A Coin for Charon
Rating: PG
Characters: Lee, angst
Spoilers: Season 2.12 “Resurrection Ship II”
Disclaimer: I know I don't own these characters, but Ron Moore said we could write fanfic, so there!
Note: Written for the http://www.livejournal.com/community/worldstage_fic/ challenge and woefully late. An earlier version of this was helpfully proofread by widget285 and lilyvalley73 who were wonderfully patient while I wrestled with the story's demons. I don't think I succeeded, but I'm sending it out there.
"What's gone and what's past help
Should be past grief." (William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale)
It was full dark when Caroline Adama and her son met with the funeral director to confirm the plans for graveside services tomorrow at the military cemetery. Lost in her misery, Caroline stared at the photo of Zak they'd brought for the ceremony. Lee's lips twisted at the irony of full service honours for a young man who should have washed out of flight school and he had to ask the woman to repeat her last question.
"Do you have the ghost money?" She looked down at a checklist and then turned her professionally concerned gaze back upon him. "It's customary, even in closed casket burials. We'll provide it in any case, but most families want to handle it themselves. Any coin at all will do. It's strictly symbolic: the traditional payment for the newly dead to be ferried across the Acheron."
"You mean a coin for Charon?" Lee asked.
"Yes," she said. As he continued silent, her gaze returned to the checklist. "We'll handle that, then. . . ."
"No," Lee said sharply. "No," he repeated more softly, "I'll take care of it."
He fished around in his pocket for the offering. For some reason, it seemed vitally important that he be the one to pay this price. He'd failed Zak in so many ways: to fail him after death felt unbearable.
The blood rushed in Lee's ears as he sought for the change he was sure he carried. His heart rate didn't slow until his hand closed on a cool, smooth coin. He pulled out the cubit and pressed it into the older woman's hand. "Zak's fiance is pretty observant." Lee thought of the times he'd seen her whisper a prayer to the Lords of Kobol when she thought he and Zak weren't watching. Not that Zak would be watching anything anymore.
"Many of us are," she said, taking the coin and sealing it in an envelope from her clipboard. "That's everything, then, Lieutenant Adama, Mrs. Adama. I'll see you tomorrow."
Lee nodded and, taking his mother by the elbow, slowly strode out the door, blinking the dampness in his eyes away and looking up at the nearly invisible stars in the city-bright sky. He had to be strong and not give in to the grief and anger that surged inside. Whether he shouted or sobbed, it would do no good. He had no brother anymore and he might as well have no father, but his mother needed him and he clung to that while, in his free hand, he turned a single cubit coin over and over again.
***
Since the funeral, Lee had established a habit he refused to recognize, always carrying a single cubit coin. In pyramid games he'd stop at least one coin shy of emptying his pockets, establishing a reputation for care in play that spilled over into other areas of his life. He was promoted the following year to Captain and the first thing he transferred to his new uniform was that single coin. It followed him from posting to leave and back again - not necessarily the same coin, but always one. Keeping the same coin would imply devotion and Lee couldn't summon belief in the gods anymore. It was always just there. Just some change in his pocket, that's all. He never admitted to himself that it was a careful hedge: another coin for Charon, should the need arise.
***
When the world came to an end, Lee spared a moment to think of that cubit coin, carefully tucked along with his ID papers in the thigh pocket of his flight suit. He wondered what the priests and priestesses would say about the billions lost and whether there were enough coins in the ruination of the colonies to pay all their fares.
***
As they prepared to honour Galatica's dead, Lee walked among the rows of bodies. Ahead of him he saw a quiet, uniformed figure pausing at each body, murmuring and kneeling down. Catching up with the man, Lee saw he carried a small lockbox.
"Captain." He stood smartly to salute.
"At ease, Sergeant."
Lee looked across the expanse of still forms that surrounded them.
"Need help?"
"Sir?"
"With the coins," Lee explained.
"Oh, I couldn't ask, sir."
Lee managed to produce a small, mirthless grin. "You didn't ask, Sergeant. I offered." He held out his hands, accepting a flow of clattering metal before he turned to the next row of bodies. The coins felt familiar in his hands.
To his left, he heard the sergeant murmur ritual phrases he half-recognized: one of the prayers offered at Zak's funeral.
