Notes: This story is experimental. I don't know if you'll like it, or even get it, but I hope that you do. This song is the namesake for this series, so I hope you like it! It felt like there could be two stories going on within in it, so there is here! You'll get the portion of the song & the character at the beginning of each transition.
Setting: Lee on Pegasus Kara on Galactica
Characters: Lee, Lee/Dee, Kara, Kara/Lee, Kara/Baltar
Time Frame: Mixed: Lee/Post Unfinished Business (New Caprican period) Kara/Colonial Day
Lee
Life used to be life-like,
Now
it's more like show biz.
I wake up in the night,
And I don't
know where the bathroom is,
And I don't know what town I am
in,
Or what sky I am under,
I wake up in the darkness,
I
don't have the will anymore to wonder.
Everyone has a
skeleton,
And a closet to keep it in,
And you're mine.
Every
song has a you,
A you that the singer sings to,
And you're it
this time,
Baby, you're it this time.
Life on Pegasus was routine. He was commander, but really, what was a commander in peace time? It was nothing but an antiquated figurehead, a symbol, the second largest cog in the wheel. It meant nothing. Sure, the ship needed leadership, things needed to get done, papers needed to be signed, schedules written up, and he did these things. Well, Dee did most of them, he mostly went through the motions.
Since he had married Dee he felt like he was in a daze. He wandered around like a zombie, neither here or there. Last time he felt like this was after the Blackbird, after he floated through space, oxygen deprived and ready to die. This time it wasn't a near death experience that had brought about his melancholy, it was a near life experience. He had tasted and seen and proclaimed what he had wanted most of all, and then it snuck off the next morning and married someone else. So he walks around in a daze, and nothing fulfills him.
Now he wanders the halls of his ship, a ship he can't even find the head in. He sleeps in a real bed, next to the woman he committed himself to and he feels nothing but alone. He feels lost in the dark without a light to guide him, he's lost his direction, true north is gone. He doesn't even really know where he is anymore. When he goes planet side, which is rare, it could be New Caprica, it could be some crap miner's settlement on Triton, it's irrelevant, it doesn't matter, they all seem the same.
His will to fight with Dee was gone; instead he went through the motions of being a good husband, of caring about her, of loving her. He was an actor playing the role of a life time, the role of his life. Commander, husband, leader, lover, it was all nothing to him. He was a shell, being filled with whatever role someone expected of him. When he frakked Dee it was always with his eyes closed and his mind somewhere else, that is when he could stomach it. He imagined Kara was there, and once had called out to her during the act. That landed him two weeks on the couch. It didn't really matter, when he woke in a cold sweat, with her name on his lips and her scent in his mind, it was still just darkness around him.
He had stopped wondering what would be different if Kara and he had wed that morning; he had lost the will to do that too. He stopped caring about her little house, he stopped wanting to upset her neat little apple cart, he stopped thinking about his porch swing. He had stopped imagining the small tow haired girl child with his eyes and her fight. He had even stopped fantasizing about calling in a favor to Zarek, to his black market pals, to put a hit out on Anders. If he was gone maybe she would come back to him. It wouldn't be the first time her dead love drove her back to the stars. That was his most desperate moment, a moment he found in the bottom of a whiskey bottle and later regurgitated in the head.
Dee said she would have him until either the cylons or Kara came back. He desperately wished for either. He knew if the cylons came back that it would take Zeus himself to keep her out of the fight. It made him feel sick to wish that, but it didn't stop him.
He kept her personnel file in the locked bottom drawer of his desk. Whenever he was feeling particularly lost he would pull it out just to see her face again, just to reset his balance. She might not have been dead, but the specter of Kara Thrace followed him everywhere. The skeleton in his closet had a name, and his heart, and quite possibly his soul.
Lee Adama had the startling revelation that for a long time everything he had done had been for her. Not directly, but she had been what it was all about for a while. That first time he saw her, laughing and cooking and eating with Zak, he knew she had him. He would have taken her on that table, double dare or not, brother in the next room or not, but in reality she had stopped him. Since then other women had gotten under his skin, Dee had even at first, but now everything was for her. It was all her this time. I had always been her. It probably always would be.
