Chapter Text
ONE YEAR LATER
NEW CAPRICA
Dee's just finishing up her duty logs when the comm buzzes. "Commander's not here," she says, anticipating a call from the CIC or Galactica.
"Hey, Dee." Kara's voice answers her, faint and crackling over the surface relay.
"Hey," Dee says, smiling. "How are you?"
"I'm okay," Kara replies, and then there's a static-filled pause. "Sam's sick, though."
Dee processes this. "How bad?" she asks. Kara wouldn't call this late if it weren't a problem, but...
"Not sure. He says it seems worse than it is." Kara laughs, but Dee can hear the strain behind it, which tells her all she needs to know.
"Mail run's tomorrow; I'll catch a ride," Dee says, "Help you knock some sense into him, how's that?"
There's a soft sound, Kara smiling or sighing. "If Lee can spare you..." she says, token resistance.
"I'm coming," Dee says firmly, and that's that.
* * *
Lee makes half-hearted complaints about how Dee's gotten the last two turns planetside, but she pokes him in the side and laughs at him. She points out how the Commander of Pegasus can't very well go AWOL for a weekend to play medic, and he lets her go with a rueful shrug.
When Dee steps onto the Raptor, she spots the Tighs aboard. "Colonel; ma'am," she says, buckling in. "Looking forward to some R&R?"
"Not a vacation," he replies.
"The admiral's letting us settle," Mrs. Tigh explains with an enthused grin. "Isn't it great?"
From the colonel's expression, the jury's still out on that, but Dee smiles at them anyway. "Well, good luck," she says, meaning it.
"Speaking of luck," the Colonel says, "You've got an anniversary coming up, don'tcha?"
Dee nods, but before she can respond, Mrs. Tigh cuts in. "Oh, congratulations! You know, there were some who bet against it lasting this long, with you and Lee –"
"Ellen," the colonel gruffs.
Dee keeps the smile fixed on her face. She's heard worse. "Adamas have a tendency to take the long odds," she responds, tamping back a pointed response about troubled marriages.
"Ha," the colonel barks out a laugh. "That's for damn sure. Have you heard about the time..."
Dee gives him credit for his tact with relief and no small surprise, and the rest of the trip is spent trading scandalous Academy stories.
* * *
It's always a shock, after so long shipside, to step out into a space so bright and wide and open. Dee shields her eyes from the glare of the sky; even overcast (as it always seems to be) it's still brighter than she's accustomed to. She spots Kara, hovering at one side of the crowd, looking so weary and strained that Dee immediately hugs her tight without a word.
"I'm glad you're here," Kara breathes quietly into her collar before letting her go.
"What does the Doc say?" Dee asks as they start off down the road – more of a broad muddy lane, but it's been graded and there's no help for the muck, this early in the season. Dee's just glad she's in her civvies.
"Pneumonia," Kara says tightly, tucking her coat more closely around her. "Sam might pull through with rest, but he needs meds that we don't have and..." She's looking away, clearly unwilling to ask.
"He'd be better off on Pegasus, wouldn't he?" Dee fills in the rest.
"Dee, I can't ask you or Lee to look after him; I –"
Dee rolls her eyes. "Lords of Kobol, save me from air-headed Viper jocks. Of course you can, what good is –"
"Motherfrakker, " Kara spits, freezing in her tracks before she takes off at a jog in a new direction. Dee tries to keep up, weaving through the crowd. "Gods damn it, Sam!" she hears Kara hollering, and then she comes to the edge of a cobbled-together pyramid court, where Kara's dragging Sam off by his collar.
Sam glances up at Dee and smiles. "Hey," he says before a coughing fit wracks his body. His face is pale, and his lungs rattle like a broken engine. Dee and Kara bracket him so that he doesn't fall over.
"Yeah, you're going right on today's Raptor," Dee says, patting his shoulder.
Sam shakes his head, wheezing. "And miss your visit?" he says. "Not a chance."
