Fic: Six Things That Changed Because They Were In A Sedoretu, and One Thing That Didn't

[beatrice_otter]

sedoretuex has revealed, and I can now reveal that I wrote TWO stories! (I have not yet had time to read any stories but my own--I have been really busy this January--but I am planning on making my way through the collection soon.)

A sedoretu is a specific organization of a poly marriage created by Ursula K. Le Guin in her short story "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" aka "Another Story" available in a 1994 short story collection of the same name. It includes four people and specific arrangements of the relationships inside it. All people have a "moiety" that is considered as inherent as gender; the two moieties are Morning and Evening. Sex with someone of the same moiety is considered incest. The expected relationships within each sedoretu are:
The Morning woman and the Evening man (the “Morning marriage”)
The Evening woman and the Morning man (the “Evening marriage”)
The Morning woman and the Evening woman (the “Day marriage”)
The Morning man and the Evening man (the “Night marriage”)
(i.e. two homosexual and two heterosexual pairings) Here is the Fanlore explanation of it and the E2 explanation.

My second story for this exchange was a pinch hit for tielan that I had been eyeing for treat purposes since the beginning, because our tastes are very similar and every one of her ideas was amazing and absolutely a story I wanted to exist. But there was a problem! Each one of those stories, my feeling was "I want that to exist, but I don't know if I can do justice to it."

Here were my main options:

1) Relationship and prompt I have written for tielan before (MCU, Steve/Maria/Natasha/Bucky, the previous fic being Look Clear and Calm)

2) Really interesting relationship and prompt from a TV show I've only seen sporadic episodes of (Simon Basset/Anthony Bridgerton/Daphne Bridgerton/Kate Sharma (Bridgerton TV), The oldest son and oldest daughter of the Bridgerton family finding and settling on a sedoretu husband and wife for their familial quartet. In the middle of the season. With the ton looking on.)

3) Relationship I requested myself and would really like to se done, but I requested it because I'm not sure of my ability to write it and the canon is a TV show I haven't watched in almost 2 decades. (BSG, Lee/Kara/Sam/Dee)

4) Relationship I already wrote for this ficathon for my original assignment. (Star Wars Legends, Luke/Mara/Leia/Han, the other fic being Dawning Understanding)

And these were just the top four. There were 13 requested quartets and I could have written 10 of them! I was spoiled for choice! Honestly, it was a little bit paralyzing.

But in the end, I went with BSG, and decided that Wikipedia would have to be enough canon review. And it really did write itself; everything poured out. As always, for me, Dee was going to have a major role and survive; I love her and she was done so dirty by canon. Her death was the first time I got incandescently angry about a fridging because I could see it for what it was. And of the relationships in this foursome, Lee/Kara is my least favorite. (I am glad that in Kara we got to have a female character who was fucked up and messy and not punished for it or considered 'whiny,' but at the same time, there were a lot of other fucked up and messy female characters on that show, and a lot of the other character arcs interested me more than 'cosmic destiny + will she and Lee ever get their act together.' But I know that Lee/Kara is tielan's favorite! So as I was plotting out each section I had to restrain myself: how much Dee was too much? What could I find to say about the other three? Because if I was writing it for myself, the balance would have been very different. (But I think it would have been a weaker story, less balanced.)


Title: Six Things That Changed Because They Were In A Sedoretu, and One Thing That Didn't
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Relationship: Lee "Apollo" Adama/Sam Anders/Anastasia "Dee" Dualla/Kara "Starbuck" Thrace
Rating: T
Length: 7930 words
Author: Beatrice_Otter
Written For: tielan in Sedoretu Exchange
Betaed by: iberiandoctor

On AO3. On Squidgeworld. Rebloggable on tumblr and pillowfort.


One.
Collaborators

Sam was waiting for Lee when he came off the flight deck after his flight. It had been a routine combat air patrol, relaxing, not even a hint of a ghost of a problem, and Lee was feeling pretty good.

"Hey, Sam," he said, giving him a peck on the lips. "How's it going?"

Sam smiled, but his eyes were stormy. "I know our room's supposed to be mine and Kara's tonight, but that's not happening. Would you like to join me?" The room they shared was tiny, barely room for a bed, and they were lucky to get it. And the bed could only fit all four of them if they got really close. They had a rotation for who got it, and the rest of the time they slept in their individual racks.

Lee stopped himself from asking what had happened. Sam and Kara were a lot less volatile than he'd ever imagined a relationship with Kara could be, so it wasn't anything petty. But Lee appreciated that Sam didn't try to interfere with Lee and Kara's fights, and he tried to return the favor. "Sure," he said. A (slightly) bigger bed than his rack and a handsome man to fill it—of course he was interested.

***

Dinner was no worse than usual, the sex was excellent, and afterwards Lee was looking forward to cuddling with Sam in a way neither Kara nor Dee tended to prefer. But Sam turned away and curled up on his side as soon as they were done.

Lee raised his head and looked at his husband's back. "You okay there?"

"Yeah," Sam said.

He wasn't very convincing, but Lee didn't say anything. He relaxed, and started running through the pilot roster for the next week in his head.

"How do you get used to the killing?" Sam asked, when Lee was on the verge of falling asleep.

"Cylons?" Lee said. "It doesn't bother me. You've killed lots of Cylons before."

