The Original Starbuck

Angyl

From the moment Lee Adama had met Kara Thrace she had been all piss and vinegar, full of heat and raging emotions. They hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye, to say the least. Lee had been all rules regulations and was absolutely driven to be better than his old man. Kara was about as anti-establishment as one could get while wearing a uniform and was in trouble more often than she was out of it. However, for all her felgercarb, she was still the best damned viper pilot he’d ever seen.

At first it had stuck in Apollo’s craw that no matter how often she bucked the regs that he clung to with all his might, Starbuck was still going to be the best damn pilot in the skies. He had the technical proficiency and flew like a fracking textbook, but Kara... Kara could make those Vipers literally dance across the sky. She could do things with those ships that were supposedly impossible, and no matter how hard Lee tried, he knew he’d never be able to compete with her. She owned the skies when she flew them.

Just like she had the old man eating out of the palm of her hand, which was probably the real sticking point, if Lee were honest with himself. For all his struggling to be better than his father, to be recognized as being equal, by being his own man, a man his father could be proud of, the fact was that all Kara Thrace had to do was bat those baby blues, and old hard-ass William Adama himself was jumping through hoops to protect his almost-daughter from whatever insane stunt she’d pulled. If had been Lee, he’d have left his firstborn cooling his heels in the brig. But not Kara, because Kara had been engaged to Zac and was the last link Adama had to his youngest and dearest-departed son.

It took a long time for Lee to come to terms with that, with his father’s favoritism and with Kara herself, but he eventually had found in his dead brother’s fiancée the friend he’d never known he’d wanted or needed. Kara had become important to him, too. And then, frack her soul forever, she’d been shot down in a training exercise by some hotshot nugget who’d ignored all the rules of engagement and figured that when their CO had said to return to base, he’d only been kidding and had proceeded to get in a cheap frackin’ shot which had got Starbuck knocked out of the sky and the nugget knocked all the way out of the corps with a dishonorable discharge to boot. The old man was on route back from Picon at the time, and it had fallen to Lee to contact her listed next of kin, which surprisingly hadn’t been Adama.

His name was Rion Thrace, and he was Kara’s fraternal twin. The first thing that had crossed Lee’s mind when he met Rion was that he had Starbuck’s eyes, those bluer-than-blue intense eyes that seemed to bore their way into a person, stripping away all the bullshit until they’d laid a person bare. Except Rion’s eyes had danced with laughter, not smoldered with closely guarded rage the way Kara’s usually did. Lee had taken one look into Rion’s eyes and had fallen harder and faster than Starbuck’s Viper had earlier that day.

Once the dust had settled and Starbuck and her brother had had one helluva screaming match in her hospital room, proving to all and sundry that she was perfectly fine before ordering both Lee and her brother to get the frack out of her room and never come back, Rion had gone out of his way to charm himself into Apollo’s pants. It had taken less than half a bottle of shared ambrosa upon leaving the hospital to do that. Truth was, Apollo had been anything but resistant to the idea.

They’d gone back to Rion’s place and had fucked like weasels in heat. Lee’d had the older Thrace twin’s dick buried so far up his ass he thought he could taste it in the back of his throat. It had been hot, sweaty, and dirty and the best sex that Lee Adama had had in his entire life. And he’d been hooked. From that point on he’d belonged to Rion Thrace, and had been with him every chance he got—every leave time, every night he was on planet, and once or twice even in the cockpit of his Viper. Apollo had become almost as good at bucking regs as Starbuck herself.

The sex had been the kind that people only dreamed about or wrote about in plays and in songs. It had been incandescent. He’d been made to fly amongst the stars with only Rion’s mouth and dick giving him lift and thrust, and in turn he’d shown Rion the pleasure of being ridden so hard your eyes crossed when you came. It was a mutual relationship, both men willing to learn how to please each other, both men happy to fuck as well as be fucked. It had been as close to paradise as Lee thought he’d ever get.

So what if it was the sort of relationship that flew in the face of everything his father had taught him about life, love and being a man. It made him happy. Rion made him happy. In fact, for the first time in his life, Lee found himself liking the man he was when he was with Starbuck’s twin, and conversely, the men who served under Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama found their CO to be one of the best captains in the fleet. Every last one of them, Kara Thrace included, was proud to call Lee their CO, and at long last Lee was recognized by many to be as good a leader, as charismatic a leader, as his father. But oddly enough, Lee no longer cared about living up to the old man. He had something else, something better to aim for: to be worthy of Rion’s continuing love.

And then the Cylons had come, and Lee’s life had turned to ash around him.

His very reason for living gone was, consumed by the fires of war, for as far as he could tell there was no one by the name of Rion Thrace anywhere in the fleet. He was as alone as... as Kara had been since Zac died. It gave Lee a whole new respect for the woman he called friend, and a whole new understanding of the pain he saw just below the surface of those too-blue eyes—her brother’s eyes.

So they clung to each other, both survivors, both surviving by being the missing part of their soul for the other, each still desperately in love with the other’s sibling and both forever mourning what might have been.

"I never told you this, never told anyone, not even the old man," Kara whispered late one night, looking out of her rack towards Lee. "The reason why I took the call sign Starbuck. It was his call sign, or at least, the one he dreamed of having when we were kids growing up. Trouble was, he was born with a weak heart and the military wouldn’t even consider him so I... I lived his life for him, and he lived mine for me. We made each other a promise when we were small, before dad left taking Rion with him and leaving me with that bitch I had to call a mother. That day in the hospital was the first time I’d seen him since they left. For what it’s worth, Lee, you made him happy. Right up to the end, he loved you."

"I know. That’s what makes it so frackin’ hard, going on," Lee choked out, staring up at the bunk above him.

Kara’s eyes shadowed, her own loss and grief riding her hard. "I know, Apollo. Believe me, I know."

But they had to go on, both knowing they were it, the last hope for mankind’s survival, the last line of defense between the Cylons and the annihilation of humanity. Besides, Apollo still had something to prove to the world at large: that he was worthy enough to have been loved by Rion Thrace, the original Starbuck.

Author’s note: Due to the decided lack of a good ‘top’ on the new BSG I had to invent one so giving Kara Thrace (Stabuck) a twin brother seemed to be the way to go and that way I could combine the playfulness of the original Starbuck with the strength of will of Kara and give poor Lee the man he deserved *G*

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