Disclaimer/Author's Notes: I didn't invent any of the characters of Battlestar Galactica. This was originally written for the Lee Adama Ficathon at the LJ comm Lee Adama Daily. My thanks to thegreenkitty for her lovely prompt, and special gratitude to sci-fi-shipper for her patience as I struggled with a story that got a bit longer and angstier than I had originally planned. The title and opening quotation are taken from the poet Emily Dickinson. The later quotation about wisdom is taken from Aeschylus. Thanks for reading!
A solitude of space
There is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Lee spent his first months on the ocean. He learned its currents and colors, let himself sink into its airless weight when the sun and the sky grated on him. He skirted close to the shore for the sake of fresh water, but avoided human contact, native or colonial. The emergency beacon he'd promised to carry had been swept off his raft in the first week. He never worried with the silent radio in his pack.
He liked this world for its emptiness. There were no associations to catch him unawares; for months nothing poignant was pulled out of him. Blank immersion in the hardships of survival might have been a form of shock or of transcendence. Either way, it kept him moving.
But travel was a temporary escape. He couldn't face his grief this way; it had no traction here. Life on Earth consumed his energy, swallowed his thoughts. It left him adrift in a constant, directionless dream.
Death was not a dream; it was not an undiscovered country. It wasn't even a hand on glass and the fading sound of engines, or a half-finished sentence and a breeze blowing through tall grass. Those moments would always feel too surreal to be final. On Earth, he could say no goodbyes.
For that, he needed a place he knew, where absence cut sharp and war had bled into the walls.
He tuned his transmitter to the standard CIC channel – Dee flashed through his mind, the numbers on the dial all her own – and he poked a bit at the batteries. He'd let them sit dormant too long; their charge had probably drained too steeply for long-range communication. And, for all he knew, there was no one left aboard to answer even if his signal did get through. The ship had been a broken husk even before the last jump; it might have been completely scrapped by now. It bothered him, slightly, that he'd left that decision to others.
"Galactica/Apollo, Galactica/Apollo, please respond."
Instead of tangling the headset through his hair, he held the mike up to his lips as he set up camp. He figured he'd give it a day or two, trying at regular intervals, before giving up. His old callsign sounded strange after so much time.
A pretty pair of ghosts they made, Galactica and Apollo.
After only fifteen minutes, the static of the open line shifted pitch as someone picked up at the other end.
"Lee? Lee, is that you? This is Galactica actual, Tyrol here. Please respond."
"Chief?" Lee was surprised, but after a moment he realized he shouldn't be. He couldn't actually imagine Tyrol's face without a backdrop of grey metal.
"Lee, you all right? Do you need assistance?"
"No, no," Lee said quickly. "No assistance, I'm fine." He paused, then backtracked. "Or, well…actually, yes, a little assistance, but nothing…nothing's wrong."
There was a pause.
"Good, okay," the radio crackled. Then, politely, "What can I do for you, sir?"
Lee chuckled, reaching up to tug at his beard. "Well, you can drop the 'sir,' and then you can send down a Raptor for me, if you've got anyone up there who can fly one."
"I'm qualified on Raptors for basics, I could get one down to you. How long would you need it for? Or were you wanting to keep it?"
"Keep it?" What a bizarre idea. They couldn't seriously be handing out ships, first come first serve. Who the hell was in charge up there? "Of course not," he said sharply. "I'm just looking for a lift to Galactica, that's all."
A rush of air hissed over the line, and then nothing.
"Chief?" Lee held the headset closer.
Nothing.
"Galactica? Please respond?"
The line went dead.
Lee kept calling for the next hour before giving up. It could simply be a radio malfunction, but instinctively he knew it wasn't. Tyrol had cut him off, and no one else was picking up.
Which was a pretty good indication that Tyrol was in charge up there. He'd always acted like the ship belonged to him, but now it most likely did. Apparently he'd decided that humans weren't welcome. Or maybe just Lee. Both thoughts turned Lee's stomach.
