been responsible, and he felt more than a little obligation to ensure that she was well cared for.
“Can I help you?”
The voice came from a kid who couldn’t have been any older than the one they’d just carried in here, but Lee wasn’t above using what he had to get what he wanted. Hadn’t he been the one to charm Zak and himself out of more scrapes growing up than either of them could count? Hell, he hadn’t even had the rank behind him to manage it back then, and now he was Galactica’s lead pilot, advisor to the president… and worried about one of his troops. He had just geared up to flash a dimple and the Academy-famous smile that had kept him out of the brig more than once when he caught something in the med tech’s eye. Idle flattery wasn’t going to get him anywhere with this one, he realized. Reading people was something he was damned good at, and this lady wasn’t going to respond to a little charm and a lot of rank. It wasn’t going to happen.
“One of your teams just brought in a troop from the flight deck,” he told her with honesty. “Nothing’s going to get done on the deck until I have a report on her condition, so I figured that I’d better come to the source.” It wasn’t all of the truth, but close enough that she shouldn’t be able to argue it.
Her head cocked sideways, blond curls falling just one side of regulation and yet no further. He had a feeling that if he were to pull out a ruler, those winding strands would obligingly hold exactly at the maximum length allowable by regulation. She just seemed to be that type of person; she would go so far, but no further. She could read through any subterfuge, so he didn’t bother with any.
“Crewman Cally?” the tech asked. Wait, was she a tech? Given the white uniforms with their minimal insignia, it was damned hard to be sure. Were those stripes or bars, brushed silver against white?
“Yes, Sir,” he said, just in case. No reason to offend anyone.
She looked at him for a long moment, and for a change the slight, flattering smile wasn’t his. She wasn’t overtly flirtatious, but neither did he think this was the usual treatment. “Over there,” she told him with a gesture towards a closed curtain, which held more voices than he could distinguish. “From what I saw she isn’t conscious yet. Did you see what happened? Webb and Beauchamp are new, so they didn’t think to ask the usual questions.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “One of the other crewman said that she just passed out.”
“Has she been eating?” the woman asked, reaching to grab a clipboard and begin making notes.
“No idea,” he admitted. As she had turned, he had seen that the silver was indeed surrounding stripes; she was a tech after all.
“Any injuries recently?”
“Yes,” he answered. This one he knew. “She was… attacked on a mission. After a couple days here, she’s been on light duty for a week. She had a gut-shot, and surgery following that. Doctor Connell said everything went well, and she hadn’t been complaining.”
The tech nodded briskly. “Anything else you can give us to save us looking up her records? Blood type, allergies, date of birth?”
Lee just shook his head, reminded once more just how little he actually knew about his new charges.
“Doctor Salik is on duty, so I’ll relay this to her. We’ll check for bleeding from surgical sites and stuff like that. You can wait if you want, but it’s going to be a while.” The tech finally graced him with a gentle smile, even as she turned away and walked towards the closed curtains.
Lee stood there undecided for a long moment. He wasn’t needed here. Hell, even the Chief and her friend – the other crewman who she hung out with – were still on the deck. There was nothing he could do for her. Besides, he’d left Kara to run the place on her own, and while he had complete confidence in her abilities, she’d already finished one shift and was due to get off in less than an hour. Sixteen hours was enough for anyone to work. It was settled, he decided. There was absolutely no reason for him to hang around.
So he took a seat in a chair that was essentially out of the way, but where he could keep one eye on the curtain, and he waited to find out what the frak had gone wrong.
Chapter 3
Cally awoke to the metallic taste of blood in her mouth and a blessed reduction in the pain she’d been fighting. Despite the fact that the pain was less, it was still enough to drag a moan from her, and cause her to squeeze her eyes shut against the Med Station lights.
“Look who’s awake.”
Cally turned her head cautiously to see Captain Adama sitting in a chair just to the side of her bed. It was a bed, she realized, rather than a gurney or other temporary cot. What had gone wrong to warrant this? She tried to remember back to the last thing that had happened, but everything was amazingly fuzzy. She remembered pain, feeling dizzy, and… nothing. “What happened?” she asked, her desire to know overriding her recognition of a senior officer.
