The secret of their relationship was always in plain view for anyone who took the time to look- Lee never asked for more than Kara was willing to give and Kara refused to treat Lee as anything more than what he was.


Kara rested her back against the heavy metal hatchway and tried to catch her breath. She could feel the vibrations as the Cylon got closer to her target. Her eyes drifted across the room to the man currently looking her up and down. She could feel his eyes settled on the trail of blood dripping from the gash in her head before moving to notice the way her bottom lip was already swelling past all the cuts and bruises on her arms down and finally resting where her thigh had been cut open. He wasn't worried about the fact that she was injured. He was simply checking for damages.

She had to admit he was the last person she thought she'd be with in the end.

"Do you have it in you to finish this, Major?" Lee said, slow and careful.

Kara's eyes narrowed at his words. She took a moment to look him over the way he had just done to her. His left eye was swollen, and there was a trickle of blood coming from his nose. It was broken. His right arm was resting against his abdomen. Kara figured that meant he had at least a couple broken ribs that needed stabilizing. All in all, he was no worse than she. "Do you?" she spit back, looking into his eyes in defiance.

"I always get the job done."

"That's right. Even when you don't mean to. You just can't help it," Kara said, her face breaking into a harsh smile. Lee hadn't even known there was such a thing until now.

The pounding in the corridor got louder.

"They're getting closer," Kara whispered.

Lee nodded. Silently, he pulled out his two side arms and clipped in fresh cartridges. They didn't have much time left. Now was the time to say their final words to one another, to validate why they were doing what they were doing.

Too bad he had no desire to say a word to the woman sitting across from him.

She was the last person he ever wanted to be with.

Things hadn't always been this way. Once upon a time, he had actually thought he might grow to love her. Looking back, those first few months after the attack were almost too good to be true. He had been adrift in more ways than one when the Twelve Colonies were destroyed and he found himself stranded on Galactica. Some crazy form of healing had come over him when he accepted the CAG position and forced himself to start living again.

Lee wasn't stupid. He knew that it was because of Kara that he was able to keep fighting. She had woken up something inside of him that had died years ago with Zak and just recently with Gianne and his unborn child. She proved that there were some things in life worth fighting for.

He had changed for the better during those first months, and everyone noticed the reason why. It was clear in the way he and Kara morphed into one.

Before he showed up on Galactica, he was Apollo, the son of the great Commander Adama, and she was Starbuck, the best damn pilot who couldn't seem to get her head on straight. They were good in their own right.

But together… together they were great. They were Starbuck and Apollo. They were one entity, one single being that defied description or definition. They were as gods.

People claimed they couldn't understand how it happened, but it was actually quite simple. The secret of their relationship was always in plain view for anyone who took the time to look- Lee never asked for more than Kara was willing to give and Kara refused to treat Lee as anything more than what he was.

It was unfortunate that the very give and take which made them so great would also become their downfall.

For six months, they existed in this flawed relationship of thinking they were stable. Then the bottom fell out.

Kara was hung up on Anders. That was fine by Lee. He had his own issues. Things would have been all right if only Lee had broken his half of the agreement while she stuck firm to hers.

He demanded more than she was willing to give. They had been teetering on the edge of something big since the second he walked back into her life. It could have been a love that would surpass all loves like some of his more gutsy pilots bet on. It could have just been a partnership in the sky that defied the odds like some of the CIC staff believed. Or they could have just had the most important connection in the world, the bond of being family. Whatever it was between them, Lee saw it. He felt it. He wanted her to admit it. He demanded she acknowledge it.

She wasn't ready.

He pushed her, and she wasn't ready.

Things just got worse from there.

"Lee."

Her voice pulled him away from his memories. She sounded unlike herself. She sounded fragile. If she wanted reassurance that they were going to make it out of this one alive, she was looking to the wrong man. Lee knew they were going to die.

"What is it, Kara?"

"I keep remembering the day you got promoted to Commander."

Lee shifted. He remembered that day, too. That was the day they reached the point of no return. "What about it?"

"You promised me that we'd be okay. I believed you so much that if someone had said five years from that moment I would be sitting here hating the fact that we are going to die together, I would have punched them out. Because you promised and I believed you back then."

