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Disclaimer: I don't own anything to do with Battlestar Galactica.

Commander William "Husker" Adama liked to walk the corridors of his battlestar at night. The feel of the sturdy metal beneath his feet, the reassuring thrum of the ship's engines, the chatter of the night crew as they went about their business--all combined to make him feel at home. He was more comfortable here than he ever had been planetside. The Galactica wasn't the nicest or most up-to-date ship in the fleet—in fact, it was the most old-fashioned—but it was a well-put-together ship, and one he knew he could rely on in a time of need.

It had been an exhausting day. The Galactica had pulled into orbit around Picon for an annual check-up, and while it had been there the Admiral had cruelly decided to subject Adama and his crew to visits by a few high schools. Apparently the fleet's recruitment had not been as good the past few years as they would have liked, and allowing children onto a battlestar was a new form of advertising. Adama had put up with it with fairly good humor—he thought—although having rowdy teenagers underfoot all day had not been his idea of a good time. Fortunately the intruders were now gone and the fleet was three FTL jumps away from Picon and he could go back to pretending that the Galactica was a weapon of war and not a museum piece, whatever some of the higher ups might have thought.

He passed by a storage closet and stopped at the sound of strange noises coming from inside. He stared at the doors in trepidation, trying not to imagine the kinds of things a bunch of kids could have left on his ship. A wild arglemyre, from Sagittarius? A fendelplank from Caprica? Worse, a mean cat from Picon? He thought back to his own childhood and shuddered to remember his ingenuity at the time.

He reached out hesitantly and grasped the handle of the closet, turning it and listening to the click of its latch as it swung open. He looked inside. And stared. Two piercing blue-green eyes glared up at him defiantly. The owner of the eyes happened to be a young girl—perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old.

"What the fr—" he cut himself off, mindful of his language. He knelt next to her, pulling a knife from his boot—glad for once that he still insisted on arming himself like a soldier rather than a has-been—and using it to slice apart the rope binding her feet. He moved to do the same thing to the rope tying her wrists together, but paused when he realized that she had nearly gotten herself untied, rubbing the rope against the sharp edge of a shelf until it frayed. Her wrists were speckled with blood from where the rope had chafed her skin. He cut the rope with his knife, then watched as she scrambled back from him, reaching up to untie the sock that had been used to gag her, wincing only slightly as the blood began to flow back into her limbs.

She rubbed her arms as she stared at him, her expression a mixture of fear and anger.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, then could have kicked himself for his stupidity. "What happened to you?" he amended.

"Some kids from my class," she muttered. "Couldn't take me one on one, so they waited till today to gang up. Fraking cowards."

He winced at that kind of language from a young teenager.

"Why would they have done that?"

She blinked at him as though that were a particularly stupid question. "Kids are stupid," she said. "I guess they thought it'd be funny…" She grinned suddenly, maliciously. "We'll see how funny they think it is, when none of them can sit for a week!"

He tried not to think about the implications of that statement. "Well, let's get you out of here and to CIC so we can try to work out a way to get you back home," he said instead, offering her a hand up as he rose.

She glared at the proffered hand suspiciously, then pushed herself up to her feet, wavering a little unsteadily before becoming stable. "I don't even know who you are," she pointed out brashly, hands on her hips. "How do I know I should go anywhere with you?"

He quirked a smile. This girl was a real firecracker—much more interesting than most teenagers he knew, his own sons included. He gestured to the pins on his shoulders. "See these? These show that I'm—"

"A commander," she interrupted, her expression taking on a keen-eyed look of interest. She stalked toward him in a rather predatory manner considering she was just a young girl, stopping only a few feet away. Now there was an expression he recognized—hero worship. "You're Commander Adama?"

"I am. And you are?"

She hesitated, as if wondering whether to trust him, even knowing his identity. "Kara Thrace."

"Well, Kara Thrace, I don't know about you, but it's just about my bed time," he said, making a show of exaggerating how tired he was. She seemed confused as she watched him, and he realized that she was too old to be talked down to. He was reminded how long it'd been since he'd last seen his sons—they were both around her age. "Like I said let's head over to the CIC so we can call your parents and get this sorted out."

She paled, so suddenly and dramatically that he wondered what he'd said wrong. "Do you have to call my mom?" she asked, for the first time sounding fragile. "It's just…I don't want to bother her."

Adama frowned. "I certainly do need to call your mother, Kara. We need to arrange to get you back home. We're in deep space right now, but a couple of jumps can take us back soon enough."