"No arguing," Kara says, sounding a little like she used to when she was barking at nuggets on the flight deck. "I'll pack your kit. Dee, can you handle getting him to the Raptor?"
"Sure can," Dee says, then pokes Sam in the side. "On your feet, mister. Lean on me."
Sam gives her a faint echo of his usual grin, and slings an arm around her shoulders. "Don't mind if I do," he says, and Dee shakes her head.
"Don't start," Kara says, then presses a kiss to his temple. "Just get on that ship, get better, and get back here."
"Yes ma'am," Sam says, saluting weakly with the wrong hand, and Dee starts steering him towards the Raptor.
When they get there, Dee helps him up to the hatch, settles him into the seat, and tells Racetrack, "Medical priority, just waiting on his kit." Margaret nods, and Dee hops out to watch for Kara.
There's a faint noise, just on the periphery of her hearing, that somehow sets her nerves jangling. It takes a moment before she recognizes the particular pitch of Cylon engines. A scout? she thinks, and then she realizes that it’s more than one, a gathering whine just out of her range of sight.
"Go!" she shouts through the hatch without a second thought.
"Wait," Sam says, "What –"
Dee can hear Racetrack cursing. "Multiple Dradis contacts!" the pilot calls out. "Are you coming, ma'am?"
There's no sign of Starbuck. "Shut up and move! " Dee says, and backs away as the hatch starts closing.
"Wait!" Sam shouts, but it's too late. The hatch seals and Dee doesn't stop to watch it take off, just starts running towards Kara's tent, a half-formed prayer on her lips.
The Cylon raiders are screaming through the air by the time she gets there, and Kara’s nowhere in sight. "Frak, " Dee says, breathless, an icy chill in the pit of her stomach.
All around her, people are frozen in their tracks, staring up at the sky.
* * *
THREE MONTHS LATER
NEW CAPRICA
Dee ties the faded scarf around her cropped hair, knotting it tightly at the base of her skull, sparing no thought to the luxuries she left behind on Pegasus. She glances in the mirror, then, checking only that her expression holds true, her mask in place, showing nothing suspicious, nothing dangerous, nothing weak, then she heads out of the tent. She pauses only to touch the base of the two figurines – Artemis, Aphrodite – that Kara left behind.
Bypassing the breakfast line that winds its way down the street, she treads a path so familiar she can walk it in her sleep. It's what gets her out of bed in the mornings.
Every morning, first thing: find Gaeta.
Ask.
Ask, and ask, and ask again.
"I still don't know anything," Felix says. If she were anyone else, he wouldn't let her this far, this close, every day. "And the president's schedule is full."
"Please, Felix, I just need to know if she's all right," Dee says. "If she's even –" It's a good morning; she can tell because her voice doesn't break, or waver. Her eyes don't fill with tears. On the really bad days, she begs.
Not today.
"Please," she repeats, voice as steady as a stone.
"I'll do what I can," he says, an empty promise she's heard a thousand times.
She nods, and walks away.
If asking after Kara is the only thing that gets her out of bed in the morning, then her turn at the hidden wireless each night is the only thing getting her though her days working at the food processing plant. Starbuck’s not the only one they’re missing.
"Any news?" Tyrol asks, when she climbs down the ladder to the Resistance HQ that night.
"No," she says, "Any word from above?" It's their inside joke, gallows humor: two people of threadbare faith from religious families waiting from a sign from the sky. Except, of course, they're hoping for communication from the Fleet, from home.
It's a poor attempt at humor, but it's all they have.
"Maybe tonight's the night," she says, and takes over at the wireless while he goes to see if they've received intel from their mysterious source inside the President's office. Not for the first time, she wishes they'd been successful stealing the election for Roslin, but she tucks that thought away and closes her eyes. Listening through the noise for a signal, any signal.
While the rig auto-dials slowly through the channels, she wires detonators by touch, from memory and long practice.
When her shift is over, she heads to her tent, touches the base of Kara's patrons, and goes to sleep.
