Chapter 24 Through the End of the Worlds

Kara still feels the thrum of amusement throughout her whole body when she and Helo finally meet up with Lee at Dionysus that evening. Every time her mind wanders, she imagines Lee running away from his admirers, and she can't help but to chuckle at the visual. Her brow furrows when she spies Lee at an out of the way table by himself. They were supposed to meet up with Zak and Lee's programmer tonight. The programmer might have bailed for whatever reason—it's not like Kara knows her well enough to understand her motivations—but Zak wouldn't give up a free meal and the possibility that Lee might be persuaded into buying him a real drink for anything.

"Looking lonely there, Apollo," she both teases and questions when she reaches his table.

Lee smiles but doesn't look up, just kicks out the chair beside him. She takes it. "Something unexpected happened when I introduced my brother to Henderson," he tells her.

"Who's Henderson?" Helo asks, pulling out the seat beside Apollo rather than the one by Kara.

Lee does look up then, meeting Helo's eye right away. "She's the cadet programmer I recruited to help Starbuck and I start a movement to revolutionize the Raider Sims to make them act more like real Cylons," the words come from him easily, openly, as if he thinks Helo's already in on their plans.

Kara scans the table top, looking for condensation rings from drinks Lee might have had before she and Karl arrived. The two beer bottles on the table aren't enough to have loosened Apollo's tongue like this—the tinted glass currently in his hand isn't even halfway empty yet.

Kara's brow furrows. "Lee?" she bites her lip.

Apollo takes a slow, measured sip of his beer. "Did you know Zak was a Green-Level programmer?"

"Are you serious?" Kara lifts her chin. "I remember something about Junior Defense something rather when he was a kid but he never took a programming class at the Academy."

Apollo nods. "Yep. I didn't know either," he confesses and swipes his tongue between his lip and his front teeth. "He went to dozens of competitions in T-School," Lee heavily sets his bottle down on the table. "Hell, I was there. I went with him. I saw him collect all these awards, and I had no idea that it was a big deal."

Kara purses her lips, glancing to Helo long enough to note his curious eyes and the tilt of his head that tells her he's listening in that intense way he gets when he realizes something important is going down around him.

"He and Henderson got along like a house on fire. Unlike me," Lee grins proudly, "Zak understood everything she said. And then he even challenged her on her assumptions." He shakes his head, smile still wide on his face. "They argued a lot about whether the sims could be improved without networking them."

Kara grabs his arm in alarm, "Networking?" she demands, not ready for more plans to fall apart, not realizing until now just how much she'd had personally invested in the thought of improving their pilots' tactics against the Cylons. "Can it be done without networking the sims?"

Lee lets go of his beer to bring the newly freed hand atop Kara's where it's still strangling his opposite arm. "Yes. It's significantly more complicated and expensive, but yes," he reassures her.

Kara leans back in her chair. "So that's why the Fleet haven't changed the sims before now."

"Yep," Lee nods and picks his beer back up, taking a small sip.

She squints at the deliberateness of the motion, "Is there something else?" she demands.

Lee squinches the right side of his face. "The program has promise, and I think Zak might want to help Henderson with it. Also," Lee bites his lip and turns his steady stare to her, "he likes her."

Tilting her head, Kara leans forward in her seat, back in towards Lee. "Must like her a lot?" she wagers by how carefully Apollo mentions it.

Lee lifts his brow, keeping his rock solid gaze on her as he nods confirmation. "Though they did just meet," his tone is conciliatory, as if he imagines she might be hurt or disappointed by this turn of events, "so who knows what might happen."

Joy bubbles up from somewhere deep in her chest. Kara's not sure if it's a reaction to Zak's potential happiness alone, to Lee's marked concern for her, or if maybe there's some guilt loosening up from somewhere in her gut, but it makes her smile. She squeezes Lee's arm, still beneath her hand. "That's good," she rubs her thumb over his forearm. He studies her features, and she lets him—not even feeling the slightest itch to glance away.

