Lee says, "Lieutenant."
After boarding the vessel, amazingly, with what he presumes to be the Arrow of Apollo (clearly the gods love her) strapped across her back, Thrace's impossible accomplishment makes it easy for Lee to swallow the remaining shreds of humiliation from weeks ago and greet her respectfully. Her spirits are looking particularly ravaged, but when she sees him her features light up with the type of restrained smirk that he's used to making him feel like there's some kind of joke at his expense. But he must not care just then, since he's smiling back.
"Captain." Her tongue drags over her teeth when she reaches out to shake his hand, quickly but grabbing it tight, like a taunt.
Before she turns to march up to the president, she winks.
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"Look..." Lee tries to start in with her when they're making their seemingly aimless hike on Kobol, the two of them lagging several yards behind the rest of the oddly arranged party. "Um. Is it okay for me to talk to you?"
Since finding the Astral Queen, Kara's attention to Lee has been virtually nonexistent except for in their short burst of almost violent but impersonal dispute about the toaster she dragged in, and a couple opportunities to fleetingly make fun of him. Somewhat indifferently, she comes out of the pensive silence of her walking to look at him, then rolls her eyes when she realizes what he means. "That was weeks and weeks ago. Not exactly on my mind right now."
"Listen," Lee sighs. "I know maybe you don't care, especially not now, but just humor me? I want to explain myself."
She grants him an amused smile, This better be good.
"This is none of my frakking business, okay, and you don't have to tell me, it's just kind of important for you to understand what I was talking about..." Lee sighs, hesitating.
Actually a bit curious, Kara stops walking to give Lee a confused look.
Up ahead, Laura has noticed the stalling; she turns and says something to Helo, who shouts back to them a second later, "Take five?"
Kara returns a quick affirmative gesture; she and Lee put down a couple heavier items they're tired of carrying. After he sits down on the ground, she leans against a tree instead of following suit. He sighs, and stands back up again.
"Come on," she says boredly. "Let's have it, Apollo."
"Did you sleep with Gaius Baltar?"
Her expression quite paintedly goes from initial shock, to being only halfway offended for a few seconds. Then she quite decidely smiles, and gradually falls into laughter.
"What?"
At the crest of a stretched-out giggle, she exclaims, "Really! That's what that was about?" She falls into another fit of snickers, none of it helped by his annoyance.
"Is it really that funny?" Lee grumbles.
"You have no idea how funny it is. The man's a freaky piece of work. He started saying this weird stuff, like he was talking to himself, right..."
Lee cuts her off with a broadly unsettled gesture, "I—no. Pretty sure I don't want to hear this."
She gives another little aah of laughter. "What do you wanna hear? That you were better?"
He practically coughs, blinking at her and way too close to actually wondering if she means that. "You're the one that's a frakking piece of work."
She scoffs like he's no fun. "...Apollo, what is your problem with me?"
"I guess while we're being frank?" In his discomfort, he laughs. "I can't take you cause you're a frakking mess, Starbuck. You're worth more than half the pilots I've got, but you drink like you're trying to kill yourself and you frak around like you don't have an inch of self-respect."
"That's not even—"
"No, come on, even I know you don't like Baltar," he cuts her off. "...It's all frustrating as hell. Especially since without all of that, seriously, I sort of..." He finds he can't finish the sentence.
There's a weirdly suspicious look in her expression.
"Really, I'd give my left leg for half of your guts and gods know you are funny as hell, but. There's all this baggage there I don't even know what to do with."
Kara lets one of her short, unamused laughs go; she now looks like she has a bit of a sour taste in her mouth, but like she's still processing what he just said.
He mildly interjects, "Of course that's...now. When I met you...Well, I was terrible when I met you."
"It was because of your brother," Kara says. "That's why this thing with your father is so complicated for you, and that's why you hate me so much. It doesn't help that you miss your brother so bad, and I didn't really lose anybody that day, not really. Right?"
Lee's expression seems at first resistant to this possibility, then not so much, like everything she said was true and it wasn't something he'd recognized. After a moment of contemplation, he just gives her a bewildered, "Hell, no wonder we don't like each other very much."
A whistling sound up ahead signals that the break is over. They continue walking in silence for a few more moments.
Lee notices a laugh forming on Kara's face. "What are you smiling about?"