He frakking hated Cylons. Every time he started to forget how much, something like this happened to remind him. The big picture was too much to hold in his head day in and day out, but these stinging minor wounds kept the battle lines drawn long after the war was over. He hadn't been so mad in a long time.
But there was really nothing he could do, except tack toward the nearest inhabited harbor tomorrow and see if the Colonials had any shuttles they'd be willing to loan him. He didn't really know what he was going to do once he got up to Galactica and got denied permission to land, but he'd come up with something.
With nothing more to be done tonight, he ate a light meal and then scoured a make-shift rake through the sandy soil to clear his bed space of the heaviest rocks and pebbles. He was half-asleep under his tarp when he heard the sonic boom of a misaligned atmo break. He started up, burning his wrist on the portable heater he'd left too close again, and hurried out with his flashlight and flare gun. It was full night, lit by a mere sliver of moon, so he used his ears more than his eyes to track the incoming ship.
The pilot had busted his entry angle, but at worst he would have blown a few calibrators; apart from Vipers, which were finicky at the best of times, Colonial ships were pretty hard to crash – they'd been designed for endurance rather than maneuverability, and handled steadily enough to be flown by rooks. Lee waved the white beam of his light overhead, slow and regular, estimating incoming speed and distance automatically from the engine's changing pitch. It was close enough that he didn't waste a flare; he should be visible now from overhead.
Soon enough, the outline of a Raptor solidified against the stars to the east, and in under forty seconds it settled onto the beach in a clunky, but roughly textbook, landing. The hatch popped and Tyrol ducked out, skipping the in-set step to jump down onto uneven ground. He lurched a bit, catching one hand on the wing; the light from the interior panels was strong enough that Lee could cut his flashlight as he approached.
Tyrol straightened and they looked at each other. The Chief was clean-shaven and pale. He'd gained some weight; there was an unhealthy tinge to his face, a puffing redness around the eyes and nose. His hair was curly and tangled, but not unmanageable – nothing compared to Lee's caveman looks. Lee hadn't bothered with a shave since he'd started traveling, and though he'd eaten regularly, he had not eaten well. He knew his time on the water, catching reflected heat and sun, had aged him.
"I wasn't expecting you," Lee said.
Tyrol nodded. "I'm a bit surprised, myself."
"You cut me off, before."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
Tyrol sighed and didn't answer.
Lee could feel himself toeing the edge of a serious loss of temper and turned away, stalking back to camp and stooping to gather his gear. Tyrol followed and started efficiently rolling up tarp as Lee stowed his radio, medical kit, and ammo. He lifted his gun in its holster and strapped it on, then unloaded his raft, transferring the tools worth keeping into the sling of his good blanket. Between the two of them, it took only one trip to load everything Lee owned into one corner of the Raptor cockpit. Lee settled himself in the pilot seat, and Tyrol shut the hatch and then took up ECO position in the back, staring blankly at the navigation screens.
Lee ran a quick systems check, then turned around in his seat.
"Whatever your problem is, I'd rather hear it now than later."
Tyrol leaned back, a little tense, one arm crooked to the side; it was strange to see his posture so unmilitary. "The old girl's in bad shape, you know. I've repaired the most critical systems, but it's cold and dark and empty up there."
Lee raised an eyebrow. "And?"
"And I like it that way. It suits me. I'm not looking to change, so if you want the ship in working order for…I don't know, the government, or something, then you'll have to…"
"That's not what I want," Lee interrupted.
Tyrol stared at him, his face neutral. "No. I figured that, somehow, once I had a chance to think." He tapped a finger against his control board, looking away. "Look, Lee – it's your father's ship; it always will be. That means you have a place there and a right to take it whenever you want. It's just…" He gestured with one hand, a little helpless. "I'm not much for company these days."
Lee blinked, his irritation slipping away, and let out a considering breath. "Neither am I," he offered.
Tyrol shifted again, his shoulders dropping, easing out. "Okay then."
Lee turned back to the instrument panel. "Okay."
He fired up the engines, and they lifted off.
