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Chapter 36
(Lee's POV)

I hadn't realized how much I had missed this, just being able to fly with Kara by my side, knowing that no matter what happens she's got my back. Sure, we may have our disagreements every now and then but out here we don't even have to talk to understand each other. Of course, seeing how words do have a rather annoying tendency to get in our way --how we both keep saying one thing while thinking or doing another-- maybe out here we can understand each other precisely because we don't have to talk.

The truth is that in the aftermath of the awkwardness that has characterized these past couple of weeks just being out here feels like coming home. Oh, I know that things are still far from normal between us, that we still have a very long way to go, but at least now we are back in our element and that is deeply comforting... especially for Kara. I can see it on her face.

I am still thinking about that when the little joyride that had been our first CAP together in what felt like ages is suddenly interrupted by half a dozen raiders and we turn our attention toward taking them out, even as we see the fleet jumping away all around us.

The dogfight itself is over in a matter of minutes, in fact the encounter is hardly worthy of that name. I take out two of the raiders while Kara takes care of the other four and then we head back to the Galactica where even as I land my bird I can't keep myself from grinning like a fool at the memory of her whoops of joy. We may have been fighting for our lives out there but you would never have known it by listening to her. For her that was just fun, something she had obviously been missing. Flying is what she was born to do... and I have to admit that her enthusiasm in that regard is contagious.

I know that sounds more than a little crazy considering the circumstances but that's just the way it is.

Oh, I know that some of it is the adrenaline talking but there is more to it than that. The rest of it has to do with Kara herself and with the way in which she keeps dancing on the edge almost as if that edge weren't even there.

I am not even sure if she realizes that she is doing it at all but I can't miss it because... well, because I have a reference. I know what it feels like to fly when she isn't by my side and I have to say that taking on the cylons with her is very different from doing it with anyone else. Sure, there is a level of excitement that is part of going into battle, there's no question about that, but when she is not with me that excitement is tinged with fear rather than joy... and a lot of that has to do with trust. That, I think, is what this whole thing boils down to.

Out there I trust her implicitly and I know she trusts me, which is probably one of the main reasons why the realization that she had been keeping some pretty big secrets from me felt so much like a betrayal. The truth is that while I am still having a hard time trying to come to terms with the fact that she never told me about her mother, the one I'm really mad at is not Kara... though I am not sure she knows that. That, I suspect, is something I'm going to have to work hard to overcome.

The thing is that for all her bravado I do know that not too deep down Kara does have a rather annoying tendency to blame herself for... well, pretty much everything, actually. That is precisely one of the countless little things I had never been able to understand before but that all of a sudden are starting to make a disturbing amount of sense... and I know that in that regard chances are that my attitude hasn't exactly been helping matters.

Even though the rational part of me knows that what she kept from me was something personal, something that happened long before we even met and that there was no real reason for her to tell me about it in the first place, let's just say that my gut is still having a hard time trying to be rational about any of this and leave it at that.

Unfortunately I also know that unless I can manage to get that gut reaction under control I run the risk of permanently alienating her and that is a chance I can't afford to take... in fact even as things stand I know I am going to have some serious apologizing to do here. In these past couple of weeks I have been unable to even look at her without seeing her as the broken little girl she must have been all those years ago rather than as the competent but short-tempered woman she has become since then and that has been a mistake.

In a way I guess that is what I can take away from today's CAP, a lesson my father had been trying to drill into me almost from the beginning but that had never quite sunk in: the fact that in spite of everything we have learned in these past couple of weeks nothing has really changed, that when all is said and done Kara is still Kara. She is still crazy and impulsive as hell, not to mention that she is by far the best frakking pilot I have ever seen... and even though now I have a better understanding of why she does some of the things she does, when it comes down to who she is, the truth is that that doesn't really matter.