***
After the accident on the flight deck, Lee found himself back amongst the ranks of the dead, preparing for yet another hollow ceremony. What use, he wondered, were these coins for bodies that would never be buried, simply consigned to the cold expanse of space? He chose not to pursue that line of thought as he knelt beside each of the fallen pilots and left them with the cold comfort of the ferryman's price.
***
As the hours counted down on Kara's oxygen reserves, Lee lay beneath a Viper, desperately trying to clean out enough grit and debris to ready the fighter for another search pass.
A lone coin lay beneath his flight notes in the pouch on his thigh, burning through the heavy material right to his bone.
Lee thought of the devotional figures tucked away in Kara's locker. He recalled those overheard prayers. One part of him urged that he drop that coin in the dusty atmosphere of the barren rock they were fruitlessly searching. The other part denied that impulse, knowing it would signal the end of hope.
He gave the wrench a last yank, loosening the coupling and sending a cascade of glittering particles showering down on the flight deck. In his head, a clock ticked down the merciless count in a rhythm that matched the rote words of prayers for the dead. Each clatter of metal from the tools on deck seemed the sound of coins clinking in the lockbox.
There would be no coin for Kara. He willed that thought away.
***
As the CAG, Lee had the duty of clearing out lockers of pilots "no longer on duty." So he stood in the junior pilots' bunkroom, thankful no one else was there to watch while he emptied out the meagre possessions of another rookie who hadn't survived their assault on the asteroid.
Uniform clothes he tossed into the hamper. Civvies and personal possessions he tucked into a box in the utility cabinet. Maybe, in a few weeks, his bunkmates and buddies would be up to the task of searching out a memento. Far back on the shelf, Lee found a few stray cubits, obviously forgotten. He tucked the small coins into his pocket: one for each of the pilots they'd lost yesterday.
Tomorrow there'd be patrols lined up to escort the mining and refinery personnel to the asteroid. He'd invoke his privilege, pencil in his name on the roster and secure the coins in his flightsuit pocket. It wouldn't ease the guilt, he knew, but having paid the ghost money might make him feel less of a hypocrite when he mouthed the necessary platitudes - "they knew the risks," "they're with the gods now" - to the others under his command.
***
Lee sat on the edge of the bunk, trying desperately to look at anything except the blood on his hands. His fingers longed for the comforting feel of a coin between them but he had neither liberty nor inclination to follow that through.
He didn't want to think about the next payments he'd have to make to Charon. He didn't want to have his last words with his father be prayers murmured over a cold corpse. He didn't want to have to send yet another coin out into the stars for a friend - Gods, Kara - for one more pilot who never returned.
Lee turned his head to the side, blinking to clear his vision. Again, his fingers twitched for the touch of metal.
When Colonel Tigh entered the brig, escorted by two marines, Lee seized the opportunity for distraction and action. Parole was easy if it gave him purpose again. His marine guard shadowed him to quarters where he quickly readied for battle. Blessedly clean hands confirmed, unobserved, the coins in his flightsuit pocket before he secured the last seals and pulled on his helmet. The cold calm of command settled over Lee as he hurtled into the fray. He threaded his Viper through the chaos of combat, dispatching Cylon raiders and deploying his pilots in defense of the battlestar and her fragile charges.
At least fighting provided the illusion of hope.
***
Lee knew it was too good to be true when he heard word of his father's recovery. And when Kara returned from Caprica with no more visible damage than a weary grin, he knew there'd be a price to pay. A high price.
Yet, for all of that, he was caught off-guard when Elosha was killed. He watched as President Roslin, resolute despite her exhaustion and grief, slipped a coin he'd offered up between the woman's motionless lips. And as the body count on Kobol ramped up, Lee watched as the bodies of Zarek's men were less ceremoniously dispatched. He helped roll the bodies into an empty tomb near Athena's. No one asked for a coin for their crossing and Lee, sure as Hades, didn't offer.
All he had was one coin left. He knew, in some quiet part of himself, that if he asked, Captain Kelly or one of the other pilots would provide. But not asking was, in some way, staving off his links to the deaths around him.
