6/15/14: Edited from the original, which I thought was, well, a little harder to understand.
When the war wound down, Kel began to notice that some things actually got a little harder. Particularly when she was around Dom.
When she was around Dom, Kel noticed that it became a little harder for her to breathe. A little harder for her to keep her Yamani mask in place. A little harder for them to keep from letting a touch linger longer than necessary in public. A little harder (though she'd been adept at it all her life) to stifle the occasional giggle fit. A little harder to hide a part of themselves, because that's what they were to each other.
But these new "difficulties" were what made it a little easier to live with the things that never got easier. Loss. She didn't mind that Dom was the first to see her at her most vulnerable, when a skirmish near New Hope killed five of her townspeople under her watch. He was there to commiserate with her, to lend her spoken and unspoken comfort through his shared knowledge of the burden of command. When her frustration and private despair destroyed one of her precious Yamani cats, he held her as she crumpled—her walls crumpled until they were as if they never existed—before his eyes. After that, which really was her first true cry over the war without inhibition, the shoulders on which she bore command grew stronger, though the burden never lightened.
Kel was only one person, but it was Dom who treasured, loved, respected, and enjoyed every aspect of how singularly she had the ability to change countless other people. Whenever Kel blamed herself for not being able to help enough of them, instead of arguing Dom conceded that she was right, but always shot back with a sad but hopeful grin and a "But does it, or should it, stop you from trying, Protector?" that was decidedly Dom.
So, eventually, Kel realized that the romantic schoolgirl in her with the butterflies in her stomach made maintaining a Yamani expression a little harder. She also dreaded the changes she would see, coming home, at the end of the war. Friends, family. All changed irrevocably by the destruction and the heartbreak. But one change she would face with a smile was that she wouldn't return to unrequited love, this time. By the end of the Scanran War, she had Dom waiting for her, and that made coming home more than a little easier.