A/N: There is an apparent symmetry to Chief Tyrol's and Lee Adama's personal tribulations upon their respective wives' tragic and untimely deaths. However, whereas Chief's journey of grief received thorough enough exploration on the show, Lee's was woefully understated.
This drabble is yet another attempt to glimpse into Lee Adama's innermost ways of coping (or lack thereof) with the drama of Anastasia Dualla's departure.
Disclaimer 1: None of the characters, situations, plot-point mentioned and/or alluded to belong to me.
Disclaimer 2: The lament-prayer is borrowed from the BSG episode 4.04 "Escape Velocity".
Lament
- Dee will receive military honors, – a statement, not an argument. His father's voice is thicker than ever, preemptively defying objection. As if the Admiral doesn't know better than to impose decisions on him…
The words snap off his lips before he can help it – the snarky edge a tad too sharp to his own liking:
- Unauthorized discharge of weapon… Cally Tyrol served a month in the brig on a similar charge. Her reasons to pull the trigger were no less veritable…
He's not sure he can quite place where the sarcasm stems from. Might be the chilly void nestled within his heart, once the ghosts of joy and promise fled. Might be the uncomfortably fuzzy area of his mind blurred by insomnia.
- Don't! Don't do this to her! Military honors are for fallen warriors. She was a fine officer and is entitled to no less, – an order tinged with menace, barked by the Admiral, not the mourning parent, at the moment.
He has to gulp down a rueful sigh and shake his head ever so slightly. It's a small fleet, a smaller yet ship – the rumors and attests of Chief Tyrol's notorious public denouncement of his late wife had reached him that same day.
The Admiral needs not worry – Lee Adama won't disown, nor disgrace Anastasia. He is not in that place, grief-wise. Not yet. He is still grasping for words to voice a rationale on how, and why, and what if, to align the arguments and close the case – lawyers' habits run bone-deep in the family. But he is speechless.
Besides, it doesn't take a Romo Lampkin to deduce that however eloquent the rhetoric, it will fail eventually to make-believe she didn't matter enough for the hurt to be this smoldering in parts of his soul he fooled himself into thinking weren't quite emotionally credible. And any curse he might conjure, any grievance, any disdain would be self-inflicted anyway…
He even tried to pray – the little lament-prayer Chief recited at Cally's memorial service was stuck in his mind ever since, for seemingly no reason. He now wonders if it was meant to. "I couldn't keep you safe from harm, my love, but I kept you in my heart. You were the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins, the light in my eye, and now that breath is gone. That blood and the light are gone. Now I am left, a voice…"
It failed to work for him the way prayers are supposed to. It failed to make-believe she could listen, like she so often would. It failed to summon the luminous grace of her silences. It failed to make-believe he was heard. For he is now mute in the deafening darkness…