"Don't do that!" she exclaimed urgently. "I don't want anything to get messed up because of me. Just—pretend I'm not here, and drop me off the next time you're on Picon."

"A year from now?" he asked dryly, prepared to see surprise on her face. What he was not prepared for was her immediate agreement.

"A year, yes! That sounds great."

"Kara, the Galactica is not a high school. It's not a daycare. It's a battlestar, designed to go into war. I'm afraid there's just no place for you here."

"Please." The urgency in her voice kept him from dismissing her out of hand. It prompted him to look more closely at her—at her thin face and big eyes, at the sleeves that came down to hang over her hands, at her complete lack of laugh lines.

"Do you have…a reason for not wanting to return home?" he asked cautiously. Of all people on the battlestar—except maybe Saul Tigh—he had to be the least qualified for this conversation.

She couldn't seem to make up her mind whether to nod or to shake her head. She just pleaded with him with those eyes of hers.

He turned over this problem in his mind. On the one hand, he had been quite right in telling her that the Galactica was not equipped to act as a refuge for children. On the other hand, as a father and a decent person he could hardly turn his back on a child in need.

"You can't stay here for a year, Kara," he told her softly. "I'm quite sure that wouldn't be allowed. A few days, though…"

The way her expression lit up almost made the thought of the hassles he had just brought down on himself not so intimidating.

Kara Thrace pinched herself, hard, just to make sure she wasn't dreaming. The pain radiating out from a bruise on her arm told her that this wasn't a dream—that somehow something that was far too good to be true had actually happened to her.

She was sitting on a bunk in the viper pilot's bunkroom. Commander Adama had explained to her that although he would have liked to have put her in a private room the battlestar was very conservative in its use of space, and he had given her the choice of bunking with the viper pilots or deck crew. He had smiled when he heard her decision—a friendly, open smile the likes of which had never been directed at her before. She still didn't trust him, not really—couldn't trust an adult, no matter how nice he seemed—but she did like him.

The viper pilots bustled about her, and she stared at them in awe. There were men and women—mostly men—all in various states of undress, all joking and teasing each other as they readied themselves for the day ahead. They had taken the intrusion of a strange girl into their realm very well—had barely noticed her presence—and now acted as if she didn't exist, which was exactly as she wanted it.

She was just beginning to wonder what she was supposed to do with herself when one of the CIC crew she'd met last night poked her head through the door. "Kara, will you come with me please?"

Kara hopped off of the bunk, holding back a wince as she landed a little badly on her mostly-healed sprained ankle, then hurried over to the woman. "Good morning, Lieutenant," she said awkwardly. Niceties didn't come easily to her, but she didn't want to make anyone on this battlestar unhappy with her.

"Good morning, Kara." The woman smiled, showing no sign of being annoyed to be forced to spend time with Kara rather than doing more important things. "The Commander asked me to show you to the mess hall, and then to ask whether there's any particular part of the ship where you'd like to spend your time."

Kara practically glowed, trotting alongside the woman to the mess, where she devoured the tasteless food quickly, too eager to explore the ship. She knew exactly where she wanted to go, too. "The hangar bay, please." Being a pilot would be beyond awesome, she knew, and she would seriously have considered trying the join the fleet, but she was going to be a kick-ass professional pyramid player—the star on the C-Bucs, if things worked out as she wanted—so this might be the closest she ever got to vipers.

The lieutenant smiled indulgently and led the way. Kara memorized the corridors as she went, wanting to be able to find her way back to the hangar on her own as many times as possible over the course of the next three weeks.

The hangar was everything she'd ever dreamed it would be. Vipers were everywhere, some of them flying out, some returning, some being repaired, some just sitting around waiting for someone like Kara Thrace to come fly them. The lieutenant left her there under the watch of a young deck crewman, Galen Tyrol, who patiently showed her a viper and let her watch as he tried to fix it up.

"Can I help?" she asked. He paused in his work, gazing up at her from under the viper as he thought.

"You think you can turn these bolts if I give you the tools?" he asked.

She was affronted. "Of course I can." She wasn't a sissy, not like the boys and girls at her school. She hopped off of her perch—she had been balanced on a piece of scrap metal—and strutted over to where he was working, taking the wrench he offered and using it to twist a bolt out of place. It was a good deal harder than it looked, but she kept her face bland as she forced it out and handed it to him. He kept his face expressionless, too, but she thought he was impressed. After that, he put her to work, and she threw herself into learning the ins and outs of the wonderful vipers as she worked the rest of the day.

"I see you've been keeping our young stowaway busy, Specialist," a gravelly voice said, and Kara almost hit her head in her haste to drag herself out from under the viper to greet the Commander.

