BSG fic: Kyparissus
He stands in the corner farthest from the desk, folds his arms, and wills himself not to curl into the doorjamb.
“Is it true?” Lee glares at his father’s collar. There’s a moment of silence longer than all the shore leaves of the last two years - he would pick this week to come home, Lee thinks - but it’s still over too soon. “Is Zak lying to me?”
“Zak should-“Lee has spent sixteen years on the defensive. It’s more habit than fear, and today he is foolishly brave. “What’s it to you?”
His father glares blankly past him, eyeing the door as if it’s something new and distasteful. “Nothing. You’re still my son.” It’s the right thing to say on paper, but all Lee hears is the grinding effort behind a few short syllables. He’s not sure which of them is more surprised when his father speaks again. “You should talk to your Uncle Sam.”
He chokes back a laugh that feels more like a sob. “I’m not looking for pointers.” Maybe that was a joke, maybe it was some way to hit back; either way, it falls flat and his father’s face sags further, and if he doesn’t end this moment he’ll be in it forever. “Are we done here?”
“Looks that way, son.” And he’s dismissed.
He thinks he hears something about leave the door open, but he’s already kicked it behind him. The slam is duller and less satisfying than he’d hoped.
*
Lee doesn’t know what he expected, exactly. Maybe some deeper connection, some self-discovery, at least a chance to defy the way they‘re usually tolerated but rarely welcomed. But they’re just another couple in most ways, and when the summer ends Marcus goes back to Geminon for school. Lee doesn’t see him off.
Two weeks later his father leaves for real. He wants to call Marcus, to talk to someone, but that would break the façade of silent respectability his grandfather bought for them all. Anyway, Zak needs him, and so Lee’s world shrinks until it collapses in on itself.
*
There aren’t yet many bars, where people can sit and pretend not to worry together instead of in their own rooms. He doesn’t have a shift before tomorrow’s briefing, and the president smiles and hustles Lee and Billy to the other end of Colonial One.
Billy is that rare thing these days--an acquaintance. Lee usually finds himself surrounded by colleagues closer than family, or utter strangers parked across the stars. He and Billy skate over the ice, pointedly silent about how neither of them can bring themselves to leave her alone otherwise.
The ice breaks once they arrive--and it’s a real bar, with pool tables and dartboards and even a makeshift karaoke setup. A small handful of ragged professionals sit in a corner, transcribing old lyrics by hand.
“How’d this place get set up?”
Billy shrugs. “Roslin. Re-issued press credentials, including right to live on the ship, indefinitely, in exchange for communal use of equipment after office hours.”
“To each according to his needs, from each according to our entertainment equipment desires?”
“Not really the best place on the fleet to paraphrase Zarek.”
Oh frak, he’d sworn he’d never give an inch on that bastard, and he’s just done so in front of all the press in the world.
But their next round arrives, and Billy gives him an out. “But a stopped clock’s right twice a day. Greater economic equality, less exploiting the Sagittarons. I could drink to that.”
He nods politely to the reporters who periodically come over to press Billy on Roslin’s crime prevention policies, and surprises himself by chatting with the bartender about mixer substitutes instead of staring down into his third drink courtesy of the press corps. Billy is the voice of and way to the president, and he’s young and charming and sometimes brings new friends. Of course he doesn’t pay for drinks.
Lee watches Billy meet those social expectations he so hates on Galactica. Tonight is a breather. He gestures toward the makeshift table in the center of the room. “They let you win at pool around here, too?”
Billy scoffs, “They wish,” and nods Lee over to the game. Billy, the pasty president’s aide, has just thrown down a dare with the CAG of the Fleet. It’s a trivial, non-catastrophic choice Lee makes just for himself when he pulls up a long surplus bar and throws ten cubits on the table.
Billy isn’t half bad, which is pretty unfortunate for Lee, who was half bad when he’d used to play, back on solid ground. This is something he can afford to lose, though, and that’s worth all the money in his pockets. Which, predictably, he runs through, and Billy’s the one who buys the last round.
They’re arguing the merits of economic restructuring, Billy waving his drink around for emphasis, when the inevitable splash falls across his chest. “Frak! This is my last blue tie!”
Lee snorts. “And when we run out of paisley, the Cylons have won?”
“Damn right!” They retreat before the casualty count climbs. Billy chats and Lee laughs as they make their way in the direction of the living quarters and deck, until they stop at Billy’s door.
