Title: Polaris
Author: Canis
Rating: R (M)
Warnings: Some disturbing topics
Spoilers: Up to 2.08
Pairing: Lee/Kara
Summary: There are no morals in war. Lee-centric, slight LeeKara
Disclaimer: I own them not, so sue me not.
Author's Note: Please. Review. I live off reviews. One of my 'big sisters' can tell you how much I love reviews. I bask in your reviews' glory. So review. Please.

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Chapter 2: Like Minotaur

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Polaris was barely six feet away from the office when Lee came barreling through the hatch once more. He was eight feet away when Lee ran over to him. On the ninth, Crewman Polaris found himself being briskly dragged once again by the CAG to another place down the corridors.

"Sir, what are you-."

"Come on," Lee said tersely as he tugged his younger companion along. Polaris stumbled after him, one arm held in the iron grip of the CAG.

"Where are we going?" Polaris asked. He was struggling to keep himself from falling over while simultaneous trotting after Lee in an awkward position.

"The Commander's office."

Polaris froze. Unfortunately this led to Lee pulling his arm harshly. His eyes went wide and he almost instinctively recoiled, hissing and curling into a ball right there on the corridor floor. Lee looked back to see why the deckhand had halted abruptly, only to see him clutching at his shoulder with his eyes screwed shut. Lee remembered belatedly that Polaris had said he had a broken shoulder. Alarmed, he kneeled on one knee before the boy and reached out to inspect the damage done, but Polaris withdrew sharply away and glared at him. Lee almost took a step back from the storm of emotions in those black eyes.

Coldness. Fury. Dread.

Fear.

"Don't touch me," Polaris hissed out through clenched teeth, moving away from Lee again. He was still nursing his shoulder. Lee drew back the hand that had been about to reach out and stood up. Polaris followed, albeit a lot more slowly. He stumbled in place behind Lee, refusing to look at him. Awkwardly Lee began to lead the way to his father's office once more. They remained that way, silent and Lee casting apologetic glances the boy's direction every now and then, until they finally reached the Commander's office. Lee knocked.

"Come in," Adama called. Lee paused and looked at the boy.

"...Stay here," Lee instructed. Polaris nodded tiredly, but didn't face him. For some reason that sent a small pang of pain through Lee, and he gave one last guilty look the deckhand's way before stepping through the hatch.

William Adama looked up to see his son and CAG enter his office. Lee snapped off a smart salute. He nodded.

"At ease, captain. What's going on?"

"Something came up, sir," Lee said, his voice carefully neutral. Adama raised an eyebrow. Lee held his gaze.

"Well? Let's hear it then," Adama said, leaning back against his chair. Lee opened his mouth hesitantly.

"Sir..." he broke off. "I... there's something I need to ask you first."

"Go ahead, Lee."

"Did you know about the orphan ships?" Lee blurted out. The Commander blinked, scrutinized his son's face carefully. Lee looked pale. And shaken. His blue eyes were wide and intent, transfixed on him and desperately seeking an answer.

Something was terribly wrong.

"...Where have you heard of such?" William finally asked the question with a question of his own.

"Dad, I need to know the truth. Did you or didn't you know about the orphanages?" Lee asked, almost frantically. William stared at Lee. His son stared back.

"...Yes," Adama finally said. He did not let his gaze waver. Lee squeezed his eyes shut. Silence filled the room.

"...Dad..." It was Lee who finally broke the silence again. His voice came out oddly strangled.

"...Did you send marines aboard the ships...?"

"Yes. I did."

Lee clenched his jaws. His next words came out in a strained hiss.

"Did you know those marines murdered the children aboard the Minotaur?"

No, he had not known that. Adama's eyes narrowed, and he looked at Lee above his glasses.

"Explain."

Lee's shoulders sagged.

"There's a sixteen year old technician on the deck, Dad. Did you know that? A kid with a broken shoulder who doesn't have anywhere to go snuck onto the ship just so he could get three warms and a cot. He ran away because his friends in the hospice were killed by the doctors by having their life systems shut down. He saw his friends shot to death when they tried to escape. By marines. Marines you assigned, Dad," Lee said, his voice soft. It wasn't accusatory; it was simply stating the facts.

William took a deep breath. He had been aware of the situations aboard the orphan ships for a long while. He had known the children were not receiving the supplies sent their way and that instead, the people assigned to care for them - the captains of the ships, the doctors, the workers - were smuggling the food and clothes behind their backs for profit. He had known about the situation, yes. But he had not been able to do a damn thing about it; he couldn't spare any of his officers to look over that as well, not when there was already a shortage of hands for combat. So he had sent the marines.

Only to find out now they were responsible for murder.

"What do you want me to do, captain?" Adama finally asked, taking his glasses off and setting them down on his desk.

"I request an investigation, sir. We need to look into this matter fully-."

"No," his father cut him off. Lee stared at him disbelievingly.

"Sir?"

"We're not going to dig through this, son. Think of the impact it would have on the fleet's morale."