But now she isn't smiling; she's stopping and looking around. With the briefest click of a hand gesture from her he realizes she just heard something, and they both smoothly draw out their sidearms, forming back-to-back.
Before either of them can try to warn the others, the distinct crunch of sticks under feet is heard, and Kara quickly determines the direction, covering it with her sidearm and blocking in front of Lee.
"Hold your fire."
That gruff command grabs a gasp out of Lee, who turns around whispering, "Holy shit."
Kara smiles with relief as Bill Adama appears out of an obscuring tangle of trees. The commander pauses at the sight of both of them. For half a minute none of them can find any words.
Lee just stands there, his eyes flicking over at Kara momentarily, unsure. Finally she sighs, reaches back and grabs his upper sleeve to shove him forward. With that encouragement, he goes the few steps and throws his arms around his father.
She rolls her eyes to herself and mutters, "About frakking time."
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That night Kara is sitting propped back on her elbows, taking the night watch. Even though she knows the boss is probably also awake a handful of yards away, the darkness dims out her sight of anyone else in their party, making her feel more alone, profoundly bored. Lee, sleeping close under the small propped tent ceiling, has a slight rasp in his breath, and she rolls her eyes. Once she's used to it, though, she recollects and entertains the details of him in bed with her; it's just too amusing with prudish Apollo unconscious right there, unable to do anything about it.
After a minute of this Lee stirs, rolls clumsily over with a soft grunt, and his elbow digs right into her lower left abdomen.
"Frak—OW!" Seething with the sudden sharp pain, she wakes him with her low outburst and a hard shove that accidentally gets him in the face.
"What—?" Lee rears up angrily; then he sees her turning on the flashlight, holding it in her teeth, unzipping her jacket, and beginning to peel off her bandage.
In response to the dawning expression on Lee's face, she puts the light down and cuts him off muttering, "These stitches are ready to come out anyway." As she reaches for her first aid box, Lee tiredly sits up and snatches it over.
"I'll do it."
With the slight toss of her head in the dark, he can tell she's rolling her eyes before she says, "I'm capable, thanks."
"I didn't say you weren't."
She tries to pull the kit out of his hands. "Frak off—Look, just go back to sleep—"
"—Would you shut the hell up and let me help you?"
Kara is so startled by the frustration in his raspy hush through the thick dark that the aid kit slides easily out of her grasp. There's a pause, and then with a heavy grudging sigh, she quickly reaches down and unfastens the waist of her pants to cuff it down a bit, cringing a little at the exertion of the sore muscles, and when he hands her the flashlight she leans back and aims the light where he needs it.
Lee is still agitated when he pulls out the first stitch. He grumbles, "I don't understand why you have to be so frakking stubborn."
She boredly replies, "I don't understand why you give a shit."
Still squinting a little in the weak yellow light, Lee shifts down so that his knees and feet rest on either side of her lower legs, his elbows propped gently close to her torso. He is still fixated on the careful task, not looking up at her, when he admits softly, "Maybe I'm a piece of work too."
The rhythm of her breathing relaxes over the minutes, and they stay in silence up until one of the last threads he's pulling away from the pink scar. "So what happened?"
She flatly replies, "I was shot."
"Twice?" He asks this with some doubt but figures out pretty soon she's not going to explain the other wound, if the one he's tending to is in fact from a bullet. Then he stupidly prods, "By a cylon?"
In the faint glow emanating outside the direct stream of light, he can see her shake her head incredulously. "Yes, by a toaster, Apollo. That's what they do, they shoot people."
He's fixing her a new bandage, pressing the edges on gently. When he looks up, maybe to dryly say the all-better, something makes him fall silent.
She heavily adds, "Lots of people." More like she's talking to herself than to him.
His hand is unconsciously stilled on her skin for a few seconds, and Kara is hiding her consideration of him in the dark that swallows her expression, but she can faintly see that he's thinking, and an allergic surge of irritation wells up in her stomach against him. This is still Apollo she's talking to. Can it really sink in for him, imagining how hard it must have been for her? Having to skulk around like unwelcome rats on a planet still recognized as a home, now in shambles. Being unable to go back to that ignorance still held by most people that are still alive of what it was really like down there, that she feels ripped-up and almost bloodthirsty now with the comprehension of all that destruction. Or does he think that Starbuck is too numb for that? This is still Apollo. He stung her pretty bad when they were still meeting each other, when he seemed to be trying from day one to make her feel like an outsider on her own ship. He's a frakking hypocrite and he doesn't care about anyone else's pain and...
