"Oh my gods. You're alive?"

Lee Adama does a fazed turn on the hangar deck and sees this spark of a woman, five-six, blond, and cut with a pair of scissors from the surroundings simply by the astonished look on her face.

He blinks. "Who the frak are you?"

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"She's our best stick," is the hardly substantial classification of Kara Thrace that Commander Adama gives his son, when the question, Lee believes, went something like who-the-hell-does-she-think-she-is-under

cutting-my-command-in-the-heat-of-a-raider-attack.

"If I remember correctly," Bill adds slowly, pushing on his glasses, "she also very personally saved your ass out there."

Lee scoffs. "I'll send her some flowers."

Bill shakes his head regrettably. "You may not like her style of doing things, Lee, but it's too bad. We're hanging alone out here, and you're both good officers. You should try to get along with your pilots."

He twitches automatically at the commander using his first name rather than formalities. "As if it's even professional. Everybody tells me she's your pet lieutenant." Lee has to suck in a breath, stop himself from pointing out things like the fact that having a definite softer spot for one of your officers than for your washed out younger son seems a little screwed up—And he's still thinking about these things in present tense, like back in Delphi Zak is getting a beer out of the fridge and ignoring Lee's messages because it's just not quite on with them anymore, like he'll still have the chance to tell his dad where to stick it before he buys himself a nice suit and tie, goes to school for real this time.

He doesn't have time to grieve and he sure as hell doesn't have time to soften his grudging regard for his father, because there's a war to fight now and thanks to this girl, he's still alive to be a good soldier. Bill doesn't say anything; a look across the room from Tigh says it all.

And he gets the message, fine, he'll stick to being Captain Apollo. He's nobody's son.

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The memorial walls expanding in a mosaic of photos and leafy parchments fill Kara with an invading glumness when she first passes them by, and as she slows and then stops to glance at the hundreds of smiling and blurred faces tacked up together, one in particular catches her eye before she realizes what she's looking at. In the forefront of the grainy colorless picture is a boy in an oversized sweatshirt who can't be older than six or seven, looking at the camera with a detached contentment and not quite smiling. His hair curls endearingly in a couple awkward areas above the ears, and his lips set together in just a certain familiar way...

Kara realizes she's looking at Bill Adama's eyes set into that young face at the same moment she acknowledges the other figure off on the right in the foreground, a more mature boy standing in profile several feet away, hard to diminish, but definitely a younger version of the commander's living son, with just a slight tint of Apollo apparent even then in the way he holds his head.

Kara reaches and gently takes the photo off the wall to look at it more closely. She wonders whether it was the old man or Lee who put this up, and feels fleetingly like the half of the photo with Lee in it should be tucked under; her mind envisions where the crease would go, but of course she doesn't, it's not her business, but the contemplation brings up that grim question about Lee's survival. If he was the one who put the photo up, he left himself willingly next to his brother, and Kara can only attempt to imagine trying to weigh absolute grief against any gratitude that he managed to make it out alive. She didn't have someone like that growing up and she's more than aware it's not something she can quite understand.

She keeps having this feeling lately, that she's not supposed to be the lucky one, never has been before, and maybe it's the people in the photos who got all the luck.

"What are you doing?"

Kara gasps, nerves tightening in recognition of the voice. Lee is almost just behind her with an accusatory look. She rolls her eyes in apologetic exasperation.

"I'm sorry, I was just..." She has no idea what to say.

"What?" Lee asks cynically, stepping forward and taking the picture away from her. "Sending up a prayer?"

Yeah, so he doesn't take her for the spiritual type, and that's kind of a trap right there: If she denies it, she's predictable. If she argues... "Maybe I was," she says with a dry shrug.

"Right," he scoffs.

She is not going to say anything. Not here, while he is holding that picture of his frakking brother, she is not going to—

"You know...I don't get this. You don't know anything about me—"

"We're not doing this," he cuts her off, and part of her understands it, empathizes that he just can't, as he gives a shake of his head. Part of her just doesn't care.

After a long hesitation, after he's replaced the picture and is probably about to walk away, she says, "You liked debate club."

He looks back over, startled. "What?"

"You read a lot of Lystra novels in your teens. You have never introduced your father to a serious girlfriend. You may, in fact, have boyfriends, for all he knows...You used to set your alarm on traditional Tauron music, because you dislike it."

Squinting, he demands, "What, my father just tells you these things?"

She swallows. "Zak...liked to play pyramid. Sometimes you would let him win. That's pretty much the list, Apollo, but it's more than you can say about me...But here's something." She pulls out Lee's hand, pushes something into his palm.

Hard and wrapped in cloth, a figure of Venus. Lee furrows his brow at the figure in his hand as she just walks away down the hall.

The next day he comes by where she's sitting at a briefing and nudges her to sit up straight, surreptitiously setting it on her desk as he walks by.

