Lee is nudged awake by Dee, squints up at her and immediately asks, "How long was I out?"
"Six or seven hours." She shrugs. "You needed it. Hey, when was the last time you ate anything?"
Lee's head thunks back against the back of the futon where he fell asleep, and his eyes travel down to get his bearings on what he was doing before. It takes him a moment to remember he was asked something. "Um. I don't remember. Has my dad called up about—"
"The meeting is still on. They're coming over to Pegasus." Dee's body seems to tense from where she has her hands wrapped around a warm drink. She sets it on the glass table in front of them.
Lee sits up and goes over the transcripts of messages they looped back from a recent risky Raptor run close to New Caprica, tapping a pencil against it until he drops it down, combing his hand up to rub his heel against his sore eyes. He's gone over it a hundred times now, and he's in the same snag as the admiral: They've got no element of surprise, no shock and awe, if they don't—
"You know," Dee finally says, jarring him out of his thoughts. "There was a time you always valued my input on things..."
"I still do. I mean...I value it." Lee gives a self-explanatory gesture. "But this is different. I'm finding it harder to ask."
"Lee," she says, serious and staring forward instead of at him. Her head shakes a little, almost furiously. "We are going to die if we attempt this rescue. You realize that, right?"
"Dee, we're not going to die." He looks at her and the brewing of her inner thoughts for a moment. He repeats, "We're not."
"Between you and your father, I just wonder..."
She trails off with a little noise of hesitance, and a defensive edge crawls into his mind.
"You've lost your head, Commander." She's both personal and terse in how she says it. "You don't have the perspective on things you once did. And we both know why."
He shrugs, starting to feel a couple cold words creeping up, but he simply says, "It doesn't matter what reasons we have to get them back. As long as we get them back."
She considers with a rougher look on her face; he can see her hands are almost clenching into fists as she tries to bite something down.
"Dee. Just say it."
She daringly, impatiently simplifies, "She was just a woman you were sleeping with."
Dee is bravely bracing for some backlash, but Lee can't muster more than frustration about it. He evenly replies, "Do you have any idea how many times I've tried to convince myself that it's really that simple?"
It's like there's something, too much fervor in the room that Dee is almost scared of. Very quietly she says, "You're losing it, Lee."
"What do you want me to do?" he demands. "Let my dad go into this with just his crew...Just dance out into space and survive? Frak around with you and everybody else on this ship and keep breathing like it even matters to me when everyone else is..."
But Dee is just shaking her head again, eyes flaring.
"I don't know what to say to you, okay. I'm not like you, I can't just forget about everything, is that what you want me to do? Like you forgot about Billy?...I just can't."
When he looks at her he's abruptly aware that he's hit a very bad nerve. "Hey, I didn't mean...Dee." She's already on her way out of his quarters. "Dee, I'm sorry—"
The hatch slams behind her, leaving him to bite out a curse at the mug she left on the table.
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That time, one time: They were in his bunk during one of the last few days when he'd become more insistent and less there at the same time, sleeping with her like he needed to get it over with and never any more extending any disguise about what she might have been doing to him the whole time.
They hadn't bothered jamming the hatch. Right in the middle, two pilots came stomping in. Lucky and Grape arguing about something they couldn't find, sifting, searching in their bunks. With a stiff impatience Kara had halted her motions under him; but in the act of waiting in controlled silence for a few seconds, Lee adopted a suddenly insistent look in his eyes, moved to grasp up her leg.
With a curving silent grace, he hoisted her body into a hug of a knot against him, continuing in controlled motions, the kids bickering just above the half-whispers of noise they made as he took her fervently, possessively, hijacking the moment into his control. It was strangely stifling with the two out there and them in here; being stuck with each other in a baited silence, it was the most alone they'd ever been, because Kara was somehow powerless this way, confined to her body, her lips, the things he was doing to them. When her breath hitched too loudly, he bit at her bottom lip, but then after her silence his lingering mouth moved at hers far too sweetly, too dearly.
