Everything is just too much of a mess amidst the time frame in which the mission party successfully gets back: The election looks like Baltar, then it's Roslin, then it's frakking Baltar again, and Lee has been too distracted lately to really let it sink in that his living situation is about to change, a lot. And it's strange how he puts in only half of a shift thinking about it before he realizes what he wants to do.
It just so happens that the first person he tells is Dualla, because she's the first person to ask. Both crews are down on the planet helping to set up a few of the thousand things that need to be done within the first week of Baltar's presidency, and the flimsy table where he's catching lunch ends up occupied by only her after what he thought looked a little bit like an argument between her and Billy Keikeya.
Her fork pauses in the air, and then he can tell she's trying not to look so surprised. "Oh," she says, remembers to swallow. "Who's taking command?"
"I'd guess Taylor, unless Hoshi's sticking around." Lee gives his noodles a funny look. "Who do you think should do the job?"
She blinks, and he realizes before she replies that she's shocked he would ask for her opinion. He has to suppress a smirk at that.
He eventually says, "Anyway, it'll still be a couple months before anyone of the fleet is settling down here for good."
She asks, "Have you told your father yet?"
It actually takes him a month to go in and declare his intentions to his father, who isn't exactly surprised, but finds it curious. Lee understands why; it's not that he loves being up here, but it's probably hard for someone like his father to imagine what his aspirations are for down there. His only point of dreading it was a small amount of guilt for giving up his chances to really catch up with his dad, but it's not like they won't have any time for that at all. He can see the wheels turning, Bill wanting to ask if there's any particular reason for it, but instead he gives him a loose smile and a handshake, even a light hug around the shoulder.
"Like I said." Lee tells him, "I'll stay in command through the groundbreaking. To give you some leeway, and I can always help with—"
"Nah, stop. You know I've already got somebody lined up in case you decided to give it up."
"Oh?" Lee cocks an affectionate expression. "So eager to get rid of me?"
"You know that isn't the case," he says, but then jokes, "Not having Starbuck under my command, now. That'll be less of a headache."
Lee's smile takes on a more uncertain layer before he finally distractedly says, "Yeah."
.
.
.
.
Even though there would seem to be more respect and reason in starting the parties after the ground-breaking ceremony, that doesn't seem to be the case with the throngs of civilians Lee weaves through at 0300 the night before it's supposed to take place. While he passes plenty of tents where it looks like people have shut in for the night, there are easily hundreds of people for only a few miles around who don't plan on getting any sleep.
For the most part he's just getting a look around, seeing what's being set up where and enjoying the cool night air, when he wanders out to the edges of one of the "neighborhoods" to something that is starting to look like a rough imitation of a park. One of the first things he sees is the quick movement of two people with a third straggling close by, in what he is impressed to realize is a sparse but functional reproduction of a pyramid court. Coming up closer, he picks up some humored dialogue between the two people having an informal match just as the ball goes bouncing out of bounds and is retrieved with casual agility by the third one who's only been watching. As the match resumes, both Lee and the spectator gravitate to sitting on a pile of lumber that makes for a good bench, and he nods at the other in greeting.
"How's it going?" The man is tall, his voice very companionable.
"Hey. This is, um. I hadn't seen this yet, this is great," Lee conversationally says, indicating the court. "I wonder if the Buccaneers built this."
The man laughs. "Yeah, well, that's us actually."
"Oh—" Lee laughs too, automatically sitting a little closer to extend a handshake. "Thing is, even if I could see you better, I wouldn't know. Haven't followed pyramid since I graduated."
"It's Sam," he says with a friendly grip. "T. Anders, if you didn't..."
"I have heard of you," Lee says, his voice taking on a more formal friendliness. "And a lot of the stuff you did on Caprica. Very admirable."
Sam seems a little surprised but humbly shrugs. "Well, we like staying alive." Lee realizes all at once that he hasn't introduced himself, but before he has a chance to say anything the other's attention is being caught by a person Lee now hears approaching in quiet pebbly footsteps.
"Nuh-uh." Sam shakes his head, looking far back over Lee's shoulder and shouting, "I'm not drinking that."
"It's not—No, come on. This stuff is fine."
Not knowing if it's a smirk or a grimace or what, Lee feels the corners of his mouth curling up slightly.
"That's what you said last time. That crap tasted like motor oil."
"And you'd know. Cause you hardcore resistance fighters drink motor oil for breakfast."
"Nah. But pro players do."