In the morning, she is woken by the muffled boom of an explosion in the distance, and she allows herself a small, grim smile before starting all over again.
* * *
"I can get you five minutes with the President after lunch," Felix says, and Dee blinks.
"What?"
"Five minutes," he repeats, "Thirteen hundred. Don't be late." He closes the door before she can respond.
She skips work that day, gets Cally to cover for her. Digs through the tent for something to wear, something presentable, something that's not too –
Her hands are shaking, and Dee sits back on her heels, forcing her breathing to level out. Forcing herself still, calm. Everything around her is Kara's, or Sam's; her own civvies are threadbare and patched, but she hadn't touched their things since boxing them up and shoving them under the bed. She doesn't know what's worse – pawing through it all again, without them there, or holding on to all of it when she doesn't know if – when! – she'll see them again. Some of these things are nice, would fetch good trade...
Dee would never. It's bad enough that she's looking for something to borrow now.
Kara won't mind, she thinks. Kara will understand.
She finds a blue dress, simple but elegant, crisscrossing straps of darker blue, soft and delicate. She can't imagine Kara wearing it, but then remembers Colonial Day on the Astral Queen. She remembers dancing with Billy, seeing Lee and Kara laughing across the dance floor.
Lee, she thinks, balling the fabric up in her fists, fighting deep ache that wells up from her gut. Lee, you'd better be out there.
She keeps looking. Finally, she pulls out a simple button-down shirtdress, deep russet with military-style pockets. It's far too big and has paint splatters on the cuffs, but she can belt it and roll the sleeves up.
Dee packs the rest away, pulls on her boots, and checks her reflection in the mirror; the mirror is unsympathetic. She tries to wrangle her hair into a semblance of order, the riot of curls barely tamed by a broad ribbon she ties as a makeshift headband.
Gaius Baltar, Dee thinks, glaring at her reflection. She unbuttons the top button, then another, then a third. Buttons the last back up, indecisive.
Good enough. She lifts her chin, squares her shoulders, and leaves with ten minutes to spare.
* * *
"I remember you," President Baltar says, fatuous and overly delighted. In the corner, there's a Six sitting in a chair. The Cylon is reading over some reports, her pose screaming indifference, but something about the angle of her mouth says that she's paying very close attention to the conversation. "Dee, isn't it?"
"Anastasia Dualla," she replies, nodding, "Yes, Mister President."
"Good to see you're well,” he offers, one of those polite niceties to fill time she doesn’t have.
"Thank you, sir," she says, not echoing his sentiment in kind as she probably ought. "I don't want to take too much of your time, but I was wondering..."
"Yes?" he prompts, strolling around the side of the desk to lean against it, all attentive generosity. "I'm happy to hear your concerns, Anastasia, as I'm sure Gaeta has told you."
Gaeta has said nothing of the sort, but Dee nods anyway. "...um, do you know if Kara Thrace is...?" For all her careful planning, she doesn't know how to end her sentence. "Where she is, I mean. If she's..." Again, she stalls out, bingo fuel, adrift.
She drops her eyes to the floor, to the polished toes of Baltar's shoes inches away from her scuffed, muddy boots.
"Well, " he says. "As I'm sure you know, I can't keep track of all the, ah," he clears his throat, "persons of interest that the administration –" not his administration, but the administration –"...has detained, but I can certainly do my best to access..." It's the most circuitous, polite 'no' that Dee's heard in her life.
"Please, sir," Dee says to the carpet.
"What is she to you?" The Six says, her voice suddenly close, and Dee looks up in alarm. She hadn't heard the Cylon moving. Six is perched on the desk, almost sinuously curled around Baltar, one hand on his arm.
"She's..." Dee tangles her hands together in her lap, a thousand answers crowding in her throat. My last tie to Galactica, to Lee, to... "Kara's all I have left," Dee chokes out. All she has but the static at night, and she's not about to mention that.
The Six's mouth softens by just a fraction.
