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molly

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There's a bar near city hall that Lee frequents. Usually, it's only when he's been spending time in the law library, studying or working on a paper, and by the time he's done for the day and he's read through enough that he finds himself going cross-eyed, the idea of stopping in before heading back to High Gate Terrace for the night seems like the best thing he'll do all day.

Of course, he knows all the work will eventually be worth it. While Darrow has been mostly kind to its newcomers, to people from different times and planets and dimensions, it's not without its flaws. First and foremost being the lack of representation for those people. It's something that grates on Lee every time he sees a protest or reads an Op Ed in the paper about it, and for the most part, no one else seems to care much. But they're stuck here, just the same as everyone else, and they deserve to have a say in their government. To help shape it. There should be programs to help new arrivals get acclimated. Instead, there's nothing.

He's hoping to change that. Eventually.

This evening, there's just a bar full of professionals and a strong glass of scotch. The rest, he'll figure out later.

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“So that’s what you’re doing,” Molly says, nodding slightly. “I was just gonna ask.” He’s asked her, after all, and both his being here and the speed with which he guessed that she works at City Hall have made her curious. His being a law student explains it, with the library so close, too. “Did you practice law back home, or is that something you decided to take up here?”

In her experience, at least, it seems like most people try to pick up where they left off, inasmuch as that’s possible here. Still, she doesn’t want to just assume. She’d had no intention of getting back into politics when she showed up here, after all, sure she was out of the game for good, until she was convinced to do otherwise.

"Uh, no. Not really," Lee says, and he gestures to the bartender for a refill, "I didn't really get much of a chance, back home."

It had been the plan not long before being brought to Darrow. At least, he thinks. He hadn't much time to consider what came next after Baltar's trial before being relocated, but something tells him he would have landed there anyway. Maybe the last conversation he had with his father came about for the wrong reasons, but he has a feeling that trying his hand a law would have been for the right ones.

"I was a pilot."

That would explain the career change, Molly thinks, though decides it would probably be too tactless to say so. She's not really one to mince words, but even if he's found something else to do here, he probably doesn't need to be reminded that there's not exactly a lot of flying to be done in Darrow. In that regard — in so many, really, more than she likes to spend time thinking about — she got lucky. Even if she'd thought at first that she would choose a different field, she gets to keep working towards what she's spent her whole life planning to do. Government in Darrow is a different beast from government back in the States, but still, she prefers that to starting from scratch.

"Big difference," she says, brow arching, and takes a sip from what's left in her own glass. "So why law?"

If Lee's honest with himself, law was something he'd considered a long time ago, before test pilot school, before the Fleet, before he'd joined the reserves, waiting for something better to come along. But it hadn't been an option back then, not when his father was Commander William Adama. A man wasn't a man until he wore the wings of a Viper pilot, and both Lee and his brother had had their futures written for them early on.

And after the attack on the colonies, doing anything that than piloting a Viper would have been turning his back on the oath he'd taken. There hadn't been a choice.

The bartender sets a full glass in front of Lee, and he thanks him before turning back to Molly.

"I guess I've always been interested in it," he says, "My grandfather was a defense attorney."

Lee thinks that he might want to make more of a difference than just that, eventually. People brought to Darrow against their will need some kind of representation, a say in their government. Maybe it won't be Lee himself, but he knows that he needs a better understanding of the city's laws and government before he can help make that happen.

"Runs in the family, huh?" Molly asks, one corner of her mouth lifting a little higher. In spite of her phrasing, she knows there's probably not really some kind of genetic component when it comes to things like that. It's more having someone to take after. Without her dad around, she doesn't have the first idea how she would have turned out, what she might have been interested in. As it is, she's only ever seen one future for herself. Those expectations may have had to shift slightly here, but it's close enough. After having to learn the hard way in those early days here that, even without her dad's actual presence, she'd be lost trying to figure out anything else to do with herself, she wouldn't see the point in trying that again. "I know a little about what that's like."

"It's not exactly the family business," Lee says, though he knows what she's getting at. If his family had one at all, it was taking the oath and joining the Fleet, but considering how all of that has turned out, he'd hesitate to call it that. He has a feeling that, even under current circumstances, his father wouldn't be too happy with what he's chosen to pursue in Darrow.