"Not Cylons," Sam said. "Humans. Traitors. Collaborators."

Now that woke Lee up. "I haven't really had to," he said. "Closest I've come was the Olympic Carrier." Sam hadn't been with the fleet then, Lee realized. He wouldn't have known about it. "It was a passenger ship. Unarmed, with a thousand people on it. One thousand, three hundred and forty-five people. They stayed with the fleet through 237 jumps in quick succession, those first few days after the colonies were destroyed and the Cylons were finding us every jump we made, coming after us every thirty-three minutes for over five days. Then something happened—the Olympic Carrier missed the jump. And the Cylons didn't follow us. We waited, and they didn't come. Then the Olympic Carrier made the jump, claiming the Cylons had just … ignored them, left and let them fix their drives. But they had a nuke on board, and disobeyed orders to stay away from the fleet, and thirty-three minutes after they showed up, so did the Cylons. So we destroyed them. Kara and me. One thousand, three hundred and forty-five people." Lee trailed off.

He liked to forget the whole incident, and mostly he succeeded; he'd been up for something like six days straight at that point, with only catnaps in between, and the whole thing was more like a dream than anything else. "I like to think that they were dead by then, that the Cylons had stormed the ship and taken it over. But why would the Cylons have done that? However they were tracking us, it was through that ship. Out of all the ships in the fleet, Olympic Carrier was the least likely to have been targeted and taken over by a Cylon boarding party." He lapsed into silence again.

Sam huffed, a laugh without humor. "Makes my tally seem pretty small," he said.

"I didn't know their faces, and I didn't have to see the bodies afterwards," Lee said. "And it was over quickly. Whatever you had to do on New Caprica—"

"Not New Caprica," Sam said. "That was hell, but it's done."

"Then what?" Lee asked, propping himself up on an elbow and studying Sam's back.

Sam shifted, and Lee wished he could see his face. "Zarek wants to clean house before handing things back to Roslin," he said. "Get rid of the people who collaborated with the Cylons."

"And by 'get rid of' you mean 'murder'?" Lee asked. He wouldn't have thought Sam would agree to something like that, but then, he didn't know what Sam had gone through on New Caprica.

"Not murder," Sam said. "Judicial executions. Secret trial by the surviving leadership of the Resistance. Me, Tigh, Galen, Seelix, Jean, and Charlie."

"And do the accused have lawyers?" Lee asked. "Time to gather evidence or prepare a defense? Witnesses?"

"No," Sam said. "But Galen and I do our best to make sure things are fair. Tigh is usually pretty good about backing us up on procedural issues, making sure people aren't getting railroaded."

"Making sure people aren't getting railroaded," Lee said incredulously, sitting up and staring at Sam, "in your secret trial where they don't get lawyers or time to prepare a defense and you have to do it quickly before political power changes hands? Are you even listening to yourself?"

"I know," Sam said, shamefaced. "I know. I've been thinking about stepping out."

"You should," Lee said. "You should tell the Admiral and President Roslin about it, too. If there have to be trials, they should be real trials, not just people getting kidnapped and a bullet in the head if a secret cabal thinks they deserve death." He frowned. "Is that what you and Kara are fighting about?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "She doesn't think it's legal … but she thinks they deserve to die."

"And you, what, think it's legal but that they don't deserve to die?"

Sam covered his face with both hands. "I don't know. I just don't know."

Lee stopped himself from saying the first five things that came to mind and waited him out. All three of his spouses liked to play things close to their chest. Sam and Kara seemed like open books, but only until you got to know them and realized just how much they weren't saying. Dee, at least, would let you know when she was thinking something but wasn't ready to say anything yet. Lee was learning patience.

"It's just … I keep thinking about Ellen."

"Ellen … Tigh?" Lee asked. That was the only Ellen he could think of in the Fleet, but he hadn't known Sam knew her. Though of course of course he knew her, she had to have been involved in the Resistance, if Colonel Tigh had been.

"Yeah," Sam said.

Lee waited. Nothing. "What happened to her?"

"Saul killed her. Because I told him to."

"What?" Lee gaped. What the frak had been going on down there?

"She sold us out to the Cylons," Sam said. "Passed information. That's how the Cylons knew the Raptor's landing spot. She was supposed to destroy the map, and she gave it to them, instead."

Lee worked through all the implications of that, and what might have made Ellen Tigh—Ellen, without a principle in her head except love for chaos and booze and her husband—betray humanity to the Cylons. They had to have threatened Saul. It was the only thing that made sense. "And you made him kill her. No wonder he's so frakked up."

"I thought he'd rather do it himself than stand by and watch someone else," Sam said.

Lee shook his head. "I bet he's never voted to acquit, has he? Even in borderline cases where there's a good excuse. Because he already killed the love of his life for treason. How could he bear to let others live for the same crime?" He shook his head again. "Do you know if Dad knows?"

"About Ellen?" Sam said. "No clue."

"I don't think Saul could bear to tell him," Lee said. "And Dad needs to know what kind of head space he's in, how to manage him, if he's going to be XO again." Which wasn't certain, but how could they not reinstate him? As many problems as Saul Tigh had, when he was sober and focused he was a very good officer, and those were (like everything else) in desperately short supply these days.