Dee leans forward, touches Baltar's hand where it rests on the edge of the desk. "Please," she says, knowing that the angle lets him see down her dress. She remembers how beautiful she used to be, and pulls that old confidence around her like a cloak.
The Six draws in a breath between her teeth, but Dee doesn't look at her, just keeps her eyes on Baltar's face. His tongue darts out, swipes at his bottom lip in a furtive gesture. Interest or nervousness or both, she doesn't care. It's enough.
There are three ways this can end, Dee knows:
If this Six is the jealous type, Dee won’t survive the next few minutes.
If she's jealous but forgiving, she'll tell Dee what she wants to know just to get her to leave.
Or Six doesn't care, and Dee will get her information from Baltar.
"She's all I have left," Dee says again. She trails her fingers across the back of Gaius' hand, and she waits.
* * *
Dee keeps her head high as she leaves.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't. All that matters is knowing where one of her missing birds is.
One down, she thinks, and tries not to number the rest. If she starts counting those still lost, the numbers will never stop climbing.
Kara's enough, for today.
* * *
They get another back the next day. "Colonel!" Dee says when she spots him in the street. Tigh turns at the sound of her voice and she doesn't gasp when she sees the angle of the bandage – nothing truly shocks her anymore. She does nod in greeting, an acknowledgment as good as a salute. "Good to see you, sir."
"Wish I could say the same, " he says, voice like a scabbing wound. "But I wouldn't wish this place on anybody I liked half as much as you, Dee. Any news?"
"Starbuck's alive. In detention," Dee offers, and he coughs up something like a laugh.
"Of course she is, heh. Too stubborn to die, just like me. To dangerous to let loose," he says, and he bares his teeth in a terrible grin, letting the rest of the sentence go unsaid: Just like us.
Dee nods again. "It is good to see you, sir. Give my best to your wife."
That night, they plan the bombing of the NCP graduation ceremony.
"Good hunting," she tells Duck. He nods, and the empty look in his eyes mirrors her own. He's not the first she's relayed hopeless orders to, and he won't be the last.
* * *
They get the jamming frequencies from Tyrol's source, and Dee throat closes up, staring at the numbers and doing the math in her head automatically, knowing how to cut through.
Lee, she thinks, please be listening, and she sends the message.
* * *
Dee waits in the brush at the rendezvous point, straining her ears for a sign of Galactica’s advance team. For a long time, all she hears is the sound of the water and the wind lightly rustling in the trees.
"C-Bucks rule!" Dee hears in a familiar voice, and her heart stutters.
"Go Archers!" she shouts back, and then she hears Sam's laugh. He got out in time, she thinks, barely able to get to her feet under the crushing wave of relief.
She's so happy that she can't breathe, and she doesn't even notice that he's wearing a flight suit before she's wrapped up in his arms. His wings jab into her cheek and she pulls back.
"Since when are you an LT?" she asks with a laugh.
Then Sharon signals that they have incoming, and they have to run.
* * *
The calm before the storm: tomorrow morning they'll gamble everything, roll the hard six. For now, it's quiet.
Dee walks away from the planning session, feeling as steady as she's ever felt before a battle, a preternatural calm settling into her bones. She and Sam head to her – his and Kara's – to their tent, to pack what they can carry.
"I hope you don't mind," she says, not looking at him. "That I stayed here, I mean."
He chuckles under his breath. "Are you kidding? No, of course not." She envies his ease, his confidence, his uniform. She'd give anything to have her blues with her, to feel her uniform wrapping her up, pulling her shoulders and spine straight.
Everything that she owns barely fills half the bag, and on impulse, she wraps the blue dress around the goddess statues, stows them in one corner.
"I don't –" he laughs, sitting down on the bed with a dazed expression. "I don't know what I want to pack. I've been doing without all of this for so long..."
