In the Whole World: Chapter 9, "Four Brothers, Part 2"
“Four Brothers, Part 2”
Chapter 9/13
Word Count: 4,531
Before Leoben Conoy and Sarah Porter had walked in, Hera was pretending to be asleep in Aunt Kara's bed, but she was actually playing a game of Colonies. She was imagining herself, with her Mom and Dad, at the Caprica City Zoo, in the primate house that Aunt Kara had been telling her about earlier when they were drawing pictures together.
Aunt Kara's pictures were not of the zoo. Hera thought she knew what they were from a game of Colonies she'd played with Uncle Lee where they'd been in Delphi, but she knew Aunt Kara didn't want to talk about it.
That was a game where you pretended you were back in the Twelve Colonies and there were paved roads and magnetic trains and holographic video games and all the strange animals and foods and shopping malls-whatever those were-that grownups were always talking about. Hera had learned to play it at preschool, where she had a reputation for being really good at it. It was easy; it was just like projecting, but you had to use words. She and Uncle Lee had played a round the other day where they pretended they were at the top of a giant building in Boskirk, on Virgon, the tallest in the worlds, looking down on Earth. Sky scrapers. That's what Uncle Lee had called them. He said Graystone Tower had been taller than Galactica was long and almost as wide at the base.
Uncle Lee was pretty good at Colonies, but Aunt Kara hated to play-it made her sad. And that made Hera miss her mother. Where was she? Hera hadn't seen her in days and days, since before Dad left with Olivia.
When Leoben Conoy and Sarah Porter walked into her Aunt Kara and Uncle Lee's tent, Hera watched through slitted eyes as Aunt Kara got tense, but didn't look up from her notebook.
That was how Hera knew she had to stay still.
"May we have a word?" Leoben asked now. Hera shifted so that, if she just barely opened her eyes, she could continue to covertly watch. Before he left, Uncle Lee had told her to keep an eye on her Aunt Kara, and when Aunt Kara had laughed, Uncle Lee had just looked at Hera and said, I'm not joking.
"Oh, yeah, by all means," Aunt Kara said, lounging back in her chair.
"I've come to request one last time that you sit with our artist for the statue of you we'd like to place in the temple."
Aunt Kara smirked. "I'd like to request one last time that you go frak yourself."
"Not in front of the child!" Sarah Porter gasped. Hera remained very still. Adults were always so worried about what language she heard. To her, it was the least interesting part of what Aunt Kara had said.
"If that's all?" Aunt Kara turned back to her paperwork.
"One more thing, Kara Thrace." Her aunt's shoulders tensed. "We'd like to formally put in Sarah Porter's name for the upcoming election of a new president of the former citizens of the fleet. President of the citizens of Earth."
Aunt Kara was very still. "President Adama hasn't announced the election schedule yet."
"Surely that's dependent on you, Kara?" she heard Sarah Porter say in her relentlessly calm tone. "He announced, after all, that there'd be a new president in time for the unveiling of the new temple. So as soon as you announce when it'll be finished…"
"He said an election. Not necessarily a new president. He hasn't announced yet whether he's going to run for it." Aunt Kara sounded scared, and so Hera's heart started to beat faster. Normally, when her aunt was afraid, she was laughing-her laughs made no sense-but that she wasn't laughing now chilled Hera to the bone.
"Yes, well. Tell him that if he does decide to run, he'll have a worthy opponent in Sarah," Leoben said smoothly. "We'll be running on a platform of reform that recognizes the new universal system of values shared by all of humanity."
"The what?"
"Thanks to you, Kara. You've made a believer out of everyone. Last week Bill Adama himself told a Six who was working on his cabin that he believes in a power higher than himself because you brought us to Earth with your song." He leaned forward. "This is why it's so imperative that we have that statue of you ready for the temple. You're an icon of our new faith."
"You died, and yet you live," Sarah Porter chimed in. "You led us all to our salvation. As it's written in the Scrolls of Pythia, 'She will rise from the dawn and lead them into the dawn, and of her, all that will abide in the whole world is her second self…'" She drew in her breath sharply, seeming to realize what she was saying. "I beg your pardon."
" 'Her second self: a scarred limb, the remains of the deed.' " Aunt Kara sounded sullen, impatient. "I've read the godsdamned scrolls, Sarah. If I thought they made sense of all of this…" She shook her head. Hera squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.