"Yeah," Sam said with a sigh. "You're right. He has to know. About all of it."

Two.
Unfinished Business

Unbelievable. Dee looked at her husband and her wife as they embraced in the boxing ring, bloody and punch-drunk, and tried not to hang her head in shame or let her inner revulsion show on her face. Most Colonials—and especially Capricans, who were over-represented in the Fleet—either ignored the idea of moiety altogether or paid only lip-service to it. Few of her crewmates would care. And even if they did, Lee and Kara were sibling spouses in the same sedoretu—of course they would be close. The only reason for anyone to think anything [SPICY/FORBIDDEN] was happening was if Dee reacted as if it was. And the only reason three quarters of the crew would care enough to gossip was if they thought Dee was upset about it.

"Unbelievable." Dee glanced up at Sam, and wrapped an arm around him, grateful to not be alone in this.

Sam shook his head. "You know, you'd think after all this time they'd have some way of working through their issues that was better than just beating the crap out of each other and making up."

"Yeah," Dee said. Sam was a Caprican through and through, and he didn't care about moiety any more than Lee did. But she couldn't imagine trying to deal with either Lee or Kara long-term without someone as level-headed as Sam was to balance things out. "It's such frakking bullshit."

But the match was over, and so she and Sam crawled up into the ring to help their spouses out and get them patched up.

Usually, Dee would handle Lee and Sam would handle Kara, but Dee went for Kara, instead. She knew that if given the choice between her and Kara, Lee would pick Kara about 90% of the time, and she'd learned to be okay with it, but after today's performance she felt a little raw.

"You planning on fighting anyone else, Starbuck?" she asked, gently wiping away sweat.

"No," Kara said. "Why? You wanna go a round?"

Dee snorted. "Unlike you, Starbuck, I use my brain to solve problems, not my fists. How about we hit the showers?"

"Okay," Kara said, and Dee led her off. Not to the closest showers—those would be packed—but to facilities far enough away that they had a chance at a few minutes of privacy. Nobody was in there, so she dogged the hatch shut.

"Oooh, getting me alone," Kara said with a salacious grin. "Hoping for a little nookie in the showers?"

"I'm not into blood and violence," Dee said. "That's your thing." She shoved Kara towards the showers and waited. When Kara was done, Dee opened the first aid kit she'd brought with her, and poured a bit of alcohol on a cloth to begin cleaning Kara's cuts. The fleet was short on everything but booze, but that, at least she could do.

Kara was fidgeting and not wanting to meet her eyes. Hardly a surprise, after the show she'd made. Her eyes kept flicking to the hatch, looking for an escape. But the hatch was dogged shut, and Dee was between Kara and it, and that was enough to keep Kara from fleeing.

Dee let her stew.

When she was done, she packed the kit away. It wasn't much more than alcohol and gauze pads, these days, but even that was precious.

"Well?" Kara demanded. "Aren't you going to yell at me for stealing your man?"

Dee looked up at her. "I wish you wouldn't treat me like I'm stupid, Starbuck."

"What?" Kara said blankly.

"The entire fleet has known about you and Lee since about two seconds after he stepped foot on board this ship," Dee pointed out. "I don't get what the two of you see in each other, and I don't get why you both keep dancing around it when Lee couldn't care less about moiety and you only care when it's an excuse to keep you two apart. But I've known that you were the most important person in his life since long before there was anything between us. I don't like it, but if that were a deal-breaker for me, I'd never have started dating him to begin with, much less married you both."

Kara stared at her mouth open.

Dee sighed. For someone as smart as Kara was, it was amazing how stupid she could be sometimes. "What I mind is that you rub my nose in it," she said. "If the two of you would just frakking go for it and work things out where I don't have to see it, that would be so much better than this thing where you dance around each other and get frustrated and hurt each other and make a big show of it in public. Like you've been doing for the past few weeks."

"And, what, kick you out of your own bed to have sex you think is disgusting?" Kara said. "That's what you'd prefer?"

Dee rolled her eyes. "It isn't my bed, idiot, it's our bed. Yours and Lee's and Sam's just as much as it is mine. And it sucks we have to schedule 'who gets the bed and privacy and who has to bunk down in regular crew quarters' but I actually like sleeping by myself sometimes. My bunk is cozy, and I don't have to worry about anybody's nightmares but mine. And if you think I spend my nights in my bunk stewing over what's going on back in our bed … I really, genuinely don't. I have better things to do with my time."

Kara thought about this for a second, frowning. "But … you're really traditional about moiety, you think same-moiety relationships are gross."

"Yes," Dee said. "Which is why I would rather not have to think about yours and Lee's. Which would be much easier if you kept it private. Instead of splashing it all over everywhere." She considered. "Sam would be happier, too. He doesn't care about moiety any more than Lee does, but he cares that you're hurting yourself and Lee."

"You'd … really be okay with me and Lee sleeping together?"

"As long as you don't make out when I'm in the room," Dee said. "And you would know this if you were willing to talk things through like an adult. Instead of making assumptions based on … I don't even know what goes through your head, I've given up trying to figure you out."

Kara opened her mouth, but someone banged on the hatch.