Lee can just imagine the eyebrows raising smartly when her smoothest of mocking tones delicately replies, "Guess that explains why they're all so dumb—"
"I heard that," one of the players on the court, a woman, is yelling while Kara just snickers, slams the bottle down on the lumber while blowing a stream of smoke out of her mouth.
"Where'd you get that one?" Sam is asking Kara.
"It's a secret," she says wryly. She offers him a drag of whatever it is she's smoking, and Sam shakes his head.
"You know I don't like it," he says.
That's when Kara realizes, in the dim profile from the nearest firelight, that Lee is sitting there. The half-lit impressions of their faces meet; Lee just smirks uncomfortably as she looks between the two men in vague dissatisfaction, and she has that half-terse look of adamant refusal to show much of anything at all in her expression. What she does is hold out the cigarette in a polite offer, not expecting him to take it; but he does, and takes a slow drag still looking at her, and gives it back.
"Sorry, this is...You know what, I don't think you—"
"I know who it is," Kara interrupts Sam flatly.
"Oh." To Lee he says, "You didn't say you were fleet..."
"This is Commander Adama," she informs. "I'm sure I've mentioned him a couple times. The admiral's brat? I'm his problem pilot?"
"Was," Lee says.
Kara takes an aloof second to concede, "Was."
With a simplifying shrug, Sam says, "So you two must know each other pretty well, I'm guessing?"
For a moment they're both trying not to grimace, until Lee lets Kara off the hook with an open-ended, jokingly sarcastic "Yeah, Starbuck's a real blast" that has everyone snorting into short laughter.
After they all somehow manage small talk for a few more minutes, Sam is standing up to stretch out and Kara taps the bottle with her fingernail. "Drink that shit, you know how long it took me to find that?"
Sam just laughs.
"Come on. Chug it, Samantha."
"Oh, for—" Sam grabs her doggingly around the waist, dragging her along in a bullying grasp. "See how your attitude plays out when I kick your ass on this court—"
"No, no, stop," Kara squirms in protest, holding up her cigarette. "I gotta finish this."
"Ah, fine." The other players are nagging at Sam to join in, so it ends up with Lee and Kara sitting on the ground a little closer to the bonfire, next to each other but not next to each other.
"For some reason it's weird to see you in your civi clothes," Kara remarks, her eyes fixed on the match.
"Yeah?" Lee looks over at her. "Same with you, I guess."
"...I've been hearing an interesting rumor, you know."
"Have you?"
"Yeah. Is it true?"
"Unfortunately for you? Possibly."
She laughs, a genuine little laugh.
They feel a bit separated from the match sitting alone out there, a wall of false privacy seeming to go up. When Kara speaks again, her question surprises him.
"What was that look on your face when Sam was complaining about the music from earlier?"
"...Oh." It takes him a moment to remember, and then he feels a little uncomfortable trying to explain it. "I just had this thought that he would've...gotten along with my brother pretty well..."
She looks over at him then for just a brief second. He thinks it's going to get really quiet again, but then she asks, "What was Zak like?"
He just gives her a slightly confused look.
"I mean, I know some things, but it's only your old man's side of the story, so I may not really have a good idea." She shrugs, and with a surprising lack of discomfort about it states, "I'm just curious."
He shifts up his knees, twitching a bit until he manages to sort out his reply. "Well..." He clears his throat.
"If you don't want to, you don't—"
"No, it's fine. Guess I just don't really know where to start." Lee's foot scrubs against the grass a little bit as he takes another half a minute. "He was...very into other people. Like his favorite thing to say was 'What about you?' Very good at figuring people out from the first minute he knew them. He had an obnoxious way of never looking out for himself, though. He felt a lot for other people, but..."
There is a long pause, in which Kara says nothing and doesn't look at him, but he can tell somehow she's not paying attention to the match anymore.
"It's way worse," Lee said, his voice going low, "that I let things slip off with him. I got fed up with my father. With Zak I just...felt guilty. It was hard to be around him when I couldn't get away from this awful feeling that I had everything he wanted, or deserved. Though of course now I start to wonder if I had all that wrong."
"What did he do after he busted his sims tests? Just leave the academy?..."
Lee lifts his brows and grins a little, reaches to smoke another drag. "He opened up a record store in Dionis."
Kara's eyes slowly grow into a humored astonishment. "Ah, wow. Old man must have been ecstatic about that."
"I can't believe you don't know this. Yeah, he turned a good profit too. I'd occasionally go visit there, and he'd tell me something to buy. He thought my taste in music was horrible, so..."
"What did he like?"
