The Way We Live
His mother always said that military life was abnormal. Growing up, Lee Adama understood this to mean that wives and children were not meant to spend weeks, months, years of their lives without their husbands and fathers. That people were not supposed to move every two or three years, when their loved one was promoted and given a new posting. That children shouldn't assign team captains for pyramid practice based on whose Daddy had the highest rank or the most missions logged in a Viper.
It wasn't until he'd graduated from the academy and received his own first posting that he understood what she really meant to say: that the life of soldier was abnormal. That it changed you, made you change yourself, relentlessly demanded that you think and act and feel only in acceptable ways. That war made carefree youth into harsh, cynical men.
Kara is warm and soft and pliant when he crawls into her bunk at night. She rolls toward him, still asleep, and Lee settles onto his back so that she can cuddle up to his side. He slides his hand under her shirt to rest against her ribs, sighs, and closes his eyes.
He doesn't do this often, if he can help it. It's a bigger risk than he's used to taking.
He'll be back in his own bunk before she wakes up, and it's a fifty-fifty chance whether she'll remember this in the morning. Kara's a deep sleeper, and he knows that she wonders, some mornings, if she dreamt him or if he was really there, what he dreamt of, was she talking in her sleep again, did she tell him her dreams?
Her hand on his chest twitches. She murmurs something unintelligible and turns her face up into his neck. He isn't the only one dreaming tonight.
Lee's slides his hand down her side, to her hip, to pull her in close as he shifts onto his side. Stomach to stomach, legs tangled, they settle back into stillness.
Lee listens to her dream, and tries to rest.
Lee lives his life by a careful routine. Each moment of his day carefully planned for maximum efficiency with minimum effort. His CAG and his wingman always know where to find him.
His self-discipline is legendary. His commanding officers cite him as the ideal example to unruly rooks. Who, in turn, mock his efforts and ridicule his control.
The military rewards his consistency. Lee is on the fast track to promotion – he graduated from Officer's Training and War College top of his class – and will make Captain before his thirtieth birthday, Deputy CAG soon after, and CAG a year after that. His career is mapped out and set to paper. All he has to do is continue to do what he's always done, and he will have what he's always wanted.
If there is occasionally a small voice in the back of his mind that whispers something is missing, he does his best to ignore it. But his mother writes, like always – congratulations on his recent transfer, the latest from Zak and Kara, news about her friends' growing crop of grandchildren – and something begins to change inside him.
One night in his bunk, long after the rest of his squadron is asleep, his mother's voice whispers you're losing yourself and all the best parts of life are passing you by, and Lee listens very carefully. His mind replies it'll get easier once I'm a CAG, more freedom, less scrutiny, but his gut insists on get out while you still can.
He gets up in the morning, and goes about his routine, despite his lack of sleep. Run, shower, shave, eat, report for duty. He is ashamed of his momentary weakness and vows that it will not happen again. He has worked hard for this life, for the privilege of flying a Viper, for the honor of serving the Colonies.
That evening, there is a message from his father. Not a letter, but a video recording, marked urgent, hurried through official channels. The CAG offers Lee the use of his office to watch it, and Lee sits at the desk, sparing a moment to look around at what will be his one day. He plays the message, listens carefully, then pockets the disc. His commanding officer has already been notified about his leave.
He feels an alarming sense of panic wash over him; he doesn't know what to do in this situation. This isn't in the manual, so to speak. My brother is dead.
Lee lets his routine carry him through the next morning as if nothing is wrong, until the shuttle arrives to take him home.
He curls his body around hers, his chest pressed to her back and one leg tucked between hers. Lee breathes in the scent of her – soap and cigar smoke and an indefinable sweetness that is unique to Kara – and considers his nightmares with the sense of distance of someone who knows he is safe from them for the time being.
He is haunted by voices: people he knew on Caprica before the war, the people he's seen die, the people he's killed. The sounds blend together in his head, a morbid cacophony of all the moments he's lived. They sing loudest when he sleeps.
Kara shifts, pressing back into him, and she whispers his brother's name.