Dee didn't have anything more to say and wasn't really interested in being Kara's therapist or a relationship counselor for her and Lee, so she went over and undogged the hatch. She strode out, Kara in her wake, to a series of catcalls. Dee ignored them, but Kara responded with a smirk and a slew of ribald remarks.

Any gossip in the next few days would be about Dee dragging Kara off for shower sex, not … whatever Kara and Lee had been doing in that boxing ring.

Three.
Maelstrom.

"Starbuck, mark what you're seeing in your HUD for the Raptor, and get out of there."

"What?" Kara jerked. Dee's voice in her ear sent a shock like cold water down her spine. She'd been so focused on the Cylon ghost and the maelstrom from her dreams and visions—

"Starbuck, this is Galactica, I've got a Raptor with a sensor buoy on the way to your position. If there's anything there, they've got a far better chance of spotting it than a Viper does. So mark what you're seeing, and get the frak out of there."

"Yes!" Lee said. "Kara, mark what you're seeing and boost up, you've still got a chance to make it out of there—"

"Mark your target, Starbuck," and Kara was used to obeying that voice in her ear, and somehow it was Leoben saying it with Dee, and she marked it and sent the targeting information on. Above her, she could see the thrusters of the buoy being jettisoned by the raptor. "Buoy deployed. Now GET THE FRAK OUT OF THERE."

Kara jerked the stick up, following the voice in her ear.

"You can't really live until you've been through death," Leoben said. "You're not really living now. If you follow the Cylon you'll die, but you'll live again."

"That is bullshit," Kara spat. She wasn't a Cylon, she wasn't going to resurrect, and she was alive, gods fracking dammit.

"You can call me on my bullshit as much as you like once you're back on Galactica, Starbuck," Dee said.

***

"I don't know what bullshit you think I was spouting, but what wasn't bullshit was that Heavy Raider."

Kara jerked her head up. She'd been so deep in her own head she hadn't even heard the hatch open. "What?"

"I thought you were just plain hallucinating," Dee said, "to add to all your other kinds of crazy, but Lee saw it, after you pulled up. So did the sensor buoy, before it was destroyed. The Raider never pulled up; it's destroyed. Question is, why? What was it doing there? What was it trying to gain? What information did it bring back with it when it resurrected?"

Kara had no answers, so she focused on something else. "You thought I was crazy, and you still sent a sensor buoy to certain doom? Those things are irreplaceable. We can't make them."

"You know what else is irreplaceable?" Dee asked. "You. And your Viper. We can't make any more of those, either. And we can train pilots, but we can't give them your gods-given talents, much as I hate to admit it. The buoy was cheaper, and I didn't think you'd pull up if I didn't actually deploy it. And hey. We got a lot of really interesting data from it, before it disappeared. Don't know what any of it means, but maybe we'll be able to figure out what the Cylon was doing there."

"If I'd died, you'd have Lee all to yourself," Kara said. "You wouldn't have to compete with me any more."

"Just your ghost," Dee said. "Which would be even harder to compete with, since sainted memories can't annoy him the way you do as a real, living human being. If you think Lee would pay more attention to me with you a tragic martyr, you're nuts. Do a favor: if you're going to get yourself killed, please try not to do it in a way that would make Lee and Sam even more screwed up about you."

"Gee, thanks," Kara said. "I'll do my best."

"See that you do," Dee said. She had her arms crossed, and a cool, no-nonsense look on her face.

She looked. She looked really good, Kara realized. I mean, obviously, Kara knew her wife was hot, they'd slept together; Kara had always loved both angry sex and makeup sex and she had a lot of opportunities for that with Dee. But there'd always been an edge of obligation before. Kara would never have chosen Dee if Lee hadn't; Dee was Kara's wife, but only because she had that weird old-fashioned streak that had insisted on a sedoretu, if they were going to try some sort of polyamorous arrangement. And hey, if Kara was going to be married, she was going to at least try to be a good wife, and outside of the bedroom she and Dee drove each other crazy in the bad way, so sex it was. But Dee looked really good, the fire in her eyes suited her.

Kara stood up, slowly, drawing herself up to her full height and walking over to Dee until her wife had to crane her neck to look up at her. "I'm alive."

"I see that," Dee said. "I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd stay that way, and stop flirting with death."

"A personal favor, eh?" Kara said with a grin, putting her hands on Dee's waist and drawing her closer. "Can I cash in on that right now?"

Dee cocked her head. "Maybe I should make you work for it. You only just came back from almost killing yourself."

"But I'm alive," Kara said. "I'm alive, and you were the voice that led me out of the fire and back to safety, and you look really good right now."

"I look the same as I always have," Dee said.

"Then maybe the difference is in me," Kara said. "Maybe I couldn't see clearly, before."

"You have perfect eyesight," Dee said. "When you want to see something."

Kara shook her head; that wasn't true. Outside of the cockpit, she often felt like she was stumbling around blind in the dark, not knowing where she was or where she was going, but only knowing that other people could see what she didn't. For one moment in that cockpit, she'd felt like she could see more clearly than ever before; and then Dee had called her back, and now she could see that that clarity had been at least partly an illusion.

Whoever—whatever—it was that had been speaking to her, through her hallucinations and through the oracle, they had been leading her to her death. And maybe something else beyond that; but Kara wasn't ready for it, yet.

The hatch banged open, and there was Sam.