"Oh, everything. And I mean everything. Sometimes classical and opera, sometimes—stuff that just sounded like screaming..." His way of tapering off makes her laugh.
A moment later, more seriously, she comments, "Sometimes I wonder if that's the problem with you. Feeling for other people."
"...What?"
She's blinking hazily, rubbing a hand over her eyes before she goes on. "I think maybe you've got a lot of empathy in there somewhere. Not sympathy. Empathy. But when you've got something to grieve about, oh...You don't screw around."
There's a pause in which they both scoff, uncertain as to whether it's a bad time to laugh.
She's coming off almost maudlin in her long-trailing words, reminding Lee that she's smoked a little more than he has. "Like you just have to shut other people down for a while. Like, not even consider the fact that if I didn't lose anybody during the fall it just means I'd already lost them a long time ago. It's like you'd usually care more than most people do, but you just can't deal...At least, it's the best assumption I can make. I don't know."
He looks over at her, a bit somber. He finally asks, "What about you?"
"What?"
"What about your family? What happened?"
She inhales off the stub, puffs some out as she asks, "You want to finish this off?"
Sam comes hanging back and says something about somebody named Jean making some pancakes out at the bonfire, and Lee realizes he's invited in the same way that Kara realizes she'll probably look or feel like a jerk if he doesn't come.
This only turns mildly uncomfortable, him just watching everyone exchange jokes he doesn't understand, the way Kara will laugh at them hard enough for her forehead to sink onto Sam's shoulder. Even though he's not being left out, there's a tickling dry feeling like he's sinking into the corner even while he's sitting right there. He keeps catching little glances from Kara, and they look affectionately pitying, almost. Anders gooses her when she calls him "Samantha" again, and as Kara and Barolay start to really team up on making fun of something he said earlier, Lee is standing up to leave with a goodnight wave to everybody.
He's made it a few steps away when Kara is belatedly saying, "Hey, wait, I..." He turns just as she's tripping after him through the fire's rogue embers. "Forgot to ask you: Do you have any paper?"
"Paper?" The settled civilians have been trying to hit him up for all kinds of resources all day, but he's having a hard time imagining why she would have run out of paper already.
"Yeah, but thick...I'm making a new deck of cards."
He almost grins at that, either at the fact that she knows all the folds and rips in her own deck too well or that she's apparently that bored. "I guess I could see what's in the Raptor..."
"Okay. If you find anything, just bring it to my place, it's...the third tent down from where they're collecting clothes, you know?"
"I think I can figure that out."
"One of the sides is kind of an...orangey fabric?" She cocks an eyebrow; everyone's still getting used to giving "directions" down here.
"See what I can do," he mutters.
He only realizes about half an hour later when he finds her sitting outside of the tent that she actually meant to meet him there, unless she only decided to leave the fire a few minutes before he found it. She stands when she sees him and goes inside, holding open the entrance so that he follows.
"I ripped the bottom layer off of every notepad I found."
"That's the stuff. Great." She's lighting a little camp lantern so that he can see a lot of belongings inside. Apparently proud of her work so far, she hands him all the cards she has completed with a bit of a smirk.
Lee picks out to closely examine one of the finished triad articles from the pile, squinting when he notices the perfectly colored shapes and the delicate flourish lines she added on the edges that you'd never find on an old deck from a corner store. Noticing a rubber-banded bunch of colored pencils on top of a mess of flimsier paper, he thinks it's strangely fitting what she's done with all the free time.
She's holding a blanket tightly around her, but as she starts to make up her bed for the night she takes it off and spreads it onto the mattress. It's a bare-bones excuse for a bed; when she hops lightly onto it, though, with her skin and hair a bleeding sunny vision in the firelight, bare feet and toes nimble and bare and homey and going tucked under the fleece, she makes it look deceivingly comfortable. Plush and inviting.
"You cold?" she asks, looking just up at him from where she sits. He clears his throat or does something else that's not knowing if he gets it, and she is smiling at him, tucking her hair back, and he's still a little stoned and it's a bellowing hot ache in his chest right now, how beautiful she looks.
He's standing close enough for her to just shimmy forward a little to reach up and loosen his jacket. Her eyes do something really sweet and scary as she's going for his waistline and starts to kiss along his stomach through his shirt. Lee feels a bunch of bronze-heavy butterflies flapping and slapping through his thoughts, and swallows.
"Nuh—Hold on," Lee protests. It all zips up rather quickly: "I'm not mustering out."
She stops then and slowly looks up, cynical. "Yeah, you are. You said so, everybody's been talking about it..."