"The people must be made to remember to keep faith," Leoben Conoy was unfazed. "With the old gods, who led us to the new one. That's your gift to us, Kara. You reminded us of our sacred heritage."
"I've heard you speechifying down in the mess halls. What you've been talking about is a theocracy." Aunt Kara stood up slowly, and now her eyes were sharp and intent on Leoben Conoy's. "You're not going to use my face to legitimize your grab for power. You're not using me again, period, Leoben." She lowered her voice, turned her face away from the bed where Hera was tucked in. "I promise you now that I'll kill you first. One last time."
There was a long pause. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Kara. But I have to warn you, once Sarah's government is in power, the choice of whose face is in the temple…"
Aunt Kara made a scoffing noise, but Sarah Porter held up her hand. "The gods chose you. And they did it because you believe in the gods yourself," Sarah pressed. "Surely you believe that people should follow the laws of the Lords of Kobol."
"I believe that the world would be a better place if they did, not that the government should throw them in jail when they don't." Kara was laughing, now, again, and Hera's heart beat still faster. "I'm building a Temple of Unity. Not a Temple of Salvation or a Temple of the Harbinger of Death or the Temple of Kara Thrace. It's for everyone. No matter what they believe. It's a symbol of… of tolerance, of cooperation. Not of a particular religious law." She laughed again. "And because I believe in the laws of the Lords of Kobol, I remind you that making idols is a sin, and so is coveting what you don't have-in this case, my cooperation."
"Kara." Leoben Conoy sounded pitying. "I think you know, deep down, that at the end of the day, we won't need it."
Aunt Kara's tone softened, and the laughter in it died as it turned to steel. "The lords of Kobol also remind you to 'be not ashamed for not having that which you most want.' It's a lesson some of us have had to learn the hard way."
"Tell President Adama he has an opponent in the campaign, if he decides to run," Sarah Porter said finally.
"Oh, sure, I'll pass that right along." Kara bent her head back to the notebook open in front of her. "Have a good night, y'all."
When they'd left, she threw her pen down on the table. "Hera."
"Yeah?"
"Good job staying quiet. You stay out of Leoben Conoy's way, OK?"
"OK." Hera's eyes were wide on her Aunt Kara's face. Didn't Aunt Kara know that Leoben Conoy was much more dangerous to herthan to Hera?
"You wanna play Colonies, Hera?"
Hera heard something urgent in her aunt's voice that gave her pause-Aunt Kara never wanted to play Colonies-so she leaned back on the bed and squeezed her eyes shut.
"OK. Keep your eyes closed." Kara moved to sit beside her on the bed. "We're at the Museum at Delphi, ten years before the first Cylon War, before all the robberies and the looting. It's beautiful, and full of treasures. Big, brown stone pillars out front, and it's cavernous inside, yeah, like a cave. Like a holy cave."
Hera bit her lip in concentration, remembering when her mother had taken her to a projection of this place. But she'd been so little, then! It was so fuzzy, so hard to remember. She wished even harder that her mother were here. She knew, somehow, this game of Colonies was not meant for fun.
"So here we are. In front of us is the Arrow of Apollo, that they say points the way to Elysium. It's long and gold and gleaming, and everyone's clustered around it." Kara leaned closer. "Over to your left, in another big glass case, the Ring of Orpheus, small and red and black, that's supposed to draw heroes back from the dead." Her eyelids squeezed shut, Hera didn't see the flicker that chased across Aunt Kara's eyes, at that. "To your right, the big green metal block is the Shield of Atlas, too heavy for any one person to lift, that protects the innocent from harm. And behind you…" Aunt Kara crawled all the way into bed next to Hera, laid her head beside hers on the pillow. "Can you see it, Hera?"
Kara pulled Hera into the side of her body, under her arm, which surprised Hera-Aunt Kara didn't usually like to touch her. Hera squeezed her eyes shut, and she could suddenly see.
"The horn," she breathed.
"Yeah. The Horn of Cronus, given to Artemis to control the seasons, that reshapes the flow of time." Kara's arm tightened around her, almost imperceptibly. "Is that the horn you saw before, Hera? When you visited Uncle Sam?"
"It wasn't in a museum."
"Where is it, Hera?"
"I told you. It's here. Your brother is coming for it."
Kara's voice was urgent. "Who's my brother?"
