arrow_of_apollo | TM 183 - Tell me a secret.

183 - Tell me a secret.

((Locked to close friends and family only))

I would have done it anyway.

There wasn't a thing he could have said, nothing he could have promised that would have changed the way things turned out. He couldn't have offered himself up in surrender, couldn't have ratted anyone else out. If he had known who had betrayed the Twelve Colonies to the Cylons and that they were still on the Fleet, I still would have done it, after he told me.

There are some things that just have to be done. Or maybe more accurately, there are some things that you just have to do.

Half of it was just as I told Phelan, standing in that lounge aboard the Prometheus, one his own guards' pistols in my hand, aimed right at his chest: I had come to understand the black market, and the function it served. I had come to know some of the people who lived in this shadowy part of the fleet, and I'd already spent a hell of a lot of time there myself. The words "necessary evil" had made their way into my vocabulary.

That was why I was willing to just kill him. All I did was open up a power vacuum right at the top, knowing that there were people who could slide into place. And now, those people would understand that I and the Galactica would be watching them. They would understand that the black market's existence would no longer be unchecked, and that there were things we could not abide.

But if I said that I shot Phelan merely because he was a bad man and I did a good thing by taking him out of the picture, then I would be lying.

At Baltar's trial, I testified that humanity, as represented by the fleet, was no longer the society it had been-- that we were fugitives, and we needed to recognize that we could not prop ourselves up on the old rules and expect them to work for the humanity we had become. Things have become fluid-- less certain, less solid.

Phelan and the Prometheus were two years or more before then. I, like everyone else, wanted things to make sense. I wanted the laws of the Colonies to prevail over the lawlessness of a band of fugitives. I wanted things to be certain. I wanted them to be solid. I wanted the world to stay under my feet.

Every harsh truth and painful reality that Phelan threw in my face tilted that world upwards, steeper and steeper. And as we've all learned in our days on the run, it is a very slippery slope.

I couldn't handle it then. He could have had his men beat me to a pulp, and I still would have come back, because that much I could understand and accept. But for what he said to be true? For a man, a parasite like Phelan to know that kind of painful truth? I couldn't handle it.

I shot him because, maybe, I hoped that if the black market could be controlled, then maybe we would be able to keep from facing those truths a little while longer.

I guess it turns out that I was right.

(535)