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Learning the lines
Kara leaves.
Missing In Action is the technical term. She puts her life on the line to save other lives, save the fleet, just like all the other times, and the Adamas won’t rest until she’s found.
Dee gives up her off-shift hours to stay on shift, filling in for other officers and relaying messages between Galactica and the battered vipers skimming the airless red moon.
The Old Man is gaunt and tense with anxiety, poring over the makeshift maps and the concerning fuel and maintenance reports, and the pilots are in their planes for longer hours than ever, sifting through a vista of never-ending dust and sand, searching for a priceless needle in a haystack.
She patches Lee through from the hangar. He sounds as if all his ragged edges are wearing down to nothing at all, a voice approaching hoarseness from choking terror and constant orders rather than the typical yelling at his lately-lost, favourite pilot.
When she can’t keep her eyes open anymore, she passes the baton on to her replacement and finds her rack, but her mind takes longer to settle.
She finds herself thinking of all the concentrated, agitated energy contained in the creaking battlestar, every mind focused thousands of miles away on a tiny, larger-than-life figure that might not even be breathing.
The whole ship takes their cues from their Commander, and he and Lee give everything they have to their doubtful mission. Dee knows with quiet certainty that it’s the identity of the pilot that keeps them there.
Kara is by far Adama’s favourite and closest companion among his adopted children on the ship. She’s Lee’s reason for getting up each day.
She keeps them alive, and they risk it all, everything they have and some things arguably not theirs, to return the favour.
Dee knows that if it were her, Adama would already be an ftl jump away by now, attending her funeral.
But they stay.
They burn fuel like there’s no tomorrow, pull the CAP, defy the president, because it’s Kara.
Kara returns.
She rescues herself in a way that infuriates the Adama men and is treasured by them, and Dee wonders if she will ever realise all they went through for her.
Dee doesn’t resent it, but it might not seem as unbelievable to Kara that all humanity risked their lives for her when she has done the same for them a dozen times over.
Even before this, she was the fleet’s lucky charm, immune to the whims and winds of death and fate. She’d saved the ship, saved Lee’s life, saved half the pilots, saved the nuggets, saved the fleet.
Sometimes it feels like she’s the one leading them to Earth, sure footed and surer flown, blazingly certain and skilful and lucky.
She’s just a little brighter than life, sometimes, the ever-beating heart of the ship to the Commander and Lee’s head.
-
Opening night
Kara leaves.
Desertion from the fleet would be the technical term, but no one uses it, because it’s Starbuck and there are different rules for her. To be fair, there’s a lot more going on at the time, too.
To be honest, Dee doesn’t think a lot about her, because it’s Starbuck, after all. No one ever said that she was predictable.
A lot of people have said that she’s lucky, though, and despite the staggering odds and lengthening time after her absence, Dee fully expects her to return. She’s managed it every time so far, after all.
Until then, though, the Commander needs a surrogate daughter, and with Kara abandoning him and Boomer attempting to kill him, Adama has to make do with Dee.
She watches him put together his ship quietly, just like he wants, listens to him in the way Lee or Kara wouldn’t. She has the gift of patience, but it’s not inexhaustible.
She speaks her mind, in the end, and after the initial anger she thinks she might see approval in his eyes.
It’s what Kara would have done, after all.
Kara returns.
Dee hears about it later, when those who left the fleet have come back with starry eyes and tales of Earth and shiny forgiveness laid over them.
Dee looks at Kobol through the smudged glass of the observation deck window, thinks: to return is to exact a price in blood, and wonders how it’s so easy for Kara slip into place as if she was never gone.
Boomer’s been shot and her killer’s in the brig, given a shorter sentence than for disturbing the peace, but Dee thinks that if it had been Kara who shot him in the heart, Adama would have given her an overnight stay.
But instead she is the fleet’s saviour, carrying a golden arrow like Artemis, her aim ever-true. It’s uncharitable, but Dee thinks maybe everyone’s forgotten that the arrows of Artemis meant sudden death.
-
Intermission
Dee watches Kara and Lee circle each other carefully, a dance or a boxing match, she can’t tell.
Something’s changed between them now, a thread of something unsettled or unresolved woven into the bulletproof tapestry of their relationship, and Dee would be lying if she said her observations were only those of an impartial outsider.
Now, there’s an always-present undercurrent of uncertain tension between them, and Dee has a self-destructive impulse that wants to be the counterweight of certainty to the man who’s always seemed so out of reach, so off limits, before this moment.
