"So, my best man ended up granting my wish and brought a dress," Helo said, as he danced with Kara in the conference room, which Lee had supplied for a small wedding reception. "That's sweet 'Buck, deep down you really love your best friend."

She snorted. "Get over yourself, Helo. I brought the dress to impress the Commander," Starbuck told him. "And let me tell you that I succeeded very well…"

"You can stop right there," Helo told her, foreseeing where she was getting…

"Lee and I, a dress, a janitor's closet…" she recited, trying to embarrass him.

He took one step back and covered his ears with his hands. "Stop tormenting me, damn it!" That was like hearing one of his sisters telling him about her adventures with her boyfriend.

"I can't! Your face it's too good!" Kara said between laughs. Making fun of your best friend in his wedding day… shame on you, Kara, she thought, but with a little hint of sarcasm. It was so worth his reaction.

A mass of dark hair ran in Helo's direction. "Daddy! Dance with me?" Hera asked in a sweet voice.

The XO, of course, couldn't resist to his daughter and lifted her to his arms. "I'd never refuse a dance to such a pretty lady." He looked at Kara. "And surely a lot less annoying than the last one…"

"Annoying? Me? How dare you?" Kara asked in a mock-offense tone.

"Just stating the facts," he said.

"I'll tell you where you can shove the facts, Helo," she said, walking to the table where she had been sitting with Lee.

---

Decker waited in the Hangar Bay for Barolay to land her viper after CAP. She needed to talk to her. She needed to know. Her first reaction had been to run but, right now, she really needed to know if Sam had cheated or not. It was too important to leave to another day.

A few minutes later, Jean was climbing out of her viper and giving her helmet to one of the deckhands. Erin approached her friend immediately. "What the frak happened that night?" she asked her unceremoniously.

"What night?" Jean inquired in confusion, walking away from the viper.

Erin followed her. "The night I left," she said. "Sam said he didn't cheat on me and something about the chick being crazy. He asked me to confirm it with you."

"You finally talked to Sam?" Barolay asked in surprise. At that point, they exited the hangar bay and entered the hallway.

"Jean, get to the point for frak's sake!" Decker insisted. "Just tell me what happened."

The pilot's expression turned serious. "Not here." She nodded at a hatch that led to the restrooms. "There is quieter."

They entered the room and, after Barolay made sure they were alone, she started to explain. "When I saw you were gone that morning, I assumed you were with Sam 'cause you had been bugging me to give you Sam's card-key, so I went down there to check. When I got there, however, the security guards were dragging her out of Sam's room kicking and screaming. Gods, if you could see his face… he was shocked. Sam had gone back to his room in the previous night after running from his own bachelor party and, sometime during the night, the bitch broke into his room, undressed and got in bed with him."

Erin's mouth was hanging open. "So you're telling me some random chick climbed to his bed because she was crazy."

"Not some random chick," Jean corrected her. "It was Felicia, a girl he had dated a couple of months before he met you. I always thought she was a freak – all controlling and jealous. She even accused me of doing Sam behind her back. Me? Come one, everyone knew I was more into Hillard… Well, I think we all agreed that Sam dumping was a wise move. But it seems like she never got over it and when she read in the paper that he was getting married, she just snapped. Next thing you know, she was crawling into his bed."

Un-frakking-believable. "You're not making that up, are you?" Erin asked. The whole story was a mountain of madness.

"Look, if I am, so were the newspapers," Jean told her. "That made the headlines for weeks. 'Crazy Ex-girlfriend Ruins Anders's Wedding'. But apparently, you weren't into newspapers back then."

Newspapers had been the last thing she had thought about back then. She had been frakking dead in the inside… apparently because of something that had never happened. If she could travel back in time…

"Sam was a mess when he saw you were gone," Jean continued, while she still had Erin's attention. "At first he thought that maybe Felicia had kidnapped you or something, but then we saw the hotel security cameras. He did the math pretty quickly – you had seen her and left. Called your cell but you had left it in my room. Then he called back to Caprica to check if you were back to work, but nobody had seen you. He hoped you'd read the headlines and come back, but you didn't. It was like you had just vanished from the universe… Weeks passed before he stopped and, believe me, his mind was a mess – he wanted to hate you for leaving, but he couldn't. When the cylons attacked, he really thought you were dead and Sam grieved like you'd never left. The only thing that kept him sane was the resistance… and stupid hook ups."

