Kara stepped out of the head, a towel wrapped firmly around her body. The Old Man had kicked her out of sickbay twenty minutes earlier and demanded she take a shower. She had been sitting at Lee's bedside for three days straight, and it was starting to show.

Lee's condition had shown no change. He was still stable and sleeping peacefully. Doc Cottle said he could wake up any second or he could never wake up. There was no way to tell.

Still, Kara felt compelled to stay by his side. She had done all she could to avoid being thrown back into the flight rotation, and every time someone brought up the possibility of her taking on the CAG position, she changed the subject. If she became CAG, it would feel like a betrayal of Lee. She would be admitting that he wasn't going to wake up to take the position back for himself.

She had lost faith in him once, and he had proven her wrong by flying down a conveyor tunnel and blowing up a Cylon mining base. She wasn't about to lost faith in him again. He would wake up.

"Kara!"

She felt herself stiffen at the sound of Anders' voice. She had actively avoided the resistance leader during the few minutes each day that the Commander kicked her out of sickbay. Anders' inability to accept that maybe there were things in her life that she couldn't just offer up to him without hesitation had hurt her. Wounds had never healed easily for her.

"Please, Kara! Wait!"

The pleading in his voice made Kara slow down, but she couldn't bring herself to stop and face him. He reached out to grab her arm, and she did her best to pull away without seeming mad. It wasn't anger that had hold of her. It was disappointment.

"Would you stop for two seconds so I can talk with you?" Anders begged.

"No," she said. The chill in her voice couldn't be hidden even if she tried. "I need to get back to Lee."

"I was surprised to hear you left his side," Anders replied bitterly.

Kara turned to give him the iciest stare she could muster as she continued to make her way to the bunkroom. "Do not speak to me that way if you don't want to be dropped on your ass."

"I'm sorry. This isn't coming out the way I want it to."

"Then maybe you should leave me alone," she hissed.

"Listen, Kara. I wanted to say I'm sorry. I thought about what I would do if I were in your place, and I know there's no way I could focus on anything other than my friend who was hurt."

"That would be an incredibly noble thing for you to say if only you weren't talking out of your ass," Kara scoffed.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"How hurt were you when Sue-Shaun was taken? How long did it take you to mourn her after she forced me to pull the plug on her life? Did you even think about her in the days she was gone?"

"That is a low blow, Kara," Anders said.

Kara paused at the hatchway door to the officer's quarters. "Now you know what it feels like to have someone you care about treat your mourning and guilt and pain like it means nothing."

She felt Anders stiffen at her blunt words, and he paused over the threshold of the bunkroom. Kara ruffled through her locker for clothes before addressing him again. "If you have something else to say to me, you should say it. I'm going to be going back to Lee's side in the next few minutes, and you probably won't run into me again."

"Kara, I can't take it if you don't let me back in."

She straightened up and looked at him. "Give me a reason to, and I might, Sam."

"I missed you every day you were gone, but never once did I lose faith that you were going to come back for me. You promised me, and even though I had only known you for a few weeks, I knew that meant something."

"If I say I'm going to do something, I do it," she said as she slipped a pair of underwear on under the towel and flung it to the floor. She grabbed her double tanks and slid them over her head.

"I was stupid. I got to the Fleet and I expected it to be exactly like Caprica. You told me that it was different but I didn't really understand before. I mean, you were fighting for your life in the sky, and I was fighting for my life on the ground. It couldn't have been that different."

"Our lives are worlds apart," she pointed out, grabbing pants out of the open locker.

"Three days of living on Galactica have shown me that," he agreed. "You were out there doing your best to keep others alive while I selfishly fought only for myself. That makes you a much better person than I am."

She stiffened up and turned to look at him. "That is not the route to take with me."

"Noted. I just want to say that I understand this is what you have to do right now. The world has become a small place. If you're lucky enough to still have someone on which you can depend, you need to hang onto that. Lee Adama is obviously that person for you so you should be by his side doing whatever you can to help him fight."

"That was the reaction I expected you to have in the first place," Kara admitted. She gave him a small shrug. "Too bad it took you three extra days to get there."

Anders watched her reach into the locker to grab a sweatshirt and shrug it on. "I'm not saying I'm perfect here. It's hard to see you like that with another man."

"My behavior when it comes to Lee won't be changing anytime soon." Kara grabbed one last thing out of her locker before slamming the door shut. "I've tried to keep our relationship inside the realm of what everyone considers acceptable. It doesn't work. Lee and I are special. We always have been." She looked down at the ground and, shaking her head, let out a small chuckle. "You know, that used to make me uncomfortable. Now, I would give up everything to keep that from changing. It's become a comfort."

When she looked up at Anders, she was surprised to see he wasn't even listening to her anymore. Instead, his attention was focused on the dogtags in her hand. Doing her best to seem nonchalant, she slipped the metal chains over her head. The cold metal rested against her chest.

"I thought the military only issued two tags per enlisted."

Kara lifted her chin in defiance. "They do."

"Then why do you have three?" he asked.

"They're Lee's," she declared. "The Commander gave them to me for safe keeping." She cleared her throat and kept explaining. "When Zak died, his father gave me his tags and it helped pull me out of whatever hole I had fallen into. I guess he figured the same might be true with Lee."

"I can relate," Anders said. He reached into his shirts and pulled out the chain holding the dog tag she had given him. "It gave me strength when I needed it." His hands released the clasp and he held it out.

Kara shook her head. "You keep it." She pushed past him and was almost out the hatch when she turned to look back. He looked so happy, almost as if her letting him keep the dog tag meant he had her forgiveness. He was mistaken. "I don't need it anymore." She grasped her three dogtags tightly. "I have all the strength I need."

Forgiveness from Kara Thrace never came at an easy price.