Sometimes when he enters a room he even looks at her first, before his eyes slip unstoppably to Kara. The bar’s so low that it’s almost enough already.
A miracle appears, a Battlestar with thousands of souls aboard, and Lee and Kara become two of them.
This time they are immigrants in a strange land, without the usual consequence that being a child of William Adama’s brings.
Dee visits him whenever the Commander asks for her, but it’s not the same at all, and they both feel it. There’s little to talk about when his son and daughter are away.
The airwaves of Galactica seem near-silent without the two of them, and she misses the close-knit banter of the pilots that they had instigated and that the new CAG stamps out immediately. The ship isn’t the same place without them, and the miracle slowly morphs into something closer to a Trojan horse.
The rumours are concerning, at first, only in their unbelievability, because where there’s smoke…
And then they become concerning in their own right, when no one can disprove the fire.
The vipers of the two ships all but fire at one another, and the aftermath is as uneasy a truce as the forty-year armistice. Apparently Kara’s the Pegasus CAG now, and Dee gives a her a polite-sounding congratulations over the airwaves when they cross comm paths. Kara sounds distracted.
The battle is an almost perfect success except for the way Lee dies in the middle of it and Cain just after it. Lee’s brought back to life though, a dark, subtle irony considering his destruction of the Resurrection ship.
Kara sits by his bedside after he all but dies, listens to him with worried eyes, and Dee slips away and reminds herself that Kara hasn’t renounced her rights, that Kara’s practically an Adama, not to get her hopes up.
Lee walks around the Galactica like a ghost, rousing only a fraction at Kara and Dee’s separate efforts, and Dee lets him go.
She listens to other pilots die, one by one, over the comms, cut off mid-word with buzzing static, as if they’re in an unstoppable receiving line greeting death.
She goes to her rack earlier every night and has static-filled nightmares while Kara drinks Kat under the table, trying the traditional pilots’ coping mechanism.
There’s one day she almost thinks Kara’s silent comm is about to crackle with finality, she’s silent for so long, and Dee has just enough time to think that Starbuck would never be the type to go out this quietly before she gives Kat the shot and flies through the debris like it’s confetti.
Billy proposes and Dee panics and they both come away disappointed with the encounter. He’s sweet, and good to her, and so uncomplicated by comparison. And she loves him, in a way, but she can’t say yes because she doesn’t know if it’s the right way.
Maybe she should make the obvious, correct, first choice for once, but Dee wants to be able to accept a proposal with certainty, not lie awake wondering if she’s made the right choice.
Hours later she watches the blood pooling from two men she loves imperfectly and is certain of even less.
Dee sits by his bedside after he all but dies, next to the quiet man Kara all but killed instead of by the silent man she all but killed.
It’s easier this way, clinging to the only choice she has left, pretending that Kara’s renounced her rights, that Dee might one day be an Adama.
She lies awake knowing she’s made the wrong choice and committing herself to it.
-
First billing in tiny letters
Kara leaves.
Mustering out is the technical term, but it’s far more spectacular than anyone else’s.
The Commander and Dee are making their way back to a raptor, the day after the groundbreaking, when Kara approaches the Old Man glowingly and declares that she’s just gotten married.
There’s a small, stunned, worlds-stopping moment in time where Dee thinks she’s about to produce Lee, her new husband. And the awful thing is that she expects it, that she’s actually surprised when Sam appears beside her.
Lee’s declaration is easily foreseen, after that.
She accepts with something that feels like a close substitute for certainty, like it’s an ingredient that shouldn’t overly affect the outcome. Because really, what’s she going to do now? Say no?
The future maps itself tentatively out. Filling in the enormous-feeling quarters that Lee looks so lost in, reading up on the few manuals that might somehow help her feel qualified to be XO when Ryder musters out, trying to become friendly, if not friends, with the overwhelmingly new faces that make up the crew of the Pegasus.
It’s hard to imagine that they’ll just be orbiting this sodden planet forever, until they all die or the floors rust out from beneath them, but Lee seems prepared to do just that. So she tries.
It’s hard to leave the worn-in seat she’d had on Galactica, the rack she’d had for years and the relationships with people she knows like an extended family, especially to trade it in for feeling like an interloper, an imposter, everywhere she turns.
There’s Lee, of course, but he’s still new as their Commander, and she can’t lean on him in front of the crew and maintain their respect. She’s wildly under-qualified, she knows, and it doesn’t seem to help much that a lot of them are.
Lee himself is almost absurdly young for his position, but he rarely seems to notice. Whether from birth or experience, he has the kind of bearing that’s comfortable with command, that doesn’t double-check people are following his orders because he knows they are.