She wanted to hide in the deepest hole she could find. Frak, she wanted to die just for making him suffer like that. I was the one to hurt Sam, not the other way around, she thought. Ironic. He had been innocent all that time and she hated him so much that she had kept his son from him… Just one frakking call could have done it, could have avoided that whole situation, 'Cause now there was no way he would just have her back after keeping his child's existence a secret.

"Are you okay?" Jean asked, worried about her friend's blank experience.

"Honestly, no, I'm not," Erin mumbled dismissively. "Just, why didn't you tell me this before? For example, when you saw me in sickbay."

"I assumed Sam should be the one telling you this, not me," the pilot explained. "Of course, I was about to give up last night and just blurt it all to you, but you were quicker with the running than I was with the talking."

Erin bit her lip, hating herself at that moment. "Frak," she cursed. "You know what? I'll just go. I have a big mess to fix." With that, she exited the restrooms. You made your bed, Erin, now lie in it.

---

"I've got to confess this. When Racetrack told me you were having a kid, I thought she was just frakking with me," Chief Tyrol told Kara, who was cradling a sleeping Jamie in her arms. "But seems like you're doing well. You've got a pretty girl there, Starbuck."

She smiled lightly. "It's my kid, of course she's pretty, Chief." Kara fixed the blanket around her daughter – the room was kind of cold.

"Nicholas is about the same age as she is," he said. "We should introduce them sometime, maybe one of these days…"

Lee visibly shrugged. "Don't you play matchmaker with my daughter, Chief," he warned. Jamie wasn't allowed to date until she was thirty… His little baby girl was to be left untouched by boys at least while he had something to say about it.

"Knock it off, Lee," Kara told him. She turned back to the Chief. "So, where's Cally?"

Before Tyrol could answer, Sharon showed up, followed by Helo, who was whispering something to Hera that made her laugh. "Cally doesn't like me much, does she?"

The Chief shook his head, confirming her suspicions. "It's just the way her mind works. She accepts that I'm here for my friends, but she won't do the same…" He looked at his wristwatch. "You know, I'd love stay here and talk all day, but the Old Man is my ride back to Galactica and he's already said his goodbyes."

"It was nice to have you here, Chief," Helo said and Sharon nodded in agreement as the Chief got up.

"The Offer still stands," Lee said. "If you wanna work here…"

"Yeah, I'll think about that," Tyrol stated before walking out of the room.

Moments later, Helo pulled Sharon back to the dance floor with Hera in a tow, leaving Lee, Kara and Jamie alone by the table.

"Do you wish we'd had a wedding like this?" Lee asked his wife, who looked back at him, making a face.

"Nah, this is too big for my own taste," Kara stated. Big was not the word. They were in a battlestar; weddings in a battlestar couldn't be big. It was the fact that it had been planned that made it sound big in her head. Sometimes people tried too hard to make things perfect, plan too much, not that this is the case. But in their wedding they hadn't planned a thing and it had been perfect. There was no other way she would want to remember it, than the two of them under the moonlight with a priestess. "I wouldn't trade ours for anything."

He smiled back to Kara and looked down at the sleeping baby in her arms. "Yeah, but we won't be able to tell Jamie 'Look, that's where Mommy and Daddy got married'. New Caprica is too far behind."

"New Caprica's gone but the memories aren't," Kara stated, resting her head on his shoulder. "Hopefully Earth will be our next stop and we'll be able to actually live there."

Lee frowned. Earth seemed so frakking distant. At that rate and bearing in mind that they still had no frakking clue where it was, the fleet would never get there.

"Commander," a marine called, standing by the table.

"Private," Lee acknowledged and Kara lifted her head from his shoulder.

"Sir, your presence is being requested in the CIC," the marine said.

Apollo looked at his wife, who gave him a nod. "Go, Jamie and I will be fine. We'll probably go back to the cabin in a few minutes."