He nods again, this time with some relief. Now, with Lee's first concern seemingly out of the way, he looks to Karl. Apollo sets his beer down, and leans back in his chair, glancing between her and Helo.

"Zak and Henderson aren't the only ones who get along like a house on fire," Apollo's tone is measured, his words layered, but despite the parallels Kara sees him drawing between Zak's potentially budding romance with Lee's programmer and Kara's relationship with Helo, Kara knows Lee doesn't have any illusions that she might have sex with Karl. At least, she doesn't think he does.

"Tell me something, Helo," Apollo begins again, "You've known Kara less than a week, and while you've known me for over three years, you never liked me before," Lee purses his lips the way he does when he's thinking about how to phrase things the right way or if there even is a right way to phrase what he wants to say. "And it's not the fact that you're here with us, and that you're choosing to spend time with us even though it's odd that you would, considering."

Kara cringes, eyes shooting back and forth between Lee and Karl, but despite his words, Lee's expression is far from accusing, and Helo's is more openly accepting than anything else.

Lee keeps pushing, "It's more the fact that we—Kara and I—have said some crazy motherfrakkin' things in front of you, and you just let it roll over you."

Karl keeps quiet instead of pushing back against Lee's words like Kara would have done. He keeps waiting, seeming to realize that Apollo's not looking for a response—not yet anyway.

"I have literally, never met anyone who trusts their gut the way that you seem to," Lee waves Kara down as if thinking she might protest, but she's recalling the Sharon she met on Caprica, the Sharon Helo insisted was on their side—the Sharon who actually proved herself to be on their side time after time. Suddenly, Kara feels too stymied in wondering where Lee might be going with this to interrupt him. "Starbuck has instincts like that in the sky and even usually in the field, but not really anywhere else."

Kara almost rolls her eyes at the backhanded compliment, but Lee's building up to something important here.

"What's your gut telling you about me and Kara, Helo?" Lee finally asks, abruptly letting Karl direct their next step.

Kara holds her breath. Karl catches her eye and leans forward, elbows on the table, before his stare shoots back to Lee. "It's telling me that I should trust you both and follow wherever you go," he shakes his head, his gaze never dropping Apollo's, "no matter how unbelievable a place that seems to take me. Because you know things, important things that other people don't know, and following you is the right thing to do."

Lee watches Karl for another long minute until slowly, he nods, and redirects his stare to Kara. "I think," he pauses, and again she can tell it's to consider his phrasing. "I think it doesn't matter whether they're watching at this moment right now. Whoever they are—that Colonel yesterday or whoever's asking Reaper questions from the Upper Tier or the people my father talked to—I am confident that we have eyes on us," he tells her, his own gaze never budging from hers. "I don't know how it's possible. I don't know how we could have anybody's attention at this early date, but there's more going on here than what I can decipher."

It makes her dizzy, the way his eyes are shooting back and forth between hers, so she looks down, finds the way his hands are fiddling with his second beer. "There's something though," she knows it to be true. "There's something you know or you've figured out that you're trying to tell me," Kara leads, feeling like Lee as she does, thinking as she leads him, that this contrary insistence to know has to come from him, because normally she'd be jumping out of her seat, wanting only enough information to direct her where to fight.

"I think," his words, when he continues, are stark rather than gentle; he knows her too well to try to soften the blow, "that if they are truly determined to watch us, then they'd have eyes and ears on us around the clock, which means," he concludes, "regardless of whether anyone is watching us this instant, we don't have any secrets from them anyway."

Kara's mind blanks in self-defense, but seconds later she remembers yesterday morning, of waking up with Lee before daybreak, and a chill runs up her spine at the thought of someone watching her most private moments, of someone besides Lee having heard her beg him to stay. Kara shakes her head, "No," she rejects the very idea and pushes into his space to make him reject it, too. "I haven't seen anyone except at the Pyramid Field, and I've looked, Lee. They aren't watching. No one is watching," she insists.

He looks down at her hand atop his. She hadn't realized she'd grabbed for him. "Kara," he promises her gently, "It'll be okay."