"Kara!" he said. "Lee told me what happened." He swept her and Dee up in his arms. "Thank the gods you're alright!"

Dee disentangled herself and stepped back.

Kara held her eyes even as she wrapped herself around Sam. It felt oddly familiar, except it had been Lee she looked at, before.

Dee raised her eyebrows. Kara wasn't sure what she meant, but she turned her face back to Sam and closed her eyes. "I'm fine, I was never in serious danger," Kara lied.

Dee scoffed. "She was in serious danger, chasing sensor ghosts and phantom Raiders until it almost got her killed."

"Hey, the raider turned out to be real," Lee said. He stepped in through the hatch and closed it behind him.

"Yeah, but she was off her rocker before she saw it," Dee said. "Please tell me she's off the roster until she gets her head screwed back on straight."

"She is," Lee said. "I'm sorry, Kara, I know you don't like therapists, but he's ordering you to see one. You could maybe get away with a priest—"

"I'm putting my foot down on that one," Dee said. "Some priests are great. Some are awful. They're not trained for psychological support. Kara doesn't need spiritual support. Well, maybe in addition to psych help. But not as a replacement for it."

Kara wanted to protest, but … Dee calling the shots on this had worked so far. Kara had gone to the medium, and it had only frakked her up more.

"Okay," she said.

Four.
Crossroads.

"You know he's guilty, Lee, why the frak are you blowing up your life for him?" Kara demanded.

"You know, I think I liked it better when you and Dee weren't on the same side," Lee said.

"Dee's the smart one," Kara said. "You only think you're smart. She actually is."

"Yeah, well maybe sometimes it's more important to do the right thing than the smart thing. Did you ever think of that?" Lee said. "Have you ever stopped and taken a step back and really thought about all the things this fleet has done since the Colonies were wiped out? Really? We have done so many frakked up things. And Baltar was the one in charge when it went to hell a second time. But if Roslin had still been President when the Cylons showed up on New Caprica and they'd held a gun to her head, do you think she would have done much better? Maybe a little, sure … but the big things, either she would have done the same as he did, or she would be dead. And the Cylons would have still killed and tortured everyone they did. Same thing for Zarek, or Dad, or anybody else in the fleet. If we're going to lynch Baltar because we don't like him—and I hate that smarmy prick, I'm not saying people are wrong to hate him!—but if we're going to lynch him because of it, we should damn well be honest about it."

"That's wonderful, Lee, really great," Kara said. "Is your next career going to be as a priest? Because that was a wonderful sermon."

"You're the one sitting around thinking up ways to tell people what they should be doing," Lee pointed out. "I may not be a pilot right now, but at least I'm doing something. There's a hell of a lot of things you could be doing, besides sitting around feeling sorry for yourself while you wait to be cleared. Maybe then you wouldn't—"

He broke off as the door to their quarters opened, and Sam stumbled in.

"We're kind of—"

"Are you okay?" Lee asked, cutting Kara off.

Sam looked blearily up at him. "I don't know," he said. "Can you hear it? Tory can hear it, it's not just me."

"Hear … what?" Lee asked.

"The music." Sam started humming.

"Well, looks like I'm not the only one cracking up," Kara said.

"You haven't—" Lee cut himself off. Arguing with Kara about what, exactly, was going on with her was not productive. "Sam, where are you hearing the music?" Maybe it was just someone hiding in an out-of-the-way nook with a wireless or something.

"Everywhere," Sam said. "It's following me around."

"Do you need to be taken off of flight duty?" Lee asked.

"No," Sam said. "I didn't hear it when I was out flying CAP today. Or in the simulator." He flopped down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. "It's driving me crazy. I know the song, I just can't think from where. And I can't remember the words."

"Okay," Lee said. They couldn't afford to lose a pilot … but if he was hallucinating … but on the other hand, maybe he just had something stuck in his head?

"Well, look at it this way," Kara said, flopping down beside him. "Maybe we're both the mouthpieces of the gods. Maybe your song can join my painting and lead us to Earth." She raised a hand and patted the mandala above the bed, the mandala that was a twin to the one that had been in her apartment on Caprica, the one that looked like the place Kara had almost died. The one she'd painted after she'd almost died.

Frakking gods, Lee hated that thing.

Lee wasn't sure which one he wanted less: to fight about Baltar's trial, or to listen to whatever crazy thing was going through Sam and Kara's heads right now.

He couldn't deal with this right now. Lee walked out, leaving the two of them alone.

Dee was off shift now, and he knew she'd been planning on getting some running in. He could do with some exercise, himself.

Lee went to the pilot's bunkroom and stripped down to his tanks, then went to Dee's preferred route through the ship and stretched until she passed by. He fell into step beside her.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," he said.

"Surprised you're not with Baltar."

"I'm not doing this because I like him or think he's trustworthy," Lee said. "And I just had this fight with Kara."

"Maybe you'll listen to her," Dee said.

"About this?" Lee shook his head. "Not a chance." He'd been hoping Sam, at least, would be on his side. But the way Sam had been talking, Lee wasn't sure Sam even knew about the fight.

"Gods, you're both so stubborn."

They jogged in silence for a while. Dee was short enough that he couldn't match steps with her like he could with Kara or Sam, and it left him feeling oddly off-balance.

