BSG Fic : Long Time Coming (5/17)
Title : Long Time Coming
Author : Helen C.
Rating : PG-13
Summary : It was the only visible scar still left over by Baltar's trial, now that President Roslin was dead; Apollo's absence and the Admiral's obvious weariness.
Fandom : BSG
Spoilers : Everything aired so far is fair game.
Disclaimer : The characters and the universe were created and are owned by Ronald D. Moore and Universal Television Studios to name but a few. No money is being made. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
AN. Goes AU between the verdict and the Cylon attack in Crossroads II.
AN2. Eternal gratitude to joey51 for beta'ing this! As usual, I tinkered. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Chapter Four
Two years ago
"I'm not sure he's drunk enough."
Scott looked at Lee, smirking. "Are you kidding?" he asked Nate. "He couldn't even get to his feet on his own at this point." His voice was loud enough to be heard several feet away, even in the surrounding racket-people talking, laughing, some playing triad, others arguing about one thing or another, their gestures angry. A few people at nearby tables turned to them before going back to their business.
Nate shrugged, studied Lee. "He could be faking it."
"He's still here," Lee informed them testily.
"And he's talking about himself in the third person. Yeah, he's definitely had enough," Scott concluded.
Lee ignored them both and went back to staring at his drink. The feeling of manageable fear that had been his constant companion since Sam had told him she was pregnant had given way to near-panic when Laura had taken her first breath. Maybe if he kept staring into the liquor long enough, the dread would fade away.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time-a night out with the guys, while Sam recuperated from Laura's birth in the infirmary of the Orion. A night out before… well, before it all became real.
Now that he was here, though, Lee was having second thoughts about that plan. Alcohol didn't seem to be making things any easier.
"You okay?" Scott asked.
Lee shrugged. "Yeah." Except for the fact that sooner or later, he was going to screw up in some way and that his daughter would end up hating him. Gods, he didn't want his relationship with this little girl to end up to be as conflicted and bitter as the one between him and his father.
"No, you're not," Nate said. "You're thinking about everything that might go wrong, because that's what you always do."
Lee Adama, overthinker.
Lee Adama, permanent screw-up.
Lee closed his eyes, disgusted with himself. Now really wasn't the time to start thinking about all the things he had been called in his life, but apparently, becoming a father was making him introspective. Fancy that.
Besides…
Besides, thinking about all the ways in which he could mess things up was almost reassuring. That, at least, was under his control. He could grow up a little. He could do better than his own father had done, hopefully. He could learn from the past and avoid making the mistakes he feared he would.
But he couldn't guarantee that the fleet would ever reach Earth. He couldn't guarantee that the Orion wouldn't be blown to pieces during a Cylon attack. He couldn't guarantee that his wife and kid wouldn't die in a stupid accident while his back was turned.
At least, Sam could defend herself, protect herself. That baby sleeping next to her right now, while he was drinking his worries away, was way too vulnerable for his taste.
"I'm going to be a pathologically overprotective father," he announced to his friends. They nodded, seemingly unfazed by the non-sequitur.
"Yeah," Nate said.
Scott chuckled. "Like we hadn't figured that part out for ourselves."
They both looked an odd mix of amused and long-suffering, and yes, they knew Lee and had probably expected it all along.
Lee shrugged. After all, better overprotective than distant, right?
"I think it's high time we got you back home," Nate said, rising from his seat, a hand already on Lee's arm.
Lee blinked up at him. "I can get there on my own," he said.
Nate stepped back and motioned for Lee to stand, wordlessly daring him to try it.
Lee did, surprised when the room instantly started spinning. "How much of this did I have, again?" he asked, gripping the table to remain standing.
"Too much," Scott retorted, taking his arm while Nate got the other. Between them, they managed to guide/drag Lee back to his quarters-they were both taller than he was, which should have made it easier but didn't. "Frak, you're heavy," Scott groaned at some point.
Sam was going to mock him when she saw him the next day, looking like he was coming off a bender, which was essentially the truth. Well, either that or she was going to yell at him. Possibly both. And then their daughter was sure to start crying at some point, and that was going to be fun too, with the hangover he was sure to develop.
Nate and Scott allowed him to collapse face first on the bed and Lee felt that someone was taking off his shoes. "You're on your own for the rest," Nate said, his voice shaking with laughter.
Lee gestured his thanks, too wiped to talk. He could feel his friends retreating to the hatch and he whispered, "What if I screw up. What if I… break her?"
Nate snorted. "I don't think it's so easy to break a baby, Lee. Besides, I'm her godfather, I wouldn't allow you to do it."