The Galactica was both familiar and strange, pivoting in its orbit. Lee could see long, fractured angles where the ship's spine had cracked during that last jump, and its ribs were coated with the strange, living tissue that bound Cylon baseships together. His skin crawled just a bit to see layers of grey flesh knotting above the fuel vents like scar tissue. The ship was a hybrid now, ungainly and dark against the cirrus swirl of white and blue below.
The port flight pod extended as they approached, and Lee looked down to see his clearance and entry vectors bundled together in a simple text broadcast. "Who's running the numbers for us?" he asked, dropping in line with the stern's slow rotation and mentally calling the ball.
"Oh, it's Sam," Tyrol said, and Lee's hand froze over the stick for a second. He'd completely forgotten about Sam. "He runs most systems now, and keeps things going so I'm free to putter. He doesn't have much interest in the hangar deck, and I don't have much interest in anything else anymore."
"Right," Lee answered faintly, powering into the bay and huffing at the half-forgotten flux of weight in his stomach as the two ships' gravity fields overlapped. Emergency lighting blinked a clear path down the runway, but all the overhead fluorescents were dead. He settled the Raptor lightly on deck, and the minute he took his hands off the controls he was hit by a wave of unease.
It had not been a good idea, coming back to this wreck. Tyrol and Sam and the Galactica itself were all, in their way, broken machines – functional, but little more.
Living alone with them seemed unlikely to improve Lee's state of mind.
The first few weeks were anticlimactic. Lee wasn't sure what he'd expected to feel or find on his return, but mostly what he felt was bored and what he found was an overabundance of graffiti. The civilians in Dogsville had covered walls and storage boxes with pithy – if crude – advice for the military and some really excellent caricatures of his Dad and Roslin doing very lewd things together. He mentioned this to Tyrol, who simply shrugged and advised him never to look at the paneling under Mr. Gaeta's old work station.
The CIC itself was fully heated and powered, one of the few bright spots in the ship, but Lee felt uncomfortable there with Sam perched overhead. Light spilled from his pool, flashing quick patterns through the mixture of cables and organic cords that tied him into the battlestar's circuitry. Tyrol talked to him often, but Lee didn't know what to say.
He settled his few belongings in one of the empty officer's quarters – he chose a room he'd never lived in before – and the first night it was so cold he actually dug up a flight suit to sleep in. But by the next morning he found that full life systems had been restored to the whole of D section, which certainly made his life easier. There were still long stretches of darkened hallways – black holes – throughout the ship, but Lee didn't mind; they were good places to think.
Tyrol divided his time between the hangar floor and the empty bar. He drank too much, but was quiet about it. Lee was tempted to join him at times, but didn't. He did help out with watering the large collection of potted plants Tyrol had arranged on the observation deck; fresh vegetables were a treat, and Lee liked the artificial noon they rolled through every orbit. The sun was almost blinding through the glass.
His father's office was bare – all the books and photographs had been shipped to the Cylon's basestar before Hera's rescue mission had derailed the final decommissioning months ago. Now that he came to think of it, this ship just refused to be decommissioned, didn't it? "You were born to hang," Lee murmured, patting a hand against the nearest hatch, feeling fond and foolish.
The office was still furnished, though, and Lee spent a few hours bugging Tyrol until he caved and agreed to help Lee lug the Admiral's desk into his new quarters. They spent a good twenty minutes figuring out how to angle it through the door – they kept slamming it into inconveniently protruding bulkheads - and then they lay down flat on the floor to catch their breaths. Both agreed that they had just dishonored any and all training in spatial relations they'd ever received; they also agreed that whoever had designed the bizarrely jutting panels by the door should be shot.
Tyrol sat up, rubbing the back of his neck. "So, are you going to get the rest of your Dad's things from the basestar?"
Lee hesitated, looking uncomfortable. "Not sure."
Most people would have assumed he didn't feel ready to pick over the remnants of his father's life, but Tyrol just narrowed his eyes and chuckled.
"What's funny?"
"You are. You're so frakking prejudiced." There was no heat behind the words, but they caught Lee by surprise. He frowned, sitting up straight.
