Lee and his father spend a few hours in careful conversation, avoiding verbal landmines, or trying their best to disarm them. It's strange, talking to his father like this, but it the possibility of it becoming familiar is promise enough for him to keep going.
Besides, it takes his mind off the fact that Kara isn't with him.
He knows that he can't be by her side all the time. And she's proven over and over again that she's more than capable of taking care of herself, but neither of those things makes it any easier to be without her. He's incredibly relieved when she and the President walk back into the room again.
Lee says good bye to his father and the President and turns to Kara with a quite smile. They've been given the rest of the day to do what they want, be by themselves, and that's just the way Lee likes it.
He tries not to pry, because she's been under questioning for hours, but he can't quite help himself, so he settles for flitting from topic to topic, and not pressing too hard.
"What do you think it was that saved you?"
"I don't know, Lee. Maybe it was the gods. Maybe it was something else. To tell you the truth, I'm more interested in why."
"You mean the destiny that Leoben was talking about? I thought you said you were sure you weren't a cylon."
"I am sure. But just because it was Leoben that said it doesn't mean it isn't true. The gods always face two ways, Lee."
"What the frak is that supposed to mean?"
"It's scripture, Lee. It's not supposed to make sense."
"What's the use then?"
"Things don't have to make sense to be true."
He's about to tell her that that doesn't make sense… except, as he turns it over in his mind, it really kind of does.
"So, what do we do now," he asks, and is pleased when she accepts the 'we' without pause.
"We wait." She doesn't seem upset by the prospect, which is a little unlike her, but perhaps she welcomes the break.
"Wait for what?"
"For the fleet to need pilots. That's how I've always gotten out of hack before."
His father had decided to trust Kara's map. They'd checked it over with Gaeta, and he'd spent an entire day cross-referencing and making different inferences and doing whatever it was that he did to determine where the fleet should go next. His conclusion had been that Kara, in addition to being an incredible artist, also had a damn good grasp on astronomy, and that as far as he could tell, the map meshed with everything he knew about the probably location of earth.
Colonel Tigh had come to a markedly different conclusion. Both he and Kara had been strangely tense around each other, which Lee found strange, because he was pretty sure they'd gotten over their old animosity during their time on New Caprica.
Tigh had flown into a rage after Gaeta's pronouncement, questioning Kara's loyalty, Gaeta's sanity, and Lee's parentage. His father hadn't been at all amused about the parentage comment, and Tigh had been dismissed from the meeting. It's the first time Lee can ever remember his father choosing him over Saul Tigh.
They must have patching things up between them though, because two days afterwards, Tigh comes knocking at their door, soliciting them for active duty.
Turns out that Kara was right about the fleet needing pilots. Lee's fighter and Kara's new viper are the only two attack ships equipped with FTL drives, and they need to get around another nebula to follow Kara's path to earth. They're going to be flying blind though, and they need some advanced scouts. Preferably some that can actually defend themselves if they do run into trouble.
Apparently Hotdog and Racetrack tried to fly the two new birds that morning. Both had had to eject, and they'd had to pull the empty ships in with raptors.
"As far as I'm concerned," Tigh tells Lee, "She's a cylon, you're unstable, and the map she's drawn us it going to lead us straight into a trap. There's no way I'm going to let you both out in our only FTL fighters."
"Well then," Kara returns, "By all means, come back as soon as you get tired of dragging Hotdog's ass back to Galactica. It takes a real pilot to fly those birds, and you're not going to find one outside of this room."
Tigh looks like he'd like to hit her, and she looks like she'd love the excuse that would give her to smack him right back. The last thing Lee needs is to have to explain a fistfight to his father.
"Wait," he says, and to his surprise, they actually do. "We both fit in my fighter."
Tigh is giving him a look of utmost derision. "And you would know this how?"
"We've done it before. There's enough room. Well, as long as we don't wear flight suits."
Tigh looks torn between the joy he'll get from telling them no and the joy he would get from watching them both blow up, and Lee wonders where all this malevolence is coming from. Tigh storms out without giving them an answer either way
He comes back two hours later, scowl still on his face. "You father," he informs Lee, "seems to think that you should go with Kara. Something about watching each other's backs. I'm not going to risk two ships on you though. You both go in the fighter."
Four hours after that, Starbuck is sitting on his lap and his hands are over hers on the controls. The fighter is practically purring. He loves the feeling of being up in the sky, and, better yet, of flying with Kara, working together, seamlessly.
"Apollo, if you don't stop breathing on my neck I swear to the gods, I'm going to hit the eject button."
Well, mostly seamlessly, at any rate.
"Hang on a second," he tells her. "I think maybe if I put my left leg up like this, and you shift over a bit. No, here, if you could kind of straddle my thigh. Yes. Just like that. Perfect."
Dee's voice comes, a bit strained, over the wireless, giving them the jump coordinates over what is clearly and already open comm line. He's embarrassed for a second, but really, it's their fault for bugging the ship. He doesn't even have to see Kara's face to know that she's smirking.
She keys in the coordinates as he steadies the ship, pointing them towards the nebula.
It's limned in light from two small stars, reds and blues whirling together.
It's like riding off into the sunset. "One bright, shiny future coming up," she whispers into his ear, and he smiles and powers up the FTL.
Fin.
In Kara and Lee's conversation about scripture, I paraphrased some of H.D.'s post- WWII poem The Walls Do Not Fall.
The relevant sections are from her description of the bombing of Britain:
Over us, Apocryphal fire,
Under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor,
Slope of a pavement
Where men roll, drunk
With a new bewilderment,
Sorcery, bedevilment
The bone-frame was made for
No such shock knit within terror,
Yet the skeleton stood up to it:
The flesh? It was melted away,
The heart burnt out, dead ember,
Tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,
Yet the frame held:
We passed the flame: we wonder
What saved us? What for?
…
They snatched off our amulets,
Charms are not, they said, grace;
But gods always face two-ways,
So let us search the old highways