Author's Note: Maybe it's a bad idea to go looking through the WIPs lying in the dusty corners of my hard drive, but this was hardly one I'd forgotten as much as something I felt didn't have much of a place anymore. It's very old-school pre-series stuff that's now contradictory to canon in a few ways and it even has some head canon approaches to the characters I'm not sure I would completely go with anymore; and in any case it was the first thing I conceived of writing for this fandom and I fear that that shows in too many ways. But I guess letting over 12K just sit there makes me sad and what I had was a little more salvageable than I imagined, so I did some cleaning up on it. This isn't supposed to be one of those "MY FIC SUCKS" author's notes, it's just that with my knowledge that I was obviously planning to do more with it I don't know how complete it feels, but it ends with more of a rough landing than a cliffhanger.

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Kara awoke, blinking away the musky air of her apartment and instinctively burrowing her face into the strong chest her body was propped against to resist the garish noon light coming through the window.

Something smelled different in the dust of the room, felt stifled and low. In her hazed hunger for more sleep her mind hardly fixed on this at all; she scrunched her eyes shut and gave an encouraging rub to a shoulder blade. "Baby, you wanna get the blinds?"

After that mumbled request she was almost drowning back asleep. But after a baited silence, a truth like too much of the world being crammed inside of her skull slammed harshly back into focus.

"Kara."

She opened her eyes to the blazing hangover, the terrible sharpening of it, the reason the muscles felt strange under her hands. The scent more like spice and sweat, and the voice worn raw. She was not lying next to Zak.

She was lying collapsed in the arms of the man whose brother she had just killed.

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When Kara fell in love with Zak Adama, it was the only time she'd ever felt like her life might actually fall into some fixed order. From day one something in her was caught by the humor and compassion that had radiated from him as naturally as it did from children. The first time she realized he was trying to flirt with her was when he teasingly stole her hat right off her head in the mess hall; the way he smiled at her through her annoyed threats made her feel this pinning-down instinct that this might be the one man crazy and kind enough to put up with her for very long. When she started letting him spend his free days taking her out to coffee a few blocks from the academy, she thought at first she was just having fun with him on borrowed time. But then they'd known each other a while and she still hadn't gotten herself to make or accept a move and she had to wonder why that was, cause it sure as hell wasn't because of any lack of wanting to.

She just didn't want to frak this up, whatever it was. The first and only thing in her life that hummed a tranquil note saying Slow down. It was out of pure loss of nerve that she contemplated sometimes that they should probably just be friends. He was unlike anyone she had ever gotten close to before and the gradual discovery that he'd gotten under her skin made her feel somehow like a better person; one night she told him, knowing he'd have the right sense of humor, that if they'd met on a schoolyard when they were nine and thirteen he would have gotten the shit bullied out of him:

"You wouldn't know anything about how bad I can be, Adama." She was stirring the little plastic straw in her take-out coffee as they sat on the hood of her car at sundown, amping up on caffeine for a late trip to the gym.

He'd laughed, missing the full meaning of it that he'd never fully understand. The point was that she was kinder to him than she'd ever been to anyone before and she didn't know who this person was who suddenly loved him like she'd always been meant to. She never wanted to leave herself, now that he'd thrown this thing into her life that was simply liking it and even being happy to be herself, and she'd stopped him in the middle of the laugh nagging, "When are you going to kiss me?" There was something reckless and possessive in saying it. There was a part of her that also simply wanted it. She felt softly cleaned up, redeemed the first time he leaned fearlessly into her orbit. She was a good woman wherever he touched her, and even more than she wanted him to come home with her that night to make her body new all over, she wanted it to last. It was terrifying.

She supposed he was on the opposite side of how people turn out when they have imperfect or just absolutely terrible childhoods. They weren't into digging up little heart-to-hearts, but it came up on the aside now and again. The daddy and the mommy issues. Mostly the mothers, a vulgar insult cutting out of her curling lips and smoothed away with another kiss. She always unknowingly felt at her knuckles whenever he asked about her. One day, in an almost knowing way, he kissed every single finger instead of asking why.

It would have been wrong to say that she thought of him sometimes as a brother, but just sometimes, when they nuzzled together tangled under somebody's blankets and it was a kind of comfortable scene Kara could have never imagined herself a part of, it was hard to believe they weren't exactly the same age; she felt like she was the girl crawling out of the dark closet into a safe place with this twin, escaping her fears lulled under a blanket containing its own universe where "I love you" did not ring with dark echoes of wondering grimly how much this was all going to hurt. Her heart started to do things it was never taught to do in that soft new place painted blue by dusk and cheap cotton. She knew there was a word for this kind of belonging, but she didn't dare. On sleepless nights she would watch him dreaming and write foolish poetry in her head, but never with those irrevocable words.

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She wasn't looking for somebody to help her be angry, not any more; that was the opposite of how they were. She found a senseless hope in Zak, in how despite all the problems he didn't actually hate his father. His resentment over his parents' divorce was a sadness born of regrets and missed opportunities, no grudges. Bill Adama was a very occupied man who loved his sons and missed them. Zak understood that as well as he understood some things about Kara.

His brother, on the other hand.

What Kara knew about Lee before she met him was just a handful of things, mostly warnings. Not things that made her automatically dislike him. Things that made her vaguely certain that he was not going to like her.

"The thing about Lee..." Zak had said to her once. "He tends to think he owns all the pain in the world."

She hadn't really known what he meant by that. But she picked up on all the other stuff he didn't even tell her directly, what was there underneath all the comments like, "Of course he wouldn't have a problem getting the job if he wanted it" and "I probably couldn't keep track of Lee's girlfriends if he even introduced me to half of them." He said these things with a tone of easy admiration, but Kara could tell in a small sad way that Zak had been overshadowed his whole life, just enough to get a humbled shift in his manners whenever he talked about his brother. And he admired him still.

It was really not Lee, but the idea of Lee, that Kara started to hate a little.

Zak was supposed to be there when they met, but it didn't happen quite right. Kara had not even seen a picture of him yet, so the first she ever saw of his face was the squinting and vaguely bothered expression when he opened the front door of his condominium in his undershirt and sweats to see this woman with freshly sweat-raked hair looking awkward and ashamed on his undecorated porch. She could guess easily enough that he hadn't seen a picture of her either, since he clearly had no inkling who the hell she was.

"Hi," she blurted out with a hand scratching nervously at her head, before he could manage any polite greeting. "Listen, um. I'm a friend of Zak's?..."

"...Yeah?" Lee Adama cocked an eyebrow with more attentive anticipation and stepped out of the house. It seemed like the first time his face had wanted to move.

She unlocked her nervous lips, quickly stumbling through the explanation, "Well, he came and borrowed your car so we could go eat, and afterwards he was gonna be kinda late, and I thought since my apartment is on my side of town, I might as well drop him off and drive it back..."