On the other side of the curtain, one grunted in aggravation. The other said, "We'll have to tell him we lost it yesterday" and the noise was nothing but a static barrier. Kara couldn't make a single noise against Lee and she couldn't get out, the anxious tingle of her instincts fighting against it in vain; there was only the precisely focused blue color of his eyes as she was trapped looking at him looking at her, their caged breaths butterflying under their chests, and how good it felt. Within the last moment before the cadets left the room, he was trembling uncontrollably and biting his teeth at her shoulder to keep it in. Even with her release building to slam moaning loudly out of her as the hatch finally closed behind them, she did wish, for one second, that it had gone on a little bit longer.
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Kara wakes up to dark early morning. As the coarseness of her surroundings roars into her recollection, she rolls up off the couch and immediately sets herself pacing around the room as if she can painlessly walk right out of the dream and just forget, forget it, do something else, but it's too late.
Every single day that goes by further confirms to Kara that she is never getting out of here. Out there people are suffering but suffering with others; she is alone in her alien, unusual pain, in the gradual breaking down of her will to fight back. She hasn't seen anybody; she doesn't know who's alive and who's dead. It makes her feel like she is buried far underground, and even if there's a resistance going on, even if there's a way out, even if—one hell of an 'if'—anyone is ever coming back for them, she feels on some days like no one would find her in here no matter how loud she screamed.
Her pacing has brought her into the kitchen, opening drawer after drawer for any sharp object she can find, because she's not going to get any more sleep and neither is the man who is not a man in the next room. Right now she wants to cut her own brain out for being so cruel: For the last two months she has managed to feel so little, to want nothing, to not want to want anything. And then suddenly in the blackness of this frakking wicked joke of a home her body kicks up in her the memory of the farthest possible thing from her, quickening her breath and softening her body to the floodgates of starving loneliness. She finds a butter knife and wields it into a fist. If her dreams are going to kill her, well, he''ll just have to die in his sleep too.
The ones who really care are gone, the ships straying into oblivion, and for all she knows Sam is dead by now. No one to come looking for her, no one who's been told a good reason that they should. Something is coughing up, an insistent wail of a thought in the back of her mind, about the mere seconds in her life she was living for, and how many more of those times she might have had. The things and the people and the time she might not have wasted, if only some somehow wonderful son of a bitch had asked her a different question.
She tries to tell herself it doesn't matter now. All the truth that she refused is the same as the violent vengeance she throws onto her captor again and again. No matter how many of his dead bodies she can pile up in defiance, it doesn't change the fact that nobody is coming back for her.
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He manages to stop thinking about her. He makes himself do it because he knows his head is on straighter when she's not zigzagging through it, he does it so that he won't screw up and so they can carry out this mission like they know what they're doing and so she and all the other survivors will get their asses off Baltar's precious rock and back on a solid ship.
He doesn't think about her until Pegasus is flying its ambush path right into a basestar and he's back on Galactica and despite the hordes of crowds of refugees cramping up the ship, the walls are just singing out waiting to feel like home to him again, and it doesn't yet, because he doesn't know if she's dead.
Trying to merge throughout the ocean of elbows to actually look for someone in particular is practically impossible; he hasn't even gotten a chance to say anything to his father when he's waylaid by a crying woman holding a child who is suddenly overcome and gripping his sleeve and fumbling out a mantra of "Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming for us," and he doesn't know what to say.
That's when he sees Kara.
She's about a dozen feet off, a flat vision among the dots of dirty and tired people, and he doesn't know what the hell he imagined he'd do when he found her, but all he can do is stay rooted to the spot, and look at her. Her arms are crossed tightly against herself and there's something uncertain and lost in her eyes, as if there's nowhere for her to go. But he can hardly focus on how she looks. It's almost frightening, in that moment, how very huge the very fact of her standing there happens to be for him.
It could be seconds later, maybe it's minutes, when she's looking around enough to notice him and gradually meets his eyes, more like he's some horizon in the distance than a person.
