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Lee and Saul
When Ellen Tigh’s bare foot landed on its target in Lee’s lap under the table, Lee burst out of his chair, flustered and attempting poise. Looking around the table awkwardly, Lee gazed at Saul’s innocent, laughing face and saw his own.
Lee and Saul had more in common than this decrepit, glorious old Battlestar. More than a complicated kinship with the Old Man. They were each in love with a blonde goddess of insanity, who had no respect for pride, for feelings, for fidelity.
Lee loathed Ellen as much as he loved Kara, but he had to admire Saul for being stalwart enough as a lover to choose his own destruction again and again. Saul would have followed his kamikaze wife anywhere, inside the eye of a storm or Hades itself.
Lee should really emulate Saul’s example, he observed, and pursue the demise that loving Kara would eventually bring with a little more gusto. This unreserved, self destructive love suddenly looked honorable on Saul. Admirable even. Enviable.
Lee had always turned to father figures who weren’t his own father, and so he resolved to be braver in his sacrifices. Kara and Ellen each had a fierce loyalty burning beneath their callousness, and here was Saul loyally ruining himself for Ellen. Here was Saul showing Lee how necessary and beautiful it is for a man to lose control.
Sam and Dee
Sam had known that Kara loved Lee long before she proposed. Sam had certainly known it when he said yes.
“Kara never belonged to me.” Sam took a breath. “I accepted that before marriage. But what about you? It seems unfair.”
“You weren’t the only one. Lee was so hurt when she married you, he proposed to me that very day.” Dee swallowed her shot, catching and then avoiding Sam’s eyes. “I wanted Lee, and I married him to get what I wanted. I wasn’t fool enough to think he’d ever be mine alone.”
Sam and Dee drank silently. There was no safe place to rest their eyes. Not on arms, on chests, on lips.
“It didn’t work,” Dee said. Their eyes were safely cast down into their drinks again. “He’s so frakked up without her, there’s not much left of him for me.”
Lee wasn’t the only one Kara loved. Sam felt her love, too. But he also knew she had married him as a wall to keep Lee out. Starbuck the legendary strategist. Placing an immovable object between herself and an unstoppable force.
Kara’s friends looked at Sam apologetically, but Sam thought it was Kara they should be worried about. When she had proposed marriage that morning on New Caprica, Kara was trembling, hung over and giddy with a nervous breakdown. Accepting her proposal was likely the most ethically frakked thing he’d ever done. Kara, his hero and his breakable little mental patient, showing up smelling like a night of sex on the dusty ground, probably with Lee, asking for Sam’s hand in marriage right frakking now.
Sam could tolerate the ethical ambiguities, because he knew he would be a safe harbor for her: satisfying in bed, accepting of her problems, expecting little in return. He could be an angel in a devil's bargain.
This was their little club, he and Dee. How could she even tolerate the pitying glances? Maybe this is what you get if you marry a Major. Maybe no one notices that it’s you who gets him to straighten up and fly right, or you who takes advantage of his weakest hour.
“They were both at a low point when they proposed,” Sam commiserated. “We each made our choices.”
Lee and Kara
They were like dominos, toppling backward in a chain of death and now Lee needed someone to kill him.
Kara had been the end of Zak, and now Lee had killed her in exactly the same way. Kara had allowed Zak to fly when he wasn’t ready, and Lee had pressured an unready Kara to fly as well. Lee thought it was just nerves. He thought she needed a friendly push. But she must have known she couldn’t fly and so she had let herself become Zak, letting Lee step into her place as murderer. And he would be stuck there until someone gave him a friendly push.
If only Zak were still alive, he could be the one to kill Lee, and then the circle would be complete. Instead the loop remained unclosed, empty in the center, leaving Lee teetering with no way to finally fall.
Had Kara been like this since the moment Zak died? On the hunt for someone to kill her? Had she chosen Lee intentionally? Because she couldn’t do it by herself. For this she needed someone who would love her until the end.
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let her fly,” he told his father, as Kara had once confessed the same sin the same way to the same man.
But instead of saying “do your job,” Bill gave Lee a different job. Protect the lawyer. Stay out of your Viper. You’re not ready. Who else did Lee still have who would love him until the end? Bill wasn’t going to be the next domino.