He sighed. "And?"

She grimaced as he seemed to have an idea where this was going. "Okay, I—I nicked it on the mailbox—"

"Oh...frak it." As he opened his screen door to step out in a tight movement, it took him getting moderately pissed for her to really take in the angle of the jaw, the smoldering restraint in his eyes; she felt a wave of intimidation from him simply for him being worlds away from the animated features of his brother rather than by the slightly angry crook in his demeanor. "Okay, 'nicked'? As in..."

Kara cringed a little as he walked off the porch and went far enough down the driveway to get a look. There was a pause, and then he came back looking, at least, not surprised.

He also looked like he'd just figured something out.

"You must be Kara."

Kara smirked a little, shoving her hands sheepishly into her pockets. "Yeah, that's me."

If she didn't already know how much Zak had—and hadn't—told Lee, she could have judged from the cynical expression on his face that he understood that she and his brother were something more than friends. Lee sighed and said, "In that case, I better let you off the hook."

"To be honest, I was kind of hoping you wouldn't," Kara muttered. "I don't have any siblings but if I have any idea of how the whole thing works, you'll probably take it out on him later."

That actually charmed him into a startlingly handsome smile, suddenly giving away a good nature that melted off some of her anxiety. "You know," he said after some thought, "I think I might just get the hell over it?"

She turned her mouth up nervously when he reached out his hand. As she automatically clutched it, he said, "I'm sure you know my name's Lee."

She nodded. "Kara Thrace."

Lee's hand stopped still right in the middle of the shake. She could practically hear the sound of something clicking loudly in his mind.

And he got that steely, guarded look again, for somewhere between one second and nine thousand of them, until he realized their hands were still clutched. As he slowly let go of her fingers, a look of the slightest wary anger somehow yielded slowly into one of amusement.

"Are you seriously telling me," he asked gruffly, "that Starbuck just crashed my new Satyr?"

Clearly, Zak had mentioned her to Lee in more than one context. And clearly he hadn't yet overcome his hesitance to explain that Kara and that hell-of-a-pilot instructor were the same person. Making a mental note to kill her boyfriend later, Kara let out a deceivingly non-frantic chuckle, pulling for a joke to save her wits. "Yeah, if you can call it a car. I wouldn't have expected Zak's brother to drive such a toy."

He smirked, challenged. "I didn't expect Captain Thrace to do anything with my brother except bust his chops over his flying, but apparently we were both mistaken. I must have also been a little misinformed about your maneuvering skills."

Her jaw clenched, and her retort came out only mostly playful. "Okay. Apollo. I am the best damn pilot to come out of the Academy in a decade, and I keep every promise I make, but you might as well know right off the bat I don't make any promises that don't involve a cockpit."

Lee Adama could have taken all of this and done whatever he wanted with it and she would have let him, or so she would've liked to think later on. He could have threatened to call up somebody to get Kara fired so that she wouldn't be messing around with his brother anymore, so that Zak wouldn't be the next thing she got wrong, so that he would get shifted to some instructor that would grind him up and send him safely packing.

But he didn't really believe her, so all he did was step closer and touch her shoulder for just a second and say, "You know what's funny?...Zak fender-bent my first ride less than a month after I got it. It's like you're already part of the family."

Before Kara could stop it, that last word hooked right through her chest even while she heard it as half a joke from Lee's earnest face. For the first time since she'd knocked on Lee's door her true smile came automatically over her and they loosened out, laughing.

In that moment something else, less loud, clicked in the air. But like a moth attempting to steal through a closing door, it was ignored, shut out to its frailty where it belonged.

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When it was the three of them, the good days just precipitated. The moments that mattered for the rest of the year were Kara slamming shot glasses on a table seated between the brothers in front of the piece-of-junk TV and giggling out rules to the drinking game from her clowny grinning mirth, the "woah woah"s coming with amusement from either side when she was having too much. Drink one every time the Panthers score. Drink one for every bad commercial. Drink one every time somebody accidentally breaks a glass, every time Lee cocks his eyebrow like a smartass, drink one every time Zak is laughing at Lee for trying to be serious; fill up, again.

The other word was "home." When Lee got assigned routines an hour away from the academy, his visits involved making messes of hotel rooms when they'd had enough of the city; and there were so many moments of one of the brothers peering at her over the back of a passenger seat: "You're coming back with us, aren't you?"

Their favorite after dark was one old playground in Delphi evoking just the right mix of laughter and ghosts. See-saw, swing set, pyramid court all skeletal shadows still warm from the entire day's sun. One night Kara was griping about her knee acting up again and eating potato chips when Lee got challenging, asking how well she could still play pyramid. Zak was all sniggers and "You're messing with the pro here" until Lee actually wanted to have a match right there. Zak admitted he always felt like a dolt playing against Kara.

Only after so much nagging did Kara go to get the ball out of the car, promising to quickly kick Lee's ass. Zak sat there with his hands clutched around the chains on one of the swings, and when Kara came back tossing the ball up and down, Lee was saying, "We could play two against one?"

"Nah." Zak shook his head, something forced in his voice. "I'll sit this one out."

With an idle bounce of the ball Kara grunted at Lee, "Let's go," and they jogged off to the court.

She gestured her head in Zak's direction and said a bit heavily, "Just one game, alright, Apollo?" before crouching fast and placing the ball at center. She beat him at three rounds, their knuckles skinned by the end without any apologies for knocking each other down.

The invisible bullying began before she could stop the thing that was everything being tightened up in a different way when she and Lee were around each other. Kara was beginning to itch with hunches, that Zak's nature at times was a fiction, that things he perceived as being agreeable and pliable she was only equipped to view as stubborn and threatening. Being around his soft manners for too long made her feel like her grip on anything steep and solid was leaning away, just like she needed back into his arms sometimes when his brother made her tense and almost volatile. Lee was more steady-minded and okay to be rough with, a cool surface for honing against. She couldn't help being disappointed that she needed that as well as the fantasy, as she so unfairly seemed to consider it now.

Whatever happened some time after her down-and-out little family of two became a solid three, something had significantly changed from before. Kara could be mean to Zak.

She couldn't put her finger on what was wrong with it, only that things started to feel almost like a joke at Zak's expense when he wasn't around simply because of all the things she suddenly felt he didn't understand. In a way that just wouldn't have been noticed if it wasn't something so laced with the possibility of cruelty, things shifted notes just slightly like after a child exits the room whenever the younger brother left them to run to the store on the corner. It wasn't at all that things were better, they were just different, if they had their own gambles on sports or went to catch a movie while he was busy.

And then one night, when Zak had cancelled plans on them because of a big test he had to study for, his brother pointedly nudged her for the third time that night and said in comfortable annoyance, "I swear, if you crack your knuckles one more time..."

