Disclaimer: Mine, but by love, not by law and definitely not by origination.

Spoilers: All. I break with canon, in some small ways that will become large, from the moment Kara enters the coordinates in Daybreak. (Although, like many of you, I think it's RDM that broke it by ignoring the fact that he'd made a show that was about fellowship—with all its problems—and not just survival.)

This is a Lee/Kara story of castfic dimensions that will eventually span a couple of planets and multiple timelines (I hope) neatly. Reviews always deeply appreciated.

"I couldn't keep you safe from harm my love, but I kept you—I keep you—in my heart."

Old words. Their first dawn on New Earth found a small group from Galactica standing at a grave on a mountainside and listening to Bill Adama speak them. Only a handful of them knew just how old those words were.

Saul Tigh was one. He could remember, now, since they'd all had their hands in Sam Anders' Hybrid bath together, devising which memories of Cylon customs they would implant in Galen's history, so they could hold onto some of the old ways—even if only tenuously, if only by proxy. He wondered, now, that he hadn't felt an electric surge of recognition when Galen had first intoned these words at Cally's funeral.

Today, the poetry of it was lost on him in other ways, as well; he was watching his old friend's face more than he was listening to him speak. Saul was resolved to monitor Bill's desolation. He knew every vent and ballast that despair could crawl into, in a man's soul.

So of course he knew the admiral was sinking.

"You were the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins, the light in my eye, and now that breath… that breath. That breath is gone. That blood and light are… gone."

Then there was Kara, her hair pulled resolutely back from her face, her green surface fatigues pressed around the epaulets with viper pins pointing resolutely heavenward, all signs that she was playing at order and composure despite the reckless chaos swirling in her head. She was listening—so it seemed to Lee—almost too intently, was praying along with the admiral, seeking as ever to regain in rite what she'd long ago lost in reason.

She knew Lee was watching her. He'd been watching her, surreptitiously but undauntably, for the eighteen hours they'd been on this planet, as if he expected her to disappear in the space where he blinked. It had to be ignored. There was nothing to say to it. The weight of those eyes meant too much, and he saw too much—but understood as little as she did, and maybe less.

She had landed a battlestar directly on a planet—a habitable planet—using FTL coordinates. She had buried her own corpse. She was still here.

That last fact was one she mostly knew because she could feel Lee's eyes on her.

"Now I am left a voice."

Galen Tyrol lifted his hand automatically to draw a line down his throat—the traditional gesture at this part of the ceremony. Traditional where? In Cylon church? Yes. Yes, that was precisely where. He saw Saul raise his single, expressive eyebrow at him, while Ellen's eyes flared in sudden recognition and she lifted a hand to her neck, as well. Wired into my muscle memory, he thought prosaically. And then lifted one corner of his mouth, mirthlessly. Wired is right.

Since they'd all had their hands in Sam's hybrid bath and had recovered so many memories, the Chief's consciousness kept betraying him, kept flickering—projecting—to the last time this ceremony had been undertaken. When he'd said these words over an absence, speaking to the cold infinity into which Cally had gone. He kept thinking of other things he might have said, words that maybe could have held all the senselessness at bay by calling attention to it.

We stand here to memorialize happenstance. To memorialize fate. They are one and the same. They are the thread and fabric of history, equal and indistinguishable, because they are so equally and indistinguishably beyond our control.

He was still getting used to those projections. He found that he lived, still, in the corridors of Galactica, when it was still whole, and in the air, in those precious, precarious moments before everything had been lost. Now, watching the old man, he let his mind drift to the admiral's quarters, let himself sit down there, run his hands down the smooth portside of the admiral's model ship as it had been before the old man had broken it.

There were few places, even in his own consciousness, as utterly alone as this. Sitting there, he knew that he and Bill Adama were the same, now, perhaps had always been the same.

It was in their wiring.

"…the Lords of Kobol, as many and varied as mortal men, must bend down and lean low to hear my lament."

Lee had watched the wordless exchange among the Cylons, wondered at it. He knew it made Kara crazy, that he spent so much time watching, evaluating, had such a limited gift for impulsiveness. And while he knew that Kara wished he weren't watching her—her eyes pleaded with him to stop—she didn't know that her eyes followed him even when he turned away. He knew it. He could feel them on his back, as heavy as her body had been there, one humid night six years ago in Caprica City when he'd had to heft her over his shoulder to get her drunk ass out of trouble in her favorite bar.

Sometimes Lee thought he could tell the story of his life as a series of times he'd walked into or out of a bar with Kara Thrace.

And where was Zak, that night? Right. Out at the tracks, arguing with gamblers, gone to save a pack of wild dogs. Salve for being in the army and not in veterinary school, where he belonged.

