Dualla is surprisingly frank in how she flirts once she realizes they'll still be serving together after all. They start with a casual but romantic dinner and spread out the best excuses for dates that can be managed on a starship over the course of their first month running Pegasus together. There is something very gradual and polite about the courtship of it; the way she kisses is softly ordinary. It reminds him of a sock peeling off. A pull and a give, but nothing new.

He's comfortable.

She is too, until the day she's hanging out on his bed waiting for him to change so they can go to the gym, and he hollers out of the bathroom, "Could you check if I have an extra pair of socks somewhere in that duffel? Under the bed?"

There's a long silence after that.

"Take that as a no?"

"Still looking."

"Oh."

When he comes out, flipping off the bathroom light, he immediately wonders if something's wrong.

"Dee?..."

Then she holds up what he remembers now he had wadded in the side pocket, and all he can do is let out a short laugh to cover the grimace.

"This is Starbuck's old hat." It's not a question; Kara used to wear that sports cap all the time. Practically the entire crew could identify the exact frays, the stain on the brim. He found it wedged deep between the mattress and the side of the bunk wall when he was moving after promotion.

"...I guess I forgot to give that back to her."

"Why do you have it?" Dee asks with a little bit of a laugh in her voice. When he hesitates for even a second, her head is already tilted in disbelief.

There are about a hundred perfectly convincing lies he could tell, and it's not like the truth is necessarily her business at this point. But at the end of the day Lee is still a straight-laced noble bastard, so he opens his mouth, and only half a minute later Dualla looks like she wants to run for the door.

"Wait, wait, wait..." They're both sort of overwhelmed and nervously laughing about it in the next few seconds of shifting and stuttering. "Why does this matter? You don't actually think less of me because—?"

"No. No, no." She shakes her head. "It's not like...I don't even dislike her, you know, she's got her issues, but...she's ours and everyone knows her like that. I...It's you that..."

"What?"

"You two hate each other," she points out, not like she still believes it, but like it's in some rule book somewhere.

Lee smiles uncomfortably. "...That's not entirely true."

"Yeah. Evidently."

"But I'm telling you, it's over, it's been over."

"I don't want this to matter. It almost doesn't matter," she clarifies. "But...You and I are going to be spending a lot of time around each other, and I'd like for you to be really honest with me and...I don't know if it's going to be that way if you and I are..."

He lets out a long sigh, can't help a slightly gobsmacked glance back to the hat sitting on his bed right now. "I just was honest with you," he says almost helplessly.

She steps a bit closer, biting her bottom lip, and slowly emphasizes, "It's just too strange to mean nothing. You know?" She gives him a last kiss on the cheek as he can only fall speechless.

That is more of less how Lee manages to make his first real friend since joining his father's crew.

.

.

.

.

Almost ten months after Lee last spoke to Kara, he comes hesitantly swaggering out on the hangar deck after a Raptor touches quickly down. He doesn't wait many seconds after the door starts hissing open to shout, "So you think you can just take a Rap for a spin up here whenever you feel like it? On civilian status, to boot."

That last remark is spoken in response to the jarring image of her stepping out after piloting a ship dressed in a sleeveless top and jeans, the long ropey layers of white-blond hair also catching him.

"What are you gonna do, Apollo? Toss me in hack for old time's sake?"

Having established with the tone of these comments that there isn't any tension between them from the last day they saw each other, their eyes finally meet as Kara holds her stance inside the Raptor, looking down somewhat hesitantly. The full sight of each other immediately alters the mood, and Lee just puts on a matter-of-fact smile, says, "Hi."

She replies, "Hi," in a kind of agreement. She inches quickly down the ramp, Lee automatically helping her down by the arm.

Once her feet hit the floor he gets to asking, "So what brings you to my ship today?" With a closer look at her he can already detect maybe something's amiss; her smile isn't quite a smile. She hesitates to answer. "It's okay. I'm used to everyone wanting or needing something."

"Must be why you don't come down on the surface ever."

He shrugs. "I don't avoid it. I've been down a couple times, just...didn't run into you." In truth, only one time.

Surprisingly straightforward, she shrugs and declares, "Well, I need a favor."

"...Okay."

They're walking out into the corridor when she asks, "Do you remember Anders?"

He looks over with a cocked brow. "Samantha." When she doesn't laugh, he begins to understand what she's probably about to say.

