Apollo pulls through sneaking right under the cylons' asses like the little maverick he apparently is, and everybody on the ship is so giddy over the success of the tylium mission, she really can't help being happy for him. She joins up with the drinking and celebrating out on the deck, smiling from slightly afar to see Lee quietly accept a handshake from his father; her restless irritation from not being out on the mission is vicariously alleviated by the deserving glow around him, the sheen of sweat she usually wears with gleaming triumph.

After grabbing a bite in the mess hall, Kara stops into the racks, intending to change before joining the gambling that'll doubtlessly be starting in the rec room. She has to do a double take when she finds Lee in there, presumably having just gotten a shower before changing into his sweats, just sitting at the long table going over a small pile of papers, likely their next recon plans, with a lone glass of alcohol in front of him that has only a few shots' worth and his hoodie lazily zipped barely more than halfway up. With wide-eyed snickering wonder, she goes by him on the way to her locker exclaiming, "You've got to be kidding me."

He calmly protests, "Keep it to yourself, would you?"

"No, seriously, what are you doing in here? Are you trying not to make friends? You should be accepting toasts and lapping ambrosia out of somebody's cleavage."

He can't help a short laugh. "Yeah, it's not really my scene."

She's at her locker, changing, while he casually averts back to studying the papers at the farther end of the table from her. Before closing her locker, she pauses, then takes something out. She goes over after a second and places it in front of him; it's a shiny long silver case. Her last stogie, a gift from the commander after her close call on the red moon a while back. He shifts up slightly, consternated.

"You deserved it," she says. Rather impersonally, but sincerely.

Lee looks at it for a long spell of a moment, and finally he says, "I don't want it."

She looks down at him in irritation, like he's not following the script, reaches out to take it back. She catches enough of him glancing back at her as she does to see that there's almost some worry there; he thinks he may have actually hurt her feelings.

Then she says, "Well, your father did want me to have it..."

He sinks back, hardened again. "And there it is."

"There's what?"

"You're pissed it wasn't your victory, so you're on my ass with the usual gloating about how Daddy loves you the best."

"I'm not on your ass about anything," Kara says aggressively. "If I was, I'd be making fun of how scared you were that you weren't gonna cut it with the best pilot stuck in CIC with a bum leg."

"You are unbelievable..."

"Oh, admit it. You were all worried about what ol' pop would think if you botched up the mission."

Lee doesn't say anything, but he looks very bottled-up. Apparently she's going to ruin his evening no matter what she does.

Kara takes a drink from her water bottle; when she lowers it, one finger lifts out from the neck to point at him. "Hey, I'm not the one who thinks it, you are. You know..." She pauses with a tiny little matter-of-fact laugh. "Maybe if you put things into perspective a little bit, you'd realize that my relationship with your dad is not my way of having a pissing contest with you, considering that you weren't even around the first couple years I was working for him—"

Lee bitterly spits, "That doesn't mean you know anything about him."

"Yeah?" Kara manages to make the act of grabbing her cane look more threatening than comical before she starts walking along the length of the table back over to him, bearing down on his level. "Look, here's what really frakking irritates me about all this. I don't claim to know more about your father than you do and I never did. But whenever you get into your 'Frak daddy' modes, you say all this crap about him, about the way he raised you, that just doesn't really sound like him to me. And if I say this to you, you'll just get pissed and tell me I don't know shit, instead of actually considering that he's not the same man he was a long time ago."

Lee's eyes slowly raise up to meet hers, still glaring, as she picks up his glass and takes a swallow, dangling it loosely in her hand.

"I just don't know about you, Apollo," Kara went on in a sour tone. "Sometimes I think you feed off being angry at him so much, it's like you'd rather not admit it if he's changed."

Lee has a dour look that now says, I'm not listening to this shit.

She resigns to a more combative tone again. "Frak, well...Just to set the record straight that the bitterness is more than returned. I care about the old man and you're a little asshole to him and it's disappointing. I guess I've treated him more like a father in the past few years than you have in your entire life."

In a spurt of almost petulant anger, Lee's leg shoots out and kicks the cane out from under her. As she stumbles and catches her fall with a clumsy and painful-looking graze of her ribs to the table, the glass is dropped and rolls across the floor, having left a trail of spill down her pant leg. She groans an incoherent syllable and rubs at the fabric. Without bothering to retrieve the cain she just grumbles, "Bastard," and hits Lee with a slap to the side of the head like a bullying sibling.

Still irritated but apparently having decided they're even now, Lee tries to signal a will to ignore her by going and sitting on the edge of his bunk. But Kara does a roundabout limp circling the table, grabbing her bottle on the way around the end and then catching Lee looking away in the next few seconds: She quickly goes for his hood, pulling it back enough to pour a fleeting amount of water down his neck. With a wordless irritated outburst, he knocks the bottle down and pushes her arm away, stands up and shoves her harshly back by the shoulders.