And even with him, there are infinite moments where she’s not the person he expects to turn to, where he checks himself all at once. He’d worked with Kara every day for jam-packed, compressed months, she reminds herself, and known her for longer. And now she’s gone overnight.
So Dee fills her place, and others besides. She tries not to second-guess the communications officer’s decisions and focus on her own, fills out endless papers and finds herself trying to remember what Tigh had done, makes an effort to cultivate the often-withdrawn officers, eats every other meal alone when Lee’s busy and the other officers are using all the seats.
They’re married on the Pegasus, though Dee wistfully considers a groundside, open-air wedding in precious sunshine. It’s lovely and almost exactly what she’d always wanted and it doesn’t change much at all.
Kara sends a card with polite congratulations, a beautiful sunset in watercolours on the front that she must have painted herself. Lee glances at the picture and catches on it like a stuck zipper, and it’s one of the prettiest things they own but Dee tucks it in a dark corner after only a week.
The inside includes words like ‘you’ll be wonderful together’ and Dee sends a generic thank you note and thinks about how it doesn’t really work the way Kara thinks it does.
Kara’s placed herself in what she considers an irretrievable position, drawn a neat little line in the sand to never cross again when she decided she’d be terrible for him and smiled benevolently on her replacement, as if she’d picked Dee out herself.
And it doesn’t really work like that, like Dee will cover her part like an understudy when Kara bows out- except occasionally, Dee’s a little afraid that it does.
She treasures the small victories.
It’s quite easy to do, actually, when they’re the only ones she gets.
She remembers the moment Adama had looked at her with almost as much approval as his first soon-to-be daughter-in-law, the moment Lee had promised forever in front of dozens of witnesses and she’d been able to believe him, the moments where she’s giddy with the knowledge she gets parts of him that no one else does. (Anymore.)
Dee waits for the knife-twisted pain to wear off, for Kara’s presence to inevitably recede, thousands of miles away on a new planet, is patient and understanding and wifely.
She smooths over all the emotions of the left-behind sunflowers that had followed Starbuck’s sun, pretends she understands the personal sense of subtle betrayal they all seem to feel, carefully patches the myriad broken hearts Kara leaves in her wake.
Lee prefers to stay aloft, but Dee visits New Caprica every few months, seeing her old friends and doing some shopping for miscellaneous items.
It shouldn’t be such a surprise to see Kara in passing, but it is, and her feet slow without permission as she sees Kara step out of Galen and Cally’s tent, rest a hand on Cally’s growing bump.
It’s only a trick of the light and her whirling mind that makes it seem for a moment that Kara has a matching pregnant glow and a curve to her stomach, only a trick of the light, but it shakes her badly in the breath before they notice her.
Everyone down here’s pregnant, or so it seems, and perhaps she should have considered Kara might join the club.
All the same, it’s probably better for Dee’s peace of mind that it isn’t true yet and she doesn’t have a chance for paranoia to suggest that the theoretical baby could be-
Well.
Kara waves cheerfully at Dee as she leaves in the other direction, and Dee automatically raises a hand in response.
It’s always been a little like that, Kara leaving just as Dee arrives.
She’d accepted Lee’s proposal with near certainty, but sometimes, when she lies in her marital bed alone, she wonders if she’d make the same choice again.
If she’d ever wanted to come first with anyone, she should never have chosen the Adama men and Kara to get in between.
She bites her lip when Lee turns to her with an inside joke for the wrong woman and falters, when he has to slow to translate some pilots’ language or tradition with an apologetic look for racing on ahead, when he looks at her in a meeting with a meaningful smile at something and she doesn’t know how to interpret it.
He speaks a secret language to her that he doesn’t realise he knows at all.
(He speaks to her like she’s Kara.)
He wears the thinnest of rings on his finger for her, and the deepest of scars over his heart for Kara.
How do you compete with that?
The answer is, you don’t.
Dee takes pains to find a place in the Adama men’s lives that isn’t already occupied by a daughter or best friend or celestial body or Starbuck or Kara.
Then, she realises that the place she now occupies has already been worn in and then abandoned by someone else. Kara’s moved on to other things.
Kara returns, for a moment.
They turn the corner as Dee’s trying to get Lee to pay attention to the latest personnel numbers, something that always frustrates him, and there in the middle of the lit-up corridor is Kara.
It’s bad enough never being able to live up to a warped ideal without the former mistress of the house returning to see how things are running in her indefinite absence.
