The Bitter Taste
By Ali Cherry
K+ (For later)
Spoilers: Ummm…not really.

BSG

Lee doesn't remember a time before the pain. A searing physical ache haunts his every memory. He knows it's just an illusion his mind has conjured, but it doesn't make it any less real. It niggles his right elbow as he walks down the corridor with the Old Man. It causes the spasming muscles in his left hip that he tries to sooth when someone tells an old joke.

Little places he didn't know could hurt will break his concentration. Did the loss of all he knows, make these physical pains that much more intense, that much more frequent? Is the loss of his mother mingling with that other, more distant, pain? He can't tell for sure because he doesn't remember a time before this agony.

Before his world ended.

Before Zak died.

Sometimes when someone is reminiscing about their family, Lee shuts his eyes because the pain is so intense. A burning sensation, like battery acid, runs down his throat as his heart screams out: My brother was the same way! But the acid in his throat and locked legs hold him silently in his seat. Lee's pilots assume he doesn't speak about his life before the attacks because he thinks he's better than them. It's not that. Tigh and his father assume it is his control, that unwillingness to give in to anything. It's not that.

It is hurt, stinging and stunning as it whiplashes across his heart. Sometimes it's a cutting feeling on his back where Zak clawed at him while learning how to swim. Sometimes it's a tingle in his right fingers where his small hand gripped them to cross the street. It's the desperate urge Lee must repress when he wants to brag about his kid brother like he used to with his friends. It's the corny joke Zak told after he pummeled Lee on the pyramid court, Lee's left hip rashed red by the asphalt. He was the only one who made Lee truly laugh.

And Lee thinks Kara might have inkling about this pain, but she only knew Zak for two years. For her there is a time before Zak, a memory where he doesn't intrude, where the pain of loosing him doesn't follow.

Lee doesn't have that luxury.

His first clear memory is of watching the Old Man rock baby Zak while he is banished to the floor to look at the pictures in a book. Lee can't remember the book clearly; sometimes he thinks it has animals, sometimes trains, or planes, or cars, or Cylons, or Gods. He thinks this means that this one memory is several, which means that his father, who wasn't around to hold him until he was two, spent time rocking Zak- a lot. Instead of resenting that, which Lee expects to do considering all the bitterness he carries for the universe, it makes him feel grateful.

Lee wonders how he can feel gratitude for being left on the floor, but at least this memory, this feeling of gratitude, waxes over the shattering pain settled in other memories. It doesn't quite cause the heart numbing and hollow feeling of all the others.

Pain. Memory. Zak.

Lee can't seem to live without these three things.

Pain. Memory. Zak.

Lee William Adama.

It's all the same thing…

I initially wrote this in 2nd person POV, but I had trouble capturing the voice of where I wanted to go with in in the 2nd and 3rd piece(You'll never see this one) So I went back and edited it in 3rd person POV. All three pieces have been sitting on my hard drive, but my beta chickened out on me...So, go with it. :-)