Are you kidding? You saw her! And I know how easy it is to break another human being. Half the fleet is made up with people like me, who've been burned too bad and are terrified it'll happen again.
What the frak do I do if I screw up?
One of his friends, Lee didn't check to see which it was, patted his shoulder awkwardly and then they left him alone. He closed his eyes and fell into an uneasy sleep.
*
Contrary to Lee's worst fears, he didn't kill his daughter in her first few weeks. Three months after she was born, she was as healthy and full of life as possible, considering the circumstances. He was trying not to dwell on the dangers inherent to their lifestyle-if only because whenever Sam caught him in one of his brooding moods, she kicked his ass. Hard.
Things were going well, probably better than ever, so it shouldn't have surprised him when he got a call from Colonial One.
"What was it about?" Sam asked him the next day, as he picked at the food on his plate. He would never have thought he'd miss the military's emergency rations, but he did. The algae was long gone, had been replaced with some plants the crew of the Galactica had found on a scouting mission-the plants were both bitter and tasteless, and didn't sate hunger in the least.
"Lee?" Sam insisted.
He met her eyes. "Hm?" he said, hoping she'd understand how reluctant he was to talk about it.
"That call you got. What was it about?" She looked down at the food, then back at him, apparently about as enthusiastic about eating it as he was.
"Nothing," he said, unconvincingly.
She shot him her cut-the-crap look, the one he knew better than to resist, complete with a derisive, "Right."
He sighed, pushed the plate away. He wasn't going to be able to force that stuff down today. "President Roslin asked to see me."
Sam froze. Reports of the President's poor health were all over the fleet. According to Laura Roslin herself, she didn't have much longer left. After the first movement of panic-what were they going to do without the leader who had kept them safe from the Cylons for so long?-most of the civilians seemed to be taking this in stride. Even the military personnel Lee sometimes talked to at the bar seemed resigned to the fact that it was pretty much inevitable. A miracle had saved her a first time, but that miracle wasn't going to happen again.
"Is it time?"
"I don't know," Lee said. He hadn't spoken to the President since the day of the verdict, hadn't even seen her since then. "One of her aides made the call and he didn't say much. Just that she'd like to see me."
"Are you going to go?" Sam kept her tone neutral but Lee knew how worried she was about him. He rarely spoke about the trial, even to Romo, but all his friends knew what it had cost him, what it was still costing him. It was easy to say that his relationship with his father would certainly have taken a turn for the worse anyway, that they were too different, that there had been no way to avoid it, and another thing entirely to know that his choices had precipitated their falling out. They still talked to each other, but things weren't the same as they had been before.
"I don't know," Lee said eventually, even though in truth, he did know. Of course he was going to go see her. He wasn't particularly looking forward to it-did she still blame him for what had happened or had she found a way to forgive?-but he wasn't going to deny her that last chance to say what was on her mind.
*
In the end, Laura Roslin was the last straw between Lee and his father. It was fitting, Lee thought later-when he could think again, a few weeks after that fight. She had always been a source of tension between him and his father. She probably hadn't even meant to make things worse. It just happened-Adama temper at work, all over again.
His father stormed into his quarters, shot him a hard look and said, his voice tight with fury, "I can't believe that after all these years, you're not going to go see her!"
Lee stood up quickly, thrown from what he had been doing-they really needed to file that report on what little supplies they had left at the bar if they wanted to get more. "What?"
"Laura asked you to come see her, but you didn't, did you?"
"Is that what she told you?" Lee asked, taken aback. He didn't think he had ever seen his father this enraged, even after the mutiny, even after Tigh's testimony, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out what had happened to get him so angry.
Lee's meeting with the President, the previous day, had been fraught with tension and awkwardness but they had both survived it, and in many ways, they probably both felt better for it. Or at least, he had assumed so. But then, why was his father here, and why was he so mad, exactly?
"She said it wasn't any of my business," his father eventually said, grudgingly. For a split second, his face softened. Then, he met Lee's eyes and he started scowling again.
Lee took a breath, trying to keep his own anger under control. He had seen his father more often since Laura's birth, and he had thought they were finally doing better; they still kept their distance, but they could actually be in the same room for more than an hour without snapping at each other. Lee had seen it as progress. Apparently, he had been wrong, if his father could still lash out at him without even knowing all the facts, without so much as asking for his side of the story. Attack first had always been his father's motto.
Lee had never reacted well to these attacks. "And you just decided to assume the worst, again, didn't you?" His father looked ready to protest but Lee spoke over him. "You know what? She's right. It's none of your business and you're not my commander anymore. You don't get to barge in here and tell me what I should or shouldn't do."
