Doesn't like dice games with sharpies and frauds

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

((Occurs sometime the week after Bad Fanon Day and the subsequent fallout. Closed to Una and Starbuck.))

Despite occasional temptations to do so, Una had still not cracked open the bottle of moonshine that John Crichton had sent to her back when she'd first arrived.

Given events of the last several days, the temptation was now overwhelming.

She hated drinking alone, though, and being in one of those moods where she wanted to blame the entire male gender for everything that was wrong with the universe, she had absolutely no desire to drink with any of the men or male beings of her acquaintance.

She'd done a fairly crap job of making female friends in this place. She liked Psyche, but there was something eerily not quite right about boozing up with a goddess, especially one who could see through a person with alarming accuracy. Which—

Of course. Starbuck. They'd scarcely seen each other at all since Una had arrived, more was the pity, and that needed to be remedied. And this was as good an excuse as any.

Starbuck,

So I'm not at all sure why I haven't written or visited sooner, as I did enjoy talking to you when I arrived here. Can I make that up to you by offering a drink? I'm afraid it's only the local moonshine, but it's better than nothing. Your place or mine?

-Una Persson

((ETA: Rated PG-13 to R for not especially moderately explicit, but and pretty unmistakable femmeslashiness.))

Comments

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Starbuck,

Superb. I'll be along this evening. If you can round up something to mix the alcohol with—a course of action strongly recommended—we'll make an evening of it.

-Una

Suiting action to the word, Una arrived at Space Mountain shortly after sundown, the bottle of moonshine in hand.

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

Starbuck knew Una had arrived because Sador went out to greet her immediately. "Come on in," she called. She had put all the gear for the pyramid court inside Space Mountain, so it didn't get cleaned up or wreck or misused. It was shoved off to the side, where it was clearly visible, but not in the way. She tossed the ball back and forth between her hands, waiting.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

The dog brought a smile to Una's face; it had been too long, she realised, since she'd seen any animals. She paused to greet Sador and gently ruffle her ears in greeting before going inside.

"Starbuck! Good to see you again."

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

Sador was right at Una's heels, clearly of the opinion that the ear ruffle meant she'd be getting lots more attention.

"Likewise," Starbuck said, smiling. She motioned around. "It's not the prettiest place, but there's a mattress if the floor's too hard and a punching bag if you need to vent, so what's mine is yours and all that." She moved over to the wall, where several bottles were stashed. "I've got juice and soda to mix the stuff with, and glasses to make it easier."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"I may take you up on the punching bag. Target practice isn't really working anymore," Una said, and that came out more bitterly than she'd meant it to. She sighed, managed a wry smile, and held out the bottle. "Here we are then. Anything but pineapple juice, I think. How have you been keeping?"

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

"I get the feeling that's a story for when we've had more of this," said Starbuck, taking the bottle and filling the bottom of each cup. And to save their tastebuds at the start, she mixed it with Sprite; something about the fake citrus and lots of sugar seemed to make the stuff burn less. Later, when they cared less, they could start mixing with juice. (Or drinking it straight. Yes, she'd done it. A lot.)

"Just keeping, I guess. I don't know, it's weird not having anything to do all day. Not being on alert all the time. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, you know? Think I hear a battle stations call and just spring right to my feet."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Undoubtedly. It'll probably make more sense when I'm less sober." She laughed, not entirely mirthlessly. "Cheers." She raised her glass in salute and then gracefully lowered herself to the floor, crossing her legs.

Oh, she knew exactly what Starbuck was talking about. "It's hard to turn off, isn't it? That instinct." she said. She reached over and patted Sador, who had come over to see about more ear ruffles. "You've been at war for a long time, then."

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

There was the chance for her to look a little ironic. "If only that method worked for me too. I'd have it all figured out." Sometimes she thought she did. Usually it took until the next day to realize that no, she didn't have a handle on anything, as usual. No matter how smart she thought she'd been for a while.

She raised her glass as well and joined Una on the floor.

Sador was licking Una's closest hand and generally being a pain, but Starbuck was distracted by the conversation and didn't tell the dog to back off yet. "Very hard. And so at odds with this place, which really just makes it worse." At the comment about war she sighed silently and took a very long sip from her glass. "Not as long as it feels like. Then again, the first six days felt like a year. We had the enemy jumping into our space every thirty-three minutes, and we had to defend the fleet while they tried to coordinate a jump out of there before we were caught in the middle of an ambush. Every thirty-three minutes for over five days. And since we didn't have enough pilots for a real rotation we all flew, all the time. They had us running on stims to keep awake in the cockpit."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una really didn't mind Sador's (damp) affection at all; not that she'd ever been one for pets, but a friendly dog was a welcome sight in this weirdly sterile place.