His thumb is moving as if on its will, in the shyest comforting caress at her stomach. And in the crisp thick air his hand is cool but in a kind of warm way and—it feels just kind of nice moving down around her hip like that.
As Kara's head shifts slowly to look down at him, her expression hardly changes. But she does look.
He arches down and over, above her, and his left hand reaches up to her grasp around the flashlight next to her face. He joins his fingers with hers around the metal handle, and his thumb switches it off.
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Things get bad, bad enough that Kara's soon butting heads with other pilots even worse than she ever bickers with him. After she's just had a huge argument with Lee over whether Kat should be grounded for the stims fiasco, she goes proudly quiet, undoes one button on Lee's jacket, and heads into the racks. This is how it's usually done, only a lot of the time Kara signals that she's up for it by bending down and loosening her boots before she disappears behind a door, expecting him to follow. This was never verbally arranged and he doesn't remember where it started. He's lost count by now of how many times they've frakked; he's lost track of why, exactly, they have to make a show of barely ever associate with each other, though in all truth, they don't speak much more than they used to just because they're doing this.
When he's actually with her, on the spare days they actually find the time and space, it's usually the most thought he's given to her all day; but then when the form of it occurs, something withers as his body is trapped beyond the bending of those knees, leaving only the sensation that he has been craving this all along. As she coils up with pretty fury, under, above, against the wall, one half of his mind demands to know what he is doing. The other half is asking What the hell does it look like I'm doing? before his brain goes blowing apart into a hundred pieces and nobody's talking upstairs anymore.
He wonders right when these things happen, in a way that he forgets when it's not happening, if she does this too: Gets up and brushes her teeth and does her job and wants him and wants him, not knowing what she wants. What he feels most of the time and has known all along is that he should quit it with this, she is going to make him crazy simply because she is who she is. But there are other less definable places in him that wonder if they are the only thing keeping each other sane.
One day in the shooting range he can feel the boundaries sliding under them, slippery ice, because of the way she's laughing in his direction, even with Hot Dog in the room, after he makes some snide comment complaining about the last time Ellen Tigh was trying to hit on him.
"Apollo, what the frak is that huge stain on your shirt?" There is no stain, and she giggles when he looks down.
He shakes his head while she lets a few rounds off. His head feels weirdly cloudy. "Why are you always frakkin' with me, Starbuck?"
"Unh hah hah..." she sniggers, letting her pistol drop down. "Cause I love the way you do it."
"What?" He laughs, and laughs. "What?"
Hotdog hits the floor, and while Kara is hazily finding it hilarious he's starting to think, Oh no.
Five minutes later he isn't sure if he was passed out or not, if he's coming to or not, he just has in his mind a blurred impression of her reaching past him, a body clinging and struggling over him, weakly sliding her grasp down him for the spare round he managed to mutter was still in his pocket. And he recalls wondering in his panic with no particular emotion attached whether somebody finding their bodies mingled together like this would mean that he won the game in the end. He remembers the sound of a bullet finally shattering the glass...
"Apollo!"
As his head clears, she's standing over him, Katrain standing next to her volunteering to help her haul Hot Dog off to sick bay. Kara looks impatient, towardly annoyed at him as he starts laughing darkly beside himself.
"The hell?" Kat mutters.
Kara just says, "He's fine."
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The arrival of Pegasus makes everything strange, including them. Everyone from Galactica is able to pretty quickly start feeling out what's so off about everything, how they've stumbled upon a huge pretty package of twice the complications they had before rather than a helpful brand of humanity. Adama's crew picks up on the sentiment from each other, even though nobody talks about it; she doesn't like that she's feeling it, but she feels it the most when she's around Apollo, gathers both comfort and irritation from the fact that even he doesn't want to accept everything that's going to change.
It all seems to start with the day they both get called into the old man's office and the first thing he says is, "I'm ordering both of you to be completely silent until I say otherwise." After the two fall into their confused composure, he then goes on to explain that they are both being transferred off Galactica, and their mouths are falling open in stupid infuriated silence before he gets to the finish, where he's proclaiming, "I am trusting both of you to handle this with dignity. Part of that means I don't want any single person on that ship mentioning to me that I have two pilots who can't seem to stop pulling each other out of line. Do you understand?"