It takes her half a moment to react, and when she does, she doesn't exactly brighten up. But there's a very sad hope there, and she almost imperceptibly seems to stand up a bit straighter, eyes just a bit more lively, almost as if it's to show a measure of sturdy respect. It's as if she's saying, I'm still here.
And he looks at her.
It's not the loud and visceral reunion he thought he would've wanted; it's not much of a reunion in the first place.
But it's enough.
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When he catches only bent-up rumors of what happened to her during those months, he can only shut off and not let it wash into him, waiting for some opportunity to really know for sure what's true. The hard part is not knowing whether she's avoiding talking to him, or whether it should be the reverse, or both. She starts busting up landings like her head's completely gone, and all he can do is march up to her afterwards with that old anger on fire, calming himself down enough to force his voice to a level only she can hear.
"What the frak is wrong with you?" he demands frantically, not looking directly at her as if he needs to be candid about it in front of the couple snooping knuckle-draggers.
Her eyes are on the floor for several seconds before she looks up at him, and the look is so pathetic and sorry, he resents it. "I don't know," she mutters.
"I can't just cover your ass, you know," he grumbles, but he knows there's too much concern in his eyes for her to miss it.
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Samuel Anders survived. He catches some ride to Galactica and Kara apparently isn't pressed to see him anywhere more private than the mess hall just after she's nibbled down some food, with Lee just happening to be a couple tables away. He does a decent job blocking out their conversation, but when he looks over she's giving Sam that apologetic look, like whatever he's asking or saying the answer is no and she can't articulate why. There is no apparent lack of warmth between them, but they look completely worn out, and it's definitely nothing as simple as a catching up over lunch.
Lee is still trying to look absorbed in his own business, manages to not realize Kara's getting up and leaving the room without Anders in tow until he sees her heading out the door.
"Adama."
Lee fidgets and turns a slow, confused look over in Sam's direction.
"Let's get a drink."
He's trying to think what to say, but his head is already nodding on its own accord anyway.
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.They've moved from weaker drinks to shots after Sam apparently needed to get a bit more glazed before he could explain in any detail what that sick frak of a cylon was keeping Kara cooped up for.
"Doesn't make any sense to me either, man," he's saying as he rubs at his face. "Doesn't make sense to her. They're all so frakking twisted I didn't think anything could shock me anymore, but..."
There are other sick thoughts and questions about it welling in Lee's mind, but he can't bring himself to ask and wonders if it's possible Sam hasn't been able to ask either. Lee has felt all kinds of worried over Kara before; "protective" is something new. It's an intangible urge over someone like her, and Sam almost seems to be reading his mind with what he says next.
"Remember when you asked me to take care of her?"
A tired, bitter grunt is Lee's only response.
"That girl. I swear, I tried, you know. I'm sorry if I—frakking—failed in that or whatever, but..."
Lee tries to reassuringly shake his head.
"No, it's just. I'm asking you now. Even though we both know you can't, probably nobody can, I'm asking you to try."
Lee's brows slowly go lower. He's drunk enough to ask, "Were you with her?"
Anders just gives a little dreary laugh. "I'm sure you've heard it all by now, Commander, but you really wouldn't ask if you knew what it was like on that planet. Not just during the occupation, it was an ugly place...Ask me if I'm in love with her, I might punch you in the mouth or something. We were close. We were really close, and that's all you can call it."
Lee almost smirks. "Are you in love with her?"
He didn't say it because he didn't believe him; but Sam just laughs again. "Frakkin' Apollo...Listen. She means the world to me. She's one of the greatest friends I've got; I don't have any regrets. I'm sure you've got lots of people you work with and it's pretty intense and you're really close to them, and I'm not saying...I'm not trying to say it's not as much, it's just not the same. It's different."
"Actually..." Lee is frowning at the glass in front of him, eyes troubled and kind of wistful. He sighs and admits, "I really don't have that many friends."
A couple minutes after giving Lee this look like that's about the saddest thing he's ever heard, Anders is slapping his comm extension number onto the table in front of Lee, finishing off his last shot and getting up to leave.