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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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"Uh, I think you really did," Molly says, brow shooting up, unable to help letting out a laugh. It's good-natured, though, warm. Had it just been the question, she might have been more inclined to roll her eyes, if she did anything more than just shrug it off, but the way he catches himself makes it too difficult not to at least be a little amused. Besides, given her answer, it's fair enough to wonder. "But I do, actually. It's close to work, which makes it pretty convenient."

"So what do you do at City Hall?" Lee asks, figuring it's a safe bet to guess that she works there. It seems like most of the people who frequent this bar do, anyway.

Except for Lee, apparently. No matter how fast he picks this stuff up, he has a feeling that it's going to be a while before somebody downtown will actually employ him as anything other than a law clerk or legal assistant.

"I work in communications at the mayor's office," Molly answers, grinning a little when he doesn't even have to ask where she works, though she supposes it's probably obvious. There are plenty of other places nearby, but given the number of people who work at City Hall who come here regularly, there had to have been a good chance that she'd be one of them. "So if there's anything you wanna blame anyone for, I didn't actually have anything to do with it. Yet."

"I'll just keep it in mind for the future, then," is Lee's response, and he takes a drink from his glass with a small grin in Molly's direction.

There's a hell of a lot about the way the city's run that he'd like to blame someone for, but something tells him it's not the fault of anyone who was brought into the city against their will. Or at least, anyone who remembers being brought to the city against their will.

"After the 'yet.'"

"I'm going to choose to take that as a vote of confidence, so, thank you," Molly says, smile teasingly sweet, as she lifts her glass towards him a little before sipping from it. Truthfully, it's a hard thing to think about sometimes, when she knows she'll never have the career she originally intended, but she has to make the most of what she can here, and there's still farther she can go. That's what counts. "When I'm someone's Chief of Staff, then you can blame me. Or thank me, I guess, depending."

"So is that the goal?" he asks, and it's not that he's surprised that she doesn't want to run for office or that her goals are that lofty to begin with. Besides, it's not like his own aren't just as challenging. Mostly, he's just curious.

"It's ambitious."

“That’s the goal,” Molly confirms with a nod, his assertion that it’s ambitious brightening her smile, a slight sharp edge to the expression. She knows full well how ambitious it is. But ambition isn’t a sin, and when this is all she’s got, she sees nothing wrong with wanting to aim as high as she can. “But why not, right? The worst that can happen is I never make it.”

Lee's spent a lot of time the past few years actively planning for 'the worst that can happen', and in the grand scheme of things, he has to say, Molly doesn't really have a lot to lose as long as she just gives it a shot.

"Is that what you did back home?" he asks.

"Not quite." Molly pulls a face, nose wrinkling, a teasing sort of self-deprecation. "It was the plan back there, too, but I never got that far. I was an intern on a presidential campaign when I got here." When she died, that is, but that's hardly something she wants to think about, let alone admit to. The point is that she can do more here, that she already has, that she'll continue to do so. "Not the most glamorous job, but everyone's gotta start somewhere."

In a way, it had been a point of pride, too. Had she wanted to do otherwise, she wouldn't have needed to start at the bottom; her father's position, the connections she had, the people she grew up around, would have seen to that. While Paul might have secured the internship for her, she still wanted to make sure everything she did was on her own merits, that she didn't rely on her name or seem to. Of course, that wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference if and when the story broke — she'd still have been Jack Stearns' daughter then — but before that, it meant everything.

"As a lowly law student, I'll definitely drink to that," Lee replies, and then does so, finishing off the rest of his drink in one go.

There's no necessity here like there was with the Fleet. The legal system was just being rebuilt there, and though he never got the chance, he likely could have found a place, even if he'd gotten the bulk of his ideas during Baltar's trial from his grandfather's law books.

A rudimentary understanding of Darrow law isn't going to be enough for anyone, and Lee knows it. He can't exactly half-ass his way through this, so law school it is. Working his way from a student to practicing is the very definition of starting at the bottom and working his way to the top.

“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."