"Sam was acting weird," he said.

"Weird, how?" Dee asked.

"I don't know," Lee said. "Really out of it. Could be nothing."

"I'll keep an eye on him."

***

Sam got back from his first space combat and climbed carefully out of his ship, hoping nobody paid any attention to him, feeling like every eye was on him. But that was stupid. If anyone knew, it wouldn't be whispers, it would be marines in full armor. He just had to keep it together, keep acting like himself, and nobody had to know he was a Cylon.

This determination lasted until he reached their shared quarters—he couldn't face the bunkroom right now—and found Dee waiting for him.

"Hey," he said, warily. She was by far the most perceptive person in their sedoretu.

"Hey," she said. "What happened out there?"

"What do you mean?" Sam asked.

"I do pay slightly more attention to you three than to the other pilots I'm coordinating," Dee said. "You froze. Do you want to talk about it?"

No. No he did not. But … "Can you review the gun camera footage?"

"It's not part of my job, but I could get ahold of it," Dee said. "Why?"

Sam shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know if—I know what I think happened." The Cylon had left because it knew Sam was a Cylon, too. "But I don't know if it was real, or not. I'd like to see what the camera footage says."

"And you're asking me, and not Lee or Kara, who have much better reasons for getting it and more experience interpreting it, because …?"

"Because you're the one who asked," Sam said. "And you're the one who won't freak out if … if what I think happened actually did." Kara would kill him, possibly literally. Lee … Lee could be so self-righteous, and stuck up his own ass; he'd report Sam, first thing, no matter that Sam was loyal to the Colonies. Dee would think, and ask the questions to make sure she understood, and then do whatever she was going to do.

Dee studied him, and Sam had no idea what she saw in him. "Okay," she said, and left.

Sam sat on the bed, under Kara's mandala, and waited.

***

Dee watched the camera footage at least fifteen times, to make sure she was seeing it right.

Then she went back to their quarters, praying Sam was still there. And that Kara and Lee weren't.

The gods were smiling, for once. Sam was there, alone, under Kara's beautiful painting, staring at nothing.

Dee locked the hatch behind her and sat on the bed in front of him, staring him in the eye. "What was the Cylon signal? What was it trying to tell you?"

"I don't know," Sam said miserably. He looked down and to the side, biting his lip. "But. But I think it was a response."

"To what?"

"To me signaling it," Sam said.

"You signaled it?" Dee hissed. "What did you tell it? Why? How? You weren't using the radio!" She would have heard that.

"I don't know," Sam said. "But. I think I'm a Cylon." He huddled down into himself.

"You think you're a what?" Dee said. She shook her head. He couldn't be a Cylon; he'd been the head of the fracking resistance on New Caprica. If he was a Cylon, things would have happened much differently there. The Cylons wouldn't care so much about an operative's deep cover that they were willing to let humanity escape to protect it. "We need to go see Doc Cottle. Have him check you out. You haven't been sleeping enough, I know that."

"I'm not crazy," Sam said. "When the power went out, we were all hearing music nobody else could hear, and it led us together, and we just … we knew. And then the Cylons showed up, and we went to battle stations, and the Raider lined up in front of me and I felt myself do something. And the Raider … signaled back. And the Cylons left."

"Who's 'we'?"

Sam looked up at her, opened his mouth, and then looked down. "I can't tell you. We're not threats to humas. We are loyal to the Colonies, not to the Cylons. We've all made our choices."

Dee sat back, thinking furiously. He was right about the timing. The Cylon fleet had turned away within seconds of that signal pulse. "Admiral Adama has to be told," she said. She raised her hand to stop Sam protesting. "If you are loyal, he won't hold being a Cylon against you. He made Sharon Agathon an officer, and you've proved yourself in the same way. He's probably not going to throw you in the brig. But he has to know. It makes a difference, you know it does."

Sam swallowed and nodded.

"Let's go see him now," Dee said. She took him by the arm and led him out of the room.

Lee and Kara were out in the corridor. "Hey, Sam, you okay?" Kara asked.

"He has something he needs to tell the Admiral," Dee said. "I was just taking him there."

"Did you hear about the buoy?" Lee asked, falling in next to her.

"What buoy?" Dee asked.

"The one you sent out to follow that ghost raider two months ago," Kara said. "You know, the one that vanished into that maelstrom?"

"Yeah, what about it?" Dee asked.

"It's back," Lee said. "Popped right into the middle of our formation, right between Kara and me, good as new, just as the Cylons jumped away. Gaeta says it's got all kinds of weird sensor data on it."

Dee stopped. "What? That doesn't make any sense. It's got to be some sort of Cylon trick. Surely at least one sensor buoy survived the fall of the colonies, for them to use as a distraction here."

"That was my first thought," Kara said. "Except the serial numbers match, and it's got some of the code modifications you guys have made to those things to make them less obvious to the Cylons."

Dee looked at Sam, and shook her head. "Why is everything so frakking weird right now?"

Sam shrugged helplessly. "I wish I knew."

"Say, why does Sam need to see Dad?" Lee asked.

"Not in public," Dee said. "Tell you later."

Five.
Six of One/Faith.

"Well, congratulations, Mister Quorum Delegate," Kara said, bravado covering for awkwardness, as if he couldn't read his own wife.