“How long until your shuttle leaves?”
“Might have an hour.”
Billy nods. “Then again, we might not even have that.” Billy is calm, but the immediacy of his statement clicks something into focus. Lee doesn’t know if he’s the one who pulls Billy in first, or if Billy--the confident one, the perceptive one who knew what the president was doing when she threw them out tonight--wraps one hand across Lee’s neck and the other behind his head.
Lee realizes that he has not been in the cockpit all evening. It is a deep relief.
There’s a President, and a bar, and possibility flooding his abdomen. There’s something to live for.
There’s an hour.
*
He hadn’t argued against R&R time, but he hadn’t asked for it either. He looks down and shuts out the stars on the shuttle ride over to Cloud 9. Skulls cracks a joke about not blowing the week’s stipend on hookers and fleet wheat, and Racetrack snaps at him to focus on the landing.
He arches his eyebrows and scoffs, just acknowledgment enough that the CAG can take a joke, even a bad one at his expense, keeps up the charade that anything could seem particularly funny. Pretense atop charade, all these false Lee Adamas he’s never been particularly taken with, seem to have floated off into the universe and its endless nothing.
He’s never quite figured why there’s a military wing, as though Galactica’s sick bay’s cousin married up and became a solarium on Cloud 9, but he doesn’t criticize or even really look at his room when he drops his bags and heads for the bar.
It’s the evening. Tomorrow he will figure out how to rest and relax, but first he has to dull his mind enough to sleep. This bar is better-lit than the one on - the one he doesn’t go to anymore.
A young man sits down next to him, and Lee doesn’t quite ignore him, which seems to be the only encouragement necessary. “Hey there. I’m Sean.”
For a moment he considers lying, being Ryan or Jordan or anyone else, but their lives are smaller than small talk; little white lies do nothing but float through the recycled air and break into dust. In any event, Sean is primed to smile patiently and agree with whatever he says.
He settles on Lee, just because nothing else appeals, and buys the next round.
Sean doesn’t seem much more interested in anything other than escape, either. They chat out of habit, neither of them saying anything particularly interesting, but somehow the ritual feels familiar. It’s not enough to be called comfort, but it’s not nothing, either. As soon as it becomes decorous, they leave, wordlessly acknowledging that Lee’s bunk is nearer.
This is a piece of himself he recognizes, and he clings to it and resents it as he tips his head up for the first time since. He opens his mouth, and doesn’t breathe.
*
The next morning, Dee arrives.
The next night, Billy dies.
Lee knows it was none of his business either way. It’s still none of his business when she crawls into his bunk two weeks later, and he pretends to be asleep when he hears her stifle a sob.
Respecting her privacy means preserving his own, he tells himself. It’s enough to keep him still, but not enough to let him doze off.
*
He never quite knows what trips off the spats. One or both of them usually backs off quickly, and it pushes them into a pile of mundane domestic precedents. They let the junior officers clean for them, but they do their own laundry. If the Admiral gives them the same night off, they all have dinner in his quarters, and Lee nods and smiles a lot while saying very little. Not like his parents, all show for the neighbors and explosive fights and icy silences at home. They are the politic, respectful picture they make; he’s lucky, he knows, even as they snipe.
What he really doesn’t know is how this one--months into their marriage--turns into a fight.
Dee is standing at attention, still too poised to lift even a finger toward him even as she actually raises her voice, and he’s pressed by the simultaneous urges to tear off and button up the duty blues clinging to him by the static of a long day where they’d lost a few pilots.
She knows what kind of day it’s been - what kind of day it always is - but she hasn’t quite given up, and spits out. “Is this about Kara?”
It is about Kara, sometimes. He loves her; he’s under no illusions about that. He wonders if what he loves most is her very impossibility, the knowledge that whatever else they may be together, they will never have this moment-when she realizes she cannot be his everything.
“What? Do you want it to be about us? You want me to say, you’re the problem?”
“Am I? Am I not enough for you?” Her contempt for both of them hangs in the air.
The only wrong here is this mockery of the truth, he knows, but Lee is too tired to do anything but lengthen the list of his sins. “You mean the world to me, Dee.”
Neither of them points out that their worlds are ash.
*
He sits alone at Joe’s most nights, wearing his uniform so people know not to try to get to know him; stays busy flashing around his wedding ring. But the Chief’s safe, good for a laugh, and Majors don’t get to fraternize much, so Lee calls him over. “Hey, Chief.”
