He'd come home for the summer and without Kara to keep him grounded, the rage boiled up again. This sort of thing hadn't really happened to him since he was little, when he'd responded to the divorce by trying to beat up as many school bullies as possible. He'd been too short though, and getting knocked around certainly hadn't made him feel any better.

Although fighting had had its high points. He hadn't been able to hurt his father directly, which had frustrated him to no end. Hurting people like him had been the next best thing. He couldn't do much to hurt his father directly at this point either, but indirectly was sounding better and better. To that end, he told his mother exactly what had happened on assignment day. She wired his dad and they had a screaming fight. It accomplished nothing, except to make his mother cry and remind Lee of the divorce.

Then Zak came home from school and started talking non-stop. When it eventually came out that Lee was going to be a pilot, Zak grinned and congratulated him.

"I always knew you'd see the light!"

"I haven't. Dad kind of saw the light for me."

"What do you mean?"

Zak loved him. He'd been unsure of many people's love over the years, but Zak had always hung on his every word. Lee was pretty sure that if Zak got on the wireless, his father would have a hard time remaining unmoved; after all, Zak was his favorite, his hope for the future, and an Adama worthy of the name. Lee was also pretty sure that if he told Zak about assignment day in all its terrible detail, Zak probably would make a call.

In the end he couldn't do it. Not to Zak. Zak was a child, for all his new height and broadened shoulders. Lee wasn't going to take his father away from him. Nothing was worth that.

"Nothing. It's just, I wasn't planning on being a pilot, and I haven't put in any sim time, really. I'm going to need you to go to the arcades with me this summer. A lot."

Zak looked like his birthday had come early, and Lee thought that maybe the summer wasn't going to be so bad after all.

-------------

Then he actually went to the arcade with Zak, and the 12 year old boys who frequented the place laughed at him, and even Zak was kind of wincing at how bad he was.

"Lee, you've gotta relax. If you've got a death-grip on the stick it slows your reaction time."

"I really don't think my reaction time matters when I'm still having a hard time keeping left and right straight. Do you think there's possibly a way to pilot these things without having to turn upside-down? It just kind of seems like something that nature definitely did not intend."

"That's the beauty of it! Defying gravity! Come on, Lee. Let's do the obstacle course again. Relax a bit more and I'll bet you'll make it at least to the halfway mark without crashing into anything."

If it had been Kara saying that, it would have been said with absolute derision. Zak was sincere though, earnest enough that it made Lee cringe. He could appreciate, abstractly, the idea of flying being beautiful. How could he not, after having seen Kara in the sims? He couldn't feel it, however, and what he was doing was certainly a far cry from mastery and grace.

--------------

Despite how much Lee loved having his kid brother around, the flying was draining on him, to the point where he was almost relieved to drop Zak off at a training camp for a few weeks. It was of those pre-academy deals that Lee had never bothered with because they were designed for those who wanted to be pilots.

The officer checking Zak in was a woman about his mother's age, with dull blue eyes and hair the color of straw. The only reason he'd paid her any attention at all was because of a vicious kick she'd aimed at one of the camp cats when it prowled under her table looking for shade. The cat was fine; apparently used to this particular woman, but it had put Lee on edge. Not that that took much these days.

The woman was obviously unhappy, utterly bored with her appointed task, a sharp contrast to the excited would-be cadets around her. Lee was going to have to be careful for the next few years. If being a pilot didn't agree with him, or if his plan failed, he didn't want to end up like that.

He turned away. He loved watching people, and she was the only one standing still enough for observation, but even so, he wasn't interested in studying bitterness. He had enough of that of his own.

And she handed Zak some papers and said in a monotone, "Good afternoon, I'm Socrata Thrace, welcome to Caprica Prep" and Lee went from uninterested to interested in a hurry. His head snapped up, and he knew he was staring, but he couldn't help it. She looked nothing like Kara.

Sure, there might have been some resemblance in the hair and the nose, but it still wasn't enough to convince him that this tired, apathetic woman was in any way related to his friend.

"Do you want something?"

Ah. Direct to the point of being rude. Maybe they were related after all.

"Do you have a daughter?"

He was hoping she'd say no, but that would require something to be going right for a change, so clearly he shouldn't have gotten his hopes up.

"Ah. At the Academy are you? Kara's your fair-weather friend is she? Or is she sleeping with you?"

"Neither," Lee said, and was surprised to hear his voice come out as cold and sharp as the woman in front of him.

"If you say so. You'd best stay away from her though. She's not worth knowing, and nothing but trouble."

Lee almost said, I can see where she gets it from but the opposite was true. He had no idea how someone as alive as Kara could have been raised by someone like this.

"Ungrateful brat," Kara's mother continued. "She didn't even tell me where she was going for the summer. I got her into the Academy, and this is how she repays me."

She's on another planet, Lee wanted to say. I didn't want her to go, but now I think I understand why she did. Instead he turned away and made sure Zak had completed his forms.

"Goodbye Medea," he told Kara's mother. He didn't turn around to see whether or not she had caught the reference. For a moment, he wished the gods were real, if only so that they could smite Socrata Thrace. Then he wondered if she was the one who had taught Kara the names of the pantheon, and he wished he hadn't thought of religion at all. His childhood would have been ten times worse if his father had had the force of the gods behind him. He couldn't even begin to imagine what Kara's would have been like.

He had a sudden urge to write to her, tell her that he'd seen her mother. Let her know somehow that he understood now. That he would have gone away too rather than be near a woman like that. Except if Kara got mail she'd probably assume that it was because he wasn't coming back to the Academy. Besides, he wasn't quite sure what to say. "I saw your mother. She's a bitch" might not go over well, and he couldn't think of any other way to say it.