"What?"
"You'd rather go without your family library than ask the Cylons next door to do you a favor and send it over. That's very messed up."
Lee's face tightened. "First off, that's not true, and second, even if it were, it wouldn't make me prejudiced."
"Oh no?"
"No." Now that he looked at it, Lee could see that this fight had been spoiling since they'd first made radio contact. Might as well lay their cards on the table. "Get it straight," he growled. "Prejudice means blaming someone for what they are instead of what they do. I don't hate Cylons because they're machines. I hate them for what they did, and I have every right. So no, I don't want to trade favors; I don't want to call up the neighborhood basestar and chat. You all act like forgiveness is something we owe, but it's not. Living with you is better than fighting forever, but that doesn't make it easy and we don't have to like it."
"Don't go lumping me in with the Cylons who started this war," Galen said, light and sharp. "You get it straight: I travelled millions of miles, I gave up years of my life trying to stop this from happening again, but I was too late, because, surprise, life sucks like that. Everyone's stupid and we make the same mistakes, end of story. I don't give a frak whether you cheat yourself out of the things you want; I don't care if you live in spite." Tyrol leaned forward, has voice dropping. "I'm not asking you to get over hating Cylons; I hate most of them myself. I'm just telling you to be self-aware about it. 'Cause if you try pinning anything on me, or Sam, or the Tighs, then you can shove it up your ass. Sir."
With that, Tyrol got up, brushed off his pant leg, and left.
Overall, it had been good to clear the air.
Neither of them were particularly worked up about it afterward, and it wasn't awkward brushing past each other in the course of daily business. They didn't say much, but that was normal. Their tomatoes were ripening nicely; Lee kept them watered, and Tyrol pruned.
After a few days, Lee poked his head into the hangar deck and made his way over to take a closer look at the skeletal metal frame Tyrol was blowtorching.
"Another Blackbird?" Lee hazarded, recognizing the abnormal design.
Tyrol grunted a vague assent, wrapped up in his welding.
"Anything I can help with, this time?"
Tyrol shoved up his facemask and eyed Lee in mild surprise, which turned quickly to skepticism. "You pick up anything from your wife about the technical infrastructure of comm lines?"
"Not a thing. But I can read up on them, if Sam will give me the specs, and I can work on propulsion in the meantime."
"Sounds good to me."
Lee sorted through the spare parts Tyrol had already cannibalized, and then slipped under the Blackbird's hollow stern with a can of oil on hand. He started cleaning and assembling the fuel pumps that would eventually feed into the engines. It was the kind of work he enjoyed; so much better than sitting behind a desk.
"You make it a point to call me 'sir' when you're being nasty," Lee mentioned as he fussed with a rusted piston. "What's up with that?"
Tyrol huffed, amused. "Force of habit, sir."
"So, what, you were talking trash behind my back the whole time we were in service?"
"Nah, just half the time." Back behind his facemask, Galen grinned and relented. "Okay, that's not true. You always were a good CAG. But you did make a hell of a bad first impression. Be honest, now, have you ever got off on the right foot with anyone?"
"I'm not that bad."
"You are. Two minutes into knowing you, I wanted to mop the floor with your face. You're lucky the worlds ended before I got a chance to prank your Viper – you'd be surprised what a few dead rats under the canopy start to do in zero G."
"I should've known better than to mess with a deck chief, no matter how pissed I was at my Dad. Stupid." Lee shook his head with a hint of nostalgia. "Pranking Vipers. Can you imagine?"
"It's been a long time," Tyrol agreed.
"Roslin," Lee said two minutes later, out of nowhere. At Tyrol's blank silence, he added, "I got off on the right foot with Roslin. See? It can happen."
"Crisis situations don't count."
"Why not?"
"Normal social rules get suspended – when you're shooting off Raiders no one really cares if you're a prick. That's cheating."
"Well, if crisis situations don't count then nothing in the last five years counts, making this a pointless conversation."
"If pointlessness bothered me, I wouldn't bother getting out of bed in the morning."
