Title: Do The Right Thing
Author: upsidedownbutterfly
Summary: All his life, Lee Adama has always done the right thing. When it comes to Kara Thrace, this has been more of a curse than a blessing.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: General spoilers through the finale. Specific spoilers for "Daybreak", "Scar", "Eye of Jupiter", and "Six of One".
Disclaimer: They're not mine, people.
Break
Lee Adama first heard the name Kara Thrace while sitting in a nondescript bar on Tauron one week when Zak had finally saved up enough leave to visit his brother at his latest posting. Back then Zak was still bandaging up the pieces of a heart broken by his last college girlfriend, and Kara Thrace was nothing more than the name of his hard-ass flight instructor with a serious god complex.
Six months later however, Lee was knocking on her apartment door, with flowers in one hand and wine in the other. By that point, Lee had already logged a solid ten hours of phone calls from Zak spent listening to his little brother extol Kara's virtues as if she were Aphrodite herself. However nothing in those hours of rather one-sided conversations could have possibly prepared Lee for the moment Kara opened the door – the inexplicable twisting in his chest that accompanied her awkward hello, like the entire world was shattering into a million pieces and then reconstituting itself into a completely different pattern. Or maybe the world remained whole and it was Lee that broke.
She may have been his brother's girlfriend, but Lee would have been lying to deny that something had passed between them in that moment. Some bond forged instantaneously from the fragmented pieces of his soul. Some connection that only intensified through the evening with the amount of ambrosia consumed until suddenly Kara was hiking herself up onto the table and Lee was crawling on top of her and… Well, he never would really know where it would have gone from there. He liked to think he would have been able to stop himself in time.
But as it was Lee thanked every god that he wasn't sure he believed in for that broken glass. This was the woman that Zak, his brother, loved. With Kara, Zak was happier than Lee could remember seeing him since they were both children. It wouldn't have been right to take that away from him. In the end, it was better to break a glass than his brother's heart.
Ghosts
It took two and a half years and the end of the world before they found themselves back in the same position – Lee leaning over a table with Kara pressed beneath him, too much liquor making them both equal parts brave and stupid. Zak had been gone most of those last two and half years, his body buried beneath the soil of what was now a nuclear wasteland, and now his ghost had finally been laid to rest between them as well.
Only now something else was wrong, Lee realized to his dismay as Kara hauled him violently atop her and kissed him brutally. Passion, for sure, he'd expected; Lee had always figured that Kara frakked like she flew – with abandon and a reckless impulsiveness. Kara in the cockpit however also exuded a certain brilliant unfettered glee, and the emotions rolling off her now were nothing like her usual fire. Her kisses tasted of desperation and frustration and anger that bordered on rage.
He knew what it was before she said it, knew the name of this new ghost lingering in the corners of the room. Anders. The pyramid player she'd left on Caprica. By now most likely dead from a cylon bullet. For an instant Lee was livid, furious at her for allowing yet another ghost to come between them. Kara Thrace, forever haunted by the dead so she wouldn't have to deal with the living.
Even so, Lee meant it when he said she was his friend. She was his best friend. So as she stormed out of the duty locker bottle in hand, flinging the hatch closed behind her, Lee didn't follow. Because Kara already had the ghost of Anders dogging her steps, and Lee could see the toll that emotional maelstrom was taking on her heart and her head. She was vulnerable, or as vulnerable as Kara Thrace got; it wouldn't beright to take advantage of that. And Lee wasn't sure he was strong enough to resist her a second time.
Fallout
They never could stay away from each other for long though. Even the debacle of New Caprica wasn't enough to sever the bond between them. It was like gravity, a force of nature as constant as it was inexplicable, and over the long months it drew them inexorably back into each other's orbits, spiraling closer and closer until the inevitable cataclysmic impact.
There was never any hope that Lee's quiet, companionable relationship with Dee would withstand the resulting blast, and Lee genuinely did regret that she too would be left choking on the fallout. He hadn't lied when he told Dee he loved her - he truly did - but he and Dee were a flickering candle in the face of the atomic detonation that was him and Kara. There was simply no comparison.
He told himself that she would be all right. Dee was compassionate and kind, but never weak. Beneath her gentle exterior smoldered a certain quiet strength and dependable resilience. She would move on and find someone else who could appreciate her properly and love her like she truly deserved. Like Lee never could. Then one day, after the dust had settled, Lee let himself believe that maybe they could all be happy.
Until: "I made a vow in the sight of the gods and I'm not going to break that." With those words, Lee's hastily constructed fantasy crumbled before a shockwave of an entirely different nature. To divorce was one thing, but to go on cheating… It was the difference between breaking Dee's heart once and breaking it over and over every day for the rest of their lives. And the latter was something Lee simply could not do. Not to Dee, who had always deserved so much better than Lee had ever given her. He couldn't be that unfair to her. It wasn't right.
Let Go
When Kara climbed out of her viper, yelling at the Chief like she'd been gone six minutes instead of six months, Lee didn't question it for a moment. He just folded her into his arms and clutched her to him like he never intended to let go. A miracle or an enemy ploy – it didn't matter to Lee. He'd spent the last six months thinking she was gone forever, and now against every rational explanation she was here in his arms, whispering incoherent consolations in his ear, and Lee had no intention of ever losing her again.
His father and the president thought she was a cylon replacement, but all it took was one look at her for Lee to know they were wrong. Lee knew no one like he knew Kara Thrace, and this was Kara Thrace. The same fire in her eyes. The same wild grin. The same habit of screwing up her mouth when she didn't want to cry. Lee might not believe in miracles, but he could more readily accept an act of the gods than the notion that this woman before him was anyone or anything other than Kara Thrace.
Of course that wasn't to say that she hadn't changed. She might have been Kara, but she wasn't the same Kara whose viper he'd chased through the atmosphere of that gas giant all those months before. There was something different there. Something new and bright, blazing out through all the cracks in the Kara Thrace he'd known. A direction, a drive of an intensity that Lee couldn't remember ever having seen in her before. She'd talked about having a destiny, and Lee was starting to believe she'd been right.
And that destiny was pulling on her, tugging her out among the stars on her search for Earth. Pulling her away from him, Lee Adama whose place had always been here in the Fleet, working to build a better society for its people. Part of him wanted to stop her, to tether her to his side so he'd never have to say goodbye again. But he couldn't do that, not if this truly was Kara's destiny. Even if it wasn't, that didn't change the fact that this was clearly something Kara needed to do. For herself. Either way it wouldn't be right to stop her.
Her last words over the wireless before her viper exploded echoed in his ears even now. "Just let me go." So Lee let her go.
New
In the end, she came back, and in the process, led all of them home. To a new planet, more pristine and beautiful than even the idealized dream of Earth could have ever been, fresh with the promise of a new life and a new future for them all. Including Lee Adama. "The first day of the rest of your life" Kara had called it, and it was. Like he'd told his father, this planet was their chance to leave behind all the war and death and misery of the past few years and start completely anew.
And for Lee Adama, it was a chance to leave behind the pilot and the solider, the politician and the some-time lawyer. To strip away all those tired roles that he'd worn for so long and emerge a totally new person, a totally new Lee Adama. It was a daunting prospect, to let go of all those aspects that had defined him for so long. But then starting over should be terrifying, otherwise it wouldn't really be starting over at all.
It was liberating too, in the way that only a wholly new beginning could be. A chance to let go of a lifetime of service and obligation, and to be just a little bit selfish for once. To climb a mountain or cross an ocean simply because he wanted to. To not care whether something was right or wrong, only that it was something that would make him happy. And maybe that's what this new life could be for him – a chance to finally be happy.
Lee turned around.