They stared at each other over the length of the living quarters. Once again, it seemed that they were locked in a pissing contest. Lee was so damn tired of this-this constant fighting, this constant anger.
"I can't believe you didn't give her at least that," his father repeated. Lee thought he heard his father's voice shaking, but when he looked at him, his face was stony, his lips clenched in a thin line-the perfect picture of the hardass admiral that he was.
I went to see her, Lee tried to say, surprised when the words remained stuck in his throat.
His father shook his head and sighed, as if Lee wasn't even worth his time anymore.
For a few seconds, Lee felt torn between anger and hurt. Then, anger won-as it usually did. "Get out of here," he said.
His father stood there defiantly and Lee snapped, more forcefully, "Get out of here. Just… go."
"Fine," his father said in the same voice he had used to say, "I see you chose your side," back in the beginning of their days on the run.
It seemed like nothing had changed between them, that nothing would ever change between them.
For a few endless moments after his father's departure, Lee stood in the middle of the room, heart hammering in his chest, anger churning in his stomach. He felt like shouting, like breaking something, so he closed his eyes, clenched his fists, trying to keep it in. He didn't realize he was walking, didn't realize what he was doing until his fist slammed against the wall.
Everything stopped.
For a long while, all Lee could feel was the pounding in his hand, the nauseating pain shooting all the way from his hand to his shoulder. He almost welcomed it. Anything was better than thinking about what had just happened.
Too soon, the blinding pain ebbed away, leaving Lee with the memories-how furious his father had looked, what he had said. What they had both said.
The way his father had left, quietly closing the hatch behind him. It was the worst, Lee thought. If he had left in a huff, Lee would have known that he had spoken in anger, and he knew enough about the both of them to be able to move on past that. But it looked a lot more like his father had taken stock of who Lee was, had found it lacking, and had given up on trying to make him better, and had decided that he didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore, and that…
Well, that probably meant that their relationship was well beyond repair.
Lee hadn't thought it would sting so much. Hell, he hadn't thought it would ever happen.
He sank into a seat, cradling his injured hand.
He needed to get back to what he had been doing. He needed to get that hand looked at, or at the very least ice it. He needed to prepare for his evening shift at the bar. He needed to go ask the Orion's pilot if he had time for a lesson on how to pilot this freakingly big ship later in the week.
He didn't do any of those things; he just sat there and stared ahead, wondering is he had just lost his last chance to make things right with his father.
Chapter 5
Author : Helen C.
Rating : PG-13
Summary : It was the only visible scar still left over by Baltar's trial, now that President Roslin was dead; Apollo's absence and the Admiral's obvious weariness.
Fandom : BSG
Spoilers : Everything aired so far is fair game.
Disclaimer : The characters and the universe were created and are owned by Ronald D. Moore and Universal Television Studios to name but a few. No money is being made. No copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
AN. Goes AU between the verdict and the Cylon attack in Crossroads II.
AN2. Eternal gratitude to joey51 for beta'ing this! As usual, I tinkered. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Chapter Four
Two years ago
"I'm not sure he's drunk enough."
Scott looked at Lee, smirking. "Are you kidding?" he asked Nate. "He couldn't even get to his feet on his own at this point." His voice was loud enough to be heard several feet away, even in the surrounding racket-people talking, laughing, some playing triad, others arguing about one thing or another, their gestures angry. A few people at nearby tables turned to them before going back to their business.
Nate shrugged, studied Lee. "He could be faking it."
"He's still here," Lee informed them testily.
"And he's talking about himself in the third person. Yeah, he's definitely had enough," Scott concluded.
Lee ignored them both and went back to staring at his drink. The feeling of manageable fear that had been his constant companion since Sam had told him she was pregnant had given way to near-panic when Laura had taken her first breath. Maybe if he kept staring into the liquor long enough, the dread would fade away.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time-a night out with the guys, while Sam recuperated from Laura's birth in the infirmary of the Orion. A night out before… well, before it all became real.
Now that he was here, though, Lee was having second thoughts about that plan. Alcohol didn't seem to be making things any easier.
"You okay?" Scott asked.
Lee shrugged. "Yeah." Except for the fact that sooner or later, he was going to screw up in some way and that his daughter would end up hating him. Gods, he didn't want his relationship with this little girl to end up to be as conflicted and bitter as the one between him and his father.
"No, you're not," Nate said. "You're thinking about everything that might go wrong, because that's what you always do."
Lee Adama, overthinker.
Lee Adama, permanent screw-up.
Lee closed his eyes, disgusted with himself. Now really wasn't the time to start thinking about all the things he had been called in his life, but apparently, becoming a father was making him introspective. Fancy that.