Attacks every thirty-three minutes over five days ... Una did the mental math and a look of horror crossed her face. That sort of thing sent people mad. Which she knew from bitter experience. "My god," she murmured. "That speaks of a singularly implacable enemy. And incredible fortitude on your people's part." Not to mention luck, but she was pretty sure she didn't need to say that out loud.

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

"Machines don't get tired," she pointed out, wearily. She wasn't sure if they'd had that part of the conversation when they'd met; she'd told and not told so many people, and it was getting harder to keep track of it.

"It's easier to have fortitude when you know that you're defending the last of humanity, and they only number in the tens of thousands." Another gulp and she managed a smirk, just barely. "'Course it also makes a difference who's leading you during that sort of thing. I'd stay awake until my body fell apart on me if Old Man asked me to."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Machines." No, that definitely hadn't been mentioned. "An army of artificial intelligences?"

She dug her cigarettes out of her pocket and offered one to Starbuck. "Desperation's fueled many a cause," Una observed. "But the right leader can pull you past that and into hope. Your commanding officer's a good man, then."

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

"Yeah. The cylons. Machines that changed themselves so they're just like us. You can't even tell the difference in a medical exam, apparently. You can imagine the accusations that fly around from that." They were never pretty. And now she was thinking of Boomer, which she really didn't need right now....

"He's the best," she stated, and had a(nother) moment where she couldn't believe how fiercely she missed him, how she would have given nearly anything just to talk to him, just for a minute, about nothing at all. "I've never known any other commanding officer who thinks more about his people." She'd never known any other commanding officer who everyone was proud to serve under, who was as much a father as he was a leader. A real father, one who trusted you and cared more about what you did right than what you frakked up. "Known plenty of bad commanding officers, of course."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Considering how foul things can be when it's simply a matter of humans not trusting other humans, I can only imagine how much worse it must be with humanoid machines." She shivered a little and took a long swallow of her drink, just stopping herself from making a crack about humanoid aliens.

"Haven't we all," she said to the comment about bad commanding officers. "The ones who forget that they're commanding people, not simply organising resources, the ones who are flat-out stupid ... oh yes. It makes the good ones all the more precious." She thought fondly of Cicero Hood, the "Black Attila" whose fearsome reputation belied the love and loyalty he inspired in his people. Now there was someone she hadn't thought about in a while.

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

She shrugged a little helplessly. "Didn't make things any better when one of our pilots turned out to be one. She was..." one of us. One of Adama's. My friend. "...a good kid. Until."

Starbuck snapped out of it a bit and took a cigarette* with a "thanks". She seemed to have finished her first glass, and started feeling a little tingle in the fingertips. "I had to deal with one of those ones who forgot he was working with people right before I came here. He was a piece of paranoid, neurotic work."

*((Because mah brayns had gone and I completely forgot that part last post. XD))

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una lit Starbuck's cigarette and then one for herself. "A toxic combination," she said of Starbuck's last commanding officer. "I had to make nice with one of those once. Definitely a 'lie back and think of England' sort of business." All right, perhaps that was a bit too much information. She glared at her glass and wondered where her drink had gone.

"Did she know, that pilot? That she was—I'm sorry, feel free to tell me it's none of my business if you'd rather not talk about it."

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

Starbuck didn't really know that particular historic phrase, but she was fairly sure she got the picture, and it made her laugh. "I'm not so good at that. He was lucky I didn't hit him, actually. I've sort of got a record in that regard." More like a tradition of it. Sometimes she wished Tigh was there just so she could punch him every now and again.

She inhaled smoke, then shook her head as she poured herself another glass, indicating that she didn't mind. She wasn't sure if that was true or not, but her tongue was getting looser from the burn of alcohol. "She claims she didn't. Apparently they've got 'sleeper agents' within the fleet. Tried to shoot herself in the head at one point. Didn't quite make it. Then she goes out on a mission, comes back, shoots the Old Man in the chest and gets all confused a second later like she doesn't know what she did." She hadn't been there when it happened, but she'd gotten filled in by more than one person. The story didn't get any better from different perspectives.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una glanced down at the light scarring of recent vintage on her own knuckles. Yes, she could definitely sympathise with that urge.