"I never actually...Look, I changed my mind." He backs up a little, feeling short of breath. "It's strange enough that you're moving down. I figured if I don't have any good reason to settle here, it's the responsible thing."
She smiles, shaking her head. "Bullshit."
He challenges, "Okay. Name me even one reason I have to stay here."
She straightens out her face, looks down at her hands. "Okay, well..."
"...What?"
"I don't know," she says in a suddenly defensive tone, shrugging. "I don't know what I expected, it's just weird to me. I thought you were staying. Figured you'd finally want to...make some friends, get a frakking life. It's almost sad—"
"Sad?" he repeats, now defensive too.
"You know what I mean," she affirms, standing up now. She looks at him in a considering and disbelieving way for a long pause. "You're serious, aren't you?"
He knows he doesn't have to answer, and doesn't. She suddenly is very busy cleaning up in her tiny space, folding things away in unsteady movements when he turns out of his thoughts to look at her.
"Yes. I'm serious. And no more bullshit about it, okay: I was going to settle down, possibly because of you. Now I'm not. Because of you."
She says, "Right." Then suddenly, looking like she knows she's going to regret it, she says, "I'm not with Sam."
Lee smiles ruefully, as if she's in fact just confirmed something. "Maybe not exactly. You're not with me either."
She won't look at him.
"It's not like I'd have a real problem with it if you were," Lee says. "Just for the sake of giving something a real try. He seems like a great guy. You even seem to like this one."
"Oh, frak you," Kara grumbles; there's hardly any force behind it. She claws at her hair again, somewhat aggressive when she says, "If there's something you wanna ask me, why don't you just ask..."
His mouth opens and shuts in an unsteady, lost moment. He just shakes his head. "Do you even know for sure what's going to make you happy?" he finally asks.
For a very short, flaring moment, there's a look in her eyes like she wants to tell him he's completely missing the point. But after pressing her lips together for a second she gives an honest shrug, punctures the air with, "No."
She's run out of things to do with her hands, so she crosses her arms. This is suddenly a lot harder than he thought it was going to be.
"Look," Lee sighs, suddenly extremely aggravated, not understanding why she looks the way she's looking. Whatever he thought he would say is kind of interrupted by puzzled agitation, and he just says a bit loudly, slowly, "Is it really so hard for you to grasp that you just might be consequential to me, enough for me to start being uncomfortable with the way this is?" He finishes with some gesture indicating between them.
She is actually closer to dead serious rather than flippant when she flatly says, "That could mean about a thousand different frakking things."
After a moment of looking straight at her, he manages frank clarity. "If I've learned one thing about you in the past few months, it's that regardless of what you do or don't want from me, you're completely stuck to the idea that you are only good for an occasional frak. I don't know if it's just something about me, or something about you. But I should have walked away from all of it a long time ago."
It's strange, how it's just over then, over already. Kara walks around Lee's shoulder and grips hard to open the tent curtain, stealing outside, showing him out. He follows suit, and when they're outside among the small party crowds there's apparently nothing for her to really do except say, "Thanks for the paper."
"Yeah." Lee looks down, lets a breath out. "Good luck, Thrace." He doesn't wait, he doesn't linger, just turns and walks.
He runs into Samuel Anders after the ceremony way later when they both happen to be waiting for a resource shipment to show up, Sam wearing a skinned knee that needs to be iced. They haven't said anything to each other, but with nobody else around who either of them know the silence apparently becomes too much for Sam.
"You know," he starts comfortably, "I was gonna ask you what you did to piss off Kara so bad, but you don't look so great yourself."
The bullshit is almost out of his mouth, something like I always piss off Kara, and I'm fine, I'm just tired. But he realizes that he's kind of intangibly angry about everything himself, especially right that second, and maybe he does look like it. He's thinking Anders would see right through it anyway.
So Lee says, "I don't know her very well, you know," wondering if he will ever be able to feel like it's actually true.
Sam just nods, and as if Lee said something else entirely, gives a kind of sympathetic "Yeah..."
When the drinks come in, Lee grabs an entire bottle of the questionable suggestion of wine that at least comes in a real bottle, determined to find someone to drink it with him by the end of the evening. He wonders if Dualla has any plans. Before he walks off though, he surprises himself by veering back to where Sam Anders is standing, his expression frank.
"You gonna take care of her?" is all he asks.
"She's one of the few I've got, Commander," he replies. "What the hell do you think I'm gonna do?"
Lee lingers just another few seconds, long enough to reconsider and simply add, "...Don't tell her I said that, okay?"