Topic for 29/11/06: "What is the one thing you always wanted to say but never did and now regret?"

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I never told Zak how proud I was of him.

Always thought I had all the time in the world to say the words but I didn’t and Zak died without knowing how proud I was to be his brother.

I just never wanted this life for my brother, I never wanted him to be a soldier and when he told me he’d joined up and was going through flight school I just knew he didn’t have what was needed but how do you tell your baby brother that he’s not good enough to be a pilot?

Ever since I can remember I'd been responsible for Zak and responsible for keeping him on the straight and narrow and for a really long time I managed but then he got it into his head that he wanted to make our father proud.

Worst mistake he ever made.

Dad planted the idea and it just grew until I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t change a thing, Zak wouldn’t listen to me and Gods did we fight. He just never understood why I wasn’t happy for him and why I didn’t have the same faith in him as everyone else.

Truth of the matter, I never wanted him to die.

Zak, he was carefree and everything I wasn’t and yet I managed to fly with some of the best and he just never got off the ground. It wasn’t his strength, maybe it never was. I just wish he’d known that I said and did the things I did not because I was disappointed but because I cared too much.

I should have told him how proud I was of him and how lucky I was to have him as a brother but I never did and I still regret it.

He was my brother and I loved him.

Muse : Major Lee 'Apollo' Adama
Fandom : Battlestar Galactica
Word Count : 307

Topic for 15/11/06: "Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all." - Sam Ewing

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Garner.

He hadn’t been the best Commander but he’d been willing, he’d tried and in Lee’s mind that was all he could have done. Cain had been shot, murdered, and Fisk, well he went the way of all men corrupted by greed.

Pegasus Commanders didn’t have a long life expectancy and Garner was no different from the rest only he died a death worth honouring and remembering but that’s at the end of the story and Lee’s only at the beginning.

He tried, Lee could see it in his every action but he failed with the most basic of things. Command is about people, Garner was too used to working with machines that he lost the ability to connect and understand. He ran the CIC like he would have an engine room and that was his flaw.

At the end of the day, he did his best and he worked hard at what he did and that deserves respect and admiration because he could have easily shirked the responsibility and not even bothered.

Garner didn’t always make the right decisions and he failed in a great many respects but he still made a choice that cost him his life but he saved the ship and the people onboard that ship.

A Commander’s responsibility always lies with his ship and the people onboard that ship and Garner may have realised it too late to change his command but he realised it soon enough to be damn sure he did the one thing he knew how to do.

He gave his life to save his ship, he took that big and final step to ensure that everyone else survived and Lee can respect that. It’s a lot more than what most people would have done if they’d been in his shoes.

You had to respect someone willing to do something like that.

Muse : Major Lee 'Apollo' Adama
Fandom : Battlestar Galactica
Word Count : 310