After the Fall, Jean helped Anders fight the guerilla war, because it was all she had left. She was happy to see Starbuck return, even happier to go with her, back to the Fleet, and land on New Caprica. All that running, all the 33, going round and round -- she missed all that. Jean Barolay went from Hell straight to a dirty, stinking Heaven, and she thought that she'd know peace. A year later, she was a fighter again. Dreams died. They pulled her out of Hell and put her in a brief Heaven, an undiscovered country that became more poisonous than Hell. They told her they loved her; they told her it was for her own good.

But they couldn't change what they made her; couldn't ask her to bend herself back around the parts they'd already burnt off. They made her a warrior, and pushed her back into war. She put guns in the Temple and didn't think twice. And in the Second Exodus, she joined the Circle, too angry to forgive and too tired to forget.

Kara hears the sound, again. Finally, she hears it. Sam stares, but Leoben comforts him, loudly enough that everyone can hear: "The unstruck music vibrates in all of us. Few can hear it. Kara's one of the few."

Jean Barolay sits on a Raptor in the middle of dead dragon space, with a turncoat and a saint and an angel and an oracle, looking to build bridges with their hands. But her hands are burnt, and she's the only human left aboard.

Athena, weirded out by Leoben's usual crap, asks Sam for a course, and he begins plotting out at the ECO seat. "Give me the ship," Kara asks her suddenly, and with a look and a shrug, Athena passes her flight control. "...You have any idea where you're going?" No. Yes. The singularity:

Kara sees it, the Basestar, floating sadly against the backdrop of a triple-ringed gas giant, shooting across the canvas like a comet. She laughs, or cries. "The comet! The... It's the ship!" Leoben smiles, proud and calm and waiting for the music, and she turns to him, excited. "This is what I was meant to see!" He nods, and she laughs so joyfully.

That's when the first piece of wreckage hits. In mutiny we turn our guns upon ourselves. Everyone that comes after war makes their ginger way through what's left behind. Like Uwano and Onoda, like the unlucky victims of the Guardians, like you and me and the children of the Exodus. Have you ever seen Babylon 5? This is what it comes down to: not war, but everything after. The echoes and the ripples and the unspent mine fields of war.