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After the Fall

Author's note: I just finished Battlestar and couldn't stop thinking about that ending. This is my attempt to do the show justice, in all its wonderfully messy beauty. I hope you enjoy. Ahead are massive spoilers for "Daybreak", the finale of the entire show. So please don't read on unless you've got to the very end!

Lee Adama built two monuments on the new Earth. The first was rough and raw like Kara, made of rocks he found at the top of a steep and windswept hill, and the second was soft and pliable like Dee and rounded with flowers and leaves.

Then he made a promise to himself that he was done with all that romance crap for a good long while.

Instead, he learned how to hunt and feed himself. He spent hours down by the river fishing and throwing pebbles. He walked for tens of miles in all directions, getting a feel of the land under his feet, running his hands through the grass, learning the shapes and the calls of all the different creatures. He had nowhere to be and nobody to return to. He did go back though, to the makeshift village that was springing up by the water's edge, every few weeks or so. Just to check up on the progress of the burgeoning community and assure everyone that he was fine. Ellen and Tigh were there, playing the part of de facto village elders, and Helo and Athena and Hera too.

They all seemed to be well. Better than well. Safe. Happy. At peace. It was more than he could ever have imagined.

For at least the first few months he was waiting for something dreadful to happen, like it had on New Caprica. But time went on and on and the seasons changed and the sun shifted in the sky and still nothing dreadful happened. So he kept walking. Kept exploring. He climbed mountains and searched caves and stalked savannahs. There was more to this world than he could comprehend, than he could record in the leather notebook he kept in his pocket and scribbled furiously in every night. Sometimes he wrote to Kara. Sometimes to his brother, sometimes to his father. Sometimes to the person who might one day pick up the notebook and read it, once he had died and his bones had leached into the earth.

He knew what he was searching for, though he never wrote it down. It took him many long days and nights. Eventually, one cold, bright morning, after a weeks-long journey that left his legs numb and his feet sore, he stumbled over the ridge of the land and blinked into the rising light of the sun and saw it there in front of him. A small wooden cabin beside a mound of rocks. His heart swelled.

The sunlight falling into the valley made it look like the beginning of time, like an eternal dawn that could never be tainted by its passing. The mist was pink and gold and the trees were blue. He could not deny it. It was perfect.

He did not enter the cabin, did not even go near. It was enough to know it was there and that he was safe. He returned to the village as the sun filled the crest of the sky, to his people, fulfilled, at ease, finally understanding the peace that the rest of them had been feeling for months.

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Bill Adama followed the same ritual each and every day. He got up and made himself coffee, which was really tea, which was really whatever approximation he could find growing in the scrub at the bottom of the valley. But he liked to think of it as coffee because he had always drunk coffee.

Then he went outside and said hello to Laura.

Then he did a little gardening before the sun had risen fully and it grew too hot for that sort of thing. Tending, weeding, sewing and watering. He only had a small plot but it was enough for him. He was handy enough with snares and bait that he could live mainly off the animals that stumbled into his traps in the woodland below.

Of course, he didn't really say hello to Laura. She wasn't really there. But living by yourself could do strange things to the mind, and he liked to occupy himself by talking to her. She still encouraged him gently at times and stopped him from being rash at others. He would read aloud to her too, chapters of the few books he had kept, as he had done when she was sick. He only had three books. Luckily they were his favourites and he reckoned he could go years before getting bored of them.

Bill had almost forgotten what true grief was before Laura had died. Even with the death of Zak, and of so many good soldiers, and his loss of Carolanne and the entire frakking human race, grief was something that became rounded and smooth with time. It was still there, heavy and firm, but the edges got softer. Laura tore all those wounds back open again.

It was probably the deep injustice of it all. That she should die just as they finally made it to Earth, the true Earth, was all he could take. He wept for days - not constantly, but in fits and starts. He'd be whistling a song one moment then bawling the next. He'd wake up in the middle of the night with tears on his cheeks. Laura had started it, but really they were tears for four years of guilt and sorrow, for hatred, for fear, for the things they could never get back, for everything they had been through, for all the pain and horror that he knew of and all that he didn't. It was a deep ache that he knew he would carry with him forever, just like he carried Laura. But as weeks went by he found that the edges were indeed softening.

Soon he could think of her and smile rather than frowning. He could remember her in a cotton dress, or how the sternness left her face when she saw him, and his chest would expand rather than contract. One day he even took a trip to look at the deer they had watched together just before she passed, and he felt good. He considered trying to find the others from Galactica and see how they were doing. You're right, Laura, he thought. Not yet. I've got something I need to finish first.

Bill had convinced himself that he needed to write a book. There were so many events and memories he did not want to forget, that he couldn't permit to fade into the dull obscurity of time. People he couldn't allow to be forgotten. So he forced himself to sit at his crude wooden desk in the evenings, clutching his last pen and his last reams of paper. He would write for long hours, scratching away to get the past down before it slipped away from him, until the fire burned to ash and cinders and he'd curse in the dark. It wasn't what he'd call enjoyable work. He had never been a natural at getting his words out on paper. But it felt important, and right, and mostly it was something that he imagined Laura would be proud of.

If he had his way, nobody would ever forget the cocky young pilot who broke all the rules and became like a daughter to him. Or the XO who never stopped serving even when he discovered he had been one of the enemy all along. Or the president who led them here to Earth, in sickness and in health, and who gave all of herself to ensure the survival of the human race.

He stopped writing. There were tears on his face again. But the words had dried up. He was done. There was nothing left to record, nothing else he could dredge up out of his weary mind. He leaned back in his chair, allowing himself a moment of pure relief. Now all he needed was a title.

Bill picked up his pen one last time and squinted at the paper. "After the Fall," he wrote.

Smiling, he went to bed. This night he rested easy, with the stars shining high above the vast and glorious plains of Earth, the future of humanity slumbering below, and the memory of Laura safe in his heart. It was over.