The Chief’s been thinking lately too. “Why is it so frakkin' hard?” As if Lee is somehow the expert on simplicity. Well, of a sort, he supposes, he knows enough to wave over for another round.
Frakkin’ Cylons seems too obvious an answer; besides, that would let the skin jobs into these tiny sanctuaries where they can at least share some ordinary misery.
“Why can't we just get back to normal?” the Chief says.
Lee wonders if there’s even a back to get to, or if time and past themselves were destroyed with the Colonies along with normal. Then again, he has rank; he has a nice stable marriage to a wife who wasn’t first his brother’s; he has only cool resentment rather than red-hot rage and terror between himself and his father. Twelve Colonies be damned, this is as normal as he was ever going to get. But the Chief doesn’t want to hear about all that, so he scoffs, “Normal. What is normal anyway?”
For Tyrol, probably the kids and dog and white frakkin’ picket fence. And the obligatory girl - who, for Tyrol, was a broken toaster he’d just spent months of his life killing over and over. “Chief, you can tell me if I'm out of line here, but, um... do you ever think about Sharon? “ Chief’s hiding too, though, face distorted as though searching his whiskey for clues.
If what, he asks himself, and locks his mind down almost as tightly as the Chief’s shuttered eyes even before the Chief says no and stalks out.
Three people in one day. That’s a record even for Lee.
Maybe it’s the clarity of Chief’s dream that lets him tell the lie--that he knows what that dream is. Lee only knows that his doesn’t end with him alone. So, he forces himself home to Dee before last call.
He twists his ring, turns it upside-down and slips it over his thumbnail. He forgets how it slips through his fingers - like Kara, like time, like the illusion of normal. He’s standing over a vent, and he’s gasping for breath.
*
Dee had made a point of being gone already. She’ dropped some of his things on a pile on the bunk, maybe just to make him face the fact that she’d been here.
It’s not even as if she’d needed to separate their things. They’d never had to build a home, with wine glasses and end tables to fight over now. Lee’s stomach swoops, heavy with the unknown, and he goes to his foot locker more to distract himself than pull out his few sets of fatigues and tanks.
He tries not to let his own words ring in his ears, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of, and doesn’t know if he meant himself then, or himself now.
It would have been pretty easy to ignore - those few things that were theirs before the wars had been destroyed, his on the Atlantia and hers on the Pegasus. The constant change has suited Lee in some ways, he thinks brittlely, he has never had to wonder what he was leaving behind.
He thinks for a brief moment about leaving it all, purposefully making a mess and taking nothing but the dead man’s shirt pulling at his shoulders. APOLLO WAS HERE. Whoever that was.
But he takes everything. He can imagine some use for everything in the barter economy, maybe he won’t be stuck forever being Tom Zarek’s pet Adama on the Astral Queen.
He feels the intercom buzz before he hears it. His first thought is that Starbuck will organize them while he finds his fatigues, packed as they were at the bottom of his bag, but Starbuck is gone. The realization reminds Lee who he is, that no matter what else they’re going to lose some today, and it’s on him to make sure it’s as few as possible.
Some things he can’t abandon, he realizes as he drops has full canvas bag by the door, and he’s grateful for the thought.
*
He tries to keep moving on Colonial One, especially during the evenings. He avoids the press and quorum rooms, of course, but there are other corners of the ship and he’s got to learn his way around this new life.
Bright, shiny futures might be overrated, as he’d told Kara once before they’d tried to lose themselves in each other instead of the sky. But realistic new beginnings, slow transitions to futures soft and dim at the edges - well, their eyes have all adjusted. Other things can happen too, in the dim; the biases of the old worlds have been lurking in the dark, but they’ll also have to face the florescent light. New perspective.
They could do a lot of things better, Lee thinks. He thinks of Zarek and Shevon; he thinks back to Marcus’ Geminon parents shipping him off to a military academy to cleanse him of Lee.
He’s carried away by these thoughts, and he stops moving on autopilot. It’d always worked on Galactica, but here, he’s lost when he’s not focusing.
He’s a Delegate to the Quorum, and he still can’t find his own home, so he’s a bit embarrassed to trace back his steps to the last lit bunk he’d passed. “Excuse me-“
The man inside looks up from his book, but acts friendly enough. “Hey there. I’m Dean.”
“I’m Lee,” he answers, clumsily and unnecessarily, he knows, but he feels himself smile because for a moment, it’s the truth.