Captain Adama was, regrettably, too busy to assist in any more of the funeral preparations, although he continued to clear out the lockers and share out the possessions of each pilot who died under his command. It just all became easier to endure if he no longer had to send them off, personally; to feel their silent, accusing gaze, like those of his brother, the priestess or the countless others he'd consigned to the afterlife. It was simpler just to walk in for the ceremony and walk out: one more uniform in a series of the same.
He rarely touched the last coin, anymore, but, somehow, it weighed all the heavier.
***
In the end, it wasn’t his father or Kara being on board the assassination attempt that was hardest to handle and it wasn’t even learning that Laura Roslin had been the mastermind. Lee admired the president, but he had no illusions: she played politics for keeps.
No, what bothered him was the realization that he was entirely on the outside of this. No one here, from the president through his father to his best friend, really trusted him. Fair enough. Lee had never been quiet about his conscience. But to realize that he was so far removed from the ones he'd once thought closest? The ones for whom, individually and collectively, he'd sacrificed and would sacrifice so much? That stung. Or it would have, had Lee any more strength to spend on feeling.
Instead, all of Lee’s strength was reserved for planning the mission against the Cylon ship. He drew himself more and more within the icy circle of preparation and focus necessary to carry out the delicate task. Everyone around him receded into the distance: pilots, mechanics, commanders and politicians. He was a pilot with a purpose and he let that consume him, utterly.
And when the Blackbird launched, he poured himself entirely into the destruction of the FTL drive, so much so that, looking back to confirm the hit, he never saw the other ship until it was too late.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness, holding one hand over the pinpoint leak in his suit while the battle raged in the distance around him, Lee found his other hand resting upon the thigh pocket holding his now-useless flightplan and a single coin.
***
Lee floated in the water. Nearby he heard the gentle whisk of a watercraft approaching, the regular murmur of a pole pushing a shallow vessel across a river. His hands stretched out in the water, seeking balance, seeking something. Beneath his fingers, he felt a small slip of metal. A coin. He heard the ferry coming closer.
***
A scatter of Viper fire flared in the distance. Everything seemed immeasurably far away, impossibly unimportant. Lee’s left hand drifted away from the hole and the last of the oxygen began to slip away. His right hand remained where it was, guarding the coin that would soon be Charon’s.
Characters: Lee, angst
Spoilers: Season 2.12 “Resurrection Ship II”
Disclaimer: I know I don't own these characters, but Ron Moore said we could write fanfic, so there!
Note: Written for the http://www.livejournal.com/community/worldstage_fic/ challenge and woefully late. An earlier version of this was helpfully proofread by widget285 and lilyvalley73 who were wonderfully patient while I wrestled with the story's demons. I don't think I succeeded, but I'm sending it out there.
"What's gone and what's past help
Should be past grief." (William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale)
It was full dark when Caroline Adama and her son met with the funeral director to confirm the plans for graveside services tomorrow at the military cemetery. Lost in her misery, Caroline stared at the photo of Zak they'd brought for the ceremony. Lee's lips twisted at the irony of full service honours for a young man who should have washed out of flight school and he had to ask the woman to repeat her last question.
"Do you have the ghost money?" She looked down at a checklist and then turned her professionally concerned gaze back upon him. "It's customary, even in closed casket burials. We'll provide it in any case, but most families want to handle it themselves. Any coin at all will do. It's strictly symbolic: the traditional payment for the newly dead to be ferried across the Acheron."
"You mean a coin for Charon?" Lee asked.
"Yes," she said. As he continued silent, her gaze returned to the checklist. "We'll handle that, then. . . ."
"No," Lee said sharply. "No," he repeated more softly, "I'll take care of it."
He fished around in his pocket for the offering. For some reason, it seemed vitally important that he be the one to pay this price. He'd failed Zak in so many ways: to fail him after death felt unbearable.
The blood rushed in Lee's ears as he sought for the change he was sure he carried. His heart rate didn't slow until his hand closed on a cool, smooth coin. He pulled out the cubit and pressed it into the older woman's hand. "Zak's fiance is pretty observant." Lee thought of the times he'd seen her whisper a prayer to the Lords of Kobol when she thought he and Zak weren't watching. Not that Zak would be watching anything anymore.
"Many of us are," she said, taking the coin and sealing it in an envelope from her clipboard. "That's everything, then, Lieutenant Adama, Mrs. Adama. I'll see you tomorrow."
