Kara goes from a stiff posture of crossed arms and a schooled expression, to turning away, leaning a hand onto the CIC table. She's blinking and taking deep breaths, taking a moment to remember that she should probably say something, but Adama is still a step ahead of her.
"Don't feel like you're letting me down if you can't do this."
"Sir," she says, and it's not a confirmation or an answer. "If, um. If you have no objections, I would like to ask Lee to come with me as back-up...just in case...if—"
But she realizes he was probably about to suggest as much, from the look on his face, and there seems to be something about the way she said it that really surprises the old man. "Of course...He would be the most viable option of somebody to accompany you. I only wonder..."
"If he'll do it?" Kara's eyebrows lift up slowly. "If he'll do it for me."
Adama lets out a sigh. "It's between you and him. I can't be the one to ask."
Later that afternoon, then, Lee is clarifying, "Wait, you actually did ask me to come in here because you had something to talk to me about." She's just stopped him from untangling out of her bed sheets; this wasn't how she'd imagined it, but telling him while they're crammed into a bunk together seems as shitty a time as any. (And she really meant to ask him the second they were alone, but then she found herself pulling and touching, pressing a hand under his waistband, all in a sad and sudden way, as if she'd been missing it.)
Kara swallows, pushing her jaw out a little. The automatic attempts to get comfortable in the cramped area turn into her head lilting a little bit against his arm, and she's staring up at the bunk ceiling for gods know how long as she tries to sort out where the hell to start with something like this, and she needs to get it out before somebody starts pounding on the hatch.
"Hey," Lee says, a little too uncomfortable and confused to be necessarily soft with her, but not impatient either. "...What's going on?"
"I'm sorry I have to ask you this. I understand if you can't." She presses her lips together, and finally settles into sitting up, the sheet pulled up over her chest and staring straight forward.
"Ask me to do what?" he asks quietly, and she wishes, beyond any sense of what she would usually admit, in her clumsy and simple need for some comfort, that he would just say it, could say it and mean it, Anything for you, you know that. What do you need?
"...Help me assassinate Admiral Cain."
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If someone had told him, six months ago, that it would eventually be possible for him to be angry at his father on Kara's behalf...
But he does know him at least well enough by now to know that he's got to be aware of how frakked up this is, it's got to be eating at him at least a little that he's putting it on somebody he cares about so much, he just doesn't understand...
"Do you even know, can you imagine, how hard it was for her to even spit it out when she came to me about this?" Lee is demanding as he stands over his father's desk. "I know, I guess, I'm...the best option, but there's got to be someone she trusts more, if you can pull some strings—"
"First of all," Adama says with a raise of his brows. "Who would you suggest?"
"I don't know, I haven't memorized all the tiers of her frakking social life, but with how many of us got moved to Pegasus, I'd think...The point is, you're already throwing this in her lap, and then you had to send her to me, to—?"
"You don't understand," he interrupts, comprehending Lee a little better now. "It was Kara's idea."
"...What?"
"She suggested you before I said anything about it. It was her idea."
Lee's mouth is hanging open for a couple seconds, and his composure sinks together almost instantly. And his next words are a stammered "I'll do it."
Whatever all of it means, he means it. He wants her to understand that he knows this is hard for her, that it's probably the toughest thing she'll ever have to do. He can't imagine saying it, so he accepts the mission, hoping she'll know, that in that small way that she'll let him and he'll let himself, they're in it together and he's there for her this once.
At the back of his mind, he's even strangely aware that he might do something like this if it meant she wouldn't have to.
He always had a pretty instinctive awareness of the protectiveness of everyone around him in these dire situations, but it was more just a supplement of something he'd felt towards other people his whole life; now, he doesn't know, he must be starting to understand it a little better than that. He remembers the gun fight against the cylons on Kobol, how he and Kara were finally able to put aside all the complications and just look out for each other in the heat of battle, how there was a certain companionship soldiers had to have for one another even if it was something sturdily manufactured. He may have a really hard time with her as a person, but he realizes now that if he was in her place, he'd want her at his side too. So he tells her he'll do it and he tells her nothing else, and he knows she'll understand, even if she thinks or assumes or knows that it's not really about her. They quietly shake on it.
The feel of her hand and how it lingers, just a little bit, just long enough for her thumb to rub against him as if it has a mind of its own: This is what he's thinking about when he has to punch out and when he's floating in the cold black, when he fails her and feels like he can't get back to where he's been.