"I don't know, Aunt Kara, he's your brother."
Kara buried her face in her hands. "I can't find the horn here in the camp, Hera. I've looked everywhere. Gods, if your Uncle Lee knew how many ships and tents and cabins I've had covert ops searching…"
Hera opened her mouth to tell Aunt Kara that she couldn't find it-that Uncle Lee had to, with Hera and her mom, and the Chief and Uncle Sam and Gaius Baltar's son. But when her mouth opened, it turned into a yawn. "'m tired, Aunt Kara," she said, and rolled to cuddle into her aunt's chest. Aunt Kara's arms came around her awkwardly. "Tell me a Colonies story?"
"OK, honey. OK. OK, I can do that. Shhh, settle in." Kara pulled the covers up over both of them. "Let me tell you about the first time my dad took me to one of his concerts. The Delphi Emporium, out-doors, and I wasn't much older than you…"
"Hi, Dad," Lee Adama said, poking his head in the open door of his father's cabin, which-having been built with at least thirty volunteers-was the largest residence in the camp with six rooms, and already fully finished. Nothing his father had asked for, certainly; did the admiral ever even leave the living room?
But here was the abode of the Old King, who'd brought his people home, and his people, some of them, were grateful.
He was sitting there now, with a book open on the rug over his lap, feet up in front of the fire, looking much older than the man who'd landed on New Earth a few months ago. His hair was graying rapidly from iron to smoke.
"Lee," Bill Adama's capacity for expressing surprise while barely changing the tone of his voice was in full force. "I wasn't expecting you just yet."
"Dinner was early… Is that a new stove?" Lee nodded to the heavy, pot-bellied machine in the corner.
"Best not look at it too closely." Lee couldn't help squinting at it, hearing that. Graystone Industries' logo was branded on the base-it had been military, then. "Some of the crew… decommisssioned it for me."
"I keep hearing that I should crack down on the graft, but I suspect it's the only thing keeping the peace." Lee lowered himself into the chair across from his father and let the cauldron of dread that had been bubbling in him all day start to boil over. Nothing in either man's posture indicated that this was a ritual, an annual one.
Both men fell into silence. Lee began twisting his watch, too tight on his wrist to move far, and tapping an impatient foot. His father sat impassively, staring into the fire.
"Dad - "
"Lee - "
They both broke off. "You go." Lee hadn't known what he was going to say, anyway. He felt angry and confessional at once, couldn't reconcile it.
In answer, his father stood, walked to his sideboard, and poured Lee a tall glass of ambrosia. "To Zak," he said.
Lee touched his glass to his father's and took a quick swallow. "Seven years," he offered gamely.
They sat in silence for a long moment. Seven years into a mourning that was somehow never complete, Lee was remembering thefirst anniversary of Zak's death-or was it the second? For both, his father had wanted him to come to Galactica, and he'd refused. His dad had gone over his head, arranged his leave, that year, tracked him down in the suburb outside C City where Lee kept an apartment. And they had told stories and gotten drunk together and Lee had let himself believe that they could heal. And if love at last should set you free…
But then his father had mentioned Kara Thrace-had Lee ever met her?- how hard a time she was having, how unhappy she was. He'd left unsaid the question of with how many crew members she was sharing her unhappiness, with a fight or a frak, but Lee hadn't found it hard to guess. He'd felt, not for the first time, pain that pulled in four directions at once, all wrapped up in a name that he wasn't letting himself so much as think. And the delusion that the grieving was over had, that year and every year, faded.
Now that story seemed about to repeat, because his father said abruptly, "Kara was up here this morning."
"Yeah, she said."
Bill looked at the fire for a long moment again, and then stroked his fingers over the cover of the book on the table beside him. "Son. When were you going to tell me that you'd moved in with her?"
Lee's jaw worked without him working it. "I'm not talking about it with you. Especially not today."
The admiral sighed, and then literally put his foot down, swinging it from the footstool to the floor. "I may not go to camp, but I hear things. I just wish you could have told me. That you could tell me now."
"There's nothing to talk about."
