Word Count: 997
Date: 02/08/05
Series: One
Rating: K
Category: Relationships
Pairing/Focus: Lee, Kara
Warnings:
Summary: written for the "Things Most Missed"
challenge over on the bsg1000 LJ community. Hotdog misses Fleet Academy, and
Fireball mocks him for it. I'm presuming the existence of cows on the
Colonies. I mean, they had goats and chickens...surely they had cows?
Spoilers/Disclaimers: Well, it's set sometime after ep 4 and before ep 10.
"Hotdog."
"Yeah."
"You think about the colonies a lot, Hotdog? I mean--" Costanza leaned out and over to peer down at Fireball in the bottom bunk. Fireball halted, looking embarrassed.
He pulled back and stretched out, staring up at the gray metal above him. Quarters were filled with silence, punctuated by the occasional creak or rattling pipe of the aging ship. "Yeah."
"Did you...have a lot of family, back on the Colonies?"
"My parents. Big sister. A few aunts, uncles, cousins. Never really kept in touch with them, though. Nobody was real happy when I washed out, y'know?" His sister Melanie had shouted like a drill sergeant when she heard. Once she got over the initial shock, though, she was pretty supportive. Helped him pay for a place in the city where she lived until he could get a job.
No sound from Fireball. Costanza wondered if he'd fallen asleep.
"I was going to my granddad's funeral. My whole family was going to be there. Three brothers, two sisters. I used to spend the summers with my uncle and his wife -- they had two kids and were working on a third." There was nothing to say to that, no way any kind of sympathetic words were going to be right.
"Lords of Kobol, Fireball, are you from Sagittaron or something?" When in doubt, make it funny. Sagittarons always had big families. Whether you thought the colony was oppressed or not, it definitely had harsher living conditions. More kids died. Costanza went there almost a year ago, as a shuttle jockey for a big merchant ship line. He'd barely been on the surface long enough for a smoke, but it was long enough to get the picture.
"Grandparents were, on both sides. Parents moved to Geminon."
"I was just joking around, Fireball. Doesn't really matter where you came from anymore, does it?"
"...Guess not."
It was silent again. Costanza rolled over and tried to sleep, but he ended up just staring blankly at the bulkhead.
"You know what I want right now? A hamburger." It was Fireball again.
"Like anyone in the fleet’s gonna have a cow, Fireball. Even if we had any cows, we'd have to keep 'em around for the preservation of the species."
"Don't you miss the colonies, Hotdog?"
"Who doesn’t, numbskull?"
"What do you think about, from before?"
"Fleet Academy."
"...what, seriously?! You're a Viper pilot now, Hotdog!"
"Shut up, Fireball."
"No way. What the frak, man? You miss Fleet Academy."
"I had a hot girl when I was in the Academy." Gods, she’d been pretty. Hair like chocolate, skin like cream, kissed like ambrosia. They’d met right after he was accepted, and for a while it had been a nice, carefree, low-maintenance relationship. He’d been happy. She’d dumped him once it was obvious he was on his way out, walked away without looking back and gone to find herself a cadet with better scores.
"Whatever, Hotdog. I’m sure there’s plenty of girls in the fleet who’d love to take one of the new pilots for a test drive. What do you think my plans for my next off day are?"
"Girls, huh?" He'd seen Fireball checking out the other pilots in the mess hall. Course, he’d been checking out the girls and guys both, but it was always worth a joke to ask.
"Shut up, Hotdog."
"You’re the one who keeps asking questions. I’m just a guy trying to get some shuteye."
"I get it, I get it." He heard rustling noises and figured Fireball was finally going to clock out. Sleep was important these days. There still weren’t enough pilots, so everyone was seeing longer hours and less sleep. Captain Adama and Lieutenant Thrace were racking up even more flight time than the rest of the pilots. Costanza figured the CAG wanted to prove himself to his pilots and knew Thrace wouldn’t stand for racking up less flight time than Adama, despite serving double duty as both pilot and Flight Instructor. You’d think those two were related, or frakking on the side, but there’d never been any proof of the latter.
"Why do you really miss Fleet Academy? You washed out of Fleet Academy, but you miss it?" Does this guy never sleep?!
"What did it matter if I washed out back then? Not like there wasn't twenty more who needed the money or came from military families to take my place. Not like I couldn't find another job flying ships." Yeah, he missed the Academy. The Academy had sims. The Academy was on Geminon, and it was Geminon's warm summer days Costanza thought about longingly whenever he got out of his bunk and Galactica’s cold air assaulted him. "Besides, if I hadn't washed out then, there's no way in Hell I'd have made it here now." None of my Academy friends did, after all. Fireball's laugh drifted up from the bottom bunk.
"You got a point there, Hotdog."
Hotdog wasn't stupid enough to wish he'd stayed in the Academy, not quite. But he kept thinking about it as Lietenant Thrace pushed them relentlessly through their training. They’d been on CAPs within days of arriving on Galactica. The deckhands were still discovering new dents after they landed. It gave a whole new definition to the term "crash course." Washing out wasn't really an option anymore. Probably the only way he could wash out was to get killed. And there weren’t twenty fresh young bloods waiting to take his place these days.
It was funny in a way. Despite his offhand comment to Fireball, not everyone was a military brat or in it for the money. He'd had so many friends who were Viper-crazy or just space-crazy, who joined the Colonial Fleet to see the galaxy or to prove themselves.
Now they were all dead, and he was the one proving himself at the controls of a Viper. Yeah, Hotdog missed the Academy.
"Go to sleep, Fireball. We're on patrol in a few hours."