"Can we not talk about it?"

Kara desperately wanted to scream that no, they could not not talk about it because this was it. The pounding was even closer now. They didn't have much time left.

Kara's mind went back to the day she made the mistake that put them in this horrible place. It was a month after Pegasus and Galactica returned to save the people stranded on New Caprica, nineteen months after Lee foolishly promised they were going to be okay and then cut her out of his life. Looking back, she still couldn't say why she did it.

They had been ignoring each other for weeks, both content in their separate lives. Kara had Anders. Lee had Dee. They weren't supposed to get restless.

She wasn't even supposed to be on Pegasus that day. It had been a last minute adjustment by the Admiral. She was to deliver some classified documents to the Commander and then she was free to return to the ship.

Then Lee had looked at her in a way that reminded her of how close they used to be, back when the end of the world was still fresh, back when they still had hope that they were going to find freedom one day.

The memory tore into her, and she lashed out with her words. Words quickly turned into screams. Screams turned into fists. Fists turned into an all-out brawl.

By the time she got her senses back, Lee was fraking her up against the wall of his office.

That was what really felt familiar. The sensation of fraking without feeling was like am empty shell, covering up mistakes and lies. It was not who they were but what they are. Every inch of their beings were hollow.

They didn't speak for weeks.

Kara broke first. For some reason, she had a sense of responsibility to who she and Lee had once been. So she went to him.

The discussion they had that day had been the final nail in the coffin. They had a decision to make. They had to decide if what they had become was big enough to risk breaking colonial law. They had to decided if they were willing to sacrifice their happiness in order to hang on to what they had once been. Kara had wondered if the memories of the past could stop this downward slope they were stuck on.

In the end, it wasn't enough. The last remnants of the great Starbuck and Apollo were gone. They were two separate entities.

They both chose to sacrifice their happiness to do what was right.

Kara was absentmindedly clicking the safety of her gun on and off when Lee finally spoke to her again. "If you had known, would you have changed anything?"

Kara closed her eyes and focused on the banging of the hatch behind her. The Cylon was at the door. She knew what was appropriate to say in a time like this. Yes, I would have changed everything. I wouldn't have let our friendship go to shit. I would have tried harder. I wouldn't have let us screw everything up. She could say those words, but they would be a lie. "I don't regret one thing."

For one year, she had hated him like no other man. People she loved had joked that she and Lee were like two planets destined to collide and destroy the world. They were right. No matter how deluded she let herself become, she should have seen it coming.

Life went on for both of them as their hatred for one another and the mistakes they made festered inside. Lee thought that his life had hit rock bottom the day he got word that Kara was in sickbay. He dropped everything he was doing and got on the first Raptor shuttle to Galactica. He only paused to reassure his wife that he loved her and he promised he would return. Dee had believed him. If Kara had been there to witness that moment, she would have laughed in Dee's face. Lee Adama never kept his promises.

Lee heard the call to arms over the shipwide comm system. The Cylons had caught up to them. He knew his place was on the Pegasus, but a nagging voice in the back of his head told him his crew was capable of protecting the Fleet without his presence. He was too wrapped up in his worry about what was happening in Galactica's sickbay to understand how bad the fight really was.

The casualties started rolling in, and just as Cottle finally declared everything had gone perfect with Kara's operation, Lee got word that the fight was over.

Even though he hated to leave before he was allowed to step into the post-operating room, Lee knew his place was with his crew while they determined how heavy their losses were. He made it halfway to the hangar bay when he heard the page summoning him to his father's office.

William Adama had been blunt as always. He told Lee that during the fight between the ships, there had been a covert attack on Pegasus. A Cylon agent had opened fire on the CIC. The machine had killed a senior staff member and several Marines before turning the gun on themselves.

His father didn't even have to say the words for Lee to know who the senior staff member was. He could feel it in his bones.

His wife was dead.

For the first time in his life, Lee was glad for the hardened shell he had formed within himself. He thanked his father for telling him and made his way back to his ship.