"Sir!" she said, saluting him as she saw Tyrol was doing and as she had seen her mother do in the past.

He laughed. "At ease, Kara. You don't have to salute me." She might have blushed or bristled at his words, but the friendly expression on his face really just made her want to smile. She restrained herself, though. "I was just coming to see whether you wanted to join me for dinner."

She was sure her eyes were as wide as saucers, and she wished she wasn't acting so childishly. Still—to be invited to dinner with Commander Adama! She leapt to her feet, dropping her screwdriver into the toolkit and following the Commander out of the hangar. She could feel Tyrol watching them go, and turned to stick her tongue out at him as he grinned at her.

Adama's dining room was nice. Very nice. Much nicer, in fact, than anywhere she'd ever been before. Also joining them for dinner was Colonel Saul Tigh, whom Adama introduced as his right-hand man. She sensed instantly that the man didn't like her much; she had no difficulty returning the sentiment when she saw how much he drank over the course of dinner. Still, the meal was quite enjoyable; Adama kept the conversation light, asking Kara about her day and giving her the opportunity to rave about how wonderful it had been.

After dinner Adama invited her back to the CIC, and she spent the evening sitting in a corner and watching as the brains of the battlestar functioned. It was wonderful.

And that first day set the tone for most of her stay on the Galactica. She varied her time between the hangar bay and the viper pilots' briefing room, and occasionally spent a few hours reading piloting manuals that Adama indulgently loaned her, and spent every evening with the Commander, first with dinner and then the CIC. By the end of her first week she knew the schematics to the viper backwards and forwards and Tyrol boasted about her to the other deck crew as if he were a proud uncle. By the end of the second week she'd convinced one of the viper pilots to let her sit in his cockpit and to show her the controls and the four unities of flight: power, pitch, yaw, and roll.

There had been a few highlights that no one would forget. She had been in the mess having lunch with a group of young pilots—holding court over them, really, despite her youth—when one of them had mentioned that Adama had spent more time with her in the past week than he had with his sons in years. Kara had laughed, mostly out of surprise, and exclaimed, "The Commander's someone's old man? They don't know how lucky they are!" The others had laughed as well, but within a day the nickname—Old Man—had spread. When she heard Tigh call Adama that at one of their dinners, and saw the way the Old Man had smiled fondly in response, she'd known that she had achieved something.

Then there was the time she'd beaten Tigh at triad. She'd convinced Tyrol to spot her some cubits so she could play, and she proceeded to wipe the floor with her competitors. There was a bit of cheating involved, of course—that was half the fun—but she felt that if a group of old people couldn't tell that she was cheating they deserved to lose anyways. Tigh had gotten so upset he'd sworn and drunk and stormed out of the room.

And then there were the quieter moments, the moments that meant more to Kara than anything. Those were the times when she and Adama would sit in his quarters and just talk. She talked about not liking the people at her school; about her dreams of playing pyramid; about how much she was enjoying her time on the Galactica. He spoke of his time as a hotshot viper pilot; of his two sons, Lee and Zak, who were about her age. And once, just once, he mentioned that he regretted not having a daughter, and that he liked to imagine that if he had, she would be something like Kara. Neither of them had been able to cope with the emotion hidden behind that statement, and Kara had quickly changed the subject, but his words had stayed with her. After that talk, she could no longer fool herself—she trusted him implicitly.

By the end of the third week, everyone on the ship—save perhaps Colonel Tigh—wished that Kara would stay on the ship forever.

What had happened was this. One of the viper pilots was very young and very foolish and thought that Kara reminded him of his kid sister. He agreed to let her try to fly his viper. She could tell that he thought it was a bad idea from the outset—hell, she thought it was a bad idea, and she was the one who had suggested it—but she was hardly going to turn down this opportunity to act out one of her greatest desires, no matter the consequences.

It had been ridiculously easy for Kara to borrow an extra flight suit—although she was swamped even by their smallest sizes—and join the CAP. Galactica was always alert and ready for attack, but even the Old Man admitted that the likelihood of attack was almost nonexistent, and the pilots were not as alert as they might have been. Kara sat in the cockpit and screwed the helmet into her flight suit, whispering to herself all the time. "Power, pitch, yaw and roll. Power, pitch, yaw and roll. What the frak are you doing, Kara? You're going to get yourself killed." It was too late to talk herself out of it, though—or at least too late to get out of it without admitting what she was about to do and getting punished for it without having had any of the fun—so she focused her mind on the task before her and tried not to imagine getting blown into tiny bits.