Lee's mouth opened and closed. He seemed to struggle to regain his ability to speak.

"Dad, that kid's not even getting proper pain meds. He's been sneaking around for months trying to survive on a warship. Is that right? Is that moral? And we're not to bring to justice those who-."

"Nothing about war is moral," his father cut him off. Lee paused to look at Adama confusedly.

"Whoever says war has its own beauty and system of ethics is either a fool or a liar. You're lost in a war. You're in Tartarus. You don't know which way is up or down, you don't know your right from left. So you do the only thing that you know how to do. You try to survive."

Suddenly, William Adama looked very old.

"People go mad during the war, Lee. Not crazy. Mad. In their minds, nothing matters anymore, because the old rules are dead and there is nothing to hold them back. They do anything to survive. They can kill other men in the name of survival, and their crimes go unpunished and justified. The war is not moral, son. It's the survivors who justify and make it moral."

"You can't possibly be willing to just let go of this!"

"I am not only willing but ordering you to do so as well. Those marines will be brought to court martial, and the boy can stay on the ship as a deckhand if he wants. But we're not going to delve any deeper into this matter, captain. There's too much at risk."

"Sir!"

"Dismissed."

"Dad!"

"I said dismissed!" Adama said, not overly loudly, but definitely firmly. Lee shut up. His eyes smoldering, he saluted once more before turning on his heels and leaving the room, slamming the hatch behind him.

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Lee slammed the hatch behind him furiously. Polaris looked up from his spot crouched next to the hatch. Though his expression was guarded, Lee knew he had heard everything. Hell, he hadn't been too hard-pressed to keep his voice quiet near the end.

They stared at each other for a moment, before Lee finally sighed.

"Have you eaten yet?" he asked. Polaris silently shook his head no.

"When did you last eat then?"

A shrug. Apparently he didn't seem to much care.

"Come on. Let's go eat," Lee said, ignoring the reason he had dragged Polaris all the way over here in the first place. It probably wouldn't be pragmatic to bring the boy before his father immediately after having a rather heated discussion about his very self.

Polaris stood up carefully. His previous turbulent mood seemed to have cooled off somewhat, because he followed Lee to the nearly empty mess hall mutely. Both picked up a tray and picked up the offered mush that passed as food on the Galactica without exchanging so much as a word. Lee noticed, however, that Polaris was careful to avoid straining his left shoulder much. Another wave of guilt washed over Lee as he remembered how harshly he had tugged on the boy's arm.

"So... how did you hurt yourself?" Lee asked, once they were seated.

"I worked on the Hephaestus for a bit. Accidents happen," Polaris answered succinctly, spooning up some of the amorphous goop from his plate.

"What happened?"

"Big piece of iron fell on top of me."

"Oh."

Silence lapsed again. Lee tried once more.

"Where were your parents while you were in Picon?"

"Virgon. I attended Picon Academy."

That would explain how he was so good at mechanics. Picon Academy was a large boarding school of immense prestige. It was known to have one of the best engineering schools in all of the colonies. Only the richest or the smartest were able to enroll there, and the level of competition was high enough so that half the class - usually the richer half -dropped out before graduating. Most of those who did graduate either became successful businessmen or became well-known engineers.

Lee took a scrutinizing look at the young man before him. Polaris looked rather worn out. Lee didn't blame him.

"I'm going to have to tell the Chief about this," Lee said. Polaris paused, then resumed eating. He nodded.

"Are you okay with it?"

"...Yes sir."

"You don't seem all too scared that you were caught."

"You can't do much worse than send me back to the orphanage."

"You don't have to go back. You'll stay here, and you'll keep tuning up my bird," he attempted to lighten the mood. Polaris didn't even bat an eye. He didn't seem to care at all, or at least not as much as he did for the tasteless mush laid before him. It seemed he had transgressed from being pessimistic to simply nihilistic over the course of months he had spent on the Minotaur. Not that he could be blamed. Lee cleared his throat awkwardly.

"I... have some paperwork to finish. If you have questions you can ask me later..." Lee moved to get up from the table, when Polaris finally opened his mouth and called him back.

"Sir?" Polaris did not look up from his tray, although his hands stopped chasing the food around his plate.

"Yes, crewman?"

"...Is it pity?" the boy asked, his voice soft, and yet hard at the same time. He still did not look up. Lee frowned.

"Why should you think that?" he asked, sitting himself back down in front of the deckhand.

"Why shouldn't I?" Polaris returned evenly. He glanced at the CAG, and Lee noted with surprise that the boy's gaze was sad. It was only for a brief second that Polaris looked at Lee though, before collecting his tray and standing up. The sad look was gone, replaced by the familiar tiredness that was his usual aura.

"Thank you for letting me stay, sir," he thanked, and despite the aloofness that he had been emanating only seconds before, Lee heard something other than bitterness and sarcasm from the crewman before him. Genuine gratitude was there. Lee managed a small smile, though to his disappointment the boy did not return it.