"What, you'll break 'em?"

He set down the book he'd been browsing. "...What the hell? Your mind goes straight there?"

It just slipped out of her, like one of those jokes you realize isn't funny at all in the middle of telling it. She told Lee about her fractures, and instead of seeming uncomfortable with the sudden shift in the tone of the evening, he tried to ask Kara if Zak had ever told her about the things their mother used to do when she got drunk enough. He actually wasn't sure after all if Zak had been too young to remember much of it. When she asked, though, he couldn't seem to define in one way the things that Carolanne had done: sometimes a slap here or there, but mostly the booze just made her a nerve-rending short fuze. One night she properly freaked the shit out of Lee when some of the things she was yelling didn't make any sense to him at all.

"I have this very distinct image in my head of her screaming at us from the bottom of the stairs, and she kept repeating some line—I can't remember what it was, but it was straight out of some movie she'd been watching earlier. That was the worst it ever got in my mind, but I remember all her make-up was running from crying or sweating and she just, she looked scary. I think I was unable to look at her without seeing that night in my head for years and years after."

She asked, "Did she get better before Zak got very old?"

No, but when Lee was old enough to think of it he started to sometimes take the bottle she was working on and pour everything in the sink while she was on the phone or showering. When nothing else worked he'd just make sure to move Zak out of the way, pull him into his room late at night to share the crammed bed because there was no lock on Zak's door. Where Kara had been this type of defense tactic would have gotten her hell about "what goes on in my household," but Lee and Zak's mother was too proud and seemed to just feign constant amnesia about it when she was sober. For Zak, it sounded like, it was so reflexive to play along with her that he and Lee never even talked about it.

Suddenly the differences between Lee and his brother made so much sense. He'd always accepted a more weary awareness of the darkness in their family and bore the bruises with a bitterly waning sense of cause, and Zak had remained hidden in the corners learning gradually, though maybe in a way he didn't quite remember, that nobody expected him to be able to handle things on his own.

This made her feel pretty dirty for every time she revealed some other regrettable aspect of herself to Zak's brother. There was a growing list of little things Lee knew about her that Zak didn't, and it turned into this unhealthy escape from the things she tried to tell herself Zak didn't deserve to have to deal with; in reality she was building up two different versions of herself and neither of them were completely honest.

Lee somehow got all of the ugly, even when it was on accident. There was that sickly fateful frak-up of the first year anniversary of her mom's death that eclipsed a smear of gloom over everything else that day: Zak and Kara's first actual fight came on because of some stupid cutting remark she'd made in flight class, the dispute not even mattering as much as the fact of it being such an undesirable milestone in their relationship. She had to button herself into her dress uniform before he could even cool off because this wasn't much of an excuse for missing the award ceremony she and Lee were both expected at in Delphi, and then there was far too much alcohol at the after-party. All she really remembered after sobering up around two in the morning was clutching and pulling into a half-lit hallway whatever looked good to her at the time, which turned out to be good old Major Lark. Upper-middle-class, Libran, mediocre Raptor pilot. He had charismatic leadership and barely tolerable kissing skills and light blond hair and eyes almost the exact blue of those belonging to the one who peeled him forcefully off of her after some minutes and told him to go enjoy some more ambrosia before turning and leaving Kara sloshed and winded against the wall.

The phone rang in the morning: Zak calling from his campus house where she knew Lee would have crashed on the floor, a quiet measuring tone in his voice that made her recall more vividly their previous bickering. Wanting to know if she was up for lunch with "us." Through the seeming charade of getting dressed and waiting to get picked up and all the way through ordering her food while Zak and Lee carried out the day like absolutely nothing unusual had happened, she was wondering how much longer she'd be a part of any kind of "us."

"Babe. Are you okay?" Zak kept asking. There was no way to completely calm down and actually look fine, and he was feeling bad, assuming she was still upset about the argument. She kept shifting her hands around; if she didn't put on some kind of convincing exterior he was going to start noticing that she hadn't really said anything to Lee the whole time they'd been out.

She finally said, "Look, I need a smoke," not knowing what she was doing except getting away from them for a while, trying to feel unstifled for even a moment. Outside, with her fingers stuttering around a cigarette, she wondered with distant curiosity if Kara Thrace had actually ever been this scared of anything before.

Zak never smoked but Lee did once in a blue moon, so this was an excuse, but she wasn't exactly expecting him when he came around the bricked corner out behind the diner with the countenance he'd worn all day quite noticeably dropped into a stiff, impersonal wrath as he grabbed her by the arm, saying, "Calm the frak down."

"And here I thought you were just using the opportunity to watch me squirm," she threw back, cringing farther around the corner out of his grip.

"...No. No. Look, I'm not telling him. You don't think I would have by now?"

She couldn't begin to tell him what she thought about anything; her face probably conveyed as much. She just blurted out, "What?"

"...Listen, this is what's going to happen." Lee wasn't looking her in the eye, not today, and his whole face was twitched up with a tension that was unbearable to witness. "You are going to clean up your act. And I'm going to clean up mine."

She blinked, her head clasping in confusion onto that last part. "You...?"

"Oh, you're gonna make me explain myself? Frak you. I should be doing everything I can to convince my brother that you're no good. Instead I'm covering your ass."

The words only half made sense to her. "You could still do the right thing," she replied sardonically, not sure why she was being so upfront when she should just take this unfathomable favor without asking questions. "I don't know what happened. You guys are like my family and I'm just so frakked up—"

"No, stop," Lee suddenly snapped, not nearly as cruel as it was defensive, like he felt cornered. "Don't."

Her mouth shaped around the words, I'm sorry, but they couldn't get out of her, her body couldn't produce the sound. Not against the feeling flooding through her that she hadn't only betrayed Zak the night before. And here was Lee denying her calling him a brother, squirming out of that sloppy word she'd just let slip as a rushed plea. Later, in the lowest mood, her jaw would tense up at the way she recalled his voice.

Because the way she would replay it, Lee was wanting to say, You are not my family. You are just messing with my family, and right now you are messing with me.

Lee finally straightened out his anger with a final sour glance at her and a shake of his head. He reached and took her cigarette from between her fingers, walking a few steps out into the parking lot and taking a couple draws on it. Without turning back to face her, he said, "Get back in there. I'm gonna be a couple minutes."

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Every time Lee visited her and Zak in the next couple months he was perfectly back to normal around Kara, but he no longer stopped by when Zak wasn't around and seemed to diligently avoid being alone with her. If Zak was in the can, he rarely said anything at all. At the end of the weekend he would call a cab instead of letting Kara give him a ride to the bus station.

