15 January 2006

DCU/BSG03
Roy Harper & Lee Adama
Not dirty.  Not mine.

For brown_betty, who wanted something with Roy and said it was okay if I sent him into space.




He's living on one of the passenger liners when they find him.  Not the liner they started out on -- him and Lian, just a little daddy-daughter trip.  Show her the stars on a very short, very safe run between the colonies.  Take her swimming on Geminon and then fly back.  Except that while they were in transit the worlds ended, and their little plane wasn't capable of faster-than-light jumps.  So he picked up his kid and his luggage, shouldered the map-case containing his only surviving arrows and bow (not currently strung, though he has extra bowstrings coiled in there too), and relocated.

It's not so bad.  They organized school programs a while ago, so Lian has somewhere to be, and that gives Roy time to patrol.  At first it's just out of habit, but then he starts noticing things, like the way a crew member will decide to skim everyone's water rations.  The way some people will take advantage of others, especially the kids who wound up out here without any parents to protect them.

Roy doesn't patrol in costume, and he doesn't make a lot of noise, but there's the odd guy walking around with broken fingers and not much willingness to get them set by the military doc, seeing as he'd have to explain what happened, and why.

It passes for normal.  Keeps Roy from thinking about what he hasn't got anymore.

Except the military's paying a lot more attention to things than you'd expect, given how few of them there are, and how much time they have to spend shooting at murderous space-robots on a given week.  They haven't come up with a real police force yet, but someone on Galactica has his or her ear to the ground.  Roy's name comes up a few times, someone maybe remembers that Roy used to work for the government, and the next thing he knows he's standing in an office that looks more like a university professor's study than any of the commanders' offices he's been led to expect from TV.

He doesn't have to put on a uniform or move over to the battlestar, and he makes a point that he's not calling anyone 'sir'.  But he spends three days a week over here now, training personnel in hand-to-hand combat.  Maybe sometimes puts in the odd half-hour on the shooting range with their people, just to compare skills.

Some of them frankly suck with a gun.  Most of the crew aren't actually soldiers, and they weren't trained for combat.  S'why they need Roy, now.  Others don't suck as much.  The odd one's pretty good.

Maybe he makes the odd friend.  Roy's good at that.  And more and more, it's his job to teach the instructors, so they can go out and teach other people.  It's how he meets the head pilot guy.  The old man's kid, and doesn't he just look like he's spent his whole life being it.

That, right there, is a sad man.  Level in a way that reminds Roy a bit of Connor, lovelorn in a way that reminds him of.

Well.  Himself, mostly.

Roy can understand an attraction to scary girls who abuse you and beat you and smile at you and then wander off to fuck lesser men.  Apollo manages to do the pull-himself-together-and-lead-people thing better than Roy ever could, but he's frayed at the edges, like he's lost too much too fast.

So maybe sometimes Roy stays on after his shifts and has a drink or two with him.  Apollo has an office all to himself, which for all it's the size of a closet gives him about three times as much space as the average person in the fleet.  There's just about room in there for both of them and a jar of something bright and alcoholic just this side of napalm.

Apollo he's discovering, is a connoisseur of very old dirty jokes.  The kind so old Roy hasn't heard them before.

Also a fan of the old detective comics.  The ones that tracked the various vigilantes and printed up blurry pictures of a shadow that might or might not be Batman's.  Who kept bad guy scores for every caped crusader.

"I was kind of a fan of yours.  I mean, years ago."

Roy drinks.  Winces.  "Thanks."

"No, I mean.  Stupid outfits aside, you did some good work.  And there was the whole kid thing."  Apollo -- Lee (because if Roy's going to be Roy and not Arsenal, then Apollo has to be Lee) -- waves a hand.  It's pretty steady for a guy who's had a third of a jar already.  Good man in a fight, Roy thinks.  He wonders if Apollo's ever fired an arrow.  "Like, at that time when you actually believe in justice, you actually went out and did something.

"I used to wear this blanket cape."

Lee really obviously didn't intend  to say that out loud.  Drinker than he thunks he is.  Yeah.

He's turning red.

Roy grins.  "And?"

"And I made my.  Brother.  Be my sidekick."

"So, really, you were being Batman."

Apollo looks an entirely different kind of embarrassed.  "Sorry."

"It's okay.  Even I wanted to be Batman.  Until I met him."

"Do you think he died?"

"I think the Batcave might be the best fallout shelter in the Colonies.  He reinforced the weak points with lead.  And he has contingency plans for everything."

"Good to know."

Grin.  And Roy's got this slow burn in his body, partly from the alcohol, partly from the company.  Nothing like love, but maybe like he might now know where he can get a hand if he needs one.  It's good to know.

Except.  "I.  Shit.  I gotta go home."

Lee nods.  "Morning in, what?  Five hours?"

"Yeah."  He doesn't explain that Lian will panic if he's not there when she wakes up.  She's fine, now, with him being gone when she goes to bed, but he has to be there at one end of the night or the other.  More so since the worlds ended.

So he goes home on the next shuttle.  Rinses out his mouth three or four times so Lian won't push him away when he kisses her good morning.  Tucks his bow case under his bed and stretches out on it.

Lian's across the room, tucked in and sound asleep.  Little observation-slit window over her.  She gets the view for the same reason she got it on their plane -- because she's his girl, and she deserves it.  But from this angle Roy can see too.  Stars that don't move between jumps.  Fleet ships jockeying for position.  CAP fighters skimming between them.

Apollo wants to teach Roy to fly one of those.  Or have someone teach him.

Roy has to decide if he wants that.




jane
DCU
BSG