She looks entirely too good to have spent months living in tents groundside, Dee thinks tightly. Her hair lies in casual waves in the way Dee has to spend an hour to achieve, that an officer could never wear on duty, and her unmistakably civilian clothes lend an aura of someone on well-deserved shore leave. Even the worn shoes and lived-in jacket can’t ground the way she still seems born to fly.
She’s stopped too, beside the uncertain Captain Mariah she’s dropped in to give advice to, and she gives a minuscule, tentative smile, the slightest breath that knocks Lee over like a perfect storm.
Dee’s frozen in place, the nagging wife forgotten in favour of the old open flame, and she wonders wildly if she should say something. What is there to say?
Kara meets her eyes without guile, a sad twitch of her lips, and Dee thinks it would be so much easier to hate her if Kara actually meant to do what she does to them. The resentment alone chokes her.
The CAG trails uncertainty behind as Kara approaches.
“Dee” she acknowledges briefly.
Her eyes slide inexorably to Lee.
“Apollo.” She says softly.
No one has called him Apollo for months, perhaps more than a year. The impossibly brave, overthinking, risk-taking pilot and CAG he had been, forever saving the fleet and arguing hotly with Starbuck, has been buried well beneath responsibilities and regrets, and yet Kara barely has to mention him for Dee to watch Apollo rise again to the surface.
The other thing about Apollo, of course, was that he was never without his counterweight being mentioned in the same breath. Starbuck-and-Apollo, the inextricable, impossible pair.
The two of them had stubbornly upheld their silently understood vows of keeping the pilots alive, shared custody of the shiny-new nuggets and committed themselves to saving the fleet and each other until the day one of them died.
Kara and Lee might be tragically separated, but the Apollo-and-Starbuck of the starry void and scraped hangar deck had been married before Dee ever met Lee, and seem forever bound in the sight of the gods.
Lee stares at her like a dying man, and Dee is sickly fascinated to know whether he’ll call her Kara or Starbuck, but she walks past them as if she never expected him to reply, an inch away from brushing against Lee’s arm.
She’s down the hallway toward the hangar before either of them recover, the Captain still in her wake, and Dee remembers, belatedly, that Kara had once been the second interloper in the Pegasus crew.
She and Lee had had each other’s backs here for months, before Dee had ever come abroad.
Of course she knows her way around.
-
Forgotten lines
They leave Kara, among thousand of others, but mostly Kara.
The technical term is retreating, the desperate scramble to save their own lives in the hopes of living to fight a less hopeless battle.
Kara had called him to ask a favour, something desperate enough to gamble on his never before being able to say no to her, and Lee had stared at the few motes of dust flying through the air rather than at Dee, eyes fixed unseeingly on a ghost of bright hair and brighter eyes.
They leave her, for once, the familiar dance stumbling on unexpected steps, and Dee starts hating herself for wondering so often if the Adamas will stage another rescue mission for their irreplaceable Starbuck when the stakes are more black-and-white than ever, higher than ever.
It might be the red moon again, except they’ll have to spend lives as well as fuel.
She fills out paperwork as if humanity depends on it. Sometimes she reminds herself it might, ship manifests and readiness reports all telling the ugly truth that they can’t afford the gamble. (And that they can’t afford not to gamble.)
Kara would have hated the paperwork, she thinks distantly, yet she would have been worth her weight in anything anyone could name, her driving influence and unstoppable presence, unconventional ideas and sorely-missed skills like a physical hole in the formation of the fleet.
Dee sees people looking at the hole every day, unconsciously accusing glances directed at Kat and Lee and herself for not filling an impossible pair of boots.
She spends hours as a sounding board for the Admiral and Commander alike, ideas and concerns and recriminations all poured into her listening ears.
They think they want Dee to agree with them, sit quietly and nod, but she drops her eyes to lists of names and wonders how they’d react if she became Starbuck for a moment.
But maybe, if Kara were here and Dee left behind, they’d already be an ftl jump away by now, attending a mass funeral.
But they linger.
They make and discard plans, burn fuel, calculate heart-stopping risks, search for the brilliant, out-of-the-box strategy that War College never taught, hesitate, because Kara isn’t here.
Kara returns, among all the other refugees.
She’s haunted-eyed and hollow-cheeked and beautiful, loose-haired and quietly jaded.
Dee can’t possibly resent her familiar yet unfamiliar presence on the ship again, but it’s something uncomfortably close to it.
