The battle ended abruptly, with no warning and no sense of resolution. The Cylon Raiders just quit firing and turned around, running fast and hard. Apollo shook his head and tapped his scanner. No change. Raiders were still in full retreat. His other readout was less promising, though—of the one hundred fifty three Vipers that had launched, only thirteen remained.

"All right, people, let's regroup," he said over the comm. "Looks like we've got a problem. I want all survivors to form up behind me. We're heading home, see how bad the damage is. Anyone had any communications from Core?"

"That's a negative, Captain. Last contact with Core was a good ten centons ago." Apollo recognized the voice as one of Starbuck's innumerable friends, but he couldn't place the name.

The Galactica loomed ahead, silent. Apollo had a seriously creepy feeling about that, but he told himself that they had to be just having communications difficulties. He tried to ignore the rapidly vanishing baseship. They must have taken serious damage and decided to retreat. That was the only acceptable explanation for the cease fire.

"Right," he said. Vulpa, that was his name, the pilot that had reported on the lack of communications. "Then—"

That was as far as he got. The gaping hole where the bridge of the Galactica should have been prevented both thought and speech.

For a long moment, his vision was dark and blurry, and he wasn't sure if his Viper was spinning out of control of if it was just him.

"By all the Lords of Kobol," he breathed. That was his family there, that gaping hole in the ship, his only surviving family. And the chance that father and sister had abandoned their duty stations under fire was nonexistant.

They were dead.

He could hear voices, Starbuck's for sure, and some others he couldn't readily identify. But they weren't important. What was important was the crater where the Galactica's bridge used to be. His father, his sister... gone.

He retained enough wit to follow Starbuck's lead when he took over, but paid no attention to what was happening around him. All he could think of was his family.

He lost even that for a moment—or maybe a centare. There were no thoughts, none at all, in his head when he finally realized that Starbuck was there, yelling at him to open up. He looked around and was surprised to see he'd landed on some kind of transport. Hadn't he heard something about the Freedom Rising? Whatever. He popped the canopy release and automatically removed his helmet. Starbuck said something, he wasn't entirely sure what.

"They're dead, Starbuck," he responded, even though he was fairly sure Starbuck hadn't asked how his family was doing. "All of them."

"Yeah, I know." Starbuck looked sympathetic, but uncomfortable. "But sitting here isn't doing anyone any good. Come on down."

"Okay."

Apollo made it out of the Viper, but the world shifted uncertainly when he landed and he staggered. A small rational part of his mind realized that he was only unsteady because he'd gotten up too quickly, but the rest of him felt like the entire universe was reeling in an echo of what he felt inside. His entire family was destroyed. But Starbuck was there, and Apollo caught at his arm desperately. Starbuck was alive. He was real, and alive, and all Apollo had left.

His mind traced over the memory in careful detail, showing him every detail: the Galactica hung in space, tilted gently off center. Melted globs of metal and... other material floated around the great ship, drifting aimlessly in space. A vast hole, open to space, replaced the bridge.

His surviving family had been there. Athena, blue eyes intense and face pale with the strain of the last few days, had been staring intently at a computer screen, tracking the Viper squadrons. He could see her, concentrating, passing on performance reports. And then... had she looked up in time to see the bolt from the basestar which had finally penetrated the old ship's shielding? Perhaps with surprise, perhaps horror... or maybe utterly oblivious. But he couldn't quite believe that. Athena had always had an uncanny way of sensing whatever happened around her, rendering her utterly impervious to surprise attacks from her brothers. He and Zac had never once succeeded in sneaking up on her, not even once. Now they never would.

Adama had known, of that Apollo was certain. He could see his father as clearly as though he'd been there. The old man would have been standing on the bridge, at the command station, looking at the forward screen. His head would have been raised, proud and defiant, and he would have faced that blast with all the pride of the long line of warriors he'd been born to. Perhaps he would have spared a thought for his son, the last of the House Athanos, the one who would carry on the family name.

Or perhaps he wouldn't have. Perhaps, even in that instant before death, he'd been wishing it was Zac that had survived.