From that point on, Lee threw himself into answering the questions about how and why this type of thing could happen right under his nose. He went days, weeks, without sleeping, spending his time just studying the reports that were written up about the incident. No one understood what he was looking for. The Cylon murdered had died by his own hand. There was no crime to investigate, no killer to unmask.

Maybe it was because of his emotional connection to the victim or maybe he just felt a duty to insure the safety of the people who worked under his command. Either way, Lee followed his gut. There was something that didn't add up. It took him a year to figure out what that was.

The Cylon had to have access to the CIC to take the shot that killed Dee. Long ago, Lee had established the policy of keeping the CIC doors sealed during battle. If someone wanted access to the inside, they had to have the commanding officer's approval. Only a select few of his crew knew the codes that would open the door. Aaron Doral was definitely not one of those people. That little detail was what finally caused Lee to realize just how deep of trouble his ship was in.

Someone had let Doral into the CIC, and it was someone he trusted.

Kara finally shifted away from the sealed hatch as the pressure finally got too much. She turned to see the metal had dented in around her body. Reality was finally starting to sink in. This was it. This was the moment for which she had been waiting the past fifty-seven days.

The Cylon who had killed her husband and the rest of the civilians on the shuttle that day was here on the Prometheus. It was only inches away.

No one had believed Lee when he insisted there was another traitor in their midst. The Fleet had been tested and retested over the six years they were running from the Cylons. Every toaster had been identified and flushed from their systems. There was no way someone could have aided Doral. Everyone simply brushed off Lee's warning as the delusions of a man mourning the death of his wife.

It wasn't until the accident that Kara started believing him.

The crew said that the shuttle carrying Anders and the rest of his team had a malfunction. Kara knew they were just taking the easy out. She had checked that Raptor from top to bottom when she heard her husband was helping out with the negotiations to end the freighter strike that was holding their food supplies hostage. The Raptor was flawless. Nothing could have malfunctioned so that meant something had made it malfunction.

Kara brought her idea to the Admiral, but he told her there wasn't time for an investigation. The Fleet was on the verge of finding the thirteenth planet. They needed to stay focused. She explained that if the Admiral wanted focus, he was going to have to let her take care of this problem. Then she would focus for him.

It had taken her almost two months to figure out who was behind the death of her husband. It had taken her two hours to track down the dead pilot who had been shuttling Anders and his team when the Raptor malfunctioned.

Kara wasn't surprised to see Lee beside her when she moved to take out the Cylon. Everyone thought Lee had given up his fight to prove that Dee's death was bigger than they thought. Kara knew better. Lee was too stubborn to let things go. It was the one thing she hadn't grown to hate about him.

"She's getting cocky," Kara said, staring at the hatch as the hinges started to snap.

"She has a right to be. I counted at least ten Centurions with her."

"I counted twelve," Kara corrected. "Still doesn't mean she has a right to be so confident."

A spark ignited near the hatch, and Kara saw the claw of a Centurion start to tear away the metal. They had two minutes tops.

It was odd. She had really thought she would have nothing to say to Lee now that it was the end. She thought the anger and resentment would be enough to keep her quiet.

"Did you… did you get my message yesterday?"

Lee nodded. "I was going to come over to Galactica anyway. I had a feeling this was how things were going to play out and I wanted to tell her I loved her one last time." Lee wiped the blood out of his eyes and trained his gun on the nearly broken hatch. "Thank you for letting me say goodbye to our daughter."

Kara had to lean back against the wall to keep herself steady. The pain was only now starting to hit home. "Are you worried about what's going to happen to her when we're gone?"

"Diana will be fine," Lee reassured her. "She has her grandfather to watch after her for at least a little while."

A thought suddenly occurred to Kara. "I asked Karl to bring her to you if I didn't come back."

"I'm not coming back either," Lee pointed out even though they both knew that was what she had just implied. He felt like he needed to say it out right. "I think Helo's smart enough to know you would have wanted him to look after our daughter. He'll take good care of her."

"I know."

The hatch flew back into the room, and Kara could just make out the silhouette of Margaret Edmondson as she stood in the corridor. "Lee?"

"Yes, Kara?"

"I always knew it would end with you and I."

"Me, too."