Lee nodded and, taking his mother by the elbow, slowly strode out the door, blinking the dampness in his eyes away and looking up at the nearly invisible stars in the city-bright sky. He had to be strong and not give in to the grief and anger that surged inside. Whether he shouted or sobbed, it would do no good. He had no brother anymore and he might as well have no father, but his mother needed him and he clung to that while, in his free hand, he turned a single cubit coin over and over again.
***
Since the funeral, Lee had established a habit he refused to recognize, always carrying a single cubit coin. In pyramid games he'd stop at least one coin shy of emptying his pockets, establishing a reputation for care in play that spilled over into other areas of his life. He was promoted the following year to Captain and the first thing he transferred to his new uniform was that single coin. It followed him from posting to leave and back again - not necessarily the same coin, but always one. Keeping the same coin would imply devotion and Lee couldn't summon belief in the gods anymore. It was always just there. Just some change in his pocket, that's all. He never admitted to himself that it was a careful hedge: another coin for Charon, should the need arise.
***
When the world came to an end, Lee spared a moment to think of that cubit coin, carefully tucked along with his ID papers in the thigh pocket of his flight suit. He wondered what the priests and priestesses would say about the billions lost and whether there were enough coins in the ruination of the colonies to pay all their fares.
***
As they prepared to honour Galatica's dead, Lee walked among the rows of bodies. Ahead of him he saw a quiet, uniformed figure pausing at each body, murmuring and kneeling down. Catching up with the man, Lee saw he carried a small lockbox.
"Captain." He stood smartly to salute.
"At ease, Sergeant."
Lee looked across the expanse of still forms that surrounded them.
"Need help?"
"Sir?"
"With the coins," Lee explained.
"Oh, I couldn't ask, sir."
Lee managed to produce a small, mirthless grin. "You didn't ask, Sergeant. I offered." He held out his hands, accepting a flow of clattering metal before he turned to the next row of bodies. The coins felt familiar in his hands.
To his left, he heard the sergeant murmur ritual phrases he half-recognized: one of the prayers offered at Zak's funeral.
***
After the accident on the flight deck, Lee found himself back amongst the ranks of the dead, preparing for yet another hollow ceremony. What use, he wondered, were these coins for bodies that would never be buried, simply consigned to the cold expanse of space? He chose not to pursue that line of thought as he knelt beside each of the fallen pilots and left them with the cold comfort of the ferryman's price.
***
As the hours counted down on Kara's oxygen reserves, Lee lay beneath a Viper, desperately trying to clean out enough grit and debris to ready the fighter for another search pass.
A lone coin lay beneath his flight notes in the pouch on his thigh, burning through the heavy material right to his bone.
Lee thought of the devotional figures tucked away in Kara's locker. He recalled those overheard prayers. One part of him urged that he drop that coin in the dusty atmosphere of the barren rock they were fruitlessly searching. The other part denied that impulse, knowing it would signal the end of hope.
He gave the wrench a last yank, loosening the coupling and sending a cascade of glittering particles showering down on the flight deck. In his head, a clock ticked down the merciless count in a rhythm that matched the rote words of prayers for the dead. Each clatter of metal from the tools on deck seemed the sound of coins clinking in the lockbox.
There would be no coin for Kara. He willed that thought away.
***
As the CAG, Lee had the duty of clearing out lockers of pilots "no longer on duty." So he stood in the junior pilots' bunkroom, thankful no one else was there to watch while he emptied out the meagre possessions of another rookie who hadn't survived their assault on the asteroid.
Uniform clothes he tossed into the hamper. Civvies and personal possessions he tucked into a box in the utility cabinet. Maybe, in a few weeks, his bunkmates and buddies would be up to the task of searching out a memento. Far back on the shelf, Lee found a few stray cubits, obviously forgotten. He tucked the small coins into his pocket: one for each of the pilots they'd lost yesterday.
Tomorrow there'd be patrols lined up to escort the mining and refinery personnel to the asteroid. He'd invoke his privilege, pencil in his name on the roster and secure the coins in his flightsuit pocket. It wouldn't ease the guilt, he knew, but having paid the ghost money might make him feel less of a hypocrite when he mouthed the necessary platitudes - "they knew the risks," "they're with the gods now" - to the others under his command.
