This one's short on account of a serious case of writer's block.

This chapter takes place after the events of "Scar" and Kara and Helo's heart to heart in the gym…about a month after Chapter 2, few weeks after Ch 3. Thanks to everyone who reviewed, as always, I appreciate it!

RDM still owns all of it.

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Empty Chapter 4

"You surrender?" Kara asked.

"Yes! I'm done! I'm out!" Helo gasped, still laughing from their wrestling match on the deck of the gymnasium.

"Alright then," Kara nodded with a grin. She started back towards the locker room, but stopped short of the hatch and turned back. "Thanks."

Helo smiled and merely nodded. Words weren't necessary. He was the only other one on the ship who had been there on Caprica with her, and who knew everything about Samuel Anders. Even Lee only knew the basics. For some reason she couldn't figure out, she couldn't bring herself to tell Lee the details. Lee, true to form, had guessed a lot of it since she'd been back, that much she could tell, but he had said little to her. Now that she'd royally frakked up her friendship with Lee--- She stopped thinking. Thinking is bad.

Starbuck made her way to the adjacent locker room…and stopped cold. Lee was practicing his boxing on the speed bag near the lockers. Biting her lip, she stepped into the compartment. He had his back to the hatch and didn't notice her entrance. This wasn't a conversation she wanted to have. Their drunken, disastrous fling--aborted fling--was almost certainly going to be a hot button issue with him.

When Kara had sobered up she'd realized that, given his mood the last month and a half since near-death experience, he probably would react very badly to the incident. She considered backing out through the hatch before he saw her, but that cowardly thought was quickly overridden by her need to see if he was okay.

Her thoughts stopped abruptly when he finished practicing and turned towards the lockers. He'd spotted her, and any chance of escape was lost. She put on the best nonchalant look she could manage and croaked out a greeting.

"Hey."

"Hey," Lee replied automatically. He didn't really want to see her at this moment. Frak. I should probably smile or something. But, then, he couldn't really muster the energy for it, and his face settled into what he could only guess was a "Triad-bluff" expression. This never worked in the card games….

The seconds seemed to creep by slowly before Kara even blinked. She began to move tentatively towards her locker, which was entirely too close to his for her comfort right now. She took care to maintain the easy-going expression.

"You, uh…you're up late."

Lee finished unwrapping his hands and pulled a towel from his locker to dry the sweat from his face before glancing back.

"Yup."

He started at the sound of her locker door slamming, and looked over his shoulder at her. She was turned towards him, but not meeting his eyes.

"Lee…about the other night---"

"It was a mistake," he cut her off curtly, but she heard none of the expected anger in his voice. In fact, she heard no emotion at all, which felt worse to her. For some reason she couldn't explain, she heard a small alert klaxon in the back of her mind. She tried again.

"I just---"

"We were drunk, Starbuck. It was a mistake. We learn from it and move on," he interrupted, with that strange, emotionless voice again. And he called her 'Starbuck' again. He hadn't used her name since the argument. That really bothered her…and again she wasn't sure why. He was starting to piss her off though.

"Are you going to let me finish a sentence, Lee?" she asked with a hint of venom.

He looked at her blandly as he replaced his tanks with a dry set from the locker, and nudged the door shut. He picked up his bag and turned to her, staring blankly…more in her direction than at her. She took what she could get.

"I just think we should talk about what happened…between us."

Lee said nothing for a minute. He opened his mouth to speak, finally, when Helo suddenly strolled into the locker area whistling loudly around his ever-present sucker. Lee glanced at the ECO, then back at Kara and shrugged.

"There's nothing to talk about, Starbuck."

Kara stood there, dumbfounded, as Lee turned and left the room without another word. Helo seemed to notice.

"Everything alright, Kara? What's with Apollo?"

Kara just frowned, her eyes still on the hatch Lee had passed through, "I don't know…."

Helo matched her frown, but said nothing. With a passing farewell to her friend, Kara gathered her belongings and headed out of the locker room. What the frak did he mean 'learn from it and move on?' What, was he channeling his father now? It didn't sound like the Lee she knew at all. She couldn't tell if he was angry with her, or cutting her out of his life completely.

The first option she could handle. Angry fights and heated arguments were where she lived. The second option terrified her so much that she felt a chill just considering it. And his cold demeanor was pointing to the second. It bothered her that she used to be able to read he fairly well. Now she felt like she was on the outside, trying to see in. The knot of fear in her belly grew with each passing thought.

Kara headed down the passageway leading to the senior officers' quarters. She was torn between wanting desperately to finish the conversation she'd tried to start in the gym, and crawling into some dark closet and hiding from Lee the way he had seemed to be hiding from her. That part annoyed her. He was getting entirely too skilled at avoiding her lately. The night they got drunk was the first time in a month that he'd spent more than five minutes in her presence. She once again regretted being so deep in the bottle that night, since it would have been the perfect chance to get him to open up about his problem. The one he'd confided to her after Cain's funeral. The one she had spent a month squarely refusing to think about while she tried to drown her own problems.

"That's just it, Kara…I didn't want to come back alive…."

She rounded the corner into the area known as "Officers' Country," and pulled open the hatch to their bunkroom. A quick scan of the room told her three things: Lee was there, he had pulled his privacy curtain closed, and he wasn't alone in the room. The presence of others killed whatever opportunity Kara might have had to talk to him. Ignoring a closed privacy curtain was taboo on a warship, especially in front of others. Kara, like everyone else, had to respect that. She headed for her own rack instead, secretly happy that he had made it so easy for her to ignore this…thing between them, secretly disappointed that the confrontation would have to wait, and secretly ashamed of her newfound cowardice.