She didn't sense that he was doing this to punish her. She started to realize this was what he'd meant by cleaning up his own act. She'd been demoted back to just being an attachment of his brother's. He was angry at himself for what he hadn't done; no good could come any more of them being friends.

One week the two of them were invited by a common acquaintance along with a good percentage of their graduating class to the kind of birthday party where everybody forgets whose birthday it is beyond one or two beers; even though Zak wasn't technically invited he seemed to make pretty quick friends as soon as he got there.

Kara on the other hand had a migraine within the first hour and ended up tiredly sitting behind the secluded bar in the corner of the basement, playing with the straw in her too-weak cocktail and watching Ken Cage get his ass handed to him by Zak in a game of table court. People knew by now she wasn't feeling very well and only occasionally went over to talk to her. When Lee eventually walked up, probably to pour himself another drink, she sunk farther down on her elbows.

On his way going over to the mini fridge under the bar, Lee tossed a white box that landed next to her arm. Realizing it was a package of pain killers, she groaned in relief. She'd attempted looting the host's disaster zone of a medicine cabinet earlier to no success.

"Don't mention it." He really meant, don't mention it. After swallowing down a couple of the pills with an arching back of her head, she stole a glance over at Lee. He was leaning against the bar without sitting down, wanting to get away from the crowds but still padding a space around her.

She sighed, nearly rolling her eyes. "Lee."

"What."

Her fingers twisted the stem of her glass back and forth. "When are you going to stop hating me?"

"I'm working on it."

"Lee—" she shook her head, the hesitant repetition of his name feeling ineffectual. "Zak proposed to me yesterday."

Lee's face immediately went into a raw shock; after a second, he cooled to simple confusion.

"What? Don't tell me you didn't know."

"I didn't know he was going to do that."

Kara blinked. "Oh."

"...Did you say yes?"

Kara's jaw went out in irritation. "...I told him I only like blond guys."

"You know what, frak you. That's not funny."

She returned his same look of slight unhinged disgust. "Seriously? You're telling me that it's not funny?"

"Kara, I know you want me to be able to act like this isn't a big deal, but I can't. I won't. Zak's my brother, and I'd like to tell you that I'm going to kill you if you do it again, but I can't do that either."

"Oh. See, I wasn't aware that you're the only one who's allowed to feel like shit about this."

"Would you even feel bad about it if I hadn't found out?"

Her entire body seemed to scoot in a little farther from him at that. She closed her eyes for a second and then stood up, walked a few steps over to Lee so that she could more quietly reply, "Listen to me. You know...you do, you know, without having known me before, that this is the only time I've really been happy. And maybe I never planned on getting married, maybe I'm doing this just so I don't lose him. So what? If anyone can understand why it doesn't matter..." With an uncomfortable, self-resistant shake of her head, she looked him more directly in the face, her expression showing an abandonment of her next thought. There was an indirect echo of a previous conversation, but she wasn't sure of which one it had to be.

Lee's eyes faltered into a swallowing sadness, looking down and somewhere around her fingers.

"But there's another thing," Kara said, a defensive and flat finality now in her tone. "I don't want to be a part of Zak's family if his brother won't even frakking talk to me."

She turned and left the bar. Ten minutes later she managed to run into one of the evening's temporary buddies in the upstairs kitchen and say, "Hey, if Zak asks, I went home. He seems to be having a good time and I know he'd feel bad not leaving with me, so..."

It was almost an hour's walk to the nearest shuttle station and the whole idea quickly seemed pretty stupid when she hadn't walked for more than ten minutes and it started raining, soaking quickly through to chill her skin all over. She kept walking, saying to herself it wasn't so bad even though her head didn't feel much better and her thin jacket wasn't nearly enough to keep her from shivering in the wet breeze.

She didn't get very far out of the neighborhood before an approaching car pulled over to the shoulder of the road and honked. She turned to see a white Satyr and her heart sort of passed out, plummeting and landing.

She came over slowly and leaned to glance into the window across the empty passenger seat to see Lee at the wheel giving an impatient gesture and mouthing, "Would you get in?"

It was so much warmer inside she could've cried. She was dripping all over the leather, apologizing, "I'm gonna ruin your seats..."

"Frak the upholstery. Are you insane? You're completely soaked—Zak worries about stupid things, it's frakking freezing outside..."

"Gods." She laughed, interrupting him. "What are you, my—"

But she couldn't finish that sentence because nothing worked right, nothing was the right size. It would never even work as a joke. She looked over and saw a calm understanding in Lee's eyes as her trailing off punctuated some undefinable affection between them.

"Did you even tell Zak before you took off?"

"No. I'm sure he'll assume I gave you a ride home. I couldn't even find him..."

They were both laughing in admiration then, Kara saying, "I bet Ken got him in the backyard to go play with the four wheelers."

"Can you believe, I think he met more people tonight than I did in my whole time at the school..."

"Yeah," Kara replied, chuckling tiredly. "I can believe it."

When they were done laughing, Kara rested her head down on the back of the seat and began nodding halfway to sleep, felt the tranquil rocking and jilting of the car's motion through the pattering rain. Part of her dreamed, and the part of her that was still awake seemed to feel the warming weight of an occasional lingering glance along with the vague glow of the stop light bleeding through her lashes.

Everything was back to before, pulling at her with a brisker clarity. Zak and Lee, Lee and Zak; they connected in her mind now as the only future she could really breathe with, everything outside of that possibility simply unthinkable. She knew then that she would either have or lose both, and it made the present so frighteningly fragile, so balanced on a fine edge, that maybe even then she felt the lie beginning to form inside her before it even needed to be told.

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Eleven months later Kara was dragging her legs, pale and bare in shorts under an oversized old shirt, up the cold stairs to answer the door at her apartment in reply to the slow but steady knocks: One two three, long pause and a four five just before her hand got to the handle.

It was not five hours ago that it had happened but here was Lee. Fleet jacket undone, eyes connecting with hers all too quickly and with distant concern, almost enough of it to mask his own bottled agony.

She blinked, wiping her forehead tiredly. "What are you doing here?"

He concentrated on her door frame for the moment instead of meeting her eyes. "You just hung up before on the phone. I...I thought that I should come see you."

She pressed her lips tighter together, then mumbled, "Well, I'm not passed out on the floor or anything, as you can see." She walked back down her stairs with the quiet slap of her bare feet, giving him clearance to hesitantly follow her in.

It was the death that made them accustomed for what they'd get later, made them able to grip the wheel harder instead of letting everything fly out of place. But for now they were not used to it, and the ongoing quiet that filled Kara's apartment then was a roaring free-fall of two lost bodies with nowhere to land. Lee did a lot of crying; it shouldn't have taken her by surprise but the small noise of it made her unable to forget the absolute helplessness that had descended so suddenly and absolutely. Kara felt herself gutted and stifled watching it as she sat in her one chair at her tiny excuse for a kitchen table and he just sat on the floor leaning against it. She must have seemed like a limp phantom of herself, sitting with her hands flat and motionless on her lap; there were some smudges of paint on them and she felt sure that somebody else had put them there.