Dee digs through the boxes, grabs a bundle of crimson and black and gold, hands it to him. His laugh rings out, filled with foreign delight. "My jersey," he says, broad hands overlapping hers. "Thank you, I'd forgotten..." His eyes meet hers, suddenly serious. "Thank you. "
And then he leans up, pulling on her hands so that she's close enough, kissing her carefully, sweetly. Dee wants to lean into it, fall down over him and let him hold her up for a minute, just a moment, but she can't. If she breaks now, she doesn't know what shape she'll be in tomorrow. She pulls away.
"I... I can't," Dee says, feeling foolish. "Lee... and Kara, they're still –" She finished the sentence with a vague gesture, meaning out there. Past the noise and the ominous quiet and the impending chaos, they're out there, waiting for Sam and Dee to find them.
"The last time I saw you, you saved my life twice over. I'd be dead if I'd stayed here, and you –"
"You'd have pulled through," she says, wanting to believe it.
"I don't think so," he says quietly, meaning it. "Not with Kara gone."
"We'll get her tomorrow," Dee says. She sits next to him, the jersey fallen to the ground by their muddy boots, and puts her hand over his. "We will. And we'll all get out, rejoin the Fleet, and..."
"What if we don't," he says quietly, and she realizes that he may wear the uniform, but all of his battles before this have been guerrilla ops. He's new to this kind of fighting.
She's been living the other side of the war since the Cylons arrived on New Caprica. She’s learned that there's a different texture to war when you're fighting surreptitiously, hiding in plain sight, and when you’re in the military surrounded by clear demarcations between friend and foe. A different flavor of determination in the back of your throat.
Dee looks down; her wedding ring glints in the dim light. There’s another on Sam’s hand, and matching ones on their spouses' hands. She remembers that the last man she touched was Gaius Baltar.
Dee swallows hard at that memory and looks at Sam's face, his eyes as blue and clear as the sky’s never been since she landed here.
"We will," she says firmly, leaning in close. And again: "We will," whispered against his lips.
* * *
Dee remembers the next day in fragments, in sounds and touch more than sight:
The sleepy grumble Sam makes while she pulls on her jacket; his broad palm sliding up her spine, fingers creeping under the hem of her shirt.
"Outta the rack, soldier." The edge in her voice, all wrong for the hushed morning, cutting short their stolen reverie in the tent she’d never really let herself call ‘home.’ "Fifteen minutes."
The rasp of the sheets as he sits up; the place where he’d touched her is cold. "You know, I –" His voice, thin and raw with sleep.
"I know." The salt of his skin on her lips as she twists to press a kiss against his shoulder. "It's okay. Get ready." Not much later, there’s a muffled boom of the first explosion at the edge of the settlement.
Then: sirens, screaming, and the soft resistance of the sand underfoot as they run, serpentine, through the rows of tents. Tyrol’s voice barking orders at the weapons cache before the teams scatter to their rescue points.
Her pack bumping at her side, the strap digging across her chest. The grip of her gun in her hand as it recoils, the sharp cracks of it firing until she sees a Doral go down.
The roar of Galactica, dropping towards them out of the sky like the hammer of Hephaestus, spitting fire and Vipers before winking back out again with the sound of a titan gasping for breath.
Sam's body curling over her protectively as they duck away from the rushing wind and flying grit. "You good?" His murmur, low and breathless in her ear.
"Yeah," she says, "You?"
He nods, a sharp vertical jerk of his chin against her hair. They start running again.
The clang, clang, clang of Cylon troops behind them. "This way," she says. Pulling Sam by the elbow through the narrow gap between two tents.
She trips over a body, sand sliding between her clutching fingers, rubbing her palms raw. "Frak," she says, then recognizes the corpse by the bright red woven bracelet – dedication to Ares – on one outflung arm. She turns the body over, scrabbles at the man's collar for the chain she knows is there.
"What are you doing?" Sam says as she gets the key. "We need to move!" His hands tug at her jacket, urgent.
"You know the rendezvous coordinates?" she asks, standing.
"Yeah, why, come on, we –"
She presses the key into his hand. "You're a pilot: you need to get the Rising Star off the ground."