Apollo wondered vaguely if it was utterly sick, or maybe just disloyal, to think such thoughts about the newly deceased. But what else was he to think? He'd known for yahrens that he'd never completely satisfied his father. Not that Adama had had unusually high expectations for his son, but there had been one thing Adama had asked that Apollo had never been able to do: nothing, not even parental disapproval, had been able to make him give up Starbuck as his friend.

He remembered that first bitter disappointment all too well, when he'd first come face-to-face with his father's stupid prejudices. Demons take it, he hadn't even thought about Starbuck that way when he'd brought his new friend home for semester break. All he'd been thinking was that he'd finally found a real friend, the kind other people had always had but he'd never quite managed to attract: a best friend, that would always be there. Someone to share the lonely restday hours with, when he wasn't occupied with studying and everyone else was out with their friends having a good time. Someone who actually didn't care that he was the Commander's son.

But then, after two days of the secton-long break, his father had called him aside and informed him in no uncertain terms that his friendship with the young pilot was unacceptable. "Verging on the indecent," he'd said, about how close the two were. And Apollo was made to realize just what his father suspected was going on.

He'd been horrified, at first. His Caprican morals had been utterly shocked by the notion. But the more his father berated him for his unusually close friendship with Starbuck, the more intriguing the notion became. Starbuck was attractive, that was quite obvious, and he was much nicer to be around than any girl...

But Apollo never acted on his indecent thoughts and speculations. Adama eventually came to realize that he wasn't engaged in any immoral activity with Starbuck and quit lecturing him, but still held on to the hope that Apollo would grow out of the friendship and find a nice girl.

Reality momentarily intruded on Apollo's thoughts. His rear end hurt. How... mundane. But he shifted to a more comfortable position, vaguely noticing that he was sitting on a floor, up against a wall, in what looked like it had once been a pilots' ready room. Then he recognized that his head hurt and he rubbed his forehead with both hands.

He could hear Starbuck's voice out there, the one constant in his universe. Starbuck had taken charge like he'd been born to it.

And that was when it hit him, like a bolt from a Cylon laser canon. Adama was dead. So was Athena. So was every other member of House Athanos, right down to his cousin's baby that'd been born three days before the supposed peace treaty would have been signed. There was no one, no one at all, to keep him in command. No one to manipulate him in subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, ways, keeping him in the Fleet when he would rather just take off somewhere and be himself, where there were no regulations and he could love a man named Starbuck if he so chose.

And Starbuck... Apollo almost smiled. Yahrens ago, when he'd arrived back in Colonial space after that hellish mission on the Chimera, Starbuck had said that he couldn't imagine life without Apollo. And all Apollo had done was say something incoherent about Starbuck being his best friend ever. But he'd held on to those words all these years, keeping them inside like a private treasure, along with the knowledge that Starbuck loved him, even if he never said the words. Now he was free to love Starbuck back.

He'd heard some of what the pilots were saying, too, somewhere on the periphery of his attention. Some of them held him responsible for the devastation of the Viper ranks. Only logical, since he had been the one in charge, and he was still alive while the rest of them weren't. They were even right in a way, since he hadn't argued hard enough against the resupply run that had led them directly into the Cylon ambush.

Guilt washed over him. How could he sit here and think about how there was no one to stop him from finally achieving personal happiness when it was his fault, his and his father's, that the Cylons had nearly destroyed the remains of humanity? He could have stopped Adama, he knew he could have, if he just tried a little harder. If he hadn't given up and gone away like a good, dutiful son.

It was almost funny, really, one of those situations where there was no correct choice. If he hadn't given in to his father, if he had somehow managed to talk the stubborn old man out of entering the perfect spot for an ambush, Adama would never have forgiven him, and would have had one more thing to hold against his son. And of course, there was still the possibility that the Cylons would have set up something else in another location. They were nothing if not thorough.

Starbuck joined him then. Apollo tried to come out of his paranoid depression, but couldn't do it, not even for Starbuck. But he did achieve enough self-awareness to realize that Starbuck was holding him, was saying the words Apollo had longed to hear for so many yahrens: I love you.

Maybe this wasn't the end of everything, after all.