His last thought before he lands is that it really is going to be okay after all.

That thought flees quickly enough when he jumps out of his bird to find her in restraints and surrounded by marines. She still looks calm. He is anything but. He's just been Apollo, destroyer of cylons and god of the skies. He refuses to be powerless here, just because he's on the ground instead of in the air.

The marines aren't going to listen to him… he's technically not an officer anymore. But he's also banking on the fact that they won't shoot him, so he forces his way into the circle they've made around Kara, and does his best to ignore them as he welcomes her back.

It's not hard. She has a way of filling up his entire field of vision. He touches her hair, her cheek, and it feels exactly the same as it did two days ago. The circles around her eyes are darker, but that could just be because of sleep lost between now and the last time she came to him on the Science Ship. She doesn't seem any more or less real. Sounds like Kara, looks like Kara, feels like Kara. He pulls her close though, just to be sure, checking like he had the first night she came back to him. Smells like Kara, he thinks, as he buries his head into her neck.

She smiles when he kisses her, full on the lips. Tastes like Kara too, and he doesn't care that his father and Helo have just entered the hangar bay, or that the marines are becoming increasingly uncomfortable, or that Anders is gaping at them.

It only takes a few more seconds to cross the line from not caring to not noticing at all, and Kara has to press him back gently, because if it were up to him, he wouldn't have stopped.

She looks out at everyone gathered around him, and it occurs to him for the first time that she has other people to greet, other battles to fight. He thinks, for an uncharitable moment, that he liked it better when he had her all to himself.

His father's face is expressionless, but Lee knows him well enough (and when did that happen?) to know that disbelief, anger, and joy are all roiling around inside him in equal measure. Kara really is the daughter he's never had, and the ace pilot he'd always wanted to raise. If it turns out that she's a cylon, the old man just might not recover. If she's survived somehow, it will have been a miracle of the type that William Adama has never allowed himself the luxury of believing in.

Believe in this, Lee wants to tell him. We always knew she was special. It could happen. He says nothing though, because in order for his words to have any effect, his father would have to believe in him, and Baltar's trial showed him exactly how unlikely that is to happen.

Anders looks scared. Really and truly frightened, and Lee wonders again what exactly is going on between them.

Dee is livid, but also kind of looks like the worlds have dropped out from under her, and he knows she's remembering a dress and a drink, and Starbuck's voice whispering in her ear.

Helo… Helo isn't looking at Kara at all. Helo's looking at him.

"Lee," he says, slowly, carefully, "I know you want to believe that she's back, but you've got to at least consider the possibility that it's not really her."

Lee doesn't move. Keeps his side pressed flush against Kara's. "You mean that she's a cylon?" Lee asks. "Would that matter?"

The answer seems to satisfy Helo, but everyone else is suddenly whispering amongst themselves, and his father is telling the marines to move. Lee wishes there were some way to keep this from blowing out of proportion, but somehow he doubts that saying, "Hey, it's okay, she's really on our side. She's been randomly appearing to me for weeks now" is really going to solve anything.

One of the marines prods Kara with his gun to get her moving, and Lee grabs it and twists until the idiot is on the ground at his feet. Another marine moves in to replace his comrade, and Lee's about to take him down too, but Kara is at his side, holding him back. "It's gonna be okay, Lee," she says, and though she sounds less sure of herself now than she did up in the sky, it's still enough for him.

Not enough that he's going to let her out of his sight, but enough that he's content not to try and stage a jail break. He ends up locked in hack with her while Cottle tries to use Baltar's cylon detector, and it feels almost like they're at the Academy again.

She grins at him and pulls a pack of triad cards out of her pocket. Technically, the marines were supposed to have searched her, and confiscated things like that. Lee thinks they'd probably been a bit afraid to touch her with him there. Good.

There's so much that he wants to ask her about. The song she followed, how much she remembers, how she knew about the cylon attack, how she got a new viper, but hack is bugged and she's going to have to answer those questions under interrogation soon enough. He plays triad with her instead, and loses 16 rounds in rather spectacular fashion before it occurs to him that perhaps she's retained a bit of her weird telepathy.

He opens his mouth to ask her, but before he can even get the words out, she laughs at him. "I don't have to have special powers to beat you at triad, Apollo."

So either she still can read his mind, or he's just that obvious. Excellent.

He's about to demand a straight answer from her when his father walks in with the President, Doc Cottle, and another platoon of marines. The cylon detector reports that she's fully human, at least as far as they can tell, but they know that there are five other models out there, and it could be that she's one of them.

"You do realize how unreasonable of you it is to demand proof of my humanity, right?" she asks. "But if you really want to know about the blood type of the final five, I would suggest that you take a look at Sam Anders."