Finally she asked with a flat voice, "Did you talk to your father?"

"No." He took a moment to say anything else. "I told Mom. She said she'd give him the call."

She maybe wanted to say something else on that but didn't. She started to wonder how long she'd been sitting in this chair with a hollowing head, her body turning pained and weak and empty. Then she said, "Have you eaten?"

"...No. Not since."

"Hungry?"

"No."

"I haven't got anything anyway."

He scoffed. "What's in the fridge?"

Her head slowly rocked over in the direction of the short red refrigerator in the corner close to the stairs. "Well." She walked over there and opened the door. The ring on her finger clinked against the glass before she took out and raised up the bottle in a loose offering.

The rest of the night was alcohol. First tinking into glasses, then lips straight to the mouth of the bottle going back and forth. They paced separately around the apartment when they weren't sitting down, one of them always circulating back to the other to clutch for the glass neck, commencing to spin apart as the night thickened outside the window and was blotted with slurred comments and stories that weren't and would never be funny again; the loss carved the sense and point out of every word, audibly. Have a drink for every time you hear an echo of his laughter as a kid; one drink every time you knock something over and the thud or crash just isn't loud enough to match the meaning that he is nobody, nowhere. One drink for trying not to think about what the body must look like, one drink for remembering how his hair smelled after a day of good sweat. One more.

In her memory of that young pain, the blurred hours would play out like some sick race to see who would betray him first. The way it really was, there were faces streaked raw with all the crying, both of them groaning or pleading to no one in particular like all of the hurt became gathered hoarsely in their very throats and had to be coughed out.

When her voice was almost gone her moroseness fell flat to a twice repeated murmur of "I killed him," and that was when it must have occurred to Lee through that wall that she was scaring him. She kept tightening in, pulling her arms up to grasp roughly at her hair, and at one point this caught his attention and then those limbs seemed to pull him right in by puppet strings until he was just walking her into the kitchen wall like they could press right through it. Her legs were stiffly bending as the rest of her failed to keep her up and then found his body between them, because he was kissing her. The warmth of it, the very fact of their exchanging breath, was jolting against everything else she felt. They were slipping and collapsing a little farther down to the floor, surrendering to whatever their skin had started. She let it happen and let it happen, needing beyond need to be covered by somebody she at least knew the smell of, yes, knew a little better than she should; when his lips left her mouth and traveled with a faint quiver down her jawline, she was shaking because she didn't want it and shaking because she wanted it.

In the end she herself couldn't stop it: she was holding him tightly to her and at the same time the words somehow landed into, "Stop. Please stop, please stop please stop, please..." He disconnected with a sharp breath and weakly let his head fall down where he would hear the frantic beating under her collarbone, so tangled over her he couldn't move. It was like she couldn't even breathe with them lying against the wall like this and she bit her lip and shoved him by one shoulder away from her. Something about the motion caused a glass to teeter off the little table.

Through a muddled fog she heard it shatter; feeling her whole body tensing back in on itself as she shuffled over on her knees, it was like some senseless expression of forgiveness that she tried to unclench her hands enough to pick up the shards. In a second Lee was down next to her, holding her wrists and mumbling what was probably an incoherent attempt to warn her that she would cut her hands.

He then half-pulled, half-carried her to her bed.

She might have clutched to him with such dizzy, unconscious insistence that he felt asked to stay next to her after her body rolled down onto the mattress; in any case he fell sitting into the small space she left at the head, her arms sprawled awkwardly next to her body while his hands rubbed along her back like they just needed something to do. She saw a dead countenance of his face in the flicker of him she could see before she closed her eyes, and she could never be sure what happened after. With his mind on the other side of the room and unable to catch onto sense in the drunken dark and the need for sleep, he eventually must have laid his body down next to hers.

Collapsed into a bunched coil of heavy limbs, all backwards and warm, she could only know that they wound up this way until the late morning.

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"Kara."

With her eyes already widened slightly with the realization of Lee's arms wound close around her, Kara's head slowly lifted and her shoulders tilted back enough to meet his searching eyes. That moment, coupled with the quick and harsh realization of that terrible yesterday, made her suddenly freeze up, seized all at once by miserable fear of the day she was about to face. In that suddenly inflicting desperation, she didn't want Lee to move.

She couldn't explain it, not to him or herself, but right then she felt like nobody was ever going to touch her again. She understood in a deep fumbling grief and guilt the impending slipping away of everything she had built in and around Zak Adama, and she knew how pitiful she was for attempting to grasp what was temporarily left instead of accepting the reality of it. She'd never been good enough for her own family and obviously didn't deserve this one, and even if she did she'd probably find a way to screw it up all over again, every time.

Lee mistook the quiet panic in her eyes and just said, again in that low rung-out voice, a flat "Sorry," promptly unraveled himself from her body and rolled off the futon, staying on the floor where he landed on his back to rub his hands over his eyes. Left to the cold of the room, Kara rolled in on her chest. She slowly clutched, almost white-knuckled, at a handful of the blankets as half of her face was buried into them.

When Lee's gaze met this sad ferocity he saw not just someone reeling desperately with aloneness, but a numb dismissal. She lay there still as Lee got up and retrieved his jacket from the sofa. After he put it on, he came to stand over her for a moment. From the way she was lying she couldn't tell: if he was waiting for her to say something, if he was trying to think of something to say.

When he stepped back and headed for the stairs, his departure felt cold and fast. She rolled over to face the wall. Every sound seemed to ache in her senses, and she heard with unusual sensitivity how, after his hand only brushed the handle of her front door, he paused. She could not imagine what he looked like if he turned to look down the stairs, at her, before he finally left the apartment and shut the door behind him. She only heard a breath like the deepest, slowest sigh, and the sound empathetically unlocked her to a fresh dose of blunt pain. She lay on the futon and let it gut her with a knife, for a while. Somehow she got out of bed.

Kara didn't speak to another soul for that entire day; the next morning, the vendor working at the slushy stand where she always picked up a newspaper furrowed her brow in surprise when she walked by without a word, only a tired blank look. Reporting to the job with a feeling of something lodged in her chest, it didn't take long to hear a couple conversations fly about the young cadet who got killed. Nobody knew what it all meant to her.

Then a few hours after she was done overseeing the warm-ups, one officer remarked to her with confusion that he could swear he'd just seen Commander Adama out near the lots. One of the other flight instructors didn't believe him; Kara did, suspecting his reason for being there with a slight twist of nervousness in her stomach.