“We’re not entirely sure about that,” he admitted. “But at the moment the general consensus is that you took a little too much pain medication and not enough food to go with it. One of the crewman said you were feeling a bit queasy before you passed out?”
She shook her head, but gently. “More dizzy than sick,” she corrected. “I couldn’t get rid of a buzzing in my ears, and the lights seemed too bright. I’ve had a headache for a while, so I figured…”
“That it was all part and parcel,” he concluded.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Maybe it is and maybe not,” he admonished gently. “But unless we know what’s going on, we can’t treat you adequately. Without treatment, you get sicker. We can’t afford to lose any more crewman, especially ones as good as you.”
Cally’s head popped up at that last comment, eyes which had diverted to tolerate her scolding now locking onto her commanding officer’s blue gaze. “You think I’m good?” she asked.
“I think you’re better than good,” he told her in a matter of fact tone. “You can diagnose a Viper and have it repaired faster than any two other crewmen, and you never complain about being short handed or not having what you need. You just do it. And when things got dicey on the Astral Queen, you weren’t laying there screaming like a… ninny.” He blushed at the last words.
“Yeah, well, blushing wasn’t going to get it done,” she muttered at the memory.
“Exactly. You did what you needed to do. I know that Tyrol turns to you a lot, and that alone tells me that he thinks you’re beyond competent because he treats those Vipers better than most people treat their children.”
She gave a shrug. “I have little hands,” she told him.
“Little hands?”
She held up the hands in question, only now noticing the IV that was attached to one of them. “The Chief says that repairs are easier for me because my hands are little. I can slip into places that the guys can’t reach, get tools in where they shouldn’t fit… that kind of thing.”
Lee shook his head. “Maybe that’s part of it,” he said. “But you know what to do with the tools, and with your hands for that matter.
Cally had no clue what to do with the complement, so she decided to let it slide. She was in enough confusion over having her boss show up and check on how she was doing after she’d been so silly as to pass out on duty. “Did they ever decide what’s wrong with me?” she asked, returning to the subject he’d neatly deflected her from.
“Not yet,” he admitted, reaching forward to take a hand in his, much in the same way as he’d done on the Astral Queen when she’d been hurting and the wait for help had been interminable. “But Doctor Salik has checked the big stuff,” Lee told her. “There’s no internal bleeding from the shot, and your blood levels aren’t dangerously high or low for anything, so chances are this is something that will pass.
“Doctor Connell isn’t here?” she asked timidly.
Lee laughed at that. “Thankfully, no. Doctor Salik has the station while Connell is making fleet rounds.
“Good,” Cally said with the first genuine smile she’d had since her head had begun to throb days before. “She doesn’t yell nearly as loud.”
“Don’t count on that,” the physician in question said as she stepped into the room while looking at the readout on her clipboard. “Let’s see… Lytes are okay, CBC is normal, no problems with LFTs. Hell, even your blood sugar is within normal limits. I’m missing a piece to this particular puzzle.”
“A piece like what?”
“Like when did this start – exactly. Was it when you were in the hospital, on light duty, or once you were back on the job?”
Cally thought about it. “The last couple days of light duty, I guess. I was still feeling lousy, and you can only take the level three medications for a week, so I came in to get some level twos. They didn’t work as well, and I started getting a headache. It just seemed to get worse instead of better.”
“What did I give you?” the doctor asked, and then looked up in apology. “I remember seeing you, but I’ve seen about two hundred crewman since then. I don’t remember what we selected, and your file is buried somewhere on my desk – or Connell’s desk – or wherever.”
“Dyasipithe,” Cally said. “You said it was as good as the other one, but without the chance of addiction.”
“It usually is,” Salik muttered as she typed the information into the clipboard. “Do you have any allergies to medications?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t do well with most level threes, though. They make me sick – throwing up, sick – and dizzy. That was the other reason I needed to come off them after being on light duty a while.”
Kylen Salik gave a soft smile. “How do you feel now?” she asked.
Cally considered. “Better, actually. The light is bright, but not so bad, and I can hear without my head pounding.”
“I can’t be sure,” the doctor said, making another note, “But it sounds like the medication just didn’t agree with you. I’m going to cut you back to a level one – a simple analgesic, and we’ll see how you do. You’ll be here for twenty-four hours, and if you’re doing well we can take out the IV and get you out of here. If you’re not – or if you get worse between here and there – we’ll reevaluate the situation.