The marines are supposed to be quiet and calm but even they erupt as soon as the words leave her mouth. She leans back on her cot, and stares at the ceiling. He can see that she's troubled. Something else to file away and ask about later. That is, if she has any secrets left after this interrogation. They've brought in way too many marines for a normal debriefing—or even for a normal prisoner interrogation—which means that there's a good chance things are going to get ugly. He's seriously considering whether or not he and Starbuck can take on all the marines when his father opens the cell door and gruffly informs him that he needs to leave.

"No," from both of them, simultaneously, and Lee can tell that his father is gearing up for a fight. Which is fine, because so is Lee, and granted, odds are not in his favor but…

"You're going to need to talk to Lee too," Kara says. "He's going to have to corroborate a lot of what I'm going to tell you."

The Admiral looks less than convinced.

Lee's attempts to talk about seeing Kara three weeks after she'd died don't seem to be getting them anywhere, either. It's harder to talk about than he thought it would be, especially since he's trying to censor out the parts where they'd been curled up together. He's probably not fooling anyone, after all, his dad was in the hangar bay earlier, but some things are just private, damn it.

In the end, it's the President who convinces the old man to let him stay. It's a classy thing for her to do, Lee thinks, especially after he outed her for kamala use a few weeks ago. He's also surprised that she seems to hold so much sway over his father.

It appears that the Admiral is hanging on by a thread. Having what might be Kara Thrace right in front of him has thrown him more than he'd like to admit, and he's in enough turmoil that he's willing to defer to clearer heads. His definition of "clearer heads" though, has always been limited to an incredibly small circle. Lee had never thought it would include Laura Roslin, but strange times make strange bedfellows, he supposes.

He also remembers that there was once a time when he himself would have wanted to be one of the people his father chose to trust. If he's honest with himself, he probably still does want that. He can't really blame his father for not seeing it his way this time though. Admitting to visions of the supposedly-dead probably doesn't inspire much confidence.

--------------------------------------

After the President gets everyone sufficiently calm, the real questions begin.

Kara's description of events isn't anymore coherent than it was when she told it to him, but Roslin presses for details more than he did.

When things still remain hazy, she calls in Doc Cottle and asks for a truth serum. Lee almost kills her, but Kara and the bars stop him. Probably for the best, as they kind of need President Roslin for as long as the gods will let them have her.

Doc Cottle points out that the truth serum might make Kara's responses even more nonsensical, but even Lee has to agree that at this point, that's not likely to matter. There is the matter of the serum possibly not working against cylons, but Lee's not about to bring that up. It doesn't matter anyway. She's not a cylon. He knows.

"So after you ejected, you were picked up by a ship?"

"I think so."

"Did you meet anyone there?"

"I… no?"

"Try again, Captain."

"They weren't people so much as they were… impressions. I couldn't really see them all that well, but I could definitely hear them. There was this song, and if I followed it, it would take me different places. Sometimes it was with them, but usually it was elsewhere."

"Elsewhere?"

"Other planets, other ships. Mostly here."

"And Mr. Adama saw you here?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you interact with anyone else?"

"Errr… he was, I mean, his song was the easiest to follow. I had trouble staying with other people for too long, and they couldn't really see me. I don't know why. But I did kind of interact with other people. Or I tried to, at any rate."

"Who else did you attempt to contact?"

"Well, Lt. Dualla. Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"I said something to her. I'm pretty sure she heard me. And I umm… might have spilled a drink on her."

"Might have?"

"She deserved it."

"She deserved it?"

"What kind of wife leaves her husband just because his ideas about justice happen to be unpopular at the moment? Besides, she was wearing my dress."

Even through the haze of the truth serum, that's the Starbuck he knows. Lee ducks his head to hide a smile, and looks up at his father through his eyelashes, surprised to see that he too has a bit of a grin on his face.

It had never occurred to him that, trial or no, his father might have sympathized with him over having his wife leave him. He hasn't been able to distinguish the man from the office for a long time, but perhaps, now that he's not an officer anymore… now that he has Kara beside him, and the confidence of being able to fly circles around the cylons… maybe they can try this whole relationship again, from a different tack. Maybe.

If the Admiral locks Kara up, then father or no, Lee's never going to speak to him again.

"Mr. Barnes," the President is saying, "Will you please call Lt. Dualla down to the brig?"

Lee's mouth is dry suddenly, and for one fleeting moment he wishes that Starbuck were still invisible, a guardian who could intervene when things got too scary, and save him from things like embarrassing encounters with his ex-wife.

So he might be being a bit of a wimp. Lee thinks that after the day he's had… after the past few weeks he's had… he should be allowed a little bit of wimpiness.

Kara must agree. Either that, or his panic must be showing on his face, because she shifts closer and takes his hand.

Perhaps she can still be his guardian. He squeezes her hand a little tighter.