Lee rolled his eyes. "Thank you, Captain Nihilist."
Galen bobbed his head, unperturbed.
Spending a few hours a day on the Blackbird became part of Lee's routine. The work was relaxing, and the ship was coming together fast.
He tried not to let his eyes wander to the pristine Viper, half-covered with a dusty sheet, that sat where Kara had left it by the launch tubes. But the hairs on the back of his neck still prickled when he walked past it, and eventually he got sick of his own stubbornness. Why pretend when there was no one left to fool? He'd come here, after all, to face his grief. This might be a good first step.
It was not a good first step.
He made it up the ladder and swung his legs into the cockpit. The letters of her name braced him on both sides, and he reached down to flip on the power. He sank into the pilot seat while the engines and navigation purred to life without one hitch, despite months without maintenance. But when he reached out to shoot the canopy closed, he was mown under by sudden, suffocating emotion. He couldn't parse out what he was feeling, but his vision blurred as he stared at the frakking DRADIS. That tiny screen had been the only point this ship had ever had, the only reason she'd had to…
He peeled himself up and over the side, grinding his heel into the blank blue screen along the way, and felt it crack.
He dropped down to the deck, landing hard, but not hard enough to sprain anything. He sat there for a while, hands around his knees. He wished he could learn to predict himself better. Eventually, he circled back to the ladder and climbed up just long enough to power the engines down. Then he tossed the white sheet back over the Viper's nose and left it alone.
He couldn't help but feel disappointed in himself. In a fit of pride disguised as self-discipline, he picked up the receiver in his room and asked Sam to connect him to the basestar, determined to deal with at least one thing maturely. A Leoben picked up, which was the worst thing that could have happened, but Lee gritted his teeth and asked politely about his father's belongings. After a ten-minute search, the Cylons had located all fourteen boxes and arranged to send them over by shuttle. Lee thanked them and hung up, very civil. Then he picked up the phone again and slammed it into its cradle, twice.
He went down to the hangar bay to accept the delivery, and found Galen sticking his head out from his office as the arm of the starboard landing pod began to extend. "What's going on?" he asked, frowning, and Lee simply said, "My books."
There were three Sharons and a Leoben crammed into the shuttle with his boxes, and they made quick work of transferring them all to D Section – Lee drew the line at showing them to his quarters, but tried not to be obvious about it, making sure to thank them for their trouble. "Galen and I can get them from here," he said. "Thanks so much." He had a feeling they saw right through him, but they smiled and wished him well, and withdrew quickly to the hangar deck. One of the Sharons stopped to ask about Tyrol, but Lee's clipped "oh, fine, he's fine" sent her off without much trouble.
It was over and done with so quickly that it took Lee a while to realize Galen had gone to ground. He was not in his office, nowhere near the Blackbird, and he missed their usual gardening errands that afternoon. Lee went straight to the bar, but no luck there. Then he checked CIC, the mess, and the cramped single room the Chief slept in. He left a short note – Sorry, I should have called to tell you they were coming – and gave up the search. He moved the boxes to his room himself, and spent the afternoon sorting through titles. He placed all the family photos in their accustomed places on the desktop, lingering over the ones of his father longer than he should.
It was pure chance when he took a detour through section 4C and heard a weird thumping noise behind the walls. He found the Chief working away back there, lying sideways on the maintenance catwalk.
"Hey." Lee tapped Galen's ankle. "You okay?"
"Not really." His voice echoed a bit in the wide shaft.
Lee nodded, feeling bad, especially about the unexpected Sharons. "Yeah."
He lingered in the entryway, unsure how to commiserate in a way Galen would accept. Without thinking, really for no reason at all, he craned further into the maintenance shaft and sang the first verse of Zak's favorite break-up song (he'd used to blare it on repeat for hours, loud enough to follow Lee through any room in the house).
Lee was no great shakes as a singer, but this spot had excellent acoustics, at least.