“The Chief is gonna kill me,” Cally muttered.
“Not likely,” Lee said, reminding her that he’d been there for the entire conversation. “He’ll be relieved that it may be this simple.”
“So, we just use a different medicine?” Cally asked incredulously.
The doctor smiled. “Sometimes medicine is as simple as finding what you’re doing wrong, and stopping. What exactly was hurting that we had you on the Dyasipithe?”
“My stomach. Doctor Connell did surgery to take out the bullet, and he was able to regenerate most of the tissue, but…”
“But it took them a while to get you back here, and the nerve damage was already done,” Salik concluded for her. “Understandable. On a scale of one to ten – now – how badly are you hurting? Not your head, and not your body, but just your stomach.”
Cally had to think about it for a moment. The throb in her head had been so much worse than the pain in her gut for so long that she’d nearly blocked the latter out. “Maybe… two or three,” she admitted. “My head is way worse.”
Kylen Salik smiled. “Good,” she concluded. “I’m going to order some more fluids to get the narcotic flushed out of your system, and start you on a very mild analgesic, and I’ll bet within two hours you’re back to normal. Every symptom you’ve had – the photophobia, the ringing in your ears, and the vertigo – all of them are side effects of narcotic medications. Some people just can’t take them. I’ll bet you can’t drink ambrosia either.”
Cally blushed at that comment and hoped the Captain wasn’t listening too closely because her answer made her sound like a ten year old. “I don’t even try,” she admitted. “The couple times I did, I was so sick the next day that I wanted to die.”
Doctor Salik nodded, adjusted the fluid level to Cally’s IV, and said a quick goodbye before leaving. While Cally was grateful to have the doctor elsewhere, she wasn’t entirely certain about having Captain Adama right there without anyone as a buffer. The Captain was nice, and sweet, and he had the most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen. If she were acting in true “Cally” fashion, she’d most likely make an idiot of herself.
“Well, now that we know it isn’t serious, I’d like to get back to the deck and let everyone know you’re okay. Is there anyone special you want me to notify?”
Relief and disappointment warred within her as the Captain stood to go. No, she didn’t want him here, but his presence was indeed comforting. “Crewman Socinus,” she said softly. “He’s over in hangar three. He’ll worry.”
The Captain nodded, but didn’t comment. Instead, he reached down to brush long tendrils of hair away from her face, which had escaped her ponytail, and give her a soft but genuine smile. “Feel better, Cally,” he said gently. And with that, he was gone.
Cally lay there for a long time with only one thought in her mind.
He knew her name.
Chapter 4
Kara Thrace was just settling in to the thought that she wasn’t going to have much choice about tackling paperwork without a nap when she saw Lee half-walked, half-slide down the nearest stairwell. She breathed an inward sigh of relief because her knee was really killing her, and getting herself horizontal was the only way she knew for sure that would relieve the discomfort.
“Took you long enough,” she told him with a feigned disgust as she tossed her clipboard in his direction. “I figured you were just going to take the night off and let the real pilots do the work.”
“Ha, ha,” he muttered, taking the board from her and not taking offense. It was good to see at least a touch of her old friend back.
“So, how is she?” Kara inquired.
“She?”
With a very distinctive eye-roll, Kara stepped closer to take the clipboard back, pop him soundly on the top of the head with it, and then hand it back to him. “She,” Kara repeated with careful enunciation. “As in Cally; As in the kid you followed out of here at FTL speed… How’s she doing? Soc said she passed out with no warning. Any news?”
He seemed to give a sigh of relief, although for the life of her Kara couldn’t figure out why. “She’s better. They got some fluids in her and decided that it might have been an allergy or something to the pain pills she was taking. If she keeps doing well, they’ll let her out tomorrow.”
“Good,” Kara told him with a satisfied nod. Cally was one of the good ones. While Kara had always been able to relate to the enlisted workers on the Galactica – having spent a few years as one herself prior to OCS – there were some who just had more natural talent than others. Cally was the Chief’s mini-protégé. She was good at her job in the classic sense of knowing what to do and where, and she was willing to battle the endless paperwork that complimented the “if it wasn’t documented, it wasn’t done” philosophy that Tyrol employed, but more than that she was just damned good. She knew her job, was willing to do it, and had the instinct to go with that kind of spunk.