The war begins, and ends, before Lee even realizes he's supposed to be fighting. After the end of civilization, there is no structure to his days.
Time seems to pass in fits and pauses, and nothing is familiar. He has a new job which he never trained for, and he can't seem to keep up with the paperwork. He has a new bunk, without any of the comforts of the old one – his books, his photographs, the icon he promised his mother he would hang above his pillow even though he didn't share her faith. He flies with a new squadron, and he's memorized their call signs but can't always remember their names. He lives with them, twenty-four hours a day, but doesn't know any of them beyond the superficial acquaintance permitted by his rank and position.
Every time Lee thinks he has his feet under him, something happens. The Cylons. His father. The president. Starbuck. And the rules change, over and over again. He finds it difficult to maintain control.
Some days, the uncertainty eats at him. Makes it hard to breathe, hard to function. Hard to motivate his pilots and co-ordinate the patrols and complete his shifts in CIC.
So Lee does the only thing he can think of to cope: he abandons routine and immerses himself in ritual.
On one of her more wakeful nights, Lee climbs down from his own bunk and lies down beside her, not talking, not touching. He usually leaves her alone when she's like this – restless, remembering – because she likes to sort out her own head on her own time and in her own way. Barring that, she'll pick a fight, and Lee generally has no desire to wake their entire squadron with their verbal (or physical) sparring.
She glances at him briefly, looks away again, makes room and gives him some of her blanket. At length, he whispers, "Care to talk about it?"
"Do you?" quietly, but the sarcasm is still there, if he listens closely.
"No." He reverts to silence, rolls onto his side, facing away from her, and feels her arm wrap around his chest. He holds her hand against his heartbeat.
At length, they whisper together, "Zak."
He justifies his actions with the explanation that rituals are tiny elements of routine, of structure, of consistency. His gut acknowledges that these tiny elements of routine are sometimes the only things that tie him to people – to Kara – in a tangible way.
They fall back into old habits from their academy days quickly and quietly, and the desperation eases a little. Lee knows all of Kara's rituals, and decides that they must be his too, because most of them involve her interfering with his well-ordered life.
And where old rituals no longer suit, they create new ones: they pester his father until he joins them for lunch (it used to be Zak and Kara pestering Lee), she steals his soap out of his locker for her morning shower and he has to steal it back for his evening one (she used to borrow his physics text book), he tells her to "be safe" and she corrects him every time ("Gods, Lee, it's good hunting!").
He crawls into bed with her at night, after she falls asleep.
He's drowsing, half contemplating the duty roster for the next day and half lost in the underlying vibration the Galactica's engines create all around him, when Kara's hand on his arm startles him into wakefulness.
Lee isn't sure about the look in her eyes, or the tremor in her fingers, or the way she's suddenly altered their arrangement.
She pulls herself up into his bunk, elbows him in the ribs (accidentally, he thinks) as she climbs over him to get to the safety of the wall side, and drapes herself over him. Lee adjusts the blanket so she's warm, and waits. She wouldn't have come up here if she didn't want to share.
"I had a dream."
"A nightmare?"
"No."
He's curious. "About what?"
She lifts her head from his chest, and smiles a genuine smile, and for one horrible moment he is almost certain she is going to cry. And then –
"Us. Before Zak. Before things got complicated and I frakked everything up."
Lee takes a breath, buys himself a moment to think, and says, "This makes more sense now."
She lays her head back down on his chest.
He lets himself think in unacceptable ways, and realizes that the uncertainty of war has given him the option of finding himself again. That he doesn't have to be who and what everyone expects him to be, because he isn't going to be passed up for promotion or charged with conduct unbecoming so long as they need him as CAG.
He allows himself to consider things he'd denied himself years ago, endless future possibilities for his life. Nothing is mapped out anymore.
He questions the status quo. Emotion begins to replace the ambition, and he sets new goals: destroy the Cylons, keep Kara safe, put his brother's memory to rest.
He hears his mother's voice: the best years of your life are ahead of you.