Una refreshed her own drink and listened. "There are human societies here and there that have refined mind-control, post-hypnotic suggestion, that sort of thing," she observed. "It wouldn't surprise me if your ... Cylons have similar techniques. Probably easier on a machine brain."

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

"Hadn't thought of it that way," she said honestly. "When it happens it's hard to really sit down and think about it. It's easier to hate someone when you feel like they've hurt you that bad, I guess." That wasn't even counting what had happened with Leoben, or what had been done to her back on Caprica at the farm--

She squinted into her glass like she'd spotted something floating in it. "I must need a lot more of this; I'm all sorts of fun right now. Enough about my weird little corner of the universe. How have you been keeping busy around here?"

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"I know exactly what you mean. And really, I should be apologising; I'm the one who got you to rake all that stuff up," Una said. "As for keeping busy—" She took a long drag off her cigarette and laughed a little.

"It's a bit like what you said about hearing battle stations calls. I'm used to coming and going as I please, moving from one war zone or crisis to the next, the more hopeless the cause, the better." She took a significant swig off her drink and winced a little at the burn. "But I've none of my usual resources or outlets, and all my experience with travel across the multiverse does me precious little good here. So apart from reading an epic poem-cum-philosophical discourse from the eightieth century, I've mostly been finding ways to complicate my life." A deeply self-deprecating little grin.

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

"Eightieth century." She paused. Not that she'd ever been very good at math, but, "I thought most people around were from way earlier than that."

Starbuck smirked. "You can complicate your life here?" Not that she really had room to talk, as she had done plenty of that herself. But she was curious as to what kind of complications Una was talking about.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"It's sort of incredible what a time traveller carries around in his library," Una said by way of explanation. Another drink. "And that would be directly related to the complications. Sort of." She finished her cigarette and carefully stubbed it out on the ground. Of course it was cleaned up as soon as she looked at it again. "Take two nine-hundred-year-old aliens with centuries of conflict between them, add one human woman who likes them both despite herself, shake well. Results may be explosive."

She wasn't entirely sure why she was being so free with this information. The drinking had something to do with it, no doubt. But it was also a sort of instinctive liking for Starbuck, another complex woman with a military background.

(And in certain lights, she looked a little like Catherine, which didn't hurt either.)

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

Aliens. Two of them who...

"Wait, are these those guys?" she asked, finding it much harder to recall the incidents she needed than she would have liked. Drinking more wasn't bound to make it better, but it didn't stop her from taking another healthy sip. "The, um, the... gods, they were both real pieces of work." Well, that didn't sound very flattering. "Not in a bad way, I mean. They were just both a little..." She made a wavy hand motion. Not quite sure what that was meant to communicate, but it was the closest she could come to making sense of what was in her head.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

All right, she was definitely well on her way out of the land of the sober, because Starbuck's gesture made her burst out laughing. But in some deeply strange way, that summed it right up.

"That's it exactly," she said. "Pieces of work, oh yes. Very—" She imitated the handwave. "How'd you meet them?"

[i-have-my-flaws.livejournal.com]

She was glad she hadn't touched on anything the wrong way, at least. "Well, I met the, uh... the Master, that's right. I met him sort of randomly, when I making lunch in one of the restaurants. Guess he was just looking around, checking things out, I got the impression he hadn't been around for long. He was... well, to be honest, he struck me as the kinda guy who comes off all nice and easy and smiles, and then you turn your back and he pulls out a choke chain, or something equally disturbing." She really shouldn't be judging, since they hadn't even talked that long, just something about.... "You'd know better, I'm sure."

She just wasn't all that bad at picking up crazy in people since she had her fair share of it too.

"Apparently Sador," she motioned to where the dog was now lying on her side next to Una, "attacked him or something, because then the other one confronted me at a party about it. He didn't seem to care much after she started slobbering all over him." She reached over and tapped the dog's nose. "He was funny, though. And he could hold his liquor, which was more fun for me."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

She was a little surprised that she hadn't heard anything from the Master about getting attacked by a dog, because that seemed like one of those things that he would have bitched about at some length. Then again, it was entirely likely that he simply had other things on his mind at the time and never got around to bringing it up.

"The Doctor," she said. "That's the other one. He is funny. And sweet, and utterly impossible sometimes. You're not far off about the Master. Sometimes he doesn't even wait for you to turn around." She sighed and rubbed her hand over her face. "Sometimes I just don't know what to do about them. Well. Most of the time, really."