This was a day—there would be more of them, now that they were on a planet, now that the idea of home had reverted to mean something more like what it had used to—a day when he missed his brother. Zak had had a light touch with other people's pain. Not to say that he had been shallow, exactly… Lee winced. His own heart was hurting, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he could summon the right words, he could show up, but he couldn't be there, not for his father, not in a way that would ease their grief.

He winced again—though not so anyone could see—on noticing what was breaking over his father's face now. "Lords of Kobol, release us into an ocean of sorrow, that we may drown our hearts there. Take pity on our mortal loss."

Dad must've made her some promises. No way could he dredge this ceremony up of his own volition. He doesn't believe in the Lords of Kobol any more than Gaius believes in avoiding limelight.

Gaius Baltar, for all that, was decidedly somber. Standing between the Doc and Athena, staring straight ahead, his face was frozen solid. He had asked all of his questions earlier, and his mind was blank, now, no longer able to wonder whether his actions on Galactica at the colony had been enough, at the end, to earn what he'd come, despite himself, to want most: the dead woman's forgiveness.

"Now, for the first time in too long, we return one of your daughters into warm earth instead of cold air. Her breath and blood and light, we have lost, but know remain near us. Her spirit, we launch back into the universe."

Athena watched the admiral glance quickly up at the sky—very quickly, as if he couldn't bear the brightness—and saw Gaius… was he wiping tears from his eyes? It must be, because there was Doc Cottle, surreptitiously passing him a handkerchief.

Athena, like Lee, had been watching. She was thinking about how much misery they had brought with them to earth, wondering how those around her would survive it, mentally retracing the series of events that had led to her family's happy ending and wondering how precarious their happiness was.

Karl frakked another woman three days ago and didn't notice it wasn't me.

Boomer is not me. She isn't. I made that decision a long time ago.

So why don't I have the guts to bust Karl for cheating?

Athena worried about herself, as the admiral had worried about his species in a retirement speech she'd heard years ago in another woman's memories, worried about whether she deserved the form of survival she'd found.

"So say we all."

There was a long beat, and then the assembled congregants came back together. "So say we all," they murmured in uneven unison.

There was a long, impossible silence. Then Starbuck tore away to an isolated spot beneath the trees, wrapped her arms around herself, began muttering anew in prayer. Saul was unsurprised; nothing new there. She'd been shivering and murmuring in intervals since they'd set the first ship down on the planet eighteen hours before. It was no great mystery, either; as Saul saw it, the events of the last few months of her life had contrived to exhaust even Starbuck's supply of bullshit.

After reaching the end of the line, a man needed either answers or consequences. Starbuck seemed to have been granted neither.

Any moment, Lee would be chasing after her, offering his usual cocktail—an offer of support, a demand for an explanation, a pious judgment. What a sad, sorry lot she'd drawn. Saul didn't have the heart to watch.

"That was a lovely service, Bill," he heard his wife say, wrapping her hands around the admiral's.

Bill's bearing had never been less military, less regal, less commanding. "Why do we hold these things at dawn?"

Ellen was gentle. "Because that's when it hurts the most that they're gone."

He and Ellen bent to help Bill pile stones around Laura Roslin's grave. That was another old custom. Returning one of your daughters to earth instead of air. At long last, there was soil where there had been airlocks. It seemed more solid, more suitable. These stones they were accumulating would abide.

When they ran out, Saul walked through the congregants to gather the rocks that had been piled up under the nearby baobabs in preparation for this ceremony, and despite himself, heard snatches of whispered conversations.

"Don't be an idiot, Galen, of course you shouldn't leave. Humans—and cylons—aren't meant to live in isolation." Athena was obviously annoyed at the very idea. "You'd go mad inside a year. And what would the centurions—"

"Oh, yeah, now that's something to live for. Robot free love. What I dreamed of as a little boy."

A few feet away, Starbuck was having no easier time deflecting Lee. "Not now. I can't do this now. Your father can't cope with any of it."

"Then when, Kara? You think he's just gonna go away? Or will it be you, this time? I can't keep track of whose turn it is…"

Saul returned, stooped down to where Bill was kneeling, shattered, over the grave of the first president to be buried on New Earth, and he pressed a large stone into his hand. "We need you, Bill. We're all gonna sink without you."

Bill didn't even look up. He was murmuring something—Saul couldn't quite tell. Something about a raft? His old friend wasn't quite in his right mind.

"Bill, now is not the time to fall apart—I know things are rough, now, that you're going to need some time, but…"

Bill tuned Saul out. He placed the large stone at the head of the grave, then swung his knees from beneath him, and he—the great commander—laid down on his side, on the ground, facing the newly piled mound of earth.