Someone's voice started counting down and then her hands went to the controls and her heart started pounding in her ears and what was she kidding, this was the best idea ever, and then she was off!

In a second, her dreams of pyramid playing went out the window. Why would she ever want to play pyramid when she could do this for the rest of her life? She got control of the viper almost instantly, feeling like she was coming home even though the cockpit was large enough that she had to stretch to reach things. She did a loop just because she could, then fell into line with her leader. Fresco, the pilot whose viper she was flying, had told her that he and his wingman rarely spoke during CAP—they didn't get along for some reason—so she should be able to make it through the whole thing without being discovered—assuming she didn't do something stupid like blow herself up.

Most of the CAP went marvelously. She followed Fresco's instructions to the letter, finding that she didn't even have to think make the viper move this way, that way. She could do this, she could do that. If she wanted to, she could fly away and never look back—but why would she want to, when it would be to the Galactica that she would return? There was another pair of vipers out flying with them, and those vipers landed before she and Barebones were supposed to. It was as they were coming in to land that something went wrong.

"Galactica, Barebones." The man's voice was panicked. "Something's stuck! I can't slow down!"

Kara stared in horror as he accelerated towards the hangar, picking up speed as he went. She increased her own speed to keep up.

"Barebones, break off!" someone in CIC shouted urgently.

"Systems nonresponsive! Oh gods!"

There was nothing Barebones could do. There was nothing Galactica could do. Kara took a deep breath, came up with an insane plan, and zoomed ahead full speed, hurrying toward the hangar herself, before pulling into what should have been an impossible flip, flying back the way she had come—back at Barebones.

"Fresco, what the frak are you doing?" It was Adama's voice that came over the radio waves now, and Kara gulped at the sound. Better not to respond, she thought. Either she'd get this right and she could apologize later, or she'd miss, Barebones would crash full speed into the hangar, the hangar would go up in flames, and Adama would have far bigger problems to deal with.

She focused her attention on Barebones' viper. All vipers had one vulnerable spot—one place where, if struck properly, their systems would be deactivated completely. That place happened to be on the underbelly of the plane, an incredibly difficult if not impossible target to hit.

She was close to Barebones now, very close, and she could see his face and his shocked expression as he said, "Oh frak, Galactica, that's not Fresco…" but then she was diving under him, spinning as she did so, and she breathed a prayer as she fired a single shot at a single target, knowing that if she missed she would be killing him and possibly more people aboard the Galactica.

Barebones' engine cut out. He let out an incredulous cry of relief as his ship stopped accelerating, but that cry was cut short when he realized that he was not slowing down, either.

Kara blinked. "You've gotta be frakking kidding me," she muttered, taking off after the other viper again. "Alright, Kara, what's behind door number two?" she asked herself. He was coming in hot, too hot. At this speed, he wouldn't kill anyone else—probably—but he was toast. So she had to find a way to slow him down.

She didn't give herself time to think. Instead, she pulled in front of him again and began flying backwards, matching his speed and then gradually slowing, letting him pull closer and closer and then allowing him to bump up against her. The contact was more violent than she expected, and she cursed as she rocked back and then forward in the cockpit, refusing to let go of the controls. Her eyes locked with Barebones' as she continued to slow her own speed, slowing the other viper as well, pushing gradually so as not to cause either or both vipers to blow up.

"I thought you were going to be a C-Buc," Barebones stammered as he watched her fly them both in, a look of intense concentration on her face. She flashed him a brash, totally-Kara smile.

"I'm a star-Buc today," she told him. "Stay with me, Barebones. It's going to be okay. Galactica, we're coming in hot," she said. "Clear the hangar."

"The hangar is clear," the Old Man's voice came again. Was there fear in his voice? At least he seemed to sense that now was not a good time for a lecture. "Good luck, Starbuck."

She grinned at the call sign, then turned her attention back to the task at hand. She had managed to dramatically decrease their speed, but the two vipers were still coming in faster than she'd have liked. She glanced back, toward the fast approaching hangar. "Hand on, Barebones. It's going to be a rough landing."

"Roger that, Starbuck," he replied, and though his face was terrified it was also resolved. "I'm with you."

She held onto the controls tightly and saw him do the same. Their eyes met. And then they landed.

The landing went off better than they might have feared. The two vipers careened across the hangar in a screech of scorching metal and the clang of tools and things falling and hitting each other, and eventually crashed into the opposite wall, hard enough to batter both pilots about in their cockpits. There was a moment of silence when the crash was over, and then a sudden flurry of shouts and orders as the people in the hangar hurried to get the two pilots out.