Lee nodded and got up, following the marine back to the combat station.

---

As it turned out, Sam was still in the bunkroom. Erin found him throwing some stupid pyramid ball at wall. He always did that when he was nervous…

"You're still here," she stated.

"I was waiting for you," Sam told her from a chair, throwing the ball again. "You always used to come back after we fought. At least until…"

"…I really left," she finished. I should have come back that one time, she thought. That would have avoided the big mess she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to fix. "I talked to Jean. She told me about the 'lunatic'."

"Hum, so what do you think about it?" Sam inquired, putting the ball down and finally looking at her.

"I think I was a bitch," Erin confessed.

He smiled a bit. "You were a bit… But the situation was pretty weird, probably I would think the same if it was the other way around."

Something told her he was just saying that so she wouldn't feel so guilty… "Still doesn't make things right, Sam," she stated. "You didn't deserve the way I treated you."

He nodded, giving up softening things. She wasn't up for clemency now. "You're right in that one. Why did you leave?" Sam asked her. "Why didn't you stay and yelled or tried to strangle me?"

"I thought of that," she informed him, sitting in the bunk they had shared hours ago. "Strangling you, shooting you… maybe even stab you with something. But these thoughts only lasted one or two seconds. Most of all, I was too hurt by what I'd seen. I didn't want to hear any explanation. I just needed to get away from you… But it was cowardly of me to do so."

Sam nodded again. "Now, get ready to the big one," he said, confusing her. Big one? "Do you still love me, Erin? Now that you know the truth?"

"I never stopped, Sam," she confessed without hesitation. Might as well make him a little happy before she dropped the bomb. "I hated you for a while, but only because I couldn't stop loving you."

"So there still might be a chance for us…" Sam wondered hopefully, abandoning his chair and sitting by her side. Say yes, say yes!

"That's complicated, Sam," she told him, their hands less then one inch apart. Her fingertips were starting to feel numb with the closeness and her heart was racing. "There's something I need to tell you about… "

"What?" he asked.

"Wait, I want to ask you a favor first," she said.

Sam nodded immediately. He wanted to jump to the part where they made up. "Anything."

"Kiss me one last time," she requested.

A confused look covered his face. "One last time?"

"I don't think you'll want to kiss me after you hear what I have to say," she stated, refusing to look him in the eyes.

He shook his head and cupped her cheeks, pulling her face to him. "I'll always want to kiss you." And his lips covered hers.

So different from the kiss they had shared just hours before. It had been like a struggle for power, a fight… This one was soft and tender, a simple love declaration. A goodbye. Yes, it really felt like a farewell. So much love and so much sadness, it broke her heart…

Lips apart, she talked. It was time to come clean, to take her part in the farewell. "We have a son… and I kept him away from you."

---

Lee studied the photographs on the CIC's tactical table. Unbelievable…

"Well, sir?" Hoshi asked, wanting to hear the commander's opinion.

"Frakking unbelievable…" Lee voiced his thoughts. "Have you told the Admiral about this?"

"We assumed you wanted me to do it yourself, sir," Hoshi said.

Lee nodded. "Contact my father in Galactica for me. He had probably arrived there already."

The communications officer nodded and returned to his station.

Lee continued to study the pictures. That could be very good… or very bad. Depended on the way they handled things this time around.

"Commander, the Admiral is in line one," Hoshi announced.

Lee lifted the phone and brought it close to his face. "Sir?"

"Lee, what happened?"

"An hour ago, during a recon mission, one of our pilots found a planet," Lee announced. "An habitable planet…"

A/N: I rewrote this chapter a total of 4 times. Hope you're happy with the final results. I know updates are coming a little slower but it's almost the end of the semester in college, so exams and due dates to assignments are coming fast, meaning I have my head dug in all kinds of history books (Yes, I'm taking the equivalent to a history major). Still, fear not, because 10 reviews will get you a preview posted in livejournal. It's still a little sneakpeak of what's to come... Cause from now on, This fic is getting to a very important phase... try to guess, if you can.

Happy 2009!