The admiral closed his eyes and pictured a cabin in a wood, with high eaves, surrounded lovingly by a stand of pines. Not here, not here. No pines are growing here, maybe nowhere on this planet. But at our cabin…

Saul let him be. He recognized projection when he saw it, even in humans. It was among the deepest forms of denial, one around which both their species had evolved over millennia. Watching Galen stalk down the mountain alone, and Lee, hot on Kara's heels, lecture her all the way down to camp until, reaching the first row of tents, he threw up his hands in the air and stalked away, Saul shook his head.

Projections were the order of the day.

"Some promised land."

Ellen just smiled and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. "It was never supposed to be paradise."

Gaius, though, was frowning—not at them, but over their heads. "Not to add rain to the soggy New Earth parade the two of you are throwing, but… do you think it's troubling that the Raptors haven't made it back with a report on this planet's tylium supplies yet?" There were, in fact, Raptors overhead in the distance, but they were flying out, not returning.

"This planet is suitable for people. It'll have fuel. It has to." Saul set his jaw. Ellen just clutched his arm more tightly.

It was their first day in—no, not paradise. But the new world, the home they'd make together.

Only Gaius Baltar—as usual—was ready to start borrowing trouble.

By nightfall, Admiral William Adama—or at least, he had been an admiral, and had that only been yesterday?—had stood up, paced off the area for the cabin he knew he'd build right here. Wherever the encampment moved, here he'd stay. He spent the afternoon gathering firewood from the woods above the site.

He wasn't prepared for visitors, and certainly not for 30,000 of them.

The first to come were two Leobens, bearing a very large, deep tub between them, which they set at the foot of the grave. They drew long lines down their throats, chin to sternum, stopping next to their hearts. The two dozen men and women who followed came bearing large buckets of water, which they overturned into the tub. And then a group of Sixes and Eights, with a few humans among them—one was Kara—who joined hands around the grave and began to sing:

"OMMMM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât…"

Bill Adama felt that song sink low into his chest. It sounded like Old Gemenese—but somehow turned and… twisted. He wondered if he was hearing an ancient Cylon prayer.

Thereafter, tides of humans kept coming in. Members of the fleet arrived in a relentless line of torches creeping slowly up the mountain. When they arrived, they drew lines down their throats, or prayed to the Lords of Kobol, or to Gaius Baltar's One God, or to the Cylon God… or spoke to Laura, herself, as if she might reply. He heard more than one apologize to her for having voted against her. All in all, they undertook a thousand rituals before, each, dipping their torches into the buckets and extinguishing the flames, and returning to a darkened camp.

Down below, even the emergency lights from the nearby ships were shut off tonight. There was a moon above them. Caprica hadn't had a moon. This moon's kept reminding them that they weren't home, they were in a place with strange light and strange tides. It was hard to grapple with that; he could feel himself being pulled in only one direction.

Down.

Elliot Trebol, who was both the woman who had first advocated for shutting them off and the captain of the Calliope, arrived near the end of the procession. Standing at the foot of the grave, she knelt down in front of that wide basin of water and submerged her head in it, emerging covered with the ashes that the extinguished torches had left behind. It was an old Tauron ritual, and Calliope's captain wasn't the last person he saw undertake it. He couldn't quite remember, but he knew he was looking at something from one of the old human civil wars. There was a metaphor in it, about devastation and dignity, about carrying the legacy of violence.

She bent her head toward him deeply and solemnly, as if to say: This is why we do this at nightfall.

He let himself think about those people who'd remained in the camp below, choosing not to come up here to pay their respects to Laura Roslin. Those thoughts were a kind of harmony against the melody of the night. Of the surviving members of the fleet, nearly a quarter were down in the mess halls, talking and toasting and laughing and frakking in the tents below. There were those who would be gratified that she had died on the Feast Day of New Earth; Bill didn't doubt that, for them, the death of the woman they saw as a tyrant would only add to the revelry.

He just wished she were there to laugh about it.

By and large, those who made the journey up the mountainside to pay their final respects to Laura Roslin, cylons and humans, former prisoners and former quorum delegates, said the same four words over and over:

Thank you, Madame President.

Laura Roslin hadn't lived to see what vestiges, what scraps and pieces of cultures and peoples and traditions, she'd managed to save, when she'd endeavoured to save what she could. Had she been there, she might have pointed out that her fiercest opponents, toasting her death down in the base camp and scoffing at the idea of mourning her, were the ones who affirmed her mission best of all.

Bill Adama, one-time admiral of a now-defunct battlestar that had found a final resting place on earth a few hundred yards away, watched it all from beneath low-hanging branches.

He was thankful it was dark. Even though his own final mission was over, he didn't think it would be fitting for the fleet he'd commanded to see him cry himself blind.