The two have often come very close to getting into a physical fight, but not quite that far, and tonight isn't going to be a first. These lazy motions all play out with harmless outcomes, driven by the irrational energy of the competition and dealt with no real force behind them. The hazy mirth of the evening comically seeps through their childish attacks, which have slowly gone from malice to mischief: Adopting some feeble intention of humiliation, Lee reaches up to grab her hood, pulls it over her head and down covering her eyes, then pushes it back with the aim to mess up her hair, even mopping his hand through it a little. Her next move is clever lightning motion when she manages to jam his arms sheepishly in his sleeves by pulling the loose collar tightly down over his shoulders, grinning in amusement at the sight of his arms pinned at his sides. Annoyed and wriggling free as she's diving away for some other thing to throw at him, he manages to snatch her by one arm, shoves her against the rack wall and grabs around the drawstring holes of her zip-up, mirroring her action with a sharp tug.

But with the rapid pull, the zipper gives, undoes: Kara is suddenly unfastened except for just a couple inches above her waist. She's got the bra underneath, no big deal, but in the end his maneuver went pure slapstick and he's the one embarassed, Kara triumphant. He notices her bare stomach bouncing slightly with restrained laughter, and he looks up with an expression of sore defeat to meet the steely arrogance in her eyes, the patient smirk, the What the hell are we even doing?...

They stand that way for a few seconds, Lee brewing mad and her still managing not to laugh.

Then maybe Kara feels sorry for him, or maybe it's the next part of the game, he doesn't know. Her hand reaches up to her zipper. Her eyes, still bearing into his, take on a darker gleam just before she unfastens the bottom, and the sudden breath as Lee's body is already tilting forward is the sound of him very quickly getting it.

First he pulls the sweater quickly off down her shoulders, stopping at her wrists so that her arms are restrained behind her back, their bodies pushed together and faces propped close. He kind of measures her up with a close look, before his head ducks down just slightly lower.

Another few seconds, and she invites him with a rugged sneer of a smile. The kiss happens, at once all soft and testing and abstract, then with sudden but subdued elation. Not careful but open and slow until Kara takes the dare and slips in, tastes, prodding a sleepy hum of contentment from Lee, a motion of his hips he can't help. His hands eagerly reach up for her face and neck, allowing her finally to wriggle her arms free and begin to work him out of his clothes.

They go from Lee's back rolling sharply against the table by Kara's pushing-pressing-touching to her collapsing and grappling under him in his rack, sticking fast with however they fall in on top of the sheets as he untangles her legs from the stubborn knotting of her pants and underwear. Kara naggingly mutters a needless warning to be careful with her knee as he gently props her leg around his hip. His forearms reach forward to frame her around the shoulders, their manners still carrying on like a game of chicken with her eyes always jeering him on, do-we-or-don't-we; but then her next thought is interrupted by the action of his dauntless answer, forcing her mouth shocked and slack, shutting her up.

If it's still a contest, they seem to go about it like the loser is the one who rides off first, and all the insistent movement is almost too much for the space of one bunk as Kara boldly eases the captain out of his steady manners, budging his body into all the right tremors. They let out their mindless wordless noises, all on the same startled octaves at the very fact of what's happening; he finally manages against the tremble that's aching to ride through him, with the right rhythm and a drag of his lips down her neck, to send her head soaring back with her voice kicking out a crackling sound that quickly turns into a groan of "Gods—I hate you—"

"—know I know I know..." Having won, Lee is letting himself go with his face buried at her shoulder, mumbling against her in strangely agonized nonsense, and Kara's head tilts attentively to the side, hearing something. A second later she's easing him off and then grabbing the curtain, managing to close it not a second too early before somebody enters the room.

She doesn't have to give Lee a glance to know he's not going to make a sound. They hear some footsteps, the twang of a locker opening, a couple small shuffling sounds, and then whoever it is clacks the locker shut and walks back to the hatch, opens it and leaves. And somewhere, some second, between that entrance and the moments-later shutting of the hatch, Lee Adama clearly just realized that he has now slept with Kara Thrace.

She's shifting up, cool and uncaring except for a hint of a perplexed grimace as she slips back into her underwear. Unable to meet the practically gaping face she can almost feel him landing on her, she doesn't even give him a final glance as she wordlessly rolls over and slips out of his bunk, closing the curtain behind her.

.

.

.

.

When the first thing she says to him the day after is a completely unremarkable "Where's Chief with the check-lists?" while she licks out of her Viper, cooling off the last few hours of her cap with a blinky headshake, he thinks that this isn't going to become so awkward after all.

He's wrong.

.

.

.

.

The conversation that he shouldn't have overheard goes something like:

"I was drunk."

"So was I."

"I don't care. I don't need you to be a frakking gentleman, just get off my case. That was almost a week ago."

"Well...three days—That isn't the point. Listen, the way I was afterward was, I admit, an appalling display and lapse of any kind of...uh—"

"Really? You can stop talking now and shake my hand and walk away."

Her tone, embittered, good-humored at the same time. His, sheepish.

Lee thinks it's a little strange for her to be talking to the vice president this way, whatever's going on, but he understands nothing and thinks nothing of it, practically forgets about it.

