Title: Rapprochement

Author: upsidedownbutterfly

Summary: Kara and Sam post-"Revelations".

Rating: PG

Spoilers: "Revelations"

Disclaimer: They're not mine, people.

"Longshot!" Kara's bellow reached Sam's ears, easily cutting through the general din of conversation in Joe's Bar. Half a dozen patrons, unappreciative of the interruption, threw her angry looks, but Kara just ignored them, and instead began making her way over to where Sam sat, alone at the table in the far corner of the bar.

Sam didn't look up as she stalked towards him, hoping – vainly, he knew – that she would take the hint and leave him the frak alone. Sam didn't particularly want to deal with anyone right now, least of all his sometime wife, who was currently overdue on a promise to put a bullet through his skull.

In his peripheral vision, Sam watched as Kara reached the edge of his table. In a moment of uncharacteristic vacillation, she crossed then uncrossed her arms in front of her chest twice, before finally jamming them onto her hips. Although he couldn't see it, Sam could feel the glare she leveled at him threatening to sear him into the bulkhead.

Sam took another swig of whatever it was he'd been drinking. "What do you want, Kara?" he asked, acknowledging her presence at last though he still refused to meet her eyes. He already knew what he would see there – the disgust, the betrayal, the hate – and it was just one on the long list of things Sam didn't want to deal with right now.

"I want to know why you're not down on the frakking flight deck. You're on CAP in twenty minutes."

Kara's tone was forceful, but not hostile and in a better frame of mind, Sam might have found some small modicum of hope in that. As it was though, he could only muster up a strangled-sounding laugh as he took another drink from his mug.

Amnesty or no, Sam had no delusions about a warm welcome back among the ranks of Galactica's air wing. Most of them barely tolerated Sharon, and Sam was fairly certain that coping with not one but two cylons was more than they could abide. Not to mention that his initial refusal to come clean had nearly got a number of his crewmates spaced only a few days ago.

Sam felt a sudden tug on his mug, and before he'd fully had a chance to process what was happening, Kara had yanked it from his grasp and slammed it down on the table between them with a crash loud enough to draw more than a few stares in their direction. The sound succeeded in startling Sam into inadvertently meeting her eyes at last, and upon doing so, he found her gaze burning with a distinctive fire as she leaned towards him across the table.

"What?" she snarled viciously at him. "You didn't think that being a cylon was going to get you out of doing your frakking job, did you?" She barked out a harsh laugh. "Please. I let you off the hook and pretty soon every one of those sorry excuses for pilots down there are gonna be trying to use that excuse." She straightened, hands returning to hips, and her voice adopted a mocking, sing-song quality. "'Sorry, Captain, can't fly today – found out I was a toaster.'"

From across the table, Sam gaped at her, thoughts swirling frantically around his head as he struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. "Kara, what're you…" he managed unsteadily before Kara cut him off with a sharply raised hand.

"I want you suited up and in your viper by 0200," she commanded.

An automatic objection was already forming on Sam's lips, even before Kara had finished speaking, but she silenced him with an index finger jammed hard in his direction. "That's a frakking order, Ensign."

For a single instant, her confrontational demeanor slipped, and Sam caught the very edges of a smile teasing at the corners of her mouth as she turned to leave. Anyone else would have missed it entirely, but for someone who knew Kara as well Sam did, there was no mistaking its presence. It might not have been acceptance or forgiveness or anything of the things Sam still held out a wild hope for, but it was something, it was a start.

He was still watching Kara's retreating form as she made her way back towards the exit of the crowded bar, when Sam came to the gradual yet astonishing realization that, for the first time in over a week, he was smiling too.