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Author's Notes: In this long hiatus from the show I decided to go back and watch the first season. How powerful it is!! This has spoilers for the mini-series and "33". STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS EPISODE This takes place during the episode "33" when Lee is about to shoot down the Olympic Carrier. It's definitely a one-shot. I'm sorry I haven't updated my other BSG story but I will very soon.
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He isn't sure when he stopped believing in the Gods, or a God for that matter, but he's thankful for it now. It's hard to believe in any higher power that would allow them to go through this.
They've been on the run for days now – every 33 minutes to be exact. Frakking Cylons!
He was tired. They were all tired. But she was tired…she being Kara of course. SHE was never tired. Their interaction earlier, where she had basically ordered him to make her take the Stims to fly, was uncharacteristic to say the least. Kara ordered him around a lot, even when she shouldn't, but this had been different.
It was like she had known, known that they had no choice. How did she always know?
Honestly, he wasn't sure he could do it. Take out a civilian ship? It was insanity. It made them as bad as the Cylons didn't it?
But there were so few of them left…probably less than they even knew since some of them were probably Cylons anyway. Cylons that looked like them…it was almost inconceivable. There were limits to what the human soul could endure and he was pretty sure that they were pushing that limit.
He watched the Olympic Carrier head steadfastly towards Galactica. He listened to Lt. Dualla state that they had nukes on board. He looked at the empty windows that should have had desperate faces staring back at him. He found nothing.
It was what he had found too many CAP's lately. Absolutely nothing. It used to be what he had loved about being in the sky...the sheer nothingness…
He heard the order come through.
Destroy the Olympic Carrier.
How could he do it? How could he not? He didn't know.
He didn't have to hear Starbuck's opinion of the situation. He knew exactly what she would think. She'd lost people on New Caprica. They all had. There wasn't a soul left alive that didn't want to lose anyone else. Only she would understand what it took for him to follow these orders.
Gods! They'd even fired across their bow…no response. He felt places in him harden that he hadn't even known existed before.
It was the DRADIS contact that had done it. The frakking Cylons as always!!
When would they be free of them? Would they ever?
He could picture his father on the other line with the souls on the Olympic Carrier weighing on his own. For a moment he wondered how they were flesh and blood at all.
"Starbuck form up with me…one pass on the stern…"
"No frakking way Lee."
Lee…not Apollo…it was very telling.
Her words flowed over him like a clear blue stream. Life was a river…who was he to impede the ones left living?
But it was he and Starbuck out here and something in him told him that they could do anything together…that they would do anything together…that maybe they were destined to do all of this together. He knew he couldn't do it alone. And now matter how much he hated to bring her down this far with him, it couldn't be helped.
"Mark."
In the time it took him to blink, his finger had somehow pressed the red button in front of him. Hers did the same. His eyes opened to the blinding explosion, expressionless.
It would seem that he was his father's son after all. Silently he wondered, what did that make her?
Later…
"I pulled the trigger." He told his father…and it was true.
His father may have made the call but he was the instrument and he would never forget it.
He wrote plans on the white board, thinking how nice it would be to be able to erase all the mistakes they had made that easily. How nice it would be to leave no mark of what you did before. And he wondered where the Gods were and why he wanted them here so badly now.
Meanwhile on Colonial One47,972. Scratch that.
A baby boy.
47,973.
Numbers to live by, President Roslin thought, numbers to live by.