She had prepared herself for years silently rotating around a growing colony, stayed loyally with the shrinking fleet when it felt almost as if Kara had gone off to play house until she tired of it.
They cram onto a ship not large enough for them, with aching, worn-in bones threatening to give way, jump to nowhere in particular.
Dee’s belongings and friends and the ashes of a sunset painting now spin eerily through space above a left-behind planet, and she thinks: the path will be marked with gravestones, wonders if they’ve made the right choice.
There is no going back, she knows, not to the colonies, not to Kobol, not to New Caprica.
It’s just that there seems to be nothing left ahead.
-
Intermission
Dee watches her husband unconsciously lean towards his newly-returned, favourite pilot, sparks flying once more on the hangar deck.
Starbuck and Apollo reunited, inching unstoppably closer as he tears into her for returning to her most reckless flying. Their eyes flash, and neither gives an inch.
It’s just like old times.
Dee watches her husband reply to Kara’s scorching remark with a terrifying softness, clenched jaw and haunted eyes, sees Kara’s indignation dissolve into aching denial, and wonders why she feels like the other woman.
Kara’s never second to anybody, Dee thinks, and has a sudden realisation as to why.
Kara would never stand for being second. Kara’s always first and last with anyone she cares about, because she’d never settle for anything less.
Kara never thinks anyone she loves could settle for it either, so she tries to give everyone first equal place in her heart and swings too far the other way when she fails.
And anyone who’s experienced the whirlwind of Kara Thrace’s full attention could never go back to half her heart, but Sam tries, tries so hard not to tie her down, and damns himself to forever second place in the process.
Loving Kara and being loved by her is a war, every inch a bloody battle of who can care more, give over more of their heart and claim more of the other’s, and Sam surrenders without ever quite realising how.
Dee and Sam watch as they have it out in something worse than public, spotlighted brighter than opening night as they bloody every inch of skin Sam and Dee have kissed, as they lean on each other in the way they can only trust the other to withstand, become inextricably entwined as they collapse on the battlefield, no white flags and no compromise.
Dee turns away abruptly, because she can bear much but she’s not a masochist. She sleeps alone and dreams of bruises painted on like art, that take weeks and years to fade.
Dee sets the raptor down with the relief of someone who hadn’t had to fly one for the last four years, since the last test flight to renew her qualifications way before the end of the worlds. If it comes down just a touch harder than she could have helped on Kara’s side, well, no one but her will ever know.
Kara stands gingerly, cradling her hands like she’s holding an invisible child as she thanks Dee in a cracking voice, and Dee nods tightly, not knowing what to say.
Kara’s the first out of the door, inching carefully down the wing without the use of her hands, and Dee catches a glimpse of Lee running across the hangar. His face has such naked terror and hope on it that she almost looks away.
It’s the kind of face you don’t often make in public. (That Lee has never made in front of her.)
Kara’s golden head shines against the sooty metal behind her. Of course she catches his eye first. His eyes are- she turns away abruptly, only catching in the corner of her eye how he checks his pace as Sam appears. Reminding himself he doesn’t have first rights anymore.
She steps off slowly, making her way to a man who’d rather hold someone else, and lets herself be enfolded into his grateful arms. He does love her, is the thing. Just not like her. Not in the way he thinks he should.
And she lets him cradle her like another woman, lets herself be gently turned away from another embracing couple so he can see her instead, reassure himself she’s still there just as much as Dee is.
-
The show must go on
Kara leaves.
Killed In Action is the technical term, but it doesn’t feel quite possible.
She dies. It’s the first time anyone’s realised she actually could, and the realisation comes too late. There are no impossible odds to beat, no hope, no rescue missions. It feels like there should be closure, but there isn’t, and it’s worse than Dee imagined possible.
No one knows how to behave, hushed, disbelieving conversations in the hallways that quiet when she passes, sympathetic or unfocused looks following her wherever she goes.
She sits beside Lee under his viper, silent and patient and understanding, carefully not quite touching, and she doesn’t know if he even realises that she’s there at all.
She finds Adama with his carefully completed model ship strewn across the floor. Dee had helped him put it painstakingly together, but it’s broken in a moment for Kara.
She helps him pick up the pieces, splintered masts and tiny figureheads, and thinks that it’s far from the first time she’ll be fixing something Kara leaves shattered.
Somehow, she knows it won’t even be the last.
There’s at least two hearts to repair yet.
She bridges the awkwardly-shaped gap between Lee and his father, the gap that had been exactly the right size to admit their most mutually prized possession, only jealously shared.
