Disclaimer: Not mine.

A/N: First time writing for this fandom. Set after Rapture and Taking A Break from All Your Worries.

Single Day

There was not a single day that passed that he didn't wonder if he couldn't be happier with her than Dee.

For a while, he'd been vindicated by the fact that she'd pulled a 180 even before he'd made his choice; seeing her with Anders in the bar had given him satisfaction in the decision to stay with Dee. He saw them laughing in the corridors, playing triad together, pickup pyramid games on Cloud Nine, sitting and chatting on her bunk.

Then he heard that they'd quietly divorced the week after he'd gone back to Dee. It wasn't really that amazing that nobody had told him; not many people knew, and everyone with eyes could see that he was in a horrifically frakked up relationship with Starbuck.

He'd asked her about it, in one of the few personal conversations they'd had. She'd shrugged and said, "We didn't work."

He'd asked why she hadn't told him. She'd replied, "You didn't need to know."

And she was right. He hadn't. He'd known how she felt about divorce and her religion. She never would have offered to divorce Anders if she hadn't been serious about making it work with him... and yet he'd accused her of being wishy-washy (which was a little fair) and gone back to a wife who in all honesty shouldn't have taken him back. He loved Dee, and he loved Kara, but he had only ever been IN love with one woman in his life, and she was not the one who wore his ring.

Not that Kara would wear a ring. She'd laugh at him and come up with some original way to show it off, like swapping Viper helmets, dogtags, or another tattoo.

But it didn't matter what she would or wouldn't wear. He'd stayed with Dee, and she'd left Anders, and he realized he might have lost the only thing that had kept him alive all these years, through the Academy, through his fights with his father, Zak's death, and the Cylon attacks: the knowledge that she was always there and always his in some way.

Because now he was Dee's, and her grip on him had caused him to lose his own grip on Kara.

There was not a single day he didn't wonder if he could have been happier with the love of his life than the substitute.