Besides…
Besides, thinking about all the ways in which he could mess things up was almost reassuring. That, at least, was under his control. He could grow up a little. He could do better than his own father had done, hopefully. He could learn from the past and avoid making the mistakes he feared he would.
But he couldn't guarantee that the fleet would ever reach Earth. He couldn't guarantee that the Orion wouldn't be blown to pieces during a Cylon attack. He couldn't guarantee that his wife and kid wouldn't die in a stupid accident while his back was turned.
At least, Sam could defend herself, protect herself. That baby sleeping next to her right now, while he was drinking his worries away, was way too vulnerable for his taste.
"I'm going to be a pathologically overprotective father," he announced to his friends. They nodded, seemingly unfazed by the non-sequitur.
"Yeah," Nate said.
Scott chuckled. "Like we hadn't figured that part out for ourselves."
They both looked an odd mix of amused and long-suffering, and yes, they knew Lee and had probably expected it all along.
Lee shrugged. After all, better overprotective than distant, right?
"I think it's high time we got you back home," Nate said, rising from his seat, a hand already on Lee's arm.
Lee blinked up at him. "I can get there on my own," he said.
Nate stepped back and motioned for Lee to stand, wordlessly daring him to try it.
Lee did, surprised when the room instantly started spinning. "How much of this did I have, again?" he asked, gripping the table to remain standing.
"Too much," Scott retorted, taking his arm while Nate got the other. Between them, they managed to guide/drag Lee back to his quarters-they were both taller than he was, which should have made it easier but didn't. "Frak, you're heavy," Scott groaned at some point.
Sam was going to mock him when she saw him the next day, looking like he was coming off a bender, which was essentially the truth. Well, either that or she was going to yell at him. Possibly both. And then their daughter was sure to start crying at some point, and that was going to be fun too, with the hangover he was sure to develop.
Nate and Scott allowed him to collapse face first on the bed and Lee felt that someone was taking off his shoes. "You're on your own for the rest," Nate said, his voice shaking with laughter.
Lee gestured his thanks, too wiped to talk. He could feel his friends retreating to the hatch and he whispered, "What if I screw up. What if I… break her?"
Nate snorted. "I don't think it's so easy to break a baby, Lee. Besides, I'm her godfather, I wouldn't allow you to do it."
Are you kidding? You saw her! And I know how easy it is to break another human being. Half the fleet is made up with people like me, who've been burned too bad and are terrified it'll happen again.
What the frak do I do if I screw up?
One of his friends, Lee didn't check to see which it was, patted his shoulder awkwardly and then they left him alone. He closed his eyes and fell into an uneasy sleep.
*
Contrary to Lee's worst fears, he didn't kill his daughter in her first few weeks. Three months after she was born, she was as healthy and full of life as possible, considering the circumstances. He was trying not to dwell on the dangers inherent to their lifestyle-if only because whenever Sam caught him in one of his brooding moods, she kicked his ass. Hard.
Things were going well, probably better than ever, so it shouldn't have surprised him when he got a call from Colonial One.
"What was it about?" Sam asked him the next day, as he picked at the food on his plate. He would never have thought he'd miss the military's emergency rations, but he did. The algae was long gone, had been replaced with some plants the crew of the Galactica had found on a scouting mission-the plants were both bitter and tasteless, and didn't sate hunger in the least.
"Lee?" Sam insisted.
He met her eyes. "Hm?" he said, hoping she'd understand how reluctant he was to talk about it.
"That call you got. What was it about?" She looked down at the food, then back at him, apparently about as enthusiastic about eating it as he was.
"Nothing," he said, unconvincingly.
She shot him her cut-the-crap look, the one he knew better than to resist, complete with a derisive, "Right."
He sighed, pushed the plate away. He wasn't going to be able to force that stuff down today. "President Roslin asked to see me."
Sam froze. Reports of the President's poor health were all over the fleet. According to Laura Roslin herself, she didn't have much longer left. After the first movement of panic-what were they going to do without the leader who had kept them safe from the Cylons for so long?-most of the civilians seemed to be taking this in stride. Even the military personnel Lee sometimes talked to at the bar seemed resigned to the fact that it was pretty much inevitable. A miracle had saved her a first time, but that miracle wasn't going to happen again.
"Is it time?"
"I don't know," Lee said. He hadn't spoken to the President since the day of the verdict, hadn't even seen her since then. "One of her aides made the call and he didn't say much. Just that she'd like to see me."
"Are you going to go?" Sam kept her tone neutral but Lee knew how worried she was about him. He rarely spoke about the trial, even to Romo, but all his friends knew what it had cost him, what it was still costing him. It was easy to say that his relationship with his father would certainly have taken a turn for the worse anyway, that they were too different, that there had been no way to avoid it, and another thing entirely to know that his choices had precipitated their falling out. They still talked to each other, but things weren't the same as they had been before.