Bill set his hands on his lap evenly. "OK. Then I'll tell you something. Something I thought I was going to have to say to you years ago, just before Kara met and married Sam. Something that's especially important to say today." He met Lee's gaze levelly, and Lee remembered again how much his father could see, in his old age, that he hadn't been able to as a younger man. "After Zak died, Kara was a shell. She moved around my ship for months like a person hunted-trained twelve hours a day, slept fitfully and at odd times, drank far too much, couldn't be roused into a fight when people were trying and was always ready for the fights no one wanted. And that's the person who came back from the eye of Jupiter. She is fragile, Lee. So I am telling you-as her father-that if you hurt her, you answer to me."
"If I hurt her?" Lee almost choked. What about as my father? "I don't think you have to worry about that."
Something in Lee's tone-something hard and bitter-went straight through the admiral's ears and into his heart, piercing a shield he hadn't known he'd lodged there, hiding this fact he hadn't wanted to see, and he looked down to mask his pain at confronting it. "Son. You're in love with her."
It wasn't a question, and Lee didn't deny it. "Don't worry. It's not mutual."
"How long?"
It was Lee's turn to stare into the fire, now. Why not tell his father, finally? This day-this day might be the perfect occasion. Then he could finally face the judgment he deserved.
That would be a relief. Instead of trying to avoid or expiate his errors, he could accept punishment for them.
He bent his head toward his lap at a sudden realization: for the first time since he was a child, he was worried that his father might beashamed of him. He thought of all the reasons he was angry at his father. His brother's face, small and frightened, hiding under Lee's bed one afternoon when a dropped glass bowl had made their mother shriek, then sob, with hysterical rage. The empty orange chair in the living room where no one sat, from which his father ruled the house remotely. Kara's eyes, laughing at him in her doorway over a bunch of flowers he'd brought for her-and the weight of her hand in his, when she'd said goodnight and sent him away so she could tuck his brother into bed, one shockingly fateful night. His father's proud bearing, in full dress uniform, at Zak's funeral. The sight of Kara, the night before that same funeral, drunk out of her mind in a jail cell, when he'd come to bail her out after she'd been picked up on public indecency-frakking a stranger behind a bar.
Zak and Kara had both run to this man, with their needs-in Zak's case, to meet Bill Adama's standards, and in Kara's, to forget her own. Lee had hated him for all of that. And yet now, here he was, asking for his father's standards to do the work his own couldn't do.
The cauldron of anger in him went cold.
"Oh, about eight years, give or take," he murmured finally. He felt his father's softly indrawn breath like a lash.
"While Zak was alive." The admiral's tone was neutral, but Lee heard the word underlying the neutrality.
Betrayal.
"Yeah. I couldn't have said it, then. I didn't even think it. There were just a couple of nights, that summer I was stationed near Zak, in Delphi, where things between me and Kara went-a little too far." Lee pressed his hand over his mouth, didn't meet his father's eyes.
They were silent for a long while. Then Bill Adama stood up, left the room. Lee heard the sound of a drawer opening and closing. And then his father was back, and he passed a set of photographs to Lee.
"What are… oh." He sighed. "Why do you have pictures of it?"
"I couldn't be there when they unveiled the headstone. I had to get back to Galactica." His father took another small swallow, at that, settling back into his chair. "So your mother snapped those and sent it along to me. I expect she meant it as much as a rebuke as a kindness."
"I expect you're right. Where is that poem from, anyway? I've never known. Did Mom choose it?"
"No. Zak did."
"When?"
"At your Grandfather's funeral. Remember? The funeral home had that book of invocations, and Zak flipped through it, and this poem just fell right out. It had been tucked in there casually. He chilled us all right to the bone when he said, 'This is the poem I want read when I die.' And we might have forgotten all about it, but he kept it, and he told Kara about it, and she gave that same sheet of paper back to your mom in the days after the crash."
Lee squinted at the picture, not that he needed to. He knew the poem on Zak's headstone by heart.
I have left these worlds-no life remains,
But love, the physician who'll tend your pains,
Abides, and wounds, and lingers on,
And where you feel it, I am not gone.
Memories fade-but where they take new wing,
It's because I am the center of Orpheus's ring;
And I am the Arrow of Apollo's tip
Jutting from the stern of sorrow's ship,
And when you sing anew, although you mourn,
I am the cry of Cronus's horn.
When the worst of grief at last has healed
Know that I was the iron in Atlas's shield;
And if love at last shall set you free,
Your chains were broken at last, by me.
Lee was still feeling through what his father was trying to tell him, by giving him this picture. His heart had settled-it understood-but his brain was still working on it. "I've been thinking about the Arrow of Apollo lately." Lee set the picture aside abruptly, blinked back frustrated tears. "Do you still have it?"
