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His fingers are restless on the shot glass, rocking it back and forth, carefully slinging the liquid inside towards opposite rims, riding the building momentum of the liquid, its viscosity bulging as he edges it closer to the tipping point. The motion of his wrist slows and then stills as he hears—feels—her enter the room. She weaves towards him, holding one finger up to the bartender, pivoting toward and then past him until her posture is his reversed, her lowest ribs supporting her weight against the bar. The shot lands behind her, and she reaches to take it, the fulcrum of her arm coming to rest bare inches from his hand as she contemplates her liquid courage.

“I've been at it longer than you, Starbuck. If you need to say something, say it.”

Her eyes flick toward him, but her head stays facing forward, chin tilting up incrementally. “I need to know who I'm fighting here, Lee.”

His neck tenses, he pivots his head toward her frame, wondering if he sees or imagines a slight tremor in her hand, wondering if it's by design or by coincidence that the arm he sees is bare, unmarked by thick black lines and arcs. He thinks of her in the times when half of her body didn't belong to another man, and with an inward ache that is somehow so familiar, realizes that there may never have been such a time. He's looked away, but feels her eyes still locked on the sweep of hair around his ear. “Your honor?” She intones, impatient with her nerves more than him. “Me? Dee? Sam? Your father? Your duty? Our past? Fear?” The unspoken opponent is Zak, but maybe they've covered that one in the years they orbited each other. Zak had become a martyred memory prayed to for forgiveness long before hope and fear and chances brought them too close to each other to bear.

He looks at her again and sees the tight line of her jaw that has been building since Colonial Day, since the tyllium mission, since he saw her through bars for the first time in more than two years. He thinks, she's gotten worse at this, wonders if it's the war or the stakes that betray her triad face. He feels and revels in the thrill of pleasure at the thought that it could be because she knows they're both playing for keeps this time.

“You already know how to win a bar fight, Kara.” His words slur together, and somehow he's not even a little bit ashamed. “Go for the closest target then keep on swinging.”

“I don't…” She pauses, looking at her glass, then brings it to her lips, tips the shot down her throat, and turns to face him, her arm resting on the bar, shot glass still in hand. “I don't know what you want me to say, Lee. I frakked up. We both know it. I frakked up when I frakked you on New Caprica, and I frakked up by leaving. Gods, I even frakked up that night I didn't frak you in my rack. I'm sick of frakking up, Lee, and I'm sick of having nothing to show for it.” She pauses, reaches for his hand on his glass, stills the rocking motion he's resumed without even noticing. She holds her hand there, and it may be the first time her hand is touching his with a motive resembling tenderness. “We've given each other a lot of easy outs in this thing between us, and we both keep taking them. That's over. Tell me who I'm up against, and I'll fight to the end.”

He looks at her, straight into her eyes for the first time since she walked in. Her jaw is tight, her left hand clenched in a fist at her side, and he knows without a doubt that she has never done anything harder than saying those words. As it always does, her vulnerability clatters like bullets inside his chest. He wants to smile, to reassure, to forgive, and realizes that's what this is about. He can feel the breaking of her heart inside of him as he removes his hand from under hers, he looks away from her as he sucks down half of his shot, and expects as he looks back that she will be gone, despite her heavy words. By turns, in his life she has been three women: a boastful, taunting opponent on the field of battle; an elegant and stoic tactician; and a mask that has hidden the living, breathing wound he sees now. This is a Kara he has glimpsed only in the barest moments, a Kara who knows that the only enemy she's ever been at risk of losing to is herself.

He shifts his weight off his barstool, pivots towards a space he expects will now be only a void for another to fill - perhaps Dee, again, as before.

She is still there, teeth clenched tight enough to shatter, a war waging behind her eyes. His hand seeks hers, finds her fingernails beginning to gouge the countertop, and the moment he takes hold, the small muscles that have been holding her so tightly in check relax, trembling at the release of effort.

“You win,” he says. It's unlike her usual whooping victory: she didn't know it yet, she has no daredevil stunt to point at as the method of her triumph. She has never won in quite this way before. He reaches his right hand toward her face, brushes her hair with his fingertips and smooths his thumbprint along her still firm jawline. Her body doesn't relax—she's pent up for a battle and wants to fight. He meets every fight as she's doing now, with the effort of releasing a part of himself that he keeps tightly laced outside of the cockpit. The laced up parts of him are the opposite of hers and he feels them slam into each other with a vicious momentum.

He wonders how far that momentum will carry them.