Then again, they hadn't exactly parted on good terms.

"So your parents were politicians?" he asks.

“My dad was,” Molly says, nodding. “So I basically grew up around it.” She doesn’t think that’s the only reason why she chose to go into the same field, with as passionate as she is about what she does, but it sure as hell has made a big difference. Really, she’s never considered doing anything else. Had she grown up in a different environment, she might well have done something else. It’s too hard to imagine, though, with as much as it would have changed about her life. “Which kind of got me started in that direction.”

"You're lucky it ended up being something you were interested in, then," Lee replies, because in his case, he doubts that he would have joined the Fleet if it wasn't for his father. The plan was for it to be temporary anyway, before the attack on the Colonies. He's not sure it would have been an option at all, if he hadn't been born the son of William Adama.

"Imagine if you'd hated it from the beginning."

"God, I would have gone crazy," Molly says, stopping just short of rolling her eyes at herself, her head tipping back slightly. That, or she would have done something else, unsure if she'd have been as inclined to go into the same field if she weren't interested in it no matter what her father said, but that's still too strange to really even consider. She doesn't know what that would have been like. Even here, when she'd meant to be giving it up, she never figured out what she would do instead. He's right, she thinks. That makes her pretty goddamn lucky. "It's weird to think about, you know? Everything would have been different that way."

"What kind of work do you think you might have gone into, if not politics?" he asks, mostly just for the sake of asking. If it weren't for his father, there's a good chance Lee would have done back on Caprica just what he's doing now in Darrow, but if it weren't for the Fleet, he doesn't know that he'd have the same appreciation for the Oath, the law and the will of the people. It's just not as simple, for him.

"Honestly, I don't know," Molly says with a helpless little shrug, not quite laughing, though there's amusement in her voice nonetheless. She's been trying to think of something and continuing to come up blank, but she pauses a moment anyway to consider it. It just requires going pretty far back, when she's never been in a position to think about much else. "I took French for a while in school, and I liked that a lot. So maybe something with that." She'd been good at it, too. Like much else, though, she gave it up to focus on politics instead.

"So you'd teach?" Lee asks, and the entire conversation is hypothetical at this point, but he thinks it's interesting to think about anyway. Not that he'd even known what French was before he crash-landed in Darrow; it's a language from somewhere on Earth, he's learned. It makes him wonder if he might have ever learned it, if Fleet had found Earth.

"Or interpret, maybe," Molly says, shrugging. "Obviously I wouldn't be good enough for that now, but if I'd really studied it, I might've been." In this imaginary future, it's nice to think that she would still have been doing something useful, one thing that she guesses would be the same no matter what. Still, she likes where she is. It might be, as she's been told before, an odd fit, but there wouldn't be a better one.

"Ah," he replies with a nod, though what Molly's talking about was undoubtedly a foreign concept to him before Darrow, "We just had one standard language, back home. Not much use for an interpreter."

Life in the Colonies, language in the Colonies and in the Fleet was just different. It makes him wonder how they would have managed if they ever found Earth.

"Yeah?" Molly asks, brow raising in clear interest. "I can barely imagine." It seems like that could actually have been useful, saved a lot of trouble, but then, people will always find conflict anyway. There's no chance that the lack of a language barrier could have prevented that. Still, it's interesting to consider, what that must have been like. "Guess it's a good thing that's what most people speak here, too, then."

"Yeah, it's strange, in that way," he replies, "or so I hear."

It wasn't something that he even noticed when he first arrived in Darrow, but the longer he's been there, the more he's realizing is wrong. It's supposed to be Earth, or at least some facsimile of it, but there's a lot missing, from what he's heard.

"Yeah, it is a little strange," Molly says, "and easy not to think about when you don't have to worry about not being understood." It's one of many ways in which she's been incredibly fortunate, really. There's no language barrier, she can do what she loves, at least in some form, she's fucking alive. But this is more like a city in the States than representative of anything beyond that, and while there are people of different cultures who speak different languages, it's English that people see everywhere. Lucky for many, less so for others.

