~~BSG~~
Lee doesn’t remember a time before the pain. A searing physical ache haunts his every memory. He knows it’s just an illusion his mind has conjured, but it doesn’t make it any less real. It niggles his right elbow as he walks down the corridor with the Old Man. It causes the spasming muscles in his left hip that he tries to sooth when someone tells an old joke.

Little places he didn’t know could hurt will break his concentration. Did the loss of all he knows, make these physical pains that much more intense, that much more frequent? Is the loss of his mother mingling with that other, more distant, pain? He can’t tell for sure because he doesn’t remember a time before this agony.

Before his world ended.

Before Zak died.

Sometimes when someone is reminiscing about their family, Lee shuts his eyes because the pain is so intense. A burning sensation, like battery acid, runs down his throat as his heart screams out: My brother was the same way! But the acid in his throat and locked legs hold him silently in his seat. Lee’s pilots assume he doesn’t speak about his life before the attacks because he thinks he’s better than them. It’s not that. Tigh and his father assume it is his control, that unwillingness to give in to anything. It’s not that.

It is hurt, stinging and stunning as it whiplashes across his heart. Sometimes it’s a cutting feeling on his back where Zak clawed at him while learning how to swim. Sometimes it’s a tingle in his right fingers where his small hand gripped them to cross the street. It’s the desperate urge Lee must repress when he wants to brag about his kid brother like he used to with his friends. It’s the corny joke Zak told after he pummeled Lee on the pyramid court, Lee’s left hip rashed red by the asphalt. He was the only one who made Lee truly laugh.

And Lee thinks Kara might have inkling about this pain, but she only knew Zak for two years. For her there is a time before Zak, a memory where he doesn’t intrude, where the pain of loosing him doesn’t follow.

Lee doesn’t have that luxury.

His first clear memory is of watching the Old Man rock baby Zak while he is banished to the floor to look at the pictures in a book. Lee can’t remember the book clearly; sometimes he thinks it has animals, sometimes trains, or planes, or cars, or Cylons, or Gods. He thinks this means that this one memory is several, which means that his father, who wasn’t around to hold him until he was two, spent time rocking Zak-- a lot. Instead of resenting that, which Lee expects to do considering all the bitterness he carries for the universe, it makes him feel grateful.

Lee wonders how he can feel gratitude for being left on the floor, but at least this memory, this feeling of gratitude, waxes over the shattering pain settled in other memories. It doesn’t quite cause the heart numbing and hollow feeling of all the others.

Pain. Memory. Zak.

Lee can’t seem to live without these three things.

Pain. Memory. Zak.
Lee William Adama.

It’s all the same thing…

It’s a rocking chair. It’s all he can think; taking in his father’s smiling face. A rocking chair for Cally and Tyrol. His father rubs the chair again with sandpaper in the uncomfortable silence as Lee stares at the offending piece of furniture.

“Have a seat.” His father is ushering him to the chair. “Try it out.” But Lee remembers where his place is, feels the quivering muscles in his thighs and he drops instantaneously onto the floor in front of the rocking chair. Blue eyes closed, he takes a deep breath, tries to block out the pain and thoughts, but the husky scent of William Adama exists in his memory as well as in his nose, and he can’t get out of the memory, can’t stop the gentle gasp of air out of his teeth.

Tension pervades the air. Can’t his father tell how much this one thing hurts? It is like a decompression of his heart, everything is sucked out, leaving him in pain, in emptiness.

A large hurt, weak at this particular point, this rocking chair, because he can still, even now, hear the gentle creak of the chair back home, in their room. Zak and his. He can see his father’s face bent adoringly over Zak’s as the antique rocker chirped with his movements.

“This seems familiar.” It is the husky overused voice of the Admiral, but it might as well have been the Commander twenty-five years before. Lee opens and focuses his eyes on his father’s boots, watching the creasing of the leather as his father rocks the chair.

“You use to meet me at the front door when I got home in the evenings. You’d take my hand and lead me upstairs and make me sit in that old rocker. Damn thing squeaked all the time.”

Lee doesn’t remember that. Has no recollection of his father’s hand in his. Can’t remember the heavy step following him down the hall. When he was younger, just after his father had left, Lee would have killed for that memory. For the remembrance of his father’s presence, but all he could find in his mind was silent emptiness, the kind he lives in now.

In Lee’s childhood, it had been his own steps that had been heavy, his own steps that followed little feet down the hall, his hand that had clasped a smaller hand. For most of his memory, Lee had been the father figure, but never the little one. Never so small and trusting to lead his father to the rocking chair. The chair that hurts because he had never been rocked in it-- or at least not that he could remember.

“You’d point to Zak and say, ‘up.’” A gentle smile creases the Admiral’s face. “You were a demanding kid. Very quiet unless you wanted something, then it was all ‘do that now’.”

“I don’t remember.” It’s the truth to Lee. It’s a truth he has lived with. He remembers very little of his father. Glimpses and splashes of viper wings, commander insignias, navy blue, olive green, husky scent, deep voice, and a back walking out the door. The Commander was always walking out the door.

“You’d demand I’d rock Zak and you’d sit on the floor, looking at books.”

“I remember you rocking him.” Lee’s voice snaps and his legs still haven’t stopped quivering. He pushes his palms down his thighs trying to prevent the shaking. “I remember you rocking him…” Lee’s voice fades to a hiss of emotion “…and never rocking me.”

The Admiral continues his story, and Lee knows that he hasn’t heard. Perhaps neither of them wants the words heard. “You never wanted me to rock you. It was always, ‘Zak, up.’” The feet of the Admiral flatten and Lee feels the shadow of his father sneak over him. A heavy hand falls on Lee’s shoulder, and it is what it always is…heavy. Heavy with weight, responsibilities, and expectations. To Lee, it never just is.

The calloused hand slides up his neck, sending goose bumps dancing along his skin, until the thumb hooks his chin and forces him to look up. “You always wanted more for him than you wanted for yourself.”

“I am… I was his big brother.” The crack in his voice embarrasses Lee, reminding him of years when disappointment from his father and mother had shaken his world.

“But you were…you are my son.” The Admiral slides to the floor in front of Lee and gathers him to his chest, rocking him side to side. “It’s only twenty-five years later than I wanted it to be.” The faint vibrations underneath Lee’s ear rumble in time to the quivering in his legs, the weakness in his thigh muscles from knowing his place. His place was watching out for Zak. But Zak is gone now; has been gone for four years now. The bitter taste of grief washes down his tongue as he holds in the grief because his father is holding him, when he should be holding Zak. Loving Zak. Lee closes his eyes and thinks about Zak, feels the pain, knows they are just memories.

Zak, Pain, Memories
Lee William Adama
William Joseph Adama

It’s all the same…