So Say We All

Earth. Of all things, Earth the lost colony. It was a story, a children's story really. It wasn't even a popular children's story. He could count on one hand the number of times his mother had told him the tale. Even as a child, it had struck him as unlikely, right up there with the stories of the creepy Cylon that wouldn't stop until it had killed its nemesis.

Lee Adama leaned back in his chair and glanced at the walls of his small room. As CAG, he had private quarters and while he doubted it would last for very long, a part of him was grateful. He didn't know the pilots on the Galactica for the most part. Kara was a friend from childhood and he knew Sharon and a few others from the Academy, but most of them were strangers. Angry strangers who had seen most of their friends and the previous CAG die less than thirty six hours earlier only to have another stranger (and the commander's son no less) be put in charge of him. In some ways it was a pity that Kara didn't have the rank. They would accept her. She had been Ripper's friend and passing the squadron from Ripper to Starbuck would have felt right.

He had met Ripper only briefly, at the briefing before the attack. That made it hard to sit in the man's quarters, and stare at the pictures of people Lee didn't know. Ripper... Lee stopped himself. Did he even know Ripper's real name? The man in the photos hanging on the walls had a woman, and a few kids. And now they were all dead, Lee had been given his room, and didn't even know the man's real name. He sighed.

It was the same story every where, of course. He wasn't the only one assigned to quarters filled with the possessions of now dead soldiers. He was luckier than most of the refugees, now that he thought about it. Sure, he had only come to the Galactica wearing one field uniform and carrying his dress blues, but that was one more set of clothes than many of them had. Most everyone he knew had lost every single member of their family and all of their friends besides. He was, through luck and the assignment of a chore he had loathed, surrounded by old friends. His father was there.

And yet he felt alone.

Being the senior pilot drew a line between the others and him. On his old ship, the battlestar Triton, the CAG had been a remote figure, by her own choice but also because the junior pilots cut her out of the circle. It was made worse on the Galactica because of who he was and who his father was. It was obnoxious the way everyone had smarmed up to him. It was like the entire ship was in love with his father.

And the old man loved them back. It showed in every interaction. Had it just been himself, William Adama would have taken every single gun on board and gone running to the enemy firing. It had been their lives that the commander had worried about. And his... and wasn't that a surprise?

He wasn't sure he deserved it. He wasn't sure he deserved to be CAG. He wasn't even really certain he deserved to be alive. So many were dead. So many had made impossible choices. Helo had given up his life to save someone he considered more worthy. Starbuck had nearly been killed saving his life. Poor Ripper had gone into the fight and been shot down like a sick dog.

And there was Zac of course. Zac who died in a stupid training accident two years earlier. Unbidden, his father's words from the ceremony came to him. Were the dead the lucky ones? Had the training accident not happened.... The odds were against Zac surviving. The only pilots who had survived the initial attack were the ones who had been in the older ships. Zac would have been in the initial wave and that meant Zac would still be dead. Or take it a step further, he thought suddenly. What if Zac hadn't gone to the Fleet Academy, but instead attended art school the way he had talked when they were little? He would have been planet side when the attack came. And he would still be dead, and that wasn't very lucky at all.

Zac had always liked the story about the lost colony. But then, Zac had always been the one to have flights of fancy. He could take a simple little story and turn it into an epic. Lee had never understood where that creativity had come from. Neither of his parents were particularly creative. The traits he most associated with his father were stern discipline and perhaps some dry wit on rare occasions. His mother, a gentle caring person, was, he could admit, not someone that easily handled her children's demands for stories and entertainment. Zac, however, had always been fascinated with stories and there had been a time where it seemed like all the younger boy did was read over the old legends. It had driven Lee crazy even though both of his parents had indulged it as a phase.

He looked at the pictures on the wall again. Ripper had a pretty wife, and three children, two boys and a girl. It had only been thirty six hours. He wondered if the wife and kids were huddled somewhere on their homeworld wondering if their father was going to come and rescue him. When he and Zac would go off wandering as kids and get lost, it was always their father who went tramping through the woods, calling for them. First there would be hugs, always. There was never anything particularly scary about being in the woods but when darkness fell, there was nothing more comforting than that hug, even though it was always followed by gruff words about responsibility. Such admonitions always flew over Zac, and within minutes he would clamoring for a piggy back ride that he usually got and a story. Despite himself, Lee smiled. He didn't much like the old man and he doubted that they would ever get past their differences, but he had been given a near idyllic childhood. He closed his eyes and thought back to one of the last times he remembered walking in the woods with his father. Zac was chattering over some new book of myths he had read, and Lee could almost feel his father's hand on his shoulder. It had been a long time since he had felt so safe.

The chair rocked forward. Myth or real, Earth was a long way away. He had work to do, and quarters to clean. His feet touched something under the desk and when he knelt down to look, he found a pair of soft shoes. It was a piece of Ripper's humanity that he wasn't sure he wanted to see. The deck floors were hard and Ripper hadn't been a young man. Not that hurting feet were a sign of age. His own feet were throbbing from too much walking on hard deck floors in dress uniform. He eyed the shoes and then matched them up against his feet. Another wry smile crossed his face. At least he filled Ripper's shoes in one way.