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Most of the pilots like talking to Kara, and Lee proves pretty quickly to be a good CAG, a bit of a hardass at times but at least showing the occasional attempt to unwind, give companionable praise, permit jokes before he gets started tearing up all the problems with their strategy in the ready room. He isn't popular, but easily likable, in many ways the opposite of Kara in where he stands with everyone else.

Absolutely nobody on the ship looks forward to flying a CAP with both of them. Ever.

It's interchangeably fascinating and annoying to the other pilots, the fissuring sparks that seem to get set off even when they really really try to agree, especially when the one nugget who had the gall to blatantly snicker at it got coined with the first embarrassing call sign Kara could think of. In terms of training and planning, Apollo's got rank and Starbuck's got some people's familiarity with her tactical smarts, and nobody knows who to side with. This manages to infuriate Lee almost every single day.

And then there's the drinking. Which, he accepts pretty quickly, is probably completely out of anyone's hands, but he still can't help a pointed scowl across the rec room when she knocks a chair or table over during rec time. She almost seems to do it to excess just to prove that she doesn't give a shit what he thinks. Sometimes, for a second, he catches himself wondering whether she truly doesn't.

And anyway, on a battlestar, the air gets so polluted with too much information on everybody, it's not like he chooses to file away certain things he overhears from the conversations he's rarely engaged in.

"Nuh-uh," she says during some drinking game or another, peeling some liquor down. "At least nothing serious."

"Never?" Boomer exclaims.

"Oh, poor me," Kara intones with an exaggerated pout. "There was this guy when I was like sixteen, but that doesn't count. I mean, what about you?"

Valerii is blushing, but Kara is too busy glaring at Lee after noticing his slightly too obvious eavesdropping from a table over.

"What?" he says.

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After Galactica jumps away from the cylons by a hairline Kara and Lee already know they're in such shit trouble that neither of them particularly wants to get out of their Viper ever again. But they do, and since the commander is on Colonial One when it happens, Tigh has taken the pleasure to march right out to the deck to greet them, making them simultaneously flinch with the anger in his voice.

"Starbuck and Apollo. TEN-HUT!" He bears on the two who are now standing straight and still, letting everyone else on the deck have a casual gander at the scene. "That first raider was up on dradis before either of you caught it—It was on our nose in less than five, how in hell did you both manage to miss it?"

He already knows the answer, but he's waiting for one. The two pilots stand sort of shell-shocked, lips pressed tightly shut.

"We were distracted, sir," Kara admits.

Lee sighs, knowing it's no use to dance around it. "She was arguing with me about the formation again—"

"You were on my ass about it before I even—"

"Can it!" Tigh growls, shaking his head in grim wonder. "I don't know what the hell is the problem, but we are in the middle of a frakkin' war and you two can't be in the same gods-damned stellar system without trying to kill each other. Now whatever it is you have to do, it has got to stop. I don't care if you have to have it out in the gym or do a little heart-to-heart over breakfast, but figure it out. Hell, you can sleep with each other for all I care..."

From behind the Viper Chief is currently pretending to examine, a brief sniggering is heard. Lee and Kara both roll their eyes just slightly, and the shared annoyance loosens them up, a little. When Tigh is done with them, they stand side by side for half a minute before Lee, sighing, finally speaks.

"I admit you had a good point yesterday about the reassignments. Yeah, don't look at me like that, we both know that's why you were rearing to blow up at me since this morning. I'm done talking about what just happened if you are."

She responds with a favoring shrug and starts to unzip her smock. He's kind of impressed, really, that her face has only a slight trace of cocky victory.

But only a week later when they're in CIC and have been bickering for at least thirty minutes about how they're going to get some gods damned tylium, she interrupts him with, "No. I'm not having a frakking 'attitude,' Apollo—"

"You keep talking like I don't know how to—"

"I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that I'm better at your job or that you're not doing yours. I'm saying do better, cause you are better. Look at this..." She gives an irritated Why don't you frakking understand? sort of gesture at the plan they've hashed out so far. "You're starting off with your strongest numbers. This kind of situation, you need to plan like the need for a back-up is a given. I, am just trying to keep your short ass alive so that your father doesn't lose it completely," she finishes off in a grumble to herself.

Lee is suddenly looking at her more closely, until she notices. Then he kind of shakes into looking more dazed, like there's something she just doesn't get, and he takes the bait. "If the old man really cared that much—"

"Please do not finish that sentence. I've managed not to belt you up until now." She manages to cut off his response quickly: "You both just lost his son."

"Yeah, whatever, he's your favorite. You have no idea how much of a son of a bitch he can be." She glares, so he can't help going on. "Do you have any idea what it was like for me growing up without a father, when he could've been there if he really wanted to be?"

Something strange happens to Kara's face, like one emotion is pulling the other back kicking and screaming. She takes in a deep breath, and lets it out. There is a long, long pause, in which he starts to belatedly realize he's maybe made a very bad move.

She clears her throat, and as if this is all she's been contemplating for the last several seconds, starts explaining to him what they would need to put up a good decoy. He rolls his eyes with a sarcastic "Oh, why didn't I think of that?", knowing their previous argument is at least easier.