Both of them are a little too stunned to even gesture a response, but the ensuing silence is affirmative enough.
"If I can't have you two aboard my ship, I at least need to rely on you to be my eyes and ears." Adama speaks at the exact speed that means he is forcing himself to say what he has to say without his own particular judgment, and Kara nearly loses it and barks some curse of protest. "You've both been at least trying...to work together more, or at least that's how I hear it...Well, I need you to do better than that. Understood?"
As Adama goes on to explain who they're both to report to, Kara feels the buzzing sense of Lee looking sidelong at her, looks forward as stoic as she can manage instead of meeting his eyes. But a few seconds later she slips a furtive look in his direction, relieved somehow to note that he is easily just as steamed up about all this as she is.
They are silent in their rage until the next morning when they're setting up on Pegasus, and Kara can't help going to stand over Lee's bunk when the room is all cleared out, leaning in a shoulder and just staring down at him. He gives one bitter, incredulous shake of his head, and she snap-replies, "I mean, what the hell?"
He just shrugs.
"So you're flying a Raptor now? And the old man is just gonna—"
"There isn't anything he can do. You heard what he said."
Kara's mouth is opening to say something brisk, when the hatch opens and two huskily laughing ensigns topple around the door. To Lee's obvious surprise, she lowers down closer to him to continue at a sharp whisper her complaint about something their CAG said to her earlier. Back on Galactica she was never as quick to tell him things, but they both have a lot to get off their chests and there's no one else around who's likely to be as pissed about all of it as she is.
The first day they report for briefing, Stinger proves to be twice as incompetent as she'd guessed. And after he dismisses her comments like some power-tripping school teacher who's never touched a tactical plan, her bristling anger makes her crane her head around, trying not to make it obvious that she's checking out Lee's reaction. But he's looking straight at her and shaking his head in annoyance, and she's just not sure who he's annoyed with.
"Remember what my father said?" is what he mutters when he hands her the camera kit in the corridor. She's stuffing it back into the bag out of sight, wide-eyed, smiling.
Things aren't so comparatively smooth between them when her stealth surveillance stunt gets her promoted above him, and there are a couple times she thinks she's about to assure him that she doesn't think that's frakking fair at all, but it snags in her throat. And instead, at the first opportunity that they're both off duty, she sits her back down against the table where he's finishing off an early dinner. "Bunks are empty right now," she mutters without even turning her head towards him. "Wanna follow me back?"
Lee is a little astonished. After a second he starts laughing, and it's bitter but truly amused at the same time. "What, are you trying to make it up to me?"
Unapologetic as ever, she gives him a wry smile. She shrugs. Only five minutes later they're being a lot more obvious than usual when they jam the hatch behind them right as a younger pilot is exiting from grabbing a pack of cards.
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"Not too—" Her voice is hitching through her fast and ungentle scraps of instructions when she's on one of the long benches, legs wrapping around his movements. "I don't like it when I'm—"
"Yeah, I know—" he cuts her off, annoyed and ecstatic and irritated and mindless, "—You think I don't know by now?"
"—Mmph," her voice whimpers out, interrupting her own attempts at control as his hand is kneading down her stomach, taking and guiding her hips around him.
In a second, he's starting to smirk a little bit between all the white noise of his own feeling. "You like that, though," he accuses, and she's grunting in protest as he's setting the pace, agonizingly slow.
"Nuh," she grumbles, impatient, hating when he does this, teases and teases so frakking slowly while she coils and twists and sweats and waits, until she's practically begging for it. "Apollo," she groans, and it's chiding, it's an insult, it's the only thing she ever calls him. "C'mon...Come on—"
And it's always worth the worst of her verbal abuse for when he starts doing her in in earnest; it gives him a warm sneering sensation in his chest when the tension thrums and picks up and neither of them can take it anymore and he knows it. He must feel some weird notion to give her something for her trouble though, cause when he has her wrists pinned above her he gives a hungry licking kiss to her mouth, and his thumbs are rubbing caresses into her palms as he hears himself asking, "Can I go down on you?" Her eyes go a little wide.
"Wh—" She swallows. "No."
"Okay." He lets her hands go, gets back up to supporting his weight on his palms. They both know he won't ask again.