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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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"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."

"We were on the run for a long time," he goes on to say, "looking for some place new to call home. Maybe it's frakked up to say it, but... as much as I miss the people I've left behind to be here, it's kind a relief to finally be able to at least try to put down roots somewhere."

Darrow takes people away just as easily as it brings them, he's learned. Kara disappeared without a trace, for no reason, and the same thing could happen to him at any time, But for now, it's nice to have a bit of a breather.

"And here I thought being on the campaign trail was rough," Molly says wryly, her voice still soft. There's a fine line between sympathy and pity, and she wouldn't cross it for anything, but she doesn't want to just be dismissive, either, with something that fucking major. She's always been the kind to settle wherever she goes, anyway, decorating her hotel rooms so they'd feel more personal, like something hers, making sure her apartment here is a home and not just some empty place to live in. She imagines that would be more difficult in space, with their entire world gone. "I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I mean, after all that, of course you'd want to be able to settle somewhere, right? Especially if that's what you were trying to do in the first place."

He talks about leaving people behind as if he'd had some kind of choice in it. On the contrary, he'd been doing the exact opposite when he'd found himself in a dive, his Viper caught in the gravitational pull of an unfamiliar planet. He'd been determined not to leave Kara, or rather, not to let her leave him again. As it turns out, that had been as out of his control in Darrow as it had been when she'd flown into the storm.

"Oh, I've seen how rough a political campaign can be," he says, trying to bring the subject back to something a little more light. Though he'd only heard a lot of Roslin's woes secondhand from his father. Being CAG had taken up most of his time during the election back with the Fleet, "I wouldn't make light of it."

"It can be pretty nightmarish," Molly says, head tipping to the side, though she's grinning as she does. In the case of the one she worked on, she can't say she enjoyed every second of it, given the way all of that ended, but for the most part, she'd loved it anyway. It was one thing watching her father campaign as she was growing up, his reelection something he took seriously no matter how good his odds were. Really being a part of it herself, though, even only as an intern, she'd been sure it was what she wanted to do. "I'm not really sure what it says about me that that's still what I intend to do with my life."

"Probably that you're just a little bit crazy," he replies, taking a chance that she won't be offended by the accusation. Truthfully, he probably doesn't know her well enough to tease, but he's had a few drinks at this point and is feeling a little reckless.

"But I think most of us are a little crazy, at this point."

He's going to law school, for gods sake. He should be trying to find a way back to the Fleet, not putting down roots. But it's difficult not to try for something he'd been thinking about for so long, now that the opportunity has presented itself.

"Oh, wow, thank you," Molly says, laughing, amused rather than offended. After all, he's probably right. No person who's completely sane could want to go into a line of work this endlessly frustrating, one full of red tape and compromise, fighting tooth and nail to try to make even the smallest bit of difference and knowing there'll never be an end in sight. She isn't sure if it makes it better or worse that she's not blind to the situation, is well aware of what awaits her and how fucked up most people in that business are. Either way, it still isn't enough for her to consider anything else. "So by 'most of us,' you better be owning up to being a little crazy, too, right?"

"I never said I wasn't," Lee replies, and it's not so much that people have accused him of it, than he feels that way most of the time these days. Pretending like it's not frakking insane that he's trapped here like he is. Maybe he isn't content to live in Darrow and not feel like he's making a difference— even if getting there's going to take a while— but he knows that none of them should even be there in the first place.

Gods, it's enough that he finds himself looking up at the stars some nights, expecting Galactica to jump in. It's frakking insane.

"Alright, good," Molly says warmly, sipping her drink. "So at least we're in good company, right?" All joking aside, that goes a long way. To go into this line of work at all, anyone would have to be pretty goddamn nuts. To still pursue it even after everything she went through, though, the up close look she got at how fucked up that world is, makes her crazier. It helps to know that there are decent people interested in the same sorts of things she is. She might not know Lee all that well, but he doesn't strike her as someone who's only trying to get ahead for himself.