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The only time they even talk about it is the first idle moment Kara has a reason to hook a transport to Pegasus, when Lee is trying to catch a nap before a briefing. She climbs eagerly into his rack, straddles her thighs smoothly over him, sitting up as she removes both her tanks. His hands land automatically on her knees but don't do much else when she leans down to land some teasing nibbles on his shoulder, and it doesn't take her long to arch back off of him, a look of nonplussed boredom on her face.
It's not like he has to even say, I'm not in the mood. He just gives her an apologetic shrug.
Kara sighs, leaning farther back and pushing a couple rogue bangs around on her forehead. "You need to let this go, Apollo."
Lee looks unaffected, rests his forearm across his forehead in aggravation. He's looking at her with a mix of disinterest and adoration, and in a half-decided second thought he pushes up to pull her into lying down. "Your opinion is noted," he mutters numbly, and then he starts kissing his way down her neck, chest, grazing his teeth against her ribs at the bare skin below her bra.
"—Stop," she demands with annoyance as it tickles her. As he sits up, over her now, and starts undoing her belt, she flatly says, "It's not your fault, what happened, why don't you get that? You need to shut that noise off in your head about what almost happened, because we're both still alive..." His gestures are harsher now, tugging out of the buckle and pulling her pants down her hips. "And even if something had happened to me, so frakking what? I took the mission, it's my job. L— " She rolls her eyes at herself, pivots her hips up to get her pants farther off.
His motions have frozen, his eyes suddenly glaring down at her with tight frustration. He could make something out of the near-slip, but instead he demands, "And what about trusting each other?"
Kara rolls her eyes.
"Doesn't that mean a frakking thing? You picked me for this mission, and I let you down—"
"Do you trust me?" Kara's expression has quite quickly gone to a perplexed, sort of patronizing fascination with him, and the question seems asked in pure curiosity.
He furrows his brow in hesitation, like he's never really considered the question before. But it doesn't take him long. He answers solidly, "Yes."
From where she's lying flat under him, Kara blinks, in realization of something. All she can give him is a pitying smile before she shakes her head once and says, "That's a mistake."
Because of the look on his face, the fact that he still doesn't move, she sighs and turns to slip out of the rack. But suddenly with an almost grudging nature in his desire he grabs a shoulder and pushes her back flat again, gets the curtain, grips her by her wrists, pinning her arms back above her and kissing her, hard. She can't shrug out of the feeling of it, gives in and competes with the fervor, as if it's all just a fight he needs to get out of his system.
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Things get even worse.
One hour after Kara is the only one of three pilots to return from a Viper dive around an asteroid, Lee hears an uproar far down the hall closer to the bunk chambers, a loud thud as if someone is being angrily thrown to a wall. A couple people look over at his approach as if relieved that somebody with some authority is showing up, and he makes out the unintelligible shouting as none other than Starbuck in response to Kat's angry taunting. Before he knows it he's grabbing the closer pair of shoulders as the uproar turns too close to a real fight, barking at them to split it up, but Kara turns as if to lash out in a new direction and for some reason Lee grabs her shoulders again, tighter this time, and her eyes just blaze back all dangerous and pained.
"What. Are you drunk?" he demands quietly. And because he knows there's something more than what it looks like here, "What's going on?"
She smacks up on his forearms to get out of his grasp and slips off. More self-conscious now about the little throng of pilots still standing around watching, he just gives an exasperated shake of his head and resolves that he can probably only rile her up even worse if he tries to make something out of how much of a mess she looks like.
But he's barely started walking away when he hears a booming thud: one of her boots, shot just past him and bouncing off the wall treacherously close to his head. When he looks back at her she's terrible and severe and headed into the bunks, slamming the hatch behind her. And the look he gives everyone before he follows her in with the one boot is a mix of total confusion and Don't anyone frakking come in here, provoking a stream of shocked mutterings because it comes across like at least one of the two is going to come back out with a black eye.
And what he really is half-expecting from such a shook-up Kara is for her fist to go flying into his face the second the hatch shuts, is almost willing to have it out with her if it will get him any closer to understanding what the frak's going on. But he can't honestly say he's surprised when she goes for his belt instead.
"—Kara. Um."
"What?" she demands impatiently.
He looks up and down her, all the lines of grief in her face and the tension in her body and it's almost laughable and sour that she wants this right now. "I didn't come in here for that." She ignores him, and a second later he's insisting, "Stop it."
"What the hell do you want, Apollo?" She's already shifting into the gear of indifference, backing off of him.
Lee stupidly holds out her boot a bit before just chucking it to the floor as she sits back on the table and shucks off the other. "Look, why don't you just tell me what's going on with you?"
A bitter snigger lets out of her before she says, coldly calm, "No. I didn't come in here for a conversation."
Lee tenses up even more, watching her get up to mess around with something in her locker.