Galen was even worse than Lee at carrying a tune. But he was pretty good on percussion, and he had loads of tools with him that played iloud/i against the pipes. Lee sang himself hoarse between maniacal socket-wrench solos. He went through as much of his crummy music catalogue as he could remember, fudging his way through most of the lyrics. When Galen started shouting obscenities in the downbeats of one of the bouncier love songs, Lee gave up and keeled over. Their laughter slapped along the walls.
It was like being fourteen again.
Once he'd fully unpacked his books, Lee settled in for long mornings of reading. It was strange and lovely, to get lost in a mystery or a tale of adventure. Despite a smattering of classics, his dad had had trashy taste for the most part, and the stories were sentimental, stupid fun. He laughed a lot, and as he sped through the stack of melodramas, he felt closer to his dad than he had in a long time.
But the photographs on the desk pricked at him from the corner of his eye, until one evening he decided it was finally time to visit the memorial wall.
It was a mess. People had been leaving in a hurry, plucking their mementoes and disarranging overlapping layers of photographs and letters. There were piles scattered across the floor, while sticky tack and yellowed paste clumped over long stretches of empty wall.
It was going to be quite a project.
Lee started with a careful clean, scraping the metal bare and gathering up the remaining scattered images into a fresh, compact collage. Altogether, the remaining images took up only a quarter of the hallway. Lee gave himself time to ponder what to do with the wide blank space left over. He wanted to pay tribute; to remember. But his resources were limited.
He settled, then, on color; he hadn't the skill for forms or faces. He lined up the spectrum of paint tins he'd dug out of storage and dipped into brown. He stretched as high as his arm would reach and zigzagged down and up, across and back. The design was simplistic. But he moved with his whole body, jamming his foot into the grating and half-hopping to reach the very top of the wall. He bent low and dragged a line halfway down the hall, then ran it back in sharp angles. It was huge and muddy, a strike of rusty lightning. He pressed both hands to the wet paint and left the marks of his fingertips for his brother.
Gianne was pale blue, and their baby a shade darker, just enough to be distinct. Mom was a twisting riot of yellow, and poor Gene, who never got his wedding, made a smooth silver ring to crown her arc. The twenty-three ships he'd left behind the first day of the Fall took longer – he spent hours arranging them in constellation.
The iOlympic Carrier/i took a week. One thousand, one hundred thirty-seven mismatched patches stretched across the wall like one of his mother's old quilts, beautiful in mosaic. Flattop got a purple crescent, Chuckles curved tan like the bill of a cap. Duck's wild card faced off against Kat's ace. Jacob waved blue and gold while Zarek cut a line of grey through the shadows.
Dee was green, a deep forest green with no pattern; a mystery, always. Laura's tower, topped with an ancient dome, tilted straight into the harsh white light at the edge of her panel.
Kara came last; not a mandala, or a blue-green world, or a goddess. She was, instead, the work of many days: a close-set curtain of iridescent droplets, sprinkled the length of the hall.
Nothing but the rain.
Lee finished with his mural, but every few days he'd drop by again to add another detail, another person he remembered. So far he'd only covered one half of the corridor; the opposite wall remained blank.
He found Galen there one afternoon, holding a makeshift palette. Lee stepped up to look over his shoulder, caught the strong scent of alcohol, and then lost all the air in his lungs.
He should have realized that Tyrol would be an expert in portraiture; he had, after all, helped to model machines that looked so human they defied detection. After sculpting flesh, paint could hardly be a challenge. But Lee had not been prepared to see familiar faces staring out from the wall, achingly realistic. Tyrol had started with Cally and Sharon – or Boomer, Lee should say, as Galen clearly saw her differently than any other Eight. He'd added Dee and Kara as well, catching the shade of Dee's eyes and the slant of Kara's mouth to slightly sick perfection.
Lee was both touched and unsettled, struck dumb as his grief expanded. His throat clenched in dry panic, but he managed to gasp, "Beautiful." He started to reach his hand out.
Tyrol let out a drunk, nasty laugh. "Clean up pretty, don't they? Our murders and suicides."