"Congratulations on your ship, Captain," Lee responded. "Take care of Dee." Unlike Kara, she still wasn't speaking to him. Kara had thrown the big fit, but her anger always cooled. Dee, level-headed and sensible Dee, didn't work that way. Neither of them could argue the other around to their way of thinking, and Dee had apparently gotten tired of having the same fight over and over again, and just given up. Lee had no idea how—if—it could be fixed. And he didn't know what would happen if it couldn't. It wasn't like a monogamous marriage, which he knew the most about. How do you divorce one relationship in a quadrangle, when the others were still strong?

"I will," Kara said. "If you'll take care of Sam."

"I'll do my best," Lee said. Galactica couldn't really spare both Dee and Gaeta at the same time, but … they couldn't spare Kara, either, and there were no good choices. Gaeta and Dee were the ones who could best interpret the probe's data; Kara was the one with the visions. Between the three of them, well, if anyone could figure it out, they could.

If Kara and Dee didn't kill each other first. They got along a lot better now than they used to, but they'd never been alone without Lee and Sam there to act as buffer. And Sam couldn't go, because his father didn't want two Cylons on the trip, and he trusted Athena more.

Not that Lee could be much of a buffer right now.

Hell, out of the four of them, maybe Dee and Kara's relationship was the strongest right now, and wasn't that a kick in the head?

***

The table was covered in sensor readouts and pages of math, with star charts and other documents tacked up on the walls. Dee and Gaeta looked like they might be swallowed up by paper, surrounded as they were by drifts of it.

Kara arranged herself in the hatch, lounging artfully, stripped down to her tanks. "Hey," she said.

"Hey, yourself," Dee said without looking up from what she was writing.

Gaeta did, though, and smirked at her. Kara heroically resisted the urge to make a rude gesture at him.

"Dee, I think your wife is trying to make a booty call," Gaeta said, sitting back to watch the show.

"Kara, we're in the middle of something," Dee said, finally looking up.

"Not really, we're pretty much going in circles right now," Gaeta said. He raised an eyebrow at Kara. "Unless you've had another vision?"

"Sorry," Kara said insincerely. She swaggered in—Dee found that pretentious, but also hot (even though she didn't like to admit it)—and ran a hand over Dee's shoulders. She started gently kneading the muscles, which were probably sore from all the time hunched over the table working. "The sensor data will still be there tomorrow," she said. "Maybe a little down time will shake something loose."

Dee leaned into the massage. "Yeah. Okay."

Kara led her off to the captain's cabin, and proceeded to screw both their brains out with every trick she knew. It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't solve the underlying dread that she was frakking everything up and it was all going to go to hell. Or that she was going to start having visions in the middle of the deck where everyone could see her spaced out. (Or that she wouldn't have any more visions, and this whole mission would be for nothing, and she was just a headcase wasting precious time and fuel.)

"What's eating you, Kara?" Dee asked.

"You know, Lee asked me to take care of you, not the other way around."

Dee raised herself up on one elbow and stared at Kara. "Lee. Asked you. To take care of me."

"I know, right?" Kara said. "You're the one who's always got it together. I'm the screw-up."

"I'm not surprised, though," Dee said thoughtfully. "That he thinks I need someone to take care of me. Lee always thinks the world revolves around him. And that if he's not there to tell us what's right, we'll all turn into, I don't know, cannibals or something. Because obviously his pig-headed self-righteousness is the only thing to light our way to Truth and Justice. It's his least attractive feature."

Kara snorted. "You can say that again." She sobered up. "You know he didn't mean to insult your self-sufficiency or whatever. He loves you. He wants you to be safe and happy and not alone."

"Yeah." Dee flopped back down on the bed. "It would be so much easier if he were always an asshole. If he didn't care."

"Yeah." Then you could write him off. But he cared so gods-damned much. And his sincere belief that there was good in her and that she wasn't a waste of space was one of the few constants in Kara's life. She didn't know how she'd have survived without him.

"Your least attractive feature—well, one of many," Dee said, "—is that you use very transparent ploys to try to avoid talking things out. And then make everything unnecessarily complicated because you can't just say what you need."

"And your least attractive feature is that you never let anything go," Kara muttered.

"Still not hearing what's eating you," Dee said.

"It's nothing you could help with."

"Could Lee help with it?"

Kara huffed a laugh. "Yeah."

Dee hummed. "I can't offer you his self-righteousness, or his pilot skills. But most other things, I can probably do okay."

Kara weighed her options, but Dee had never made fun of her, when she had something serious to say, never used her fears against her or threw her secrets in her face. "I feel like a failure," she said at last. "I can't give you the visions you need. I can't get the crew working together. Nothing is working."

"Visions aren't my department, either," Dee said. "Command, though. Remember I was Lee's XO on Pegasus? I did all right."

"Oh, right," Kara said. She'd forgotten.

"You forgot, didn't you?" Dee said.

"Hey, I was on New Caprica for most of that," Kara said. And she hadn't paid much attention to Dee at the time. But she had enough tact (barely) not to say it.

"Uh-huh," Dee said. "If I thought you were really frakking up, I'd say something. Nothing's too bad, yet." She yawned. "I can give you some pointers in the morning. And don't worry. If you make a decision that's too boneheaded, I won't hesitate to tell you."