When the face from a couple pictures she'd seen emerged from a small crowd during an instinctive glance over her shoulder, Kara turned, fixing her posture, to salute William Adama as he did, after all, come right up to her.

"Sir." Her voice was coarse at first, somehow still sore from being scratched dull the night before, but she was trying to forget about that. She wasn't sure she could be that person with Commander Adama standing right in front of her. But she noticed right away that Zak's father appeared deceivingly put-together, not like he was a grieving disaster waiting to snap. She could tell all of his pain was probably a rumbling storm kept deep under the surface. That strength was immediately and unexpectedly comforting.

When Adama asked, "Are you Lieutenant Thrace?" Kara felt like there was a ground under her feet again. She would have expected that in this moment she'd be newly wracked with guilt, that she might not be able to keep from cracking right open. Instead of that fear of facing herself that had made her temporarily resolve not to go to the funeral just to be away from as many faces as possible, a kind of gruff sympathy in Bill Adama's eyes made her feel a little more held together.

They'd talked for over half an hour when he offered her a ride to the funeral, probably just for the sake of not going alone, and the next morning she was in the passenger seat of his sedan, the two of them silent as she numbly watched the scenery out of the window.

If she could say honestly, she thought the whole ritual of military funerals was kind of a perverted show, especially this one. The last thing she wanted to get formally suited up for was to watch a big box go in the ground that contained what had once been a good-humored kid who probably never should've been her first big hope. She almost dryly felt like she was entitled to the kind of lacy morose number that Carolanne showed up in, her face half-obscured by the elegant hat and the mouth so tense and pale that Kara wasn't surprised that she stayed by Lee's side after they came in together and offered no willingness to speak to anyone. She'd met Kara once before but had seemed too doting on Zak and how he'd met her and felt about her to really notice the actual girlfriend sitting there at all, and it should have been easy enough to assume that without her son's feelings even in existence anymore she'd hardly be wondering about Kara.

The old man stayed by Kara's side up until they buried Zak, having not yet talked with Lee at all when the living son stood with his mother on the opposite side of the casket. As if Bill Adama could sense the growing feeling that she had nothing else to hold onto after this, his hand unhesitantly clutched hers when she started to flinch into tears and lose her resolve.

It wasn't until a moment into the volley shots, the cold irony of the only time Lee ever saluted his little brother, that his eyes met Kara's, her glance quivering under her rigid palm. In the center of the perfectly solid salute that she and Zak had always joked made Lee a picture-perfect candidate for a recruiting poster, his eyes looked somehow both nakedly exposed and shut down into impenetrable depths. Whatever he'd gone through or done since Kara had last seen him, he had no tears left. She felt the same weathering at the edges of herself, but it wasn't quite the same as what she saw in Lee that made her hesitate to go up and talk to him that day.

There was a reception, dinner, whatever it was, under a big tent awning. A reason to keep the soldiers itching in their uniforms and keep their postures straight for an hour longer. If Kara hadn't already known, it would have taken her no time at all to tell that Zak and Lee's mother was an alcoholic by the certain way her fingers pressed around the flute, like she was hanging on for gravity one sip at a time. Kara was trying to keep it together at least for the rest of the evening, but it didn't take her long to envy the fix.

Kara kept talking to the man she couldn't help referring to in her mind as just "Adama." His reputation preceded him in a way so less attainable than the simplicity of her relation to his sons, and she found it hard to imagine quite yet that he was really the father of either of them, even with how different the two brothers were. Opposite sides of a coin, but a totally different currency from William Adama.

The connection materialized for her, and forever stuck, when Adama mentioned Lee for the first time that day—His son's name lifted out of his mouth in a different color, a vaguely fatherly half-second drift in his voice. It was a rather sudden change of topic to be asked how well she got along with Lee, and a question she wasn't really sure how to answer right then. Automatically her gaze traveled with some trepidation to where she thought Lee was sitting, and there he was stooped over with his arms bunched under the table from the elbows down, head lowered away from all the noise. Even from some ten yards away she could see his jaw clenching. She felt something sink lower in her chest as she looked back at the commander.

It might have partly answered the question when Kara managed to drop her respectfully formal tone to say quietly, "I think you should talk to him."

At that moment they were being approached by Taylor Senesca, a pilot Kara had had in the same class as Zak. When Adama noted the recognition, he excused himself before Senesca came up and greeted Kara with a sad smile and a salute. Immediately feeling newly swamped with guilt, she had to wonder again why all that had been more alleviated around Zak's father.

For a few minutes she went with a pretty empty conversation of catching up about the last time Taylor had hung out with Zak, paying no attention to the rest of the crowd. The amount of people conversing created enough buzzing noise to drown out any individual voices, but as soon as Senesca got around to wishing her well, Kara's ear was momentarily picking up the low hiss of a very familiar voice from all the way across the tent. She lost that little wavelength of Lee's speech, but immediately glanced to its source.

With Adama's back turned to her, he was facing what Kara could see was a bluntly infuriated Lee; without hearing the words coming out of his mouth, she could tell what kind of anger it was, all of his frail emotions burned into a shape of bitterness and maybe blame.

Eventually Lee seemed to have cut forward his last word. He was stopped only shortly from walking away from his father, who from what she could see had been suddenly spurred forward into a firmer protest, one that only made Lee flare like an agitated animal before flicking his eyes away from Adama and beginning to head rapidly out towards the lot.

Bill Adama turned back towards the table and his eyes immediately found Kara. She looked downward and turned to the side, politely, then after seeing the curious and concerned expression of Taylor and a couple others who had passively noticed the scene, thought better of minding her own business. Turning about swiftly, she walked in quick strides out from under the awning.

She started running after the easy pinpoint of Lee, whose solitary figure was descending away in the background of crisp grass that softened the sound of her approach. Instead of calling after him, she just closed in on his back and finally lightly grabbed his arm.

Lee started and tore his arm back before he turned to see her, and his face went from a defensive glare to blankly surprised. He blinked, collected himself a little and looked her face up and down; she waited for him to say something but only received vacant acknowledgment. It felt almost like he'd forgotten who she was.

She squinted at him in speculation for a moment before she finally spoke. "Look, if you think I'm mad at you or something, I'm not."

"...I didn't think that. I was just..." Lee's voice was too inexpressive to be cross or sensitive, though his voice fell a bit softer to add, "I'm sorry."

For a second she almost grasped him again by the arm, but she couldn't trust herself to communicate the right thing.

"Um..." She started to explain slowly, "I don't know if you've figured this out already, but I'm backing out of teaching next term, at the Academy...I'm probably actually never instructing there again."

That made his brows lower in some confusion, but instead of explaining her resignation in any detail, she just went on. "Your father says he'd be happy to set me up on his ship...you know, as long as I'm as good as everybody says."

