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theatrical_muse] 276 - Are you an only child?
Mar. 31st, 2009 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arrow_of_apollo276 - Are you an only child? Write about your siblings or lack thereof.
Mom and Dad had two sons, me and Zak. I wouldn't necessarily presume to get into who got what from whom as far as our personalities and such, but I think I can say that it would be tough to get two brothers from the same parents who were as different as Zak and I were. Despite that, though, we were always damn close, and I couldn't possibly have loved him any more if I tried.
I guess that's why the direction his life was going pissed me off so much.
When I joined the Colonial Fleet, it had nothing to do with my father. Not that I was entirely sure just what I wanted to do with myself, I knew that I wanted to go to college. Sure, I guess I could've gone to any local state school just to get a degree, but if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right. My ticket to a good university became signing up for the ROTC. They gave me four years of college, and I was willing to give them four years of service.
Zak, though, wanted to join up completely because of Dad. My father and I have more than patched up our differences since Zak's death, but I'm never going to believe anything else; Zak wanted to be like him, wanted his attention and approval, his respect. So, he signed up, like me but not.
He was never cut out for it. Zak should have been something else, anything else. I'd seen it ever since we were kids: he didn't have the edge. He didn't have the instinct to take the controls of a multi-million cubit machine and use it the way it was intended. Maybe one day he could have been a civilian pilot or a transport jockey, but no-- he wanted to wear a Viper pilot's wings.
And it killed him.
Zak was my only brother, but as I came to find out when I joined the crew of the battlestar Galactica, my father wasn't a man without a family. He created a family out of the crew of the ship, by demanding and earning their loyalty and respect. I'd never seen a group of soldiers more devoted to their CO like these people were to their "Old Man". At first I resented it, but I came to understand.
Commander Adama, though, also had a tendency to "adopt" some of his crew members, taking special interest in them and giving them extra attention. He treated them like his own children, pushed them to be better, celebrated their triumphs and was as tough on their failures as he ever was on mine.
The first new sibling I met was Kara Thrace. Oh, I'd met Kara back when she was Zak's fiancée, but on Galactica, it became clearer and clearer to me that my father had taken her under his wing, taken her into his heart.
He'd done the same with one of his CIC personnel, Anastasia Dualla, another exceptional crewmember. I couldn't argue much with that choice, especially since I ended up marrying her.
Some time later, I realized that my father had come to look at Sharon Agathon in the same fatherly way. She'd become a kind of confidante and conscience, and he put his trust in her.
Kara even told me, not too long before the end of things, that he'd called her his daughter. It never occurred to me to disagree.
(581)
Mom and Dad had two sons, me and Zak. I wouldn't necessarily presume to get into who got what from whom as far as our personalities and such, but I think I can say that it would be tough to get two brothers from the same parents who were as different as Zak and I were. Despite that, though, we were always damn close, and I couldn't possibly have loved him any more if I tried.
I guess that's why the direction his life was going pissed me off so much.
When I joined the Colonial Fleet, it had nothing to do with my father. Not that I was entirely sure just what I wanted to do with myself, I knew that I wanted to go to college. Sure, I guess I could've gone to any local state school just to get a degree, but if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right. My ticket to a good university became signing up for the ROTC. They gave me four years of college, and I was willing to give them four years of service.
Zak, though, wanted to join up completely because of Dad. My father and I have more than patched up our differences since Zak's death, but I'm never going to believe anything else; Zak wanted to be like him, wanted his attention and approval, his respect. So, he signed up, like me but not.
He was never cut out for it. Zak should have been something else, anything else. I'd seen it ever since we were kids: he didn't have the edge. He didn't have the instinct to take the controls of a multi-million cubit machine and use it the way it was intended. Maybe one day he could have been a civilian pilot or a transport jockey, but no-- he wanted to wear a Viper pilot's wings.
And it killed him.
Zak was my only brother, but as I came to find out when I joined the crew of the battlestar Galactica, my father wasn't a man without a family. He created a family out of the crew of the ship, by demanding and earning their loyalty and respect. I'd never seen a group of soldiers more devoted to their CO like these people were to their "Old Man". At first I resented it, but I came to understand.
Commander Adama, though, also had a tendency to "adopt" some of his crew members, taking special interest in them and giving them extra attention. He treated them like his own children, pushed them to be better, celebrated their triumphs and was as tough on their failures as he ever was on mine.
The first new sibling I met was Kara Thrace. Oh, I'd met Kara back when she was Zak's fiancée, but on Galactica, it became clearer and clearer to me that my father had taken her under his wing, taken her into his heart.
He'd done the same with one of his CIC personnel, Anastasia Dualla, another exceptional crewmember. I couldn't argue much with that choice, especially since I ended up marrying her.
Some time later, I realized that my father had come to look at Sharon Agathon in the same fatherly way. She'd become a kind of confidante and conscience, and he put his trust in her.
Kara even told me, not too long before the end of things, that he'd called her his daughter. It never occurred to me to disagree.
(581)
