Can I tell you a secret, Lieutenant? I know it's stupid, and you'll think me vapid at best.

Can I tell you a secret? I'm jealous of you. I'm jealous of your youth and beauty and that dress that clings to every curve of you.

I'm jealous of your freedom.

I'm jealous of your health.

You're smiling at me, just two gals making up in the bathroom. You're Artemis and Aphrodite and Helios all rolled up into one shining warrior, and you stand there grinning with the ambrosia I know has been floating around the party, even though the Colonial Day celebration is supposed to be dry.

You don't know me, Kara Thrace. You aren't talking as you wash your hands in the sink, standing next to me in the bathroom cleared by my security.

All except you. You bounced out of the stall at the far end, scaring the life almost from me, grinning because even Presidential security couldn't force you out of a bathroom before you were frakkin' ready.

You don't notice my eyes. Or how my hand is shaking from being so damned tired. Or how my smile, quickly put back in place for your benefit, seems to burn into my skin, how I sometimes want to claw it off my mouth and rip it into tiny shreds. You don't know what mortality is, Kara Thrace, Starbuck.

I smile at you through my burned-in smile, and I hate you for a moment. I hate your beauty, and your fearlessness. I hate that dress, something I would kill to have. I'll die in one of these suits, I think, as we exchange pleasantries while freshening up.

I'll die here. You might not, but I most certainly will.

I'll die here, in space, away from sunlight and water that doesn't have to be rationed and bubble baths and long slow fraks with a lover who feeds me chocolate.

I can't take my eyes off of you.

I want to take you into me, Kara Thrace, take your health and swallow it and digest it and become it. I want to rip that dress off your perfect body, your healthy body, your beautiful body, and be…completely…non-presidential.

Do you know I've loved women before, Kara? Do you know I have a bit of a wild past? Would you believe it? If there's anything wilder than soldiers on leave, Kara Thrace, it's schoolteachers on holiday. Nothing that would shock you, but enough for me.

I'll die here.

You are beautiful. Do you know that, Starbuck? I think you only know it in the most cursory of ways. Like, how beauty can be used. How beauty can produce pleasure. How beauty can produce power.

I look at you and I want to cry, right here in this cleared-out, mostly, ladies room on Cloud Nine. I want to weep for beauty, and coffins lowered beneath the soil rather than cast into space. I want to weep for sweets, melting on my tongue as my lover feeds me slowly and seductively. I want to weep for pretty clothes and days where every part of me doesn't ache with exhaustion and sickness.

I look at you and want to weep, but I don't. I smile my President smile, and we chat like two women taking a break at a party. We wash up, and put on our faces, and return to our separate lives without ever knowing, really, one another.

And I can't shed a tear.