FIC: Three's a Crowd - L/K/Karl, PG, AU, no warnings

[lanalucy]

It had all started when Kara went missing. Not the first time, when she crashed on the moon, no. The second time, when she disappeared for months.

Apollo and Helo took to meeting every few days to drink and talk about Kara and sometimes, to cry. Everybody knew the realities of war - every day was a day when someone you loved might not come back - but neither one of them really expected that someone to ever be Kara Thrace. Anyway, they took comfort in each other, and when that comfort increasingly turned physical, Lee and Karl didn’t talk about it, but never refused each other, either.

Kara showed back up, Viper more than battered enough to aggravate Chief and her computer so frakked Gaeta never figured out how she’d still been flying. The mystery of her quarter tank of fuel was also never explained.

Helo was on deck and still somehow Apollo beat him to Kara when they landed their Vipers, but not by much. He hugged them both, with Kara squeezing back just as tightly, all caught up in the miracle the two men had always known Kara Thrace to be.

There were hours of debriefings and reports to write and an airlock to barely avoid - that Laura Roslin had gotten cranky while she was gone! When Kara showed up exhausted at Lee’s hatch, and Karl answered shirtless, she never even blinked an eye, just took the “Oh, gods, welcome back!” kisses in stride. It wasn’t until months later that it occurred to her to wonder when that had happened, and by then, she was just happy they’d had each other while she was gone, and grateful that this trio of broken people had become a family.