Her next remark is all the more frustrating for not even being that roughly delivered. "Like you and I could ever have a conversation about how bad things get without...competing with each other."
"I don't know if it would kill us to try, you know." He's a little bitterly surprised that she would still be thinking he's like that, but maybe he's never given her enough of a reason to think otherwise.
After a moment, despite looking like she isn't listening to him, she does add, "Why don't you ask your old man, Apollo? I'm sure he'll tell you all about my stupid ass making promises we can't afford to keep." She shakes her head, now mumbling bitterly to herself in syllables he can't make out.
"What?" But then he thinks he knows what she's talking about and just says, "Oh."
"I left them to die," she insists, an undertone of why-am-I-bothering-even-saying-this-out-l
oud puncturing her words with exhaustion. She numbly adds, "I should've tried harder. I should've done something, I don't know."
"You did what you could," Lee says, not just speaking about that but of what happened today. He doesn't know why he's so surprised that somebody like Starbuck needs to hear something like this, but he knows it's coming through in his voice. "You give what you have. None of it's your fault."
She looks away, still brimming up with so much anxiety her breath is a bit loud. Abruptly, after they fall into a pause and she's just staring at the floor in front of her, she asks, "You sure you don't want to frak me?"
Somehow it seems intentionally disarming and he can't help a laugh of surprise, and after a moment replies, "Yes...Look, if you have to take the morning off, I'll see what I can do. Just get some rest. And that's an order, Thrace."
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"It is my professional, and personal opinion," Lee says, finishing off the half-inch of drink in his father's quarters. The president slowly cocks an eyebrow at the admiral. "Kara Thrace is, as you've said many times, the greatest pilot we've got. But she's slipping, and she might keep slipping if she doesn't at least have the chance to do this."
Adama, supportive as ever of the president putting down her foot, lets out a barely audible sigh.
"Of course I understand why you turned her down, it's...an extremely dangerous rescue mission, and for a group of people who may or may not even be alive. But from being CAG I can tell you that a lot of our pilots are very much about principles, and just not bothering to save people we know are out there..."
"This would be very much off the record," Roslin interrupts, in a tone of slightly more conversational rapport. "But considering Thrace's determination, I was wondering...if during her time back on Caprica, she may have formed a particularly close relationship with one of the resistance fighters..."
Lee's brow goes furrowed, and he exchanges an uncomfortable look with his father, who seems hesitant for a different reason.
"Captain Thrace, and Lee, don't have the closest of relationships," Bill explains a little matter-of-factly. "You can't assume he'd have any idea if that were the case, and frankly I don't know if—"
"Honestly?" Lee intercedes. "I don't think the way she's been is just about one person. Sure, it's possible something like that happened with somebody, but...I don't want you to think her becoming lax on things is all just her having some kind of personal tantrum. My bet would be, she made a promise to somebody, and she's trying to keep it. She isn't...isn't like that."
"Like..." Laura slowly grapples for the word, "Emotional?" and Lee almost feels like she's having a joke at him.
"I don't know her very well," he replies, quickly aware of how uncomfortable this is getting.
"I agree, though," his father says, slowly conceding to Kara's defense. "Thrace is more aware of what's out there, and if she thinks this is something we need to do, that's where I'm willing to stand."
When Roslin speaks after a moment, she's back to being legislative. "I am not approving the mission, but I will...consider it, once again," she tiredly promises.
That's good news, and Lee maybe looks a bit too loosened up for a moment. He just nods respectfully, and thanks her, and when he's getting up to leave he swears that the president is giving him a curiously slanted look on his way out the door.
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She goes from her low to a considerable high when the planning of the rescue mission is more than underway. Their chance meetings are even fewer than usual lately, and the first time she sees him while she's over on Pegasus to brief the pilots, she's in a good mood, flippant and friendly while everyone around her is biting their nails over the election speeches.
"Hey," he mutters to her, a little distracted by what's on the radio in the rec room when she leans into the table next to him.
"Do I owe you a thanks?" she's asking. When his attention comes out of the stream of Baltar's lecturing and into what she just said, he just meets her eyes in a look much like the one she's giving him, surprised and amused and not quite aloof. He smiles.
"Hey, if I don't see you," he finally says, "Good luck out there."
Now the corner of her mouth threatens to smirk back at him. There's an almost uncomfortably long pause before she teases, "You worried about me?"
"I need every pilot I've got," he grants; even though he's not her CAG now and it's not quite an applicable comment, it seems a fitting joke between them. He's looking away from her again when he adds, "Especially you."
Something falls in Kara's expression, but not sadly. "Um. Thank you, sir," she finally quietly says.