Lee stopped by Kara and Kacey's quarters after seeing to it that Julia was set up, and that a marine would be roaming around to make sure she didn't try anything. "She's asleep," Kara quietly told him when she opened the hatch. "Wouldn't stop crying. Finally she just…" Lee grimly nodded. The past several days had held a lot for the four-and-a-half-year-old to deal with, maybe too much.

"She's an amazing kid, Kara. You can probably take most of the credit for that."

"I don't want to do this to her…or to myself. It feels like everything's spiraling out of control and there's nothing to grab to keep my balance."

Slowly, carefully, Lee took her hand. Kara looked up and held his gaze for a long moment before pulling her hand away. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Thought I might be able to give you an anchor…Or at least try."

Anger smoldered in her eyes as she took a couple steps back from him, leaning against the wall. "Now you know how it feels, huh?" she tightly asked. Lee looked down, somewhat cowed. Not many people knew what had driven them apart nearly four years earlier, mainly because the truth would have hurt more people than the silence did.

It hadn't been too much of a surprise when he heard that Kara and Anders were getting married, although it had left a bitter taste in his mouth. Lee had never had the guts to go after what he wanted, and therefore he lost her. Using Dee as a consolation prize had been easy – too easy. He'd never expected that Kara would come to him the day after her wedding, asking him if she'd made the wrong choice. She'd tried to offer herself, offer to annul what she'd done the night before, but he'd been angry with her and even more so with himself. A violent frak gave way to a heated argument that ended with punches being thrown. He hadn't seen her again after that morning until the day she'd landed on Galactica in a heavy raider.

It wasn't exactly the same situation, but he now had a taste of what it had felt like to have her offer of shelter in a storm thrown back in her face. "Yeah," he quietly replied. "Yeah, I do."

Kara softened at that, almost as though thoughts of the past had suddenly opened the floodgates and everything from those four years crashed down upon her at once. She tried to stay strong – to stay Starbuck – but she'd lost that persona a long time ago. She'd had to in order to survive without losing her mind; there was no way that someone as independent and defiant as 'Starbuck' could justify some of the things that she'd had to do.

Lee was momentarily stunned when Kara slid down the wall to sit on the floor, curled up in a ball with her face hidden in her knees. "Kara?" he whispered as he knelt at her side, gingerly putting a hand on her shoulder. She didn't shrug him off, and he could feel her crying. She'd cried more since the founding of New Caprica than she had in her entire life beforehand. It scared her; who was she now?

"Do you think it's possible to go back?" she finally asked.

"Go back to what?"

Kara lifted her head and looked him in the eye. "Back to who we were before. Before we…did so many things to each other. Before I knew what it was like to lose someone that you'd give anything for."

Lee glanced back at Kacey's still-sleeping form. "You haven't lost her yet, Kara."

"But I'm going to…and I wish to the Gods that I could just…not care. How do I find that person that didn't care about anything other than cockpit time, a good card game, and being a pain in the ass for anyone she had to say 'Yes, Sir,' to?"

Lee watched her critically. "Do you really want to find her again? Do you really want to go back to that, knowing what you know now?" He didn't get an answer. "You've learned a lot, Kara, and yeah, you've become a different person, but I don't really see that as such a bad thing. If there's anything I've learned from you…loving somebody is always worth it, even when it hurts like hell. It keeps us human."

"She was my one good constant," Kara finally whispered. "I couldn't ever let go before, because I knew she needed me. I couldn't leave her alone…All that's different now."

"Not the things that matter. You still love her, and she knows that, and she still loves you. Just…hold onto that."

It was late when Lee got back to his quarters. He assumed that Dee was asleep in their rack, and so tried to be as quiet as possible as he changed out of his uniform and got his things out of his locker to go take a shower. He slipped back out the door and down the hall to the pilot's washroom. The warm water felt good as it cascaded over him, relieving the tension that filled his whole body.

He knew that was hitting dangerous territory at this point – it wasn't like his feelings for Kara had vanished as the years went by, but he'd thought she was dead, so it had been a moot point. But now she was back, and learning to lean on him a little more every day, trying to learn how to trust once again. He'd put himself in this position on purpose, wishing that old wounds could be healed. The scars were indeed beginning to fade, and now Lee was left to wonder exactly how smart of an idea this was. He was a married man, and Kara sure as hell didn't need any more complications in her life at the moment. Was this whole thing actually going to help, or was it just stupidly selfish on his part?

Back in the bunkroom, Dee stared up at the ceiling of her bunk and waited for her husband to return. She was well aware of where he'd spent most of his day, and didn't like the fact that she'd learned from the grapevine instead of from Lee himself – he'd told her that morning that he had meetings with his father and pilots all day. The fact that he didn't feel he could be honest with her about Kara worried her. What else was he hiding?

TBC...