As Kara watched Lee wander off to take care of something on the board – she wasn’t sure what, as there were a couple of tasks that needed to be accomplished but required two good legs to manage them – she mused that the younger woman was a pretty girl, but like Kara had always been, Cally was one of the guys. She knew when to draw the lines and keep herself within limits. She wasn’t the party girl, and she didn’t sleep around despite more than a few offers, and somewhere between that skill and her restraint, she’d managed to pick up quite a few admirers – some of her skill, and some just of her. Each and every one was treated equally, a task that Kara knew wasn’t easy. But Cally played the “little sister” with skill, maintaining an air of innocence without ever seeming silly. She was a good kid.
If she were honest with herself, Kara had been glad to see Lee take off after the med-crew when they’d hauled the specialist out of there. Lee had a tendency to stick his nose in a book and not look beyond it. Apparently, he’d grown up in the last couple of years. Yes, he was still the pilot that could finish her sentences and coax a smile when she felt like crap, but he was also starting to understand others, and that was quite a step for him.
“Starbuck, how’re we coming on the line?” the Chief asked as he walked up behind her. The words startled her out of her thoughts and caused her to turn towards him. Her knee gave a painful protest, her hand gripped the cane more tightly, and the words that passed her lips were definitely more at home here on the deck than they would be in weekly mass.
“That bad?” Tyrol asked her with one eyebrow raised.
“Frak,” she muttered again, as the stars seemed to begin to recede from her vision. “No, they’re fine. Four to Seven are clear, and just waiting for your once-over. You’ll have to check the board for status on the rest. Captain Apollo got back a few minutes ago.”
“He did,” the Chief said quickly. “Did he say…?”
Kara cut him off before he could even ask. “She’s doing fine. Slacking again, for all intents and purposes. I guess the pills they gave her didn’t agree with her. She’ll be with them overnight, and then you can check with the doc in the morning about duty status. Other than that, Apollo has the deck.” She watched as clear relief came into the man’s eyes. Cally was one of his favorites – not that he had any favorites – and she knew that he worried. They were all a little protective of her after what she’d endured on the Astral Queen. “So… I’m out of here,” she concluded and headed for the stairway.
“Sleep well, Starbuck.”
She nodded and gave a wave back over her shoulder, but didn’t turn or answer. She was facing the stairs as though they were the highest of Picon’s mountains, and frankly they might have well have been. Even with the cane, lifting her right knee high enough to go from one step to the next was beyond painful.
“Need a hand?”
She shook her head and smiled. There he was again, as though she could summon him by simple mental energy. “Yeah, either that or a new leg. You think you can get my butt up these stairs?” she asked with a glance over her shoulder.
Lee grinned in his best impression of a lewd old man. “Hey, if I get to touch your butt, life is good.”
She shook her head and laughed at that as he took a position behind her and slipped one hand on her rear, just beneath her butt if it came to that. He lifted as she did, and the knee bent with protest. Once she had a foot on the stair, she shifted the cane awkwardly to take hold of rails on both sides.
“Gimme,” he said simply, taking the cane in his free hand. “Up you go.”
She hefted, he positioned her leg once more, and she hefted again. The stairs had never seemed so frakking high. She just couldn’t bend her knee well enough to raise it up to the next stair. Coming down had been easy, and given enough time and privacy she probably would have been able to manage going up herself as well, but having some help made it a lot more graceful, and there was comfort in knowing that if the knee gave out – something she always felt might happen – then someone was there to catch her.
She was away from the stairs as soon as she cleared the last step, taking a couple of hops to leave room for Lee to follow her up even though she knew he was needed on the deck. One of them needed to be there. “Thanks,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes.
“Hey, I should be thanking you. Not every day I get to play with a woman’s backside.”
“Yeah, well that’s your choice,” she told him firmly. “Big blue eyes and a dimple. Frak.”
He gave her a grin that included the dimple as he reached forward and popped her on the head with her cane in much the same manner as she had done with the clipboard.
Neither knew who laughed first, but the absurdity of the situation hit them nonetheless, and each was taken by peals of laughter that gained them more than a few odd looks from passers by in the corridor.