That is, until an idle moment of his lunch break, when he revisits overhearing that oddity of a conversation between two people who usually seem to naturally repel each other. This thought organizes into a cut-and-dry classification: Baltar is the only person who annoys her as much as I do.

The comparison sticks. His mind draws a clean line to some previously noted, purely peripheral information, unfolding from the first musical bursts of the election ball to that gods damned dress, to what? To his cocktail glass tipping up to his face while, at the corner of his eye, the newly elected appeared to be attempting a sweet-talk on an already furled-up Starbuck, at which time Lee assumed she'd stick him in her ashtray where the sleazy bastard belongs.

But now, how the event must be pulled out and reclassified and placed among this new information and, Oh. Oh. Oh.

His first instinct is that he should find it funny. He waits for this to happen.

"So maybe you could help me straighten out a rumor," he says to her out of the blue after the nugget crowd disperses away from them in the ready room, "that you only sleep with men you can't stand."

He has apparently failed to find it funny.

Kara goes completely still for a second, then flicks her pen cap a couple times before tossing it down on a desk, hard enough that it flies right off to the floor; she turns to him with this look like she was just waiting for him to have the nerve to bring this up, and that she would've calmly preferred the worst forms of torture.

She says, "I can already tell this is going to be completely uncalled for."

"I don't know, Starbuck, maybe I'll just get a kick out of hearing you admit it."

She now actually looks confused by the level of pretense, unable to form a response for a moment. "Why are you being such a dick?"

"I just want an explanation," Lee says sharply.

"Oh. Right." She nods bitterly. "You want me to come up with some reason I was misguided or psychotic or drunk enough, so that I'm basically apologizing for sleeping with you, so that it's my fault you did something you really didn't want to do."

What got him here is by far the most idiotic train of thoughts his imagination has ever subjected him to; that night's entire game of jokes leading up to the different heat, the undeniable fun of it when their anger had peeled into a softer kind of fire, has all gone through his mind all over again, but with other men both familiar and faceless, over and over maybe ten times. The unplaceably bothersome emotional absurdity of it has compelled him to this; being a dick, he'll admit, isn't making him feel any better.

After what she said he's thinking, Get out of this. Apologize. Frak, Frak, Dammit. Shit.

The problem is, he's still mad.

He opens his mouth and says, "You must get this a lot."

She flinches half a step forward, her fist balling at her side; a second later, though, he might as well be floored by the fact that she hasn't hit him. And the profoundly bullied look she wears as she puts forth the forced effort to control herself, he thinks, is worse than if she'd knocked him a pretty purple color somewhere on his face.

"Don't frakking talk to me, okay?" she says. "Outside of doing our jobs, don't even look at me. I'm serious."

She clenches her arms together again on the way out of the door. Now completely sobered from his aims at pestering her, not understanding himself, he has no idea how the last minute happened. He kind of kicks at the floor, shakes his head and mutters to the room, "Lee, you're an asshole."

Naturally, the course of the day necessitates speaking to her. With as few words and as little eye contact as possible, he has to formally approve her little hot-shot cylon bombing mission which he can't stop thinking is going to be dangerous as all hell. Her attitude is crap, she doesn't bother standing at attention and he just can't bring himself to do anything about it. He hands her his notes on the report and she practically snatches them from him before briskly turning and walking away.

"Lieutenant," he says before he thinks about it.

He doesn't look towards her as he says it and feels like she didn't hear him until she slowly appears at his side, clearing her throat, watching Chief's crew going to work on the raider instead of facing him. A moment goes in silence before she demands, "Sir?"

His gaze doesn't move from the floor a few feet in front of them. The taste of the words seems like it should chew at his chords on the way out, but the sentence comes aloud in an unexpectedly soft way.

"I'm really sorry."

He can't dare to look at her, so he only sees an ambiguous motion of her head. "...Am I dismissed?"

One of the workers is handling the transponder like any other piece of equipment, shaking directions to someone else as they hold it at the side. Lee thinks he's getting a headache. "Yeah, you're dismissed."

And then hours later she folds out of the push of space into another pull, wriggling away from Lee, from his father, and he has enough clarity by now to squint through his irritation and wonder what the commander must have done to piss her off so bad. He implies his suspicions but does not ask.

It's the last conversation he has with his father before Boomer plants two bullets straight into his heart.

It's the closest he's come now, in his mind, to accepting that Kara is really family, because he has to, with his father all cut open and possibly dying. If they don't find a good surgeon, his heart's going to fail; if Kara isn't coming back, it'll probably break. He accepts the burden of her absence on his shoulders even though it makes him feel more alone than he's been since the Cylons first attacked. He tries to fill the space, and feels so fervent and bewildered by anything and everything lately that he doesn't realize it as he's doing exactly what Kara would've done: He fraks up, big time, and lands himself in the brig cell next to Laura Roslin.

And the really funny thing is, after he's gathered that Roslin is what Kara has decided she believes in right now, after he throws his gauntlet down and follows her out into space, what he's doing for her isn't about spirituality as much as principals, but he wants to believe in her too. Maybe because it brings him closer to Kara, which is as close as he can get to his father, the man he hates and loves and cannot lose.