Perhaps he wasn't completely nihilistic at all.

"You're family, crewman. You're always welcome here," Lee said. Polaris nodded, then turned around and walked to the counter to return his tray and eating utensils. Lee stayed and watched as the crewman left the mess hall to return to work. He stayed a long while after that.

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Lee stared at the documents in front of him. There wasn't that much dealing with the fire at all, except that twenty seven lives had been lost, and that the supplies were in need of rapid restocking. The remains of the dead, too charred to be identified, had been 'disposed of'.

Thrown out the airlock, Polaris had said.

Two days passed since then. Two days that Lee spent struggling to come to terms with the knowledge he had unwillingly discovered. Two days of finally unearthing the truth.

"What are you going to do now? Throw me out the airlock?"

The double meaning of those few bitter words came back to haunt him. Though it may have been the result of angry sarcasm from a growing adolescent, it didn't change the fact that a mere child had watched the very same thing happen before his eyes and knew that had he not gotten away, he would have ended up in that position as well. It didn't change the fact that he had kept silent witness as man became beast in a course of only a few months.

How he had been unaware of the presence of orphan ships, he could not for the life of him understand. He had attended War College and had received top marks all four years of his time there. He knew war orphans existed, and he knew conditions for them had never been good, if not downright atrocious. After they were of legal age, they would be released into the "real" world to fend for themselves; they would be offered to live in shelters of course, but by then many of them were already roaming the streets dealing drugs and selling bodies to make enough money to just survive. Statistics in the textbooks had said sixty seven percent of these orphaned children did not grow to live past twenty three.

He had been naïve enough to believe that mutual tragedy would forge a bond between everyone, when in reality, there was a growing turbulence among the handful of survivors of a now dead world. There were already those abandoned by the world - or what was left of it - clinging to their lives desperately. There were already those bartering with "illegal" goods - be it that the set laws were even considered intact anymore. The Astral Queen was good example of that, with a terrorist and loonies running a world of their own.

And not a single one of them would ever cry out for help.

Not even this one boy, who had witnessed a near massacre and come a hair's breadth away from death himself. Lee knew Polaris would never ask for any aid - had he not said that none would be stupid enough to ask himself? He would not scream. He would not cry. No smile or tears would ever shine from those black eyes, eyes that Lee had imagined took everything in and never let anything out. A boy... and yet a boy no longer, but a queer creature formed out of and mirroring the twisted and demented nature of mankind. One who had been cast away in his most helpless state by those who had been meant to protect him, one who had been thrown into the maze of survival with no way of preparing himself for it and so striking back in angry hurt.

Like Minotaur.

He knew he could not fault anyone for wanting to survive, but despite all the things that had changed when their worlds had been destroyed, he knew that the massacre of children - orphaned children! - in the name of survival was not only wrong but an undeniable, blatant neglect for human rights. And though times may be hard, certain rights were still meant to be kept sacred and high above others. Human life was above all that. They were above all that. It was what kept them from being just like the Cylons.

Lost lives may not be returned. Wounds may never heal.

But if he could right what few of the endless wrongs committed...

Then that was all Lee would ask for.

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A few days after the incident, Lee finally managed to approach the boy. It wouldn't do for any one of the pilots to be on bad terms with a member of the crew, no matter who it is or what the case may be. Those rules didn't fail to apply to Apollo himself.

"Hey," he greeted. Polaris gave him a cursory sideways glance and a nod before focusing his attention back to the fuel tank. He prodded the tank with a pencil delicately, then made a face when a gunk of green came off the eraser.

"Evening, sir."

"Everything going all right?" Lee asked casually. Polaris didn't even glance at him as he answered back.

"As well as can be expected, sir."

"Oh. Well, that's good. That's great. Uh..."

It would help a lot if the boy would at least look at him. But of course, that would have been too easy.

"I requested for a bottle of pain meds for you. They'll be in by next week," he said matter-of-factly. Polaris briefly looked from the clipboard at him, but then turned his attention back to the preflight check.

"Thank you."

"Anytime. Thanks for tuning up my Viper. I really appreciate it," Lee said. Polaris frowned a bit, not out of displeasure, but out of puzzlement.

"I was just doing my job."

"So am I."

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To Be Continued

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yannik: -blush- You give me too much credit. It was an idea I'd been fiddling with for a while now - I'm only just now getting it all out of my head and onto the computer. I'm happy to hear you're enjoying this fic

Rachel: -0- It was an aspect I didn't think of yet;;; -goes to a corner and hides- Ehehe. I hope you liked this chapter then. Hopefully you'll like the ones that will come up in the future too... :)

Sis: ...T-T Come on, it's taken me months to get this thing ready! T-T

Teresa: D: I knew I should have gotten this thing beta-ed before I posted T-T Thanks for pointing it out. I went back and fixed the mistakes. And yes, this story is a tad on the depressing side... ;; I will insert a few upbeat stuff though, so worry not.