The words shocked Lee numb for a moment. Not only because they were petty and cruel, but because they were based on fact. Cally and Boomer had been murdered. Kara and Dee had killed themselves, and it was breath-taking to realize how steadfastly he had avoided dealing with that.
But at this moment, even if he'd built his peace on shaky foundations, it hurt terribly to feel it crumble. He'd had enough stolen from him, but Galen was vicious with other people's illusions, and Lee's were threadbare to begin with.
He was suddenly sick with the smell of paint. He turned to go, started to rush.
Galen laughed and Lee turned back and decked him. Blood spurted from his nose.
Bastard looked like he enjoyed it.
Lee spent the next half hour in the head being physically sick, and the next three nights catching snatches of sleep in between long bouts of drinking. On the fourth bleary afternoon he locked his bottles away in disgust and sat down at his desk with a blank sheet of paper in front of him. He picked up a pen and told himself to write down what was going through his mind. It would help to see things in black and white, in a format that could be more easily ordered than the inside of his head.
He wrote nothing.
He forced himself to reconnect with his daily routine, though that was difficult given that he was avoiding the hangar deck, the observatory, and the memorial wall. At a loss, he picked up the topmost book on his 'unread' pile and snuck up to CIC. He sat down next to Sam and said, "I hope you won't mind. Let me know if you don't like it," and read aloud from page one. They shared four uninterrupted hours, at which point Lee bookmarked his page, said "thank you," and came back to his room feeling more like a human being.
That night, he wrote on the blank sheet: Kara – suicide?
Underneath, he added the words CHOICE TO DIE and DESIRE TO DIE and then slipped a small "not equal" notation between them.
Reading with Sam became a daily exercise. Sam was perfectly silent about it, as he was about everything. He had apparently realized that his attempts at verbal communication were too garbled with multiple data streams to be understandable to Lee. Before, he had interfaced directly with Tyrol and let him act as translator. Now, he listened to Lee through hundreds of pages with no sign of recognition. But as Lee spent more time in CIC, he gradually grew attuned to the subtle shifts in ambient noise that filled the background as he read. During exciting passages, the pitch of the monitors and the frequency of DRADIS pings subtly increased. Random bursts of static could stand in for laughter, and tiny ripples in the fluid around Sam's arms cast strange, tearful patterns on the walls.
"You're brilliant, you know that?" Lee said, once he caught on to Sam's signals.
A small valve overhead huffed out a modest "pfft," sounding unimpressed.
Lee smiled.
When he felt ready, he went to find Tyrol where he was working on the final stages of the Blackbird.
Lee wasn't surprised to be back here again. Every person he'd ever been close to had been slightly more damaged than he was, and Galen was no exception. Lee'd spent a lifetime watching them go down, not quite able to follow, and those who'd seemed most stable – Zak, gods, Dee – had been the first to go. He couldn't stand another round of reckless self-destruction, he really couldn't. But they pulled him in, somehow, these bright, tragic people.
There was an edge of Kara in Galen's anger and his booze, that hint of need for someone who would stay. No, not stay – someone who would leave when they got too close and come back when they got too far away. For Lee, it came as naturally as the push and pull of breathing.
Galen heard him approach, but stayed laid out flat beneath the Blackbird's starboard wing. "If you're looking for an apology…"
"Shut up." Lee ran a hand over his face, then sat down and turned over on his back, easing himself under the port wing opposite Galen, so their heads were set crown to crown. This conversation would be easier if they didn't have to look at each other.
Galen kept working. Lee simply joined his hands behind his head, staring upwards. "When I first started out on Pegasus, I sent Kara over to an old Cylon ship we stumbled on, from the first Colonial war. They were experimenting on people over there – trying to figure out how to make human models, but I guess they didn't have your knack for it."
Galen bristled defensively, but Lee plowed on. "Anyway, it was an SAR, but also a bombing raid – get any prisoners out, then nuke the hellhole. When they got aboard, my XO was shot and the nuke malfunctioned, had to be set manually. I gave Kara the order to stay behind. She didn't argue."