“I need to get back to work,” Lee finally said, wiping tears from his eyes. “You got it from here?”
If it had been anyone else, she might have read something into the words, but it wasn’t; it was Lee. “I’ve got it,” she told him. “Thanks for the… leg up.”
He grinned at her again. “Thanks for covering for me. I owe you three hours. Instead of oh-seven, don’t show up until ten. Got it?”
“Your wish is my command,” she said with an exaggerated bow that required some effort with the cane to get out of.
“In the morning, Kara,” he said softly, turning to jog back down the stairs with an ease that she envied.
She stood there and watched him a moment as he picked up the clipboard he’d set down without her even realizing it before backing her on the stairs, and he walked towards the Chief with clear purpose. Lee never did anything half-way.
With that last thought, she painfully turned herself towards quarters and began the long walk to her rack. Thankfully she was on the bottom; she couldn’t face the thought of another stair tonight.
Chapter 5
Specialist Cally awoke to the sound of a blood-curdling scream. It took her a moment of quick breathing to realize that the scream had not been her own… this time. All of them were fighting with nightmares, and if hers were just a little more specific than those experienced by some of the other crew members, then that was her own issue. At this point, she was just grateful that she wasn’t the one waking the room.
She used the ladder railing to pull herself upright and adjusted her dark green sweats which inevitably tangled around her in sleep. Two beds down, she could hear soft sobbing that was a gentler form of the scream that had awoken her. She couldn’t have said why she recognized the voice, but she did with certainty.
“Connie?” she said softly.
“I’m okay,” came the hiccupping reply.
“No, you’re not. Can I get you anything?”
Specialist Connie Sergeant rolled over to look at Cally and sniffled. “Do you think they felt anything?” she asked.
Cally had reached to the locker beside her friend and grabbed a washcloth. Although it was dry, it was pretty effective for mopping up tears and drippy noses. “On the planets or in the bay?” she asked
Connie gave a shrug. “Either. Both.”
Cally thought for a moment. Connie Sergeant was one of the few deckhands left from crew five, and she had lost as many friends as Cally had. In addition, she’d had a large family back on her home planet – Caprica, Cally thought – so the younger crewman had lost far more than Cally herself. “I don’t know about the planets, but it sounded pretty fast,” she reasoned. “I’m not sure about…” She took a deep breath before continuing. While she didn’t know what Connie’s dreams held, Cally knew that hers held the body of her best friend; it was an experience that had been far more terrible than an attempted rape. With the prisoner, she could at least try to fight back. She’d been afraid, but not helpless. Pulling Prosna out of the fire-darkened bay, both grateful that his body had not been lost and terrorized by how it had appeared, had come to her mind in both waking and sleeping moments. “I hope it was fast,” she finally said. “I think it must have been fast.”
Connie wiped her face and attempted a weak smile. “I’m sorry I got you up. You just got back here.”
Cally shrugged. “I slept enough in Life Station for the next month,” she scoffed. “I can sit up with you for a while if you want; I mean, if it will help you go to sleep.”
She could see the resistance in Connie’s manner, so she took the decision out of her hands. “Scoot over,” she said as she nudged the girl to the side. Cally was short enough to sit up at the head of the bed without bumping her head on the upper rack, and that was a rare thing on the Battlestar. So she did just that, pulling her knees up to rest her chin on them, and watching over her friend. “Sleep, Connie. If it gets bad, I’ll wake you.”
Connie gave a grateful nod, clutched the washcloth to her, and rolled over to get some sleep. Cally watched her with a soft smile. At least someone would get some rest tonight.
But that person wasn’t going to be her. As she’d promised, she stayed with Connie until it was time for day shift to begin getting ready. Her grateful friend had no more nightmares that night, but there would be other nights. Tonight Cally had provided the comfort; tomorrow it just might be Connie, or Socinus, or any of a dozen others who had taken up residence in enlisted quarters. It didn’t matter, though. They would take care of one another; it was what they did.
By doctor’s orders, Cally reported to the Chief for a light duty assignment. While she was feeling just fine, Doctor Salik was cautious and didn’t want her around heavy equipment until they were absolutely certain that the vertigo was completely gone.