They pulled Barebones out first because he was closest, and although he was a bit scraped up he had no serious injuries. He sat on the floor of the hangar, a little dazed, as someone ran off to get him water. They had more difficulty getting Kara out because the latch to her cockpit was shoved against the wall, but they managed to get the hinges on the other side undone. She wasn't exactly sure what had happened because she wavered in and out of consciousness, watching the action around her as if in a dream.

She woke up, though, when at last the top of the cockpit was pulled off and there was Galen Tyrol, glowering at her as he growled, "Starbuck, what have you done to my viper?"

She grinned weakly. "Give me a break; I'll fix it later." And then she was being pulled from the cockpit and she gave a gasp as a sudden, sharp pain radiated up her leg starting at her knee and someone cursed and then she was out cold, long before the Old Man arrived.

Commander Adama stood next to his young charge as the Galactica pulled into orbit around Picon, acutely aware of her crutches and the bruising on her face but refusing to offer her comfort he was sure she didn't want. "Well," he said, not quite knowing what to say. "Thank you for saving my ship" seemed melodramatic. "Please don't leave," seemed childish, and he knew it wasn't her choice. He settled for, "I'm going to miss you, Kara. Even if you are the frakking craziest person I've ever met."

He didn't want to send her back to Picon for another, grimmer reason as well. He had his suspicions about her mother's treatment of her—Kara had never once mentioned her father—but Kara had been unwilling to say anything about her home life, and he could do nothing without more information to work with.

She grinned, one of her hands coming off the crutches to touch the wings that had been pinned to her shirt. They weren't official, of course—she would have to go through flight school and all that to make them so—but they were official enough for her. They were a sign that Galactica had accepted her, had welcomed her to the family.

"I'll miss you—and the Galactica—too, sir. It's been…educational."

"I'm sorry about your knee," he said uncomfortably. Doctor Cottle had said that she would never be able to play Pyramid again, not with the skill she claimed to have had before. Adama hated to think that her time on the Galactica had ruined her dream.

"Don't be," she said, surprisingly pleasantly. Her expression turned mischievous. "I've talked to the pilots, and they said you only need one really strong leg to fly a viper."

He couldn't contain the smile that spread across his craggy face. "You've decided to go to flight school? I'll be happy to write you a recommendation."

"I can't imagine doing anything else," she confessed, looking out the window rather than at him.

"I understand," he said. He really did. The worst thing about advancing in years and rank had been having to give up his place in a cockpit to younger pilots. Considering the amazing skill she had shown in her one—idiotic—stint in a cockpit, he would have been surprised if she hadn't fallen in love with it. He had lost ten years during that little fiasco, and then had been so pleased by how things worked out that he hadn't punished Kara at all and had only thrown Fresco in the brig for a week—a much kinder sentence than he could have given him, based on the infraction. "Well…just so you know…the Galactica isn't exactly the place most hotshot pilots go, not with ships like the Pegasus and Atlantia flying around, but if you ever want a position here, it's yours."

"Thank you, sir," she said quietly. "You don't know how much that means to me."

A voice came over the speakers announcing that her ride back to the surface had arrived.

"What are you going to do to the boys who stranded you here?" the Old Man inquired lightly.

She grinned maliciously. "Nothing too painful. They've already suffered a bit, and, well, I'm glad they did it. I just have to make sure they don't get it into their stupid heads to try it again."

Adama shuddered at the thought of being on the wrong side of Kara's revenge. He liked the girl—maybe even cared for her like a niece or daughter—but she could be quite scary, if the stories he had heard were true.

They walked the corridors in silence, side by side. He paused outside the hangar. "I know the deck crew and the pilots have prepared their own goodbye, so let me say goodbye now. It's been an honor and pleasure having you aboard the Galactica. I'll place a commendation in your fleet file as soon as you actually get one. And—I'm glad to have met you, Kara Thrace. I hope you'll invite this old man to your graduation from flight school."

She grinned again. She had been doing that a lot lately, he'd noticed. "Oh, I will sir. And—it's been an honor, and a pleasure, for me too."

He nodded once, then, before he could stop himself, grabbed her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her forehead, a farewell and a greeting all rolled into one. When he pulled back he saw that her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

"I'll see you in five years, then, Starbuck," he said roughly.

Her chin was high and her expression typically defiant as she replied, "I don't plan for it to take that long."

And then she was gone, into the hangar to return to the life she had had before, out of his life. As he stared at the open door through which she had just gone, he felt a tugging at his heart, and wished she didn't have to go. Still, they would meet again, he was sure. And he was right.