Lee let that sink in. Galen said, "She was a good soldier."
"Is that what you call it?"
"Yeah, that's what I call it."
"Me, too," Lee admitted.
He'd thought about that near-miss a lot lately, and thought, too, about her plunge to the hard deck. It wasn't wrong to call those choices suicidal, but that wasn't the whole story, either.
"I don't think she wanted to die," he told Galen quietly. "But she was willing to when she thought something important for all of us would come out of it. There are days I can hardly stand to look at that planet, knowing what it cost and not understanding why. But…she was a frakking good soldier, and she brought us home. I just can't…I can't be angry anymore. I don't want to be."
Galen reached one hand over his head and caught Lee's wrist.
"And Dee?" he prodded gently. "Still angry there?"
"Dee…no. No. I don't think I ever was … I feel like I've got no right. I'm only sorry I was so frakking useless to her."
Lee closed his eyes. Eventually, Galen started talking fast, without allowing himself much time to think. "Cally was sweet and tough as hell; there were reasons I fell in love. Good reasons. But she was also violent and frakking twisted, even worse than me sometimes. I thought that side of her had won out – I thought she killed herself. I said awful things, unfair things. And now I know it wasn't her choice, to end the way she did. It should make all the difference."
Lee waited. "But?"
Galen's hand, still on Lee's wrist, clenched hard. "I'm still angry."
"That's okay."
Hesitantly, Lee asked, "Do you want to talk about Sha – "
"No."
Lee nodded and let it go.
Once Lee had run out of melodramas to read to Sam, he tackled ancient poetry.
"Kara used to like this kind of thing," he said. "But you probably know that."
He had a hard time finding a good recitation rhythm, and he wasn't sure about the significance of half the images he encountered. But the great theme running beneath the words was the struggle to overcome suffering.
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart," Lee read. "Until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of god."
Lee stared at the page for some time before looking up.
"I'm not sure I believe that," he told Sam.
The machinery around him hummed, pensive.
Lee and Tyrol put the finishing touches on the Blackbird, including the white sweep of Roslin's name.
Even though it was just the two of them, they threw a small party on deck. "We dub this fine craft the Laura," Galen announced in his best deck chief bark. "Its sister Blackbird was a ship of war. But this is a ship of peace."
Galen lifted his glass and sprinkled a small oblation across the nameplate. "Peace, Madame President," he toasted.
Lee looked at him, a bit choked up, and thought: you can be wise.
He lifted his own glass.
Then he quirked an eyebrow and caught Tyrol's eye. "You wanna learn to fly it?"
Galen's eyes went round. "Are you serious?"
Fondness shot through Lee's chest.
"I'm always serious."
Five weeks later, the fondness had worn off.
"It's official: You are the worst Viper pilot I've ever seen."
"You ain't seen nothin' yet, sir," Tyrol crowed, then hooted obnoxiously through the comm link as he once again over-rotated through a simple turn.
"What part of 'ease off the throttle' do you not understand?" Lee tried, but it was mostly for show. There was no talking to Galen in the first five minutes of any lesson, when he was caught up in riding the high of flight. The man had turned out to be as much of an adrenalin junkie as any combat pilot. Fortunately, he also had a cast-iron stomach, which made all his accidental corkscrews and spirals more entertaining than dangerous. Lee shook his head and gave him time to play.
Lee flew a quick Lombar Needle, enjoying the rapid series of reverse flips. By now he was perfectly familiar with all the quirks and strengths of Kara's Viper and put it through the most complex maneuvers he had mastered. He was glad Galen had given him a reason to return to it; he felt closer to her in this cockpit.
Eventually he managed to call Galen to order, and they worked through an intermediate formation pattern. After a shaky start, the Blackbird fell into proper position, mirroring Lee's own trajectory. They began to move in compass arcs, framing the sun between them.
Without warning, the Galactica swung into the breach, completing their circle with precision.
Lee watched Sam spin his father's ship, heard Galen laugh from Laura's. Kara's wings stretched out behind his back.
He flew forward.