"You sound like Leoben Conoy. He comes up here asking about it once a week."
"Well-but do you?"
His father rested his hand's comfortably on his lap. "I do." His tone of finality made it clear that that was as much as he was going to say.
"I see."
"Are you going to run for the presidency, Lee?"
"I don't know." Lee was having a hard time thinking that far ahead, lately. "Do you think I should?"
His father leaned forward in his chair, now, and Lee knew he was about to finally render his judgment. His features stilled. He was calm. He waited.
"Lee," he said carefully, his voice reminding Lee of nothing so much as the day he'd called to tell him his brother was dead, "you know that Kara was here this morning."
"Yeah."
"She comes up most days."
"I know."
"So you know that I'm speaking from experience when I tell you…" his father sighed, and it really sounded like the air coming out of a balloon. He slumped forward. "She looks like Laura did, son. At the end. She's being hunted by death. She doesn't have long. I think you know that."
Lee swallowed the rest of his ambrosia in one gulp, and then stood up and refilled his own glass and his father's. They both sat, identical postures, staring into the green liquid, cloudy and unfiltered here on New Earth. The silence stretched.
"I don't know if Zak would forgive you," Bill Adama finally said. "I can see, now, that you need him to. You and Kara… you carry around this heavy piece of furniture between the two of you, and you look in vain for somewhere to put it down, and it never comes. There's never enough room. That's torture, Lee, and whatever else is true, you don't deserve that. No one who struggles as hard as you have to find ways to love others does."
A fist between Lee's lungs unclenched, at that, and he took in what felt like the first easy breath of his whole life. "If Zak were here…" he began.
Once again, the admiral shook his head. "We used to talk about that. Those first two years. Remember? If Zak were here, this is the joke he'd tell, this is the thing he'd be nagging you about, this is the stunt he'd have pulled. We stopped. Do you know why?"
Lee shook off a shiver. "Why?"
"Because we both know he'd never have survived past the destruction of the Colonies. Even if he'd been on Galactica for my retirement, like you. You know how long he'd've made it?" Bill Adama shook his head. "Well, this is a night for honesty. So I'll tell you what I think. Once the Cylons started coming, I think he'd've made it about thirty-three minutes. Maybe thirty-three more. No longer."
Lee's head fell back, and his eyes closed. The relief and the shame coursing through him were both so potent. Relief, to hear his father say what he'd often thought. Shame, to hear his own thoughts aloud. "He wasn't a pilot."
"No, and I shouldn't have tried to make him one. That's what I live with. That training would have killed him any way you look at it." The swallow he took then was long. "The number of times I've wished for the horn of Cronus to be real so I could go back and apologize to him for that…"
Lee's face crumpled, but he fought valiantly. "Didn't you ever hear the rumors?" He nodded at Bill Adama's stove. "They have it, locked in a safe somewhere at Graystone Industries." He made himself joke. "Along with six original Kobolian masterpieces, the first draft of the Scrolls of Pythia, and a lock of Zeus's hair."
His father managed a smile, at that.
"Your brother was an immature kid when he died. He needed Kara because he had something to prove. To me. They were using each other, really-Kara to convince herself she wouldn't become her mother, Zak to convince himself he could be what I wanted him to." Bill sighed, and then the final judgment came. "It's not fair to sit around waiting for that immature kid to forgive you, Lee. He didn't even know himself. He never got a chance to. But you-you did. Finally. The man you've become… we don't always agree, of course. But, son. I am so proud of the man you've become."
Some of the shackles holding shut memory trunks in the corners of Lee's mind fell away with a thud, at that. Not guilty. Somehow, after all that.
His father sighed. "And I don't want you to become like me, when… if Kara goes. Sitting up here on a mountaintop… it's all I have left in me. But you-you're destined for more, Lee." His father turned back to the fire, held his hands to it as if to warm them up from these many feet away. "You should be the next president, Lee. You need to have a future, a cause. Promise me."
"I'm about drained of fighting, too, Dad," Lee said quietly, letting himself drop his guard and be honest with his father. "I don't know if I have much left in me."
"Find a cause. Because without one…"
"I know."
Then Lee picked up the photographs again, and his father kept staring into the low, flickering light of the fire. And they sat that way for a long time.
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