***
Lee sat on the edge of the bunk, trying desperately to look at anything except the blood on his hands. His fingers longed for the comforting feel of a coin between them but he had neither liberty nor inclination to follow that through.
He didn't want to think about the next payments he'd have to make to Charon. He didn't want to have his last words with his father be prayers murmured over a cold corpse. He didn't want to have to send yet another coin out into the stars for a friend - Gods, Kara - for one more pilot who never returned.
Lee turned his head to the side, blinking to clear his vision. Again, his fingers twitched for the touch of metal.
When Colonel Tigh entered the brig, escorted by two marines, Lee seized the opportunity for distraction and action. Parole was easy if it gave him purpose again. His marine guard shadowed him to quarters where he quickly readied for battle. Blessedly clean hands confirmed, unobserved, the coins in his flightsuit pocket before he secured the last seals and pulled on his helmet. The cold calm of command settled over Lee as he hurtled into the fray. He threaded his Viper through the chaos of combat, dispatching Cylon raiders and deploying his pilots in defense of the battlestar and her fragile charges.
At least fighting provided the illusion of hope.
***
Lee knew it was too good to be true when he heard word of his father's recovery. And when Kara returned from Caprica with no more visible damage than a weary grin, he knew there'd be a price to pay. A high price.
Yet, for all of that, he was caught off-guard when Elosha was killed. He watched as President Roslin, resolute despite her exhaustion and grief, slipped a coin he'd offered up between the woman's motionless lips. And as the body count on Kobol ramped up, Lee watched as the bodies of Zarek's men were less ceremoniously dispatched. He helped roll the bodies into an empty tomb near Athena's. No one asked for a coin for their crossing and Lee, sure as Hades, didn't offer.
All he had was one coin left. He knew, in some quiet part of himself, that if he asked, Captain Kelly or one of the other pilots would provide. But not asking was, in some way, staving off his links to the deaths around him.
Captain Adama was, regrettably, too busy to assist in any more of the funeral preparations, although he continued to clear out the lockers and share out the possessions of each pilot who died under his command. It just all became easier to endure if he no longer had to send them off, personally; to feel their silent, accusing gaze, like those of his brother, the priestess or the countless others he'd consigned to the afterlife. It was simpler just to walk in for the ceremony and walk out: one more uniform in a series of the same.
He rarely touched the last coin, anymore, but, somehow, it weighed all the heavier.
***
In the end, it wasn’t his father or Kara being on board the assassination attempt that was hardest to handle and it wasn’t even learning that Laura Roslin had been the mastermind. Lee admired the president, but he had no illusions: she played politics for keeps.
No, what bothered him was the realization that he was entirely on the outside of this. No one here, from the president through his father to his best friend, really trusted him. Fair enough. Lee had never been quiet about his conscience. But to realize that he was so far removed from the ones he'd once thought closest? The ones for whom, individually and collectively, he'd sacrificed and would sacrifice so much? That stung. Or it would have, had Lee any more strength to spend on feeling.
Instead, all of Lee’s strength was reserved for planning the mission against the Cylon ship. He drew himself more and more within the icy circle of preparation and focus necessary to carry out the delicate task. Everyone around him receded into the distance: pilots, mechanics, commanders and politicians. He was a pilot with a purpose and he let that consume him, utterly.
And when the Blackbird launched, he poured himself entirely into the destruction of the FTL drive, so much so that, looking back to confirm the hit, he never saw the other ship until it was too late.
As he drifted in and out of consciousness, holding one hand over the pinpoint leak in his suit while the battle raged in the distance around him, Lee found his other hand resting upon the thigh pocket holding his now-useless flightplan and a single coin.
***
Lee floated in the water. Nearby he heard the gentle whisk of a watercraft approaching, the regular murmur of a pole pushing a shallow vessel across a river. His hands stretched out in the water, seeking balance, seeking something. Beneath his fingers, he felt a small slip of metal. A coin. He heard the ferry coming closer.
***
A scatter of Viper fire flared in the distance. Everything seemed immeasurably far away, impossibly unimportant. Lee’s left hand drifted away from the hole and the last of the oxygen began to slip away. His right hand remained where it was, guarding the coin that would soon be Charon’s.