"I bet you'll be looking forward to it," Kara said, feeling a little better.

"You know it," Dee said.

***

"Kara, don't be an idiot," Dee said, rolling her eyes. "We have to check out the Cylons, yes, but isn't that what Raptors are for? Sending into dangerous scouting missions so we don't have to risk the big ships?"

Sharon snorted. The tension on the deck eased.

"Oh," Kara said. "Right. That would make sense."

"You don't have to go charging in guts first all the time," Dee pointed out. "In fact, when you're not in a Viper cockpit that's pretty much always the wrong move."

"So why didn't the Admiral pick you for command," Kara demanded.

Dee shrugged. "Beats me. I do have a lot more relevant command experience."

"Well, whatever we do, we have to do it quickly," Helo pointed out. "If we're not back with the Fleet in 15 hours, we'll be left behind."

"Right, okay," Kara said. "Here's what we're going to do."

Six.
Sometimes A Great Notion.

Lee and Dee were sitting in Joe's, laughing and telling stories and drinking. It was fragile, and a bit superficial, and Lee was afraid of saying anything that might break the fragile peace between them. He'd missed Dee so much, and the idea that a reconciliation between them might have been birthed out of the death of all their hopes felt like grace, like the universe giving them back something after all it had taken.

Dee was drinking heavily, more than usual, but Lee just matched her. He was used to drinking with Kara and Sam, he could keep up. And today of all days she deserved to cut loose a little.

Dee looked past Lee's shoulder, and her face fell. "What now."

Lee turned. It was Kara and Sam. He'd thought Dee was getting along fine with them—she and Kara had been close since they got back from the Demetrius, and Dee and Sam had always been good friends.

Sam wasn't looking so hot. He was staring at nothing, following Kara with uncertain steps. He looked like he might be in shock.

Lee grabbed a chair from the empty table next to them. "Sit down, Sam."

Sam fell into the chair, and Kara grabbed another and sat down.

Lee poured some liquor into his cup and passed it to Sam. "You look like you need it."

"Thanks," Sam said mechanically. He took a swig and made a face. "God, that's even worse than usual."

One god, not gods, Lee noted. Things like that slipped out sometimes, since he'd realized he was a Cylon.

"You know, this is the second home I've seen nuked into oblivion?" Sam said. "The first, I mean; Caprica was the second."

"Can we not?" Dee said. "Can we just … not? It was such a nice evening! All this shit, and there was one nice thing. And now it's all ruined. Just like everything else."

"Hey," Lee said. He scooted over and put his arm around her. "I'm sorry, you're right."

Around them, people studiously ignored the scene. They'd all been there, many times. Breaking down because you just couldn't keep on. The polite thing to do, if you saw someone falling apart, was to look the other way and pretend it wasn't happening.

"Sorry," Sam said. "I don't know why it's hitting me so hard now—it was all such a long time ago."

Kara took Dee's drink and tossed it back. "Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're taking the bottle with us back to our quarters—"

"It won't go far between the four of us," Lee pointed out.

"The bar is right over there, Lee," Kara said, jerking her thumb at it. "We take home however many bottles we want, and we curl up in bed together, and we list off all the happy things we can remember. The good stories. And then we don't think about anything bad or try to make any plans or speculate about the future or anything."

In other words, about what he and Dee had been doing already, except in private, and with all four of them.

"Sounds good," Sam said.

"Okay," Dee said.

***

It took a while before they found a position where nobody's arm was going numb and nobody's feet were in anybody's face, and being tipsy probably didn't help, but they figured it out in the end. Lee didn't know how long they talked, but eventually they started drifting off to sleep.

Lee roused when Dee started trying to extract herself. "Hey, where are you going?" he asked.

"My rack," Dee said. "It's late, and there's not enough room for all of us to sleep."

"Stay," Lee said. "There's room."

Dee hesitated. "I've got something I wanted to do."

"At this hour?" Lee said.

"I should—"

"Hey," Sam said. "Lee's right, you should stay."

"Will you all stop talking?" Kara grumbled. "Some of us are trying to sleep. And I said no thinking and no plans."

"That explains so much about you," Lee said.

"If it's a good idea, you can still do it tomorrow." Kara paused. "If it's a bad idea, you can still do it tomorrow. I'll help."

"It's not—" Dee said.

"That important?" Kara said. "I agree."

"Tomorrow," Sam said. "Stay tonight."

Dee hesitated. "Okay," she said, and snuggled back down.

"Thanks, Dee," Lee said, and let himself drift off.

One Thing that Didn't.
Daybreak.

Lee stared out the window at the beautiful planet below. It was perfect. As beautiful as Caprica had been. And the only surviving Cylons were not their enemies. They could settle, and be safe. Dee was on-shift in CIC, and he wished she could be here to see it. She'd see it soon enough, but he could stand here for hours watching. Sam was flying survey; they'd sent out every ship they had left to explore.

It must look even more glorious from a Viper's cockpit.

He wiped tears from his eyes.

"Do you frakking believe it?" Kara said next to him.

"No," Lee said. "There's got to be a catch."

"Yeah," Kara said. "I don't believe in paradise." She laughed. "But gods-damn if that doesn't look like it from here."