In the next second Lee looked away, his eyes going behind her back to the reception, and then his face turned back to her contorted into a sour warning. "Right. He always likes a soldier as good as him."

Ordinarily she'd be thoroughly irritated by his unwieldiness, but it seemed like there was too much at stake. "Look. I know you won't like the idea, but...maybe you could request a position up there too. A change of scenery might make it a little easier on both of us."

"Galactica?" Lee almost snickered in disbelief. When she didn't lose her look of resolve, he asked, "What am I gonna do on Galactica?"

Her voice was faintly desperate underneath the bitter flatness. "Fly birds...Be with your father." Lee just looked absolutely lost as to why she was even bothering to suggest this. Her teeth clenched nervously before she offered, "Be my friend?"

Lee sighed with frustration and looked down at the ground before declaring, "The last thing I'm ever going to do is put myself under the command of my father, and his bullshit. Okay?—that bullshit that very possibly got my brother blown in pieces—"

"—Lee," she exclaimed in frustration. "What did you just say to him?"

He looked down, seething slightly and pretty much confirming the worst.

At that moment Kara finally understood the thing Zak had told her about Lee before they'd ever met, which now seemed like it had been a hauntingly fitting warning. She'd come to understand a bit more about all that before, but only in the ways that she could fit into the most comforting relatable compartments, and with Zak dead now all those things she thought he wouldn't understand about her seemed totally trivial, and maybe she needed a good slam in the head for all the things she'd shared with Lee instead. They had all been so messed up in their own non-packaged circuitous ways and she could only feel that now, could only feel the meaninglessness of all the reflexive mistrust, now that three had become two.

So what if Lee was being the world's biggest bastard for thinking his pain outweighed his father's; it made her want to punch him, but so what? He would always be a part of her as tightly as her own blood, even if he'd forgotten all about her in a few years. She'd gotten into that when she had the chance not to and she couldn't change it any more than she could wind the days back and fail Zak, any more than she could be forgiven by Lee because she could not ever have him know what there was to forgive. She didn't know what to do with such an empty always, and the desolation spread cold again in her body just like it had when he'd started to pull himself away from her after they woke up together, the feeling worse now for the barrier pulled down more thoroughly between them.

Kara's hands were balled into fists, and her voice came out angry but a little floundering. "You have to go back over there. You don't understand the mistake you're making."

Lee took in a harsh breath. "Is it really any of your business?"

"Lee. Frakking pull yourself together, are you even thinking about how hard this—"

"Kara, drop it," Lee snapped with such suddenly directed agitation that she flinched back a little. "Let off, okay? It's not like he's your frakking dad."

As soon as it left his mouth his expression clouded with immediate restraint, maybe regret; suddenly a tremor of anger went through her body because she was starting to feel so profoundly foolish. Lee's mouth opened and he took a step forward, but her expression barred his fumbling approach.

He knew exactly what was happening. All she abruptly said was, "Goodbye, Lee" before she quickly turned, started walking. Didn't stop until her hand cupped around a glass of something, till she felt the burn start at the top of her throat.

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Even though getting used to the absence of the man Kara thought she was going to marry was one of those undesirable inevitabilities that she could feel slowly gathering like rust, working on Galactica was everything she needed it to be: a new place without a thumbprint of the last couple years of her life and one that kept her too busy for her to have much time to think. She did sometimes force herself to remember what had happened every time she got in a Viper, determined to take more careful responsibility in her job with an attitude that she should never feel like she was done proving herself for it. It was the best she could do about her guilt for the time.

For the first couple days her sadness made her come off as pretty unsociable, and in a way she knew all too well from being on the other side, acting that way in the military was bait for boredom. In a more playful than mean way, she got teased like the new kid at school from right and left with jibes she would usually laugh at and maybe have some witty comebacks for if she didn't just feel like being left alone to focus on her work. It would probably shut them up if she managed to let it slip into a conversation that she'd been more than acquainted with the commander's son everybody was talking about, but she'd hate their polite sympathy just the same.

It was tempting to revert back to her childish modes of defense, to make trouble to prove she wasn't in the mood to be bullied, but she was making an honest effort to set up a good early impression, even though respecting anybody like she respected the commander was sort of new to her. She gave him frequent salutes in the corridors and got just slightly nervous whenever he came into the ready room in the morning. She didn't know why.

Eventually it was not really on purpose that her flying skills got her noticed by her peers. When the commander sent out an unusually large group to do a borishly long CAP that would also function to work out any kinks there might be with the new Mark VII's, she got a mutter over the comm from Jolly, who'd never seen her fly before, conversationally complimenting how gracefully she handled the bird.

"I'm still getting the hang of this and you're flying like you've been in that cockpit for a year."

Ripper decided to kill some time by having a couple pilots practice speed-changing maneuvers at a more low-key environment than regular training, eventually sparking a conversation that led up to him remarking, "Of course a really good way to practice the adjustment is to try thrusting in a stencil around Galactica's middle without getting more than about a yard away from the walls..." That provoked several grim murmurs at the difficulty before he added, "Of course, it's a really bad idea if you're not good at it..."

Kara had unconsciously turned the nose of her Viper to examine Galacticaas he described this; next to her, Jolly laughed and tipped one of his wings in her direction, saying, "What about this one?"

Out next to the cluster that had just been testing their brakes, Nuke indifferently muttered, "What about her?"

"I could do it," Kara confirmed neutrally.

"No," somebody else said, laughing. "You couldn't." Many other slightly nervous snickers were heard on the comm link. They were sympathetic. Most of them thought she was about to humiliate herself.

Kara said, "Ripper?"

"No. Hell, no."

"Come on. If I get a little scratch on the bucket it can come out of my paycheck."

Laughing more heartily now, Nuke said, "Please. Oh, please, let her try."

Ripper considered it for half a moment, and then said, "Jolly, you go head to port so you can judge her distance. And who wants to time this?"

Kara positioned herself and waited for Ripper to shout, "TIME!"—A few carefully timed lilts and thrusts and brakes later, he repeated the command, and Kara heard a congratulatory "five-point"—something that was interrupted by a multitude of exclamations from the five other pilots, one of the first distinguishable comments being an astonished "Who isthis girl?!"

Later in the rec room a number of people were newly interested in her, though there were a couple who had become freshly annoyed, having observed her demeanor as arrogant. After several shots of liquor, she did little to improve this opinion: As Nuke put forth little effort to keep his voice from traveling, she picked up: "—pulled that kind of stunt if she hadn't come on this ship already a favorite of the old man's." A more aware part of her was distantly surprised at how her long-sedated self-control split with a crack. She tapped him on the shoulder and his head turned to receive a drowsy blow to the jaw. Ripper confined her to her quarters for the evening. Her good and bad reputations solidified all in one day.