What will they see when you touch me, Kara? He'd asked her. Dirt, she'd said. Kara snatches her hand back, the evenness and surety in Lee's tone making her believe that he's right—that some frakkin' soulless bastard barged in on the most important moment of her life and stole her shame, knows her worthlessness, knows that she doesn't deserve Lee, but that he wants her anyway. Her chest burns with cold fire. She feels it eating her heart, disintegrating her stomach, making her become nothing.

"No," she stands and tries to refuse the idea again. "No."

"I know what you're thinking," Lee tells her, still in that eerily calm tone. "And I need you to look past it. I need you to think about this second, right now," he points to the space between them, somehow keeping her tethered to him with her fists at her sides instead of in his face.

"You're not my frakking' CAG anymore, Apollo!" she spits back. "You can't talk down your crazy ass pilot!"

He doesn't stand, just speaks to her in a low voice that shouldn't carry past Helo, not unless there's a bug broadcasting his words to some stranger. "Be angry later if you need to," he shakes his head, "But never be ashamed."

"You have no idea how I feel, L—"

"I've wanted you since the frakkin' minute we met," he leans into her as he interrupts. "And I have carried so much guilt and so much shame that I would covet a woman who—" he can't even say it but he keeps trying. "A woman that my—" his face crumples, "That he—Zak—" Lee's voice finally just falters.

Kara sits back down and places her hand back over his. "Be ashamed later," she echoes back to him, soothing her naked thumb over the back of his hand, "if you have to," she adds, because it's a balm to her, even in the turmoil of this moment, for Lee to confirm to her that he has always felt this thing between them, too.

Lee licks his lips. He glances to Helo, who's still silently watching them, and then he pushes forward. "So if they've heard everything, then maybe they know everything about where," he emphasizes softly, "we come from. Even if they don't quite believe it's true." He twists his hand beneath hers and locks his palm to hers.

"Imagine what you would do if you were in their position," he urges, "if you were an Admiral in the Fleet, and you found out that a couple of your lowest ranking officers knew the kinds of things that we know. Tell me 'Buck," he prods her softly. "After you spied on your young officers and looked through their whole life histories, after you knew everything about them that you possibly could, then what would you do?"

She clenches her jaw, but she answers him, working towards whatever conclusion he's already come to, "I would bring them into the fold, and then after I debriefed them, I'd use them."

He nods to her and then tilts his head towards Helo, "And would let them tell anyone else?"

"No," she breathes, and the word is bare, stark coming out of her mouth.

"So if we want an ally that's our ally," Lee doesn't have to glance to Helo for emphasis because Kara does instead. She barely notes their friend's pursed mouth and raised brow before Apollo continues, "then he needs to know everything," Lee emphasizes, "right now, tonight."

She doesn't know how long she sits there, just breathing hard as she absorbs Apollo's words, until she realizes that this is a gift. Telling Helo and having her friend back is the best gift she could have beyond being placed back into the past with Lee before the end of the worlds.

The smile stretches widely across her face, and she opens her mouth to start, not even knowing what's going to come out of it, but—

"Wait," Lee cuts her off before she can speak a word. "It needs to be Helo's choice," he looks to Karl. "There's no going back once you know," he warns. "And it doesn't matter whether or not you believe what we say. If you chose to know what we do, then you have to act with us."

Helo leans into them both. He steels his jaw and keeps his eyes open when he says, "I'm already on your side."

Lee exhales heavily and leans back in his chair, tucking his head into his chest as he does. When he glances over to Kara, she sees how drained he feels by the conversation. She squeezes his hand where it still grips her, and then she turns to fully face their friend.

"The first time I met you was on the Battlestar Galactica, about three years from now," Kara watches Helo lick his lips, but it's not a precursor to protest. "Two years later, the Colonies were attacked and destroyed by the Cylons after they obliterated our Defense Net. Lee and I," she continues, "we're from seven years into the future. We don't know how we got here, but we're going to do everything we can, so that nobody ever has to go back."