She acts as Kara had, the last time the two Adamas had lost one of their own. Becomes an intermediary between two men who aren’t sure if they’ll make it past this, who blame themselves.
She gently sweeps up the pieces of betrayal they feel at themselves, at Kara, at the universe at large, tries to help them over the treacherous footing around the gaping hole of Kara’s absence. Wonders if they notice.
The hardest thing might be standing second to a ghost, too.
She could understand it whenever Starbuck was in a room, glowing with irrepressible personality and life, no corner left in shadow from her light, but there’s another empty coffin in space now and she still falls into the place worn in by another woman.
She could understand it before, but now she comes second to nothing.
What do you do when your best isn’t enough? When your best isn’t as important as a dead woman’s worst?
Kara beams down from the memorial wall, looking over her shoulder at all who pass by like a benediction.
(The fleet’s patron saint, Dee thinks with an edge that she tries hard not to let become bitterness.)
But Dee remembers her in flesh and blood, in front of her well-worn, fleet-saving viper, beaming over her shoulder at the photographer.
She looks now at Kara’s laughing eyes and wicked grin that Lee’s camerawork almost captures, hair falling out of a tie and an inside joke between them that the shiny paper doesn’t pass on.
Lee’s learned not to turn to her with the wrong memory now, doesn’t speak to her like she’s Kara, anymore. He hardly speaks at all.
Kara’s parts of Lee are gone as surely as the parts of her viper. Their secret language will die out, and her legacy will endure on as a pale imitation of her life.
Dee remembers the long minutes Lee had once spent slowly losing oxygen as she watches him now. He’s suffocating incrementally more every day, like Kara is as essential as air itself.
The light’s flickered out of his eyes, and Dee hunts vainly for the spark, the match that Kara had always struck so effortlessly to ignite him.
Maybe the rest of the universe doesn’t matter anymore when your sun is gone.
Kara returns.
She steps out of her blindingly bright, fleet-saving viper as if she were reborn yesterday, falls into Lee’s arms as agonisingly naturally as if she never left, and Dee would say that she goes back to being second again, except she was never really first to begin with.
Lee gets the first embrace even before her husband, just like they’ve always had first rights with each other, the right to each other’s best and worst moments and their first and last.
And Dee swallows down the bitter-sweet-sour thought that reminds her she did everything right and nothing wrong.
Some things are just preordained by the universe, and her only fault was not realising in time that they were one of them.
-
Curtain call
Dee watches Kara and Lee circle each other carefully, a holding pattern like binary stars orbiting.
It’s just like old times and yet not, starlit eyes and tales of Earth and cosmic signs that Kara disdains, leading them to their Earth.
They arrive at their destination by unreplicable, unprovable chance, and Dee looks out through the smudged glass of the observation deck window above the planet and thinks: And the travelers looked to the heavens and saw their brothers.
Dee contacts the last vestiges of bureaucracy and quietly signs the divorce papers she orders and sends them on to Lee.
He runs into her in the hall the next day, standing in the lit-up corridor in civilian dress, worn shoes and the bearing of someone born to command and his hair too long to be regulation, and she forces down the deja vu and asks if he’s signed.
The conversation is strained and well-meant, and she thinks how strange it is that there are parts of each other they still don’t know at all.
“Lee” she nods, gently, for the last time as his wife. She never knew Apollo very well, but she hopes Lee and Kara will be as happy as Apollo-and-Starbuck in their inevitable parallel marriage.
They part slowly, an awkward handshake made bearable by the weight of good intentions and hopes, and Dee withdraws and says quietly that she wishes them well.
There’s a moment he doesn’t get it, before he sighs, unhappily conscious and rushing ahead to explanations he thinks she might want, but she intercepts him.
“I wish you both well” she repeats. “I do.”
And so she ends her marriage with the same words that began it.
She hopes they’ll be happy, that the universe has gotten what it wanted and will let them all be.
The forever-orbiting binary stars can finally collide, and perhaps the unintentional interloper can land gently on firm ground.
There is no going back, she knows, but there’s always ahead.
Dee packs carefully, walks the halls of Galactica one last time, carefully unpins the photos she’d pinned on the memorial wall.
She looks up as she boards the raptor, sees Kara halt on the catwalk above. She raises a hand slowly, and Kara returns the gesture.
For once it’s Dee leaving as Kara begins.
Kara nods, not as one officer to another but perhaps as one Adama to another, and Dee acknowledges her, watches her figure be left behind as they bank away from the Galactica.
What do you do when there’s no way to win?
Sometimes, you bow out gracefully.