Work Text:
Trying to Get Home
by Pixie Child
glitery_insane_ pixie_child@yahoo.ca
http://pixie.submystic.com
"Kara was family. You do whatever you have to do. Sometimes you break the rules."
"And if it was me down there instead?"
"You don't have to ask that."
"Are you sure?"
"If it were you, we'd never have left."
Commander Bill Adama says it with such strength, such force that Captain Lee 'Apollo' Adama knows it to be true. Because it is his commander's word, and that is what the Colonial Fleet is built in. It is what fuels those under his command and what keeps the men fighting through the sweat and tears, what keeps them sane for all the madness around them.
But underneath all that, beyond all the training and blind following, Lee looks at his father and a small part of him dies. That little bit of the small child he used to be; the tiny part of that boy that survived his dad always being absent, his parents' divorce, both his mother's and Zack's death, all the hell and torment they've been through since the Cylons attacked all those months ago... that little part of him that was still little Lee Adama breaks away and dies as he looks into his father's eyes and sees that it isn't true. If it were him, he realized with a heart stopping chill, Commander Adama would have ordered the pull out once the estimated oxygen tank ran out. It's a bitch to realize that there is someone that his father loves more than his own flesh and blood; to see there is someone who he was willing to risk not just his life but that of his son's and everyone else under his command to save, but to also know that he wouldn't have done the same for Lee... It's just too much.
It was bad enough to think that his father hadn't mourned Zack as much as he should have; that he dismissed what happened as pilot incompetence. But at least then he'd had the small comfort of Starbuck being around to tell him he was a fraking moron and asking how the hell he could believe that about his own father. Now? He's damned if even just thinking her name doesn't hurt like a mother fraker.
---
Life's a bitch. But the real bitch here isn't just life or even that his father loves someone more than him, it's that the person that the commander would choose over him is the same person he himself is in love with despite himself. Who just happens to be his dead brother's fiancé. Life may not imitate art, but it sure as hell mirrors the old stories about the gods.
"Holy- Galactica, the Cylon is now flying in formation with me, right above my head. This thing is acting weird. Hook me through."
The real fraked up thing, though, is that even as he feels more than a small amount of wonder as the Cylon Raptor flies overhead, he also feels that knot of bitterness grow inside of him to see she's returned.
"This thing is flying with some serious attitude."
---
He's relieved and bitter and just wants to kiss her before he smacks her into next year when they lift her out of her new toy and take her down to Sick Bay.
"Boy, when you take a souvenir, you don't screw around. Oh, my gods, you smell like a latrine."
"Mmm... you wanna give me a bath?" She laughs as they carry her out, and he loved her and hates her all the more for it.
They're really fraked up.
end