"I don't know," Lee said eventually, even though in truth, he did know. Of course he was going to go see her. He wasn't particularly looking forward to it-did she still blame him for what had happened or had she found a way to forgive?-but he wasn't going to deny her that last chance to say what was on her mind.
*
In the end, Laura Roslin was the last straw between Lee and his father. It was fitting, Lee thought later-when he could think again, a few weeks after that fight. She had always been a source of tension between him and his father. She probably hadn't even meant to make things worse. It just happened-Adama temper at work, all over again.
His father stormed into his quarters, shot him a hard look and said, his voice tight with fury, "I can't believe that after all these years, you're not going to go see her!"
Lee stood up quickly, thrown from what he had been doing-they really needed to file that report on what little supplies they had left at the bar if they wanted to get more. "What?"
"Laura asked you to come see her, but you didn't, did you?"
"Is that what she told you?" Lee asked, taken aback. He didn't think he had ever seen his father this enraged, even after the mutiny, even after Tigh's testimony, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out what had happened to get him so angry.
Lee's meeting with the President, the previous day, had been fraught with tension and awkwardness but they had both survived it, and in many ways, they probably both felt better for it. Or at least, he had assumed so. But then, why was his father here, and why was he so mad, exactly?
"She said it wasn't any of my business," his father eventually said, grudgingly. For a split second, his face softened. Then, he met Lee's eyes and he started scowling again.
Lee took a breath, trying to keep his own anger under control. He had seen his father more often since Laura's birth, and he had thought they were finally doing better; they still kept their distance, but they could actually be in the same room for more than an hour without snapping at each other. Lee had seen it as progress. Apparently, he had been wrong, if his father could still lash out at him without even knowing all the facts, without so much as asking for his side of the story. Attack first had always been his father's motto.
Lee had never reacted well to these attacks. "And you just decided to assume the worst, again, didn't you?" His father looked ready to protest but Lee spoke over him. "You know what? She's right. It's none of your business and you're not my commander anymore. You don't get to barge in here and tell me what I should or shouldn't do."
They stared at each other over the length of the living quarters. Once again, it seemed that they were locked in a pissing contest. Lee was so damn tired of this-this constant fighting, this constant anger.
"I can't believe you didn't give her at least that," his father repeated. Lee thought he heard his father's voice shaking, but when he looked at him, his face was stony, his lips clenched in a thin line-the perfect picture of the hardass admiral that he was.
I went to see her, Lee tried to say, surprised when the words remained stuck in his throat.
His father shook his head and sighed, as if Lee wasn't even worth his time anymore.
For a few seconds, Lee felt torn between anger and hurt. Then, anger won-as it usually did. "Get out of here," he said.
His father stood there defiantly and Lee snapped, more forcefully, "Get out of here. Just… go."
"Fine," his father said in the same voice he had used to say, "I see you chose your side," back in the beginning of their days on the run.
It seemed like nothing had changed between them, that nothing would ever change between them.
For a few endless moments after his father's departure, Lee stood in the middle of the room, heart hammering in his chest, anger churning in his stomach. He felt like shouting, like breaking something, so he closed his eyes, clenched his fists, trying to keep it in. He didn't realize he was walking, didn't realize what he was doing until his fist slammed against the wall.
Everything stopped.
For a long while, all Lee could feel was the pounding in his hand, the nauseating pain shooting all the way from his hand to his shoulder. He almost welcomed it. Anything was better than thinking about what had just happened.
Too soon, the blinding pain ebbed away, leaving Lee with the memories-how furious his father had looked, what he had said. What they had both said.
The way his father had left, quietly closing the hatch behind him. It was the worst, Lee thought. If he had left in a huff, Lee would have known that he had spoken in anger, and he knew enough about the both of them to be able to move on past that. But it looked a lot more like his father had taken stock of who Lee was, had found it lacking, and had given up on trying to make him better, and had decided that he didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore, and that…
Well, that probably meant that their relationship was well beyond repair.
Lee hadn't thought it would sting so much. Hell, he hadn't thought it would ever happen.
He sank into a seat, cradling his injured hand.
He needed to get back to what he had been doing. He needed to get that hand looked at, or at the very least ice it. He needed to prepare for his evening shift at the bar. He needed to go ask the Orion's pilot if he had time for a lesson on how to pilot this freakingly big ship later in the week.
He didn't do any of those things; he just sat there and stared ahead, wondering is he had just lost his last chance to make things right with his father.
Chapter 5