When the commander asked her into his office a couple days later, a sinking anticipation quickly wound up her nerves, and she found herself standing in front of his desk waiting uneasily for him to bring up what had happened. But after looking him over for a couple seconds, she realized he mostly looked tired. For the first time since coming aboard Galactica, she fully held the thought that Zak wasn't safe down on Caprica; they had not taken a break for professional reasons. He was gone.

"What do you hear, Starbuck?" Adama said this absently, flipping through a stack of files on his desk.

She cleared her throat. "Sir?" The commander reached for his glasses, and she muttered, "Nothing to report. I guess."

He blinked at her, realizing she didn't know the question was informal. He gave a "nevermind" kind of gesture, a one-note chuckle at himself. He then leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms, figuring out what it was he was meaning to say. He finally hoarsely asked, "How are you doing?"

Kara's eyes widened just a hair. "I'm. Better." She nodded a little, letting her hands rest anxiously at her hips. "Um. How..." Her eyes narrowed, meeting his in an understanding of how it would sound a little stupid to ask him the same thing. He acknowledged it with a sigh.

"Why don't you sit down."

They drank an expensive malt and they did not talk about Zak, but they talked. It all went easy enough that Kara didn't even think about the disciplinary reason she thought she'd been called into the office until he made a comment about it in light humor. Slowly, she understood that this is how fathers talk to sons or daughters. The old man didn't even bother much with topics not related to the job, though if his interest was piqued, he'd ask things about her past, briefly. Maybe he detected that talking about where she'd come from was not something that excited her. Maybe he just liked to pretend they'd already known each other for years and years. She thought both by the time she put down her glass with the defined click of a motion that went with the final swallow. He gave her a final firm suggestion about taking out her problems on a punching bag, and she nodded. As she got up to go back to work, she wished she didn't have to, weighed down by the fact that she was leaving a man to his mourning, and herself to her own.

In a way, though, she did the bulk of her grieving in that office. Over time everyone understood why Kara spent a good hour per week in the commander's quarters, and probably imagined the conversations were a lot different than they were. They were absolutely personal, but not without a trace of formality that was somehow comforting to both of them. The first tears Kara ever cried on that ship were strangely accompanied by hysterical laughter in a rare moment that Adama actually rummaged up a good story from when his sons visited him.

Over time the long talks happened less, but when she went into that office she would always recognize the smoky-leathery smell of it as being part of home.

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Kara was in a slightly lousier mood than everyone else when it got closer and closer to Galactica's retirement, even though the old man had made it clear to her by then that he was intending to keep a close eye on her "whether she liked it or not." One morning when she was finishing up her daily run, Chief and Helo flagged her into the hangar deck, eager to give her a peak at the Mark 1 they were still figuring out how to put back together as a surprise for Adama.

"Lords," she muttered with a grimace, scrutinizing the technicalities a little too much to be very impressed with the find. "I mean, good luck. But how are you ever going to find—oh..."

Her cynicism had turned to an excited smile as Chief presented a collection of parts that could practically be used to build a whole new viper.

"How the hell...? How long have you been working on this?"

"Did you show her the picture?" Helo was asking Chief.

The framed photo had been hidden on the top shelf of the dusty parts locker and wrapped in a soft cloth, and everyone who'd seen it knew where it was, adding a level of collectivity to the gift. Kara was still one of the first to see it; Helo brought it out and handed it to her and she slid the fabric off while they hid slightly behind one of the birds. The black-and-white slightly grainy picture was uncovered for a couple seconds before it sifted into her comprehension; she put her hand at her mouth.

Every once in a while she remembered a conversation she'd overheard on a bus a long time ago from some students, about some philosopher's theory that the very purest possible love, one that would drive all the usual social and intimate problems into the realm of obscure triviality, would be between the two very last people left alive after the end of the world, and that the bigger the world and the more people there were, the more difficult relationships got. At least she'd gotten the gist of it that way.

Here was and had always been Kara Thrace, with twelve big planets full of people and possibility, and she'd always plummeted instinctively to wherever she could find these people she did not really belong with, these people she knew like something heavy in her hand, clinging to a name she once thought would be hers. And with no promise of permanence, no complete acceptance. She'd embraced her life on Galactica with no plan at all of where to go if it eventually fell through, not bothering to hide how she was attached to the old man and counting on the very occasional story he told her about Lee to feel like she still knew him. She considered herself something of a stray, brought in from the rain and then kindly kept inside; fed and loved, but somehow always an imposition.

But now she was looking at an old photo of William Adama in some rare occasion with his two sons, who were both in different ways lost to him now, and it occurred to her that maybe things had always been a lot less complicated than her head had made them out to be. Maybe the trouble she caused was part of the reason she belonged with this thing that after all was not whole, was stretched so far thin that it could no longer resemble a family in the way it should, and in the end she sure as hell hadn't stuck with anyone named Adama because it had felt like the easy thing to do. A part of her had wanted to punish herself by lingering and being reminded of her most unforgivable fault every time she looked into William Adama's eyes. But she was like an undercover who'd gone native; the gradual accident was that the punishment was somehow also the cure. And that, her mind tersely concluded, was why it still hurt.

Standing next to Helo and the Viper, the new sting of loss shook her so badly that the photo almost fell right out of her hand before she registered the sob that wanted badly to come out. Helo immediately held her by the shoulders enough to push her farther back behind the nose of the bird with a gentle "Hey, hey, hey" and the kind of big-brotherly hug he sensed she needed.

He was obviously a little taken aback; it had been a long time since she'd been all that fragile about the subject. She breathed shortly, sounding almost apologetic as she managed to groan a sniffling, "I miss him, Karl."

"I know. I know."

She couldn't be sure what Helo assumed when she said "him," and in truth he was probably wrong. Because she was not talking about Zak, and she was not talking about Lee. She was talking about both of them.

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Over the years Lee had become almost nothing to her but a memory of a feeble strangle of his voice from the day he'd forced the fresh bad news through the phone wires across town, her recollection of their messy grieving that night often jumped over like something that could burn her. And then there was the endless feeling of rolling over in bed to reach for warmth and finding the course of her life missing, blacked out. Somehow she had felt this not just about Zak, even though it was only from one reckless accident that she knew what it felt like to lay in Lee's arms.

She saw Lee Adama once the day the whole world exploded, and then he died. And then he didn't. And then he had a hand that was pulling her up off the floor and for the moment Kara could not take her eyes off of him because just for now, the gods had plucked a soul out of the ether and planted him before her, safe, and she was just going to take it. She wasn't going to wonder why she deserved it or be ashamed of the particular way in which she had missed him.

It was a terrible thing to want him, as if it turned every body back on their burning colonies into his brother. It was her guilt and her burden, but just for a moment, just for as long as his hand could fit so well against hers, it was also a gift.