Kara could feel her hands shaking as she stepped outside the Viper cockpit. It was the first time she had flown since her knee had healed, and it hadn't been her choice. As the Old Man said, a Cylon Basestar jumps into the system and you want Starbuck in the air. She had had no other option but to lead the remnants of the air group into battle.

She had done all she could, but over a third of the pilots Galactica had died out there. Keys and Lionclaw were the only two surviving members of her last class of nuggets. She had personally watched the others die one by one as the Cylon Raiders proved their accuracy.

"Starbuck!"

Kara snapped to attention and looked over at Racetrack. She was supporting Helo as best she could with her small frame. There was blood everywhere.

"What happened?" Kara screamed as she got close and slid an arm under the other side of Helo.

"The Cylons got the drop on us. There was an explosion, and it was all I could do to land our fraking Raptor in one piece. Helo must have been right next to where the blast punctured the wall, and I heard this loud bang..."

Kara tried to listen as Racetrack told her every single excruciating detail of what happened, but distractions were everywhere. There was a small piece of metal sticking out of Helo's side, and it was currently poking her in the ribs. The trio of pilots were too wide for the smaller corridors, and Kara's left shoulder and arm kept banging into the wall. The corridor floors below them were stained red with blood as they shuffled along. People kept staring, but no one thought to go get help. All these things flashed through her mind as she struggled under the weight.

"… and I don't think he's going to make it," Racetrack finished.

"I do not want to hear you say that ever again," Kara growled as they finally stumbled through the hatchway to sickbay. She was getting tired of everyone around her losing hope.

Two medics immediately approached them and took the brunt of Helo's weight upon themselves as they led him to a bed. Kara watched Doc Cottle's face turn white as he came over to check out the situation. Immediately he started yelling for someone to get Ishay over here to help him.

"Doc," Kara whispered from her position, leaning against the wall.

"I know, Lieutenant," he grumbled while throwing on the operating scrubs.

"You have to make this better," she insisted.

"Need I remind you I am not a miracle worker?"

She shut her eyes and reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose. It didn't help the pounding in her head disappear. "Is it going to take a miracle?"

The Doc didn't answer.

Kara became hypnotized by the movements of Doc Cottle and Layne Ishay as they worked together to remove the pieces of shrapnel. She watched them do their best to stop the bleeding and sew together all the lacerations in her friend. There was a puddle of dark crimson growing on the floor around the gurney, and Kara wondered if the floor would ever be clean again.

Racetrack stood beside her the whole time as the struggle to save Helo raged on. The two women didn't touch. They didn't talk. They didn't move one inch. They just leaned against the wall side by side and wondered if their friend would make it through the hour.

Kara hadn't realized how close Racetrack had gotten to Helo since they had been assigned the same Raptor. Then again, she had been gone for the first few weeks Helo had been back in the Fleet. He had told her she missed a lot, but it was hard knowing what he meant by a lot. It appeared a lot included whole friendships.

"You're bleeding, Lieutenant."

Kara snapped out of her haze to look over at the medic. "Excuse me?"

"Your arm is all scraped up," Ishay explained.

Kara looked down and saw the still wet blood from the cuts mingled in with the dried blood of Helo's. She hadn't even felt the pain. "I didn't notice."

"I can stitch you up," she offered.

"No. I'm fine. Focus on him."

"There's nothing more we can do," Ishay explained. "The metal missed his vital organs, and we managed to stop the bleeding in most areas. Only a few pieces went deep enough for us to even worry about the damage caused by pulling them out."

Kara held up her hand as the information began to pound against the sides of her hand. "Is Helo going to be all right?"

"He should be. Give him a few hours to sleep off part of the pain and most of the drugs we've given him." Ishay sighed. "Until then, I suggest you go get cleaned up. If those cuts are really bad, come back and I'll sew you up."

Kara nodded her understanding and stumbled away from the gentle beeping of the machines monitoring Helo's heart. She had daydreamed her way through most of the trauma, her mind intent on thinking of pointless things. It didn't matter as long as her brain kept moving. She didn't have time to deal with a complete meltdown.

Looking down at her hands, Kara realized they were still shaking. Only now they were also covered in blood. Her mind flashed back to her time on Caprica when she had been shot by the Cylons. Then there was the days after Zak's funeral when all she could see was the blood on her hands, on the walls of her apartment, in the words of everyone around her, on every inch of her insides

Kara rubbed at her hands, but it was no use. The blood wouldn't go away.

She felt herself stop without consciously telling herself to do so, but she wasn't all that surprised at what was in front of her. It was only natural that her feet would let her drift to the only closed curtain in the whole sickbay. As she pushed the curtain a few inches, she wondered if her hand would stain the sterile, white environment. She had always been the dirty girl in the middle of the clean world. She would always be the one stain in the shining armor of the man behind the curtain.

Her thoughts turned to the pilots they had lost to the Cylons only a short time ago. She might not have known a lot of them, but she could feel herself begin to mourn for each and every one. Today, the last traces of the humanity fought for their lives and won but at a terrible price. She had been in charge of keeping them safe, and she failed.

The cries caught in her throat, taking her by surprise as she stood next to Lee's bed. Her mind usually kept the tears on the inside, but it seemed like it was all finally adding up to be too much. She could feel her body shutting down.

The first thing to give out was her injured knee, and she used the bed to steady herself. When she felt the shifted weight begin to put pressure on her other knee, she gave up on her fight to stay strong. She was breaking down, and all she could do was let herself go.

Her hands grasped the bed as she pulled her body up next to Lee's. She could feel the dirt and blood and sweat caked on her body and knew she should try to keep away. Yet there was no way she could. She laid herself across Lee's body and let the cries take over. Her body wrenched with sobs that came harder and faster than anything she had ever felt. She struggled to take a breath as her lungs emptied themselves of the pain of living. Her tears were wetting the dried blood, and she could see the red beginning to spread across the tanks Lee's father had brought him earlier that day. She was ruining some of the last unsoiled clothes in the Fleet.

That thought, for some reason, made her cry even harder.

She was so lost in her pain that she didn't feel his hand moved until it had reached up to rest in her hair. Her eyes light up in confusion and wonder when she saw his eyes slowly slide open. "Hello, beautiful," he whispered, his voice dry from not being used.

"I need to get a doctor," Kara said, trying to pull herself to her feet in order to do the responsible thing. Lee's hand slipped to her shoulder and with what little strength he had, he held on.

"Please don't go."

Kara weighed his request against the reality that he had just woken up from a deep coma. There were probably a million tests that Doc Cottle and his over exuberant medic were dying to perform. There was a thousand different people on this ship who should be told Lee had woken up. There were hundreds of commitments Kara needed to fill now that the attack on the Cylons was finished. There was only one thing she yearned to do.

Weighing the million tests, thousands of people, and hundreds of commitments against her one desire, there was really only one option.

"I'm not going anywhere, Lee," she replied, lying down at his side again.