"He's really...really sick," she finally explains, biting her lip for a second. She has a slip of paper with something written on it. "Tigh said something about how you might have some back-up medical supplies for your pilots. I hate to just ask you for things, but..."

She trails off in slight surprise as he gives a pointing motion for her to hand him the paper. "Is that what you need?"

She gives it over, and he reads off the specific prescription, nods.

"I'll go see what we have. They're easy to get to, but it can take forever to find the right one...I need to be on the bridge soon, why don't you meet me there?"

She has a small look of surprised relief. "Okay. Thanks."

He's only gotten into the storage once, because Sharon Agathon needed something, and even then he had his reservations about just skimming off the supplies when he practically didn't know chamala from aspirin, didn't know what was rare, what was likely to be virtually impossible to resupply later on. But he decides ignorance is bliss, resolves to be grateful for the fact that there are two other bottles like the one he takes.

He's squinting closer at the label when the red alert makes him almost drop the bottle, and he barely registers through the jump in his nerves that Dee is on the comm and might as well be directly telling him to get his ass to the bridge, because there is only one reason he can think of and he wants to swear it can't be that...

Kara is standing in front of the dradis screen in the same stunned silence as Dualla when Lee skids through the bridge entrance. Dee jumps into motion when she sees him.

"Cylons."

When he runs up to get a look himself, there are a couple seconds where all he can do is groan a short "Gods."

But Kara has been zeroing in on one thing only ever since he came onto the bridge, and that thing is the small bottle of pills he forgets he is holding until she comes up and snatches it out of his hand. She goes running, and as Lee's hand halts in the air on its way to the phone, Dee takes a second to exclaim, "Is she doing what I think she's doing?"

Even more red blips are coming up on dradis, the red alert blaring in a constant whine and he only hesitates for a second before telling Dee, "You have the con."

"Wait, wait—" Dee's wide-eyed, demanding, "We need to—"

"Do what you have to do!" he shouts back. Once he turns out into the corridors he's absolutely sprinting, heading for the hangar bay, already starting to shout, "Starbuck!"

It isn't long until he catches up to her, sees that she's somehow wrested a sidearm off of one of the officers and is running about as fast as he is.

"Kara!" he roars, and she's turning into the deck now with him almost at her heels. He tries to snatch at her arm but doesn't quite stop her. "What the frak are you doing, are you crazy!"

Kara just looks back with her expression all flaring with an accusation of how well he has to know exactly what she's doing, and of course he does. He knows. This is her, this is who she's always been, the woman who pulled a hell of a fast one to save his life the day she met him when all she knew him as was his father's son and hasn't proven to be an inch saner since then: How many times, after all, has he been wound up to a spitting wreck with how crazy and stupid she is?...

This time he gets her forearm in a tight desperate grasp. "Look, think about this, you can't. You'll be lucky if you even make it down there before they blow you out of the sky—"

"Well, I'm trying, and you're going to let me, or I swear to gods I'll jump right out of this hangar deck and you—"

"You can't just—" She wriggles her arm out of his grip.

"For frak's sake!" she yells, backing off like she's had enough. Even louder she snaps, "For once just get off my back!—"

And almost matter-of-factly, as if she's just very calmly suggested he try to stop a gods damned earthquake, he's shouting, "I can't."

He doesn't realize how much it sounds like an admission until she turns around from avoiding and running from his glance and he sees her expression, all angry and stinging and sad at the same time. With only a slight pause beforehand she's taking a few grinding steps forward and over to him. Her hand is behind his neck, at his cheek and his jaw and she's kissing him, full and flat and a sad declaration. It's only long enough for him to teeter off balance and fall into holding her loosely; when she pulls away her face is set back together into the one he knows better, and her voice is cool and a little cold even when her mouth is still almost touching his.

"Goodbye, Apollo."

And then she's tearing away and running back into the Raptor, and he can't believe he's really ordering the exit clearance, barely recognizes his own voice or the shakiness in his hands for the next blur of minutes in which he hears Dualla on the open comm announcing thirty seconds to the jump. The ships tear off in their rubbery pluck across the galaxy, and when Dee is handing the comm phone over to Lee he realizes in a sick rush that he's going to have to somehow explain to his father that he just let her go.

When he picks up all of his thoughts are screaming and stammering too loudly, and the first thing he can manage to say to the admiral is, "We need to go back."