"I'm not sure I'd go that far," Lee says, "There's a lot of room for misunderstandings, misinterpretations, still. Maybe a lot of us speak the same language, but with so many people from so many different places... I don't know, it might be even more complicated than if there was just a language barrier."

He thinks he's done a good job of keeping up so far, but even after how long he's been in the city, and even with how similar some things are to how life was before the destruction of the Colonies, Lee sometimes finds that there's a disconnect.

"That's true," Molly allows, head tipping to the side. The basics might be the same, but what's English to her might be known as something totally different somewhere else, and each variant of the language, like each place, will have its own idiosyncrasies. When people can show up from any possible universe, worlds she couldn't have imagined and works of fiction, it could never really be totally simple. In that regard, too, she's been lucky. She's still an outsider in Darrow, and this isn't actually Earth, but it's damn close to it, more so than she knows is the case for a lot of other people. "Nobody's really going to know what it was like anywhere else." One corner of her mouth pulls a little higher. "I don't know what it was like where you're from."

Surprisingly, not a lot of people have asked Lee about his life before Darrow. From what he's found, a lot of people are content to just start new lives here and leave everything behind. In a lot of ways, Lee can respect that, and he should understand it, given what he's left behind, but he can't help but miss it.

"A lot like here, actually," Lee answers, speaking of life in the Colonies, before the cylons attacked, "Our technology was maybe a little further along, though. And, obviously, we weren't stuck on just the one planet. There were twelve, in all."

"Twelve," Molly echoes, brow raising. "That is different. There were... eight? In our solar system, but only the one was inhabitable." She considers making a joke about Pluto getting demoted, but she doesn't want to have to explain it, mostly because she doesn't know enough about the specific science and the qualifications of it. It doesn't really matter, anyway. She's far more interested in what he has to say, sipping her drink before she continues. "So when you said pilot, you didn't mean 35,000 foot up domestic flights, you meant, like, space?"

He has to admit, it's strange to hear her talk about it that way. But no one in the city had seen anything like his Viper when he crash landed, so he shouldn't really be surprised at this point. Interplanetary travel just isn't something most people in Darrow are used to.

"Uh, yeah," Lee says, and pauses for a moment, his hands wrapped around his glass, "Military reserves. At least, at first."

That plan had quickly gone out the window, after the end of the worlds.

"At first?" Molly asks, without stopping to give it much thought. "What happened after that?" It's really only in having this conversation that she's realized she doesn't know all that much about Lee in the first place. They've crossed paths several times before, they've talked, but she's never really stopped to find out more. It seems like high time she changed that, except it occurs to her a moment too late that this could be too intrusive, and she pulls a face, nose wrinkling. "Sorry, if I'm asking too many questions, feel free to tell me to stop."

He's taking a drink when she asks, and frowns as the liquid settles on his tongue, pausing for a moment before he finally swallows and answers her.

"No, it's okay," Lee says, "We were attacked. I... I'd been assigned to participate in the decommissioning of the Battlestar my father commanded. A Battlestar's kind of like an aircraft carrier. On my way back home, they set off nukes. Millions of people died, most of humanity wiped out in less than a day. They needed pilots, and I'd taken an oath. So after that it became more of a permanent position than I'd anticipated."

He'd been so bitter, so angry to have been given that assignment at first, but the truth was, it had probably saved his life, being off-world that day. He would have died on Caprica, otherwise.

"Sorry," he continues, realizing that he'd fallen silent, "It's kind of a downer."

"Jesus," Molly says on an exhale, her eyes growing wide. It sure as hell isn't what she'd have expected to hear, something that's harder to wrap her head around than anything else he's told her thus far. Other planets and space travel, those are different, nothing she's used to, but different is often par for the course in Darrow. Most of humanity being wiped out is not. Even having lived through some difficult shit in her own lifetime, none of it begins to compare to that. She can't even begin to imagine. "Don't be sorry, it's — I mean, I asked." Much as she'd like to say that, no, it isn't, he's right. It kind of is a downer, despite the fact of it not being her world. "That sounds pretty fucking intense."