"What? I've only had –"
"Principle's the same," she says, cutting him off. "And Pierson's dead. I can't fly it, so you have to."
He looks down at the corpse at their feet. "But," he says, "Kara – "
"I know the layout of the detention center. I know where she is. I'll get her."
"Frak," he says, voice harsh and mutinous.
"Lieutenant," she snaps. "Head to the northeast corner and evac the Rising Star with all the souls aboard her." She takes a breath. "That's an order. "
His eyes meet hers in a belligerent glare, but all he says is, "Yes, ma'am."
She pulls him close, kisses him swift and fierce. "See you on the other side," she says, and turns away before they can say anything else.
* * *
The detention center is quiet, almost hushed in comparison to the confusion outside. She hears running footsteps, hushed, panicked shouts, but no explosions rattle through the fine bones of her ear. Occasional gunfire reports from the entry team ahead of her, sweeping the far ends of the building.
Dee winds her way through the escaping crowd, fighting upstream. She hears Kara's voice, distant and shrill, shouting a name.
Dee finds Kara's cell door open, and –
It's not a cell. Instead of a small, cramped closet, she finds space and sunlight and tasteful furnishings, and a staircase leading down. Dee pauses in the doorway, hearing voices.
"Say it again," the man says, and Dee recognizes the Cylon’s voice.
"I...love you," Kara whispers in a broken, small voice. Dee's chest feels like it's collapsing inward. She thinks of Sam, of Lee, and wonders what's happened in this place, Kara caged in comfort.
"Now the rest."
Then silence, a gasp, whispers Dee can't make out. She steels herself and steps around the corner, gun at the ready. She spots the Leoben blocking Kara from view and the sudden, quick flash of a knife.
The Cylon’s body falls to the ground, revealing Kara and a very blonde little girl with a bandage wound around her head. Dee lowers her weapon, and Kara's eyes lift from the body on the rug to stare up at Dee, wide-eyed and wary and terrified in a way that makes Dee's stomach turn. The knife clatters to the ground.
"Hey, Starbuck," Dee says, and Kara takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"Hey, Dee," Kara says weakly, her grin a wraith that flickers into existence and twists from sight again.
Dee looks down at the little girl. "And who's this?" She tries to sound reassuring, tries to smile.
Kara lifts the girl to her hip, her right hand streaked in red. "Dee, this is Kacey," she says, looking at the child and not at Dee. "She's my daughter."
Dee knows she's staring, knows she should say something, but there aren't any words for this. Her mind is filled with noise, with static. She swallows convulsively.
Something hard moves into Kara's eyes.
"I'll explain later," Kara says tightly, coming up the stairs, Kasey cradled protectively at her side. "Let's move. "
* * *
The familiar planes and angles of Galactica wrap around Dee as she steps out of the hatch of the Raptor, and she feels something in her chest relax. Tension she'd long learned to live with unspools just enough that its absence is a shock. Then she spots Lee, and everything else falls away. There's no deck crew calling directions to the pilots, no chatter from others reuniting with their loved ones, just the slight drop down from the Raptor's wing into Lee's arms and the sound of his voice again.
"Dee," he says against her hair, hands clutching her close and fierce. She pulls back just enough to let his mouth find hers, and he touches her face with careful, trembling fingers. His lips drag away and he gasps, "I can't believe –" he says breathlessly, "I'm so –" She nods, feeling tears streaking her cheeks, and kisses him again.
"Kasey?" a woman says, and Dee pulls away in time to see Kara stepping down to the deck, and a stranger sobbing as she takes the little girl from Kara's arms. "– my baby girl –" the woman says, and thanks Kara over and over. "When the Cylons took her, I thought... But you saved her. Gods bless you."
As soon as the woman turns away, Kara's face fragments into a whirlwind of emotions that sends an answering pang through Dee's heart and a thousand questions through her mind.
"What's wrong?" Lee asks.
"I don't know," Dee answers.
* * *