Wingman

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and all of its characters don’t belong to me, but some other lucky person. I just like to borrow two of them for a while.

Author: Diamond-Raven

Rating: PG-13 (Tigh has a dirty mouth, but then again, we all know that)

Summary: Tigh reminisces and thinks about his unique friendship with Bill Adama

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Out of the two of us, everybody always assumes I’m the one who’s crazy. I never bother to correct them because I’ve never given a damn about what other people think of me.

Truth is, Bill just hides it better. I mean, he has to be crazy, right? There’s no other explanation for why the son of a bitch made me his best friend and his first officer.

After the first war ended, so did my life. During the war, I had had a purpose, I had a place to channel all of my anger and irritation. Blowing up base ships, dog fighting raiders, snapping centurion necks and blowing their heads off for good measure—I never felt more alive than I did during those years.

When it was over, when some stuffy frackhead of a bureaucrat said that there would be an armistice, my entire world collapsed.

Lugging around cargo on a freighter wasn’t a soldier’s job, but then again, neither was drinking, fighting and spending occasional stints in jail for doing the previous two.

I knew my life wasn’t going to go anywhere and I didn’t have the energy to give a damn anymore. And then, Bill Adama walked into my life and started giving a damn for me. I never asked him to step in that night at the bar when he wrestled the gun out of the barkeep’s hands and finished a fight that I hadn’t started. Okay, maybe I had started it. Not with my fists, but my mouth, and my fists weren’t slow to join in either. Yeah, I know that.

The point is, Bill Adama stepped in and threw himself in the middle of a dog fight as my wingman, and he hasn’t stopped since.

He bailed me out of jail when I couldn’t afford to.

When it was time to board the freighter after liberty was up and I was too drunk to lift my head off the sidewalk onto which the barkeep had thrown my drunk ass, he would search through the entire city until he found me and dragged me back onboard with me yelling, crying, puking and generally being a drunk nuisance.

On nights when there wasn’t enough booze to keep my head from nearly exploding and I was lying on the floor, sweating and shaking and in pain, I’d want nothing more than to grab my gun and finally put myself out of the misery that my life had become. When I’d scream at him to leave me the hell alone and that I was done, he’d cuff me over the back of the head and say “I’m not going to let a soldier die in the gutter, especially not if he also happens to be my best friend. Face it, Saul. Just because you’ve taken your hands off the stick and are willing to let yourself crash on whatever surface is closest, doesn’t mean I’ll let you without a fight.”

He never told on me when he caught me fracking our skipper in a storage closet, just like he kept his mouth shut when he found out I’d been smuggling booze onto the freighter to feed my addiction.

Until my dying day, I will never understand why he put up with me. I can’t think of a single thing that I did back then or do today that would warrant such loyalty or devotion on his part. But whatever it is, I hope to hell I’ll keep doing it, because at some point, I’ve come to realize that the old man’s friendship means more to me than anything else, yes, even Ellen. It’s the one reason I haven’t put any real effort into getting my own command. Yes, I don’t really want my own command, but in all honesty, I don’t want to lose Bill.

Back in those early days, I never believed that he viewed our friendship as anything more than bunkmates on a dirty freighter.

Anybody on a freighter wasn’t going anywhere fast and it made sense to be on speaking terms with the person sleeping next to you. Anything more than speaking terms wasn’t necessary, since either you or your bunkmate would either get killed in a fight, miss the freighter at the next port or end up in jail for longer than the liberty you were given. For some reason, Bill Adama never understood that you don’t make lifelong, meaningful friendships on a freighter. You especially don’t make a lifelong friendship with someone like me. But he did.

I always thought he was nuts when he went on and on about getting us back into the fleet.

I mean, it was a hell of a long shot for him to get back into the fleet, never mind a drunk with a criminal record and a bad temper like me. I always laughed off his crazy ramblings. Only when I was really drunk or depressed did I let him coax me into playing make-believe and imagining what it would be like to be back in a cockpit.

When he got accepted back into the fleet, I was surprised, and for the first time in a long time, I found myself feeling proud and happy for someone other than myself. The very next day, Bill left for the fleet, and I was alone again. I have to admit, I actually missed the son of a bitch for a few days.

I hadn’t had a friend in so long that I missed having him around. I missed talking to him, laughing with him and sharing old war stories. I missed him even more when I was tossed into jail during our next liberty for being drunk and fighting with whatever-his-name-was for whatever-the-reason-was.

For the first time in a year, Bill Adama wasn’t there to bail me out and the skipper didn’t wait for me. Like she had always said, she liked my cock but couldn’t stand the rest of me, so if she had to sacrifice the former to get rid of the latter, then so be it. I sat in jail for three days and by the time I got out, the freighter was long gone.

I started running drugs around the neighborhood to make money and lived in a filthy little hole at a motel which served as the main distribution center for the neighborhood’s drugs.

Every cubit I made, I spent on women and booze, trying to pretend that they made me happy.

At one point, I was shocked to realize that the last time I had really been happy was back on that freighter with Bill. If I was having a really bad day, he’d come and sit on my bunk, pull the half empty bottle out of my hands and say “You know what I’d be doing if I were on CAP right now? I’d annoy you until you did an Athena Roll with me.” I’d snort and mumble that neither of us had done a roll in years, but he’d ignore me and continue spinning his fairy tale about battlestars and vipers until I was chuckling and adding in my own little pretenses.

That fairytale was all I had to cling to as my life continued slowly wasting away.

One day I got so irritated with those stupid dreams that the old man had put into my head and forced me to think about as if they were actually a possibility, that I decided to finally shove all thoughts of the fleet out of my head. I figured a very appropriate way to do that would be to burn my dress uniform sash, which I had stubbornly clung onto, especially after Bill had found it and grinned, saying that I should hang onto it since I would need it again some day.

I clenched my jaw as I forced myself to pour the alcohol onto it and then struggled to flick the lighter on with trembling hands already itching for the first drink of the day.

Then there was a knock on the door, and I realized that for some reason, that stubborn son of a bitch hadn’t forgotten about me. Not only that, but he had actually meant every single one of those crazy things he had said. But most importantly, I hadn’t only been another bunk mate to him.

I didn’t believe for a second that I would pass the physical or be fit to fly a viper again, but for the first time in a long time, I realized that I didn’t only have my own meager expectations to rise to, but someone else’s.

After months of hard work, more tears than I will ever admit and forcing myself to only have one drink a night, the only thing keeping me going was the thought that I couldn’t disappoint Bill.

And I didn’t. Well, not entirely.

Yes, I still let my temper get the better of me sometimes—“I never threw over any damn table!…Unless I did….”—and my drinking came and went in waves. Bill and I had our fair share of fights through the years too, some of them even getting physical.

The worst by far was when he caught me in the back of the engine room in the middle of the night, making booze after I had sworn to him for two weeks that I was clean. Let’s just say that I had to make up a really good story about falling down two flights of stairs after that one, but afterwards Bill cleaned me up, finished bottling my precious liquid and dragged me to bed.

I don’t know who cried harder that night, him or me, both of us being sorry for the fact that I wasn’t strong enough to tell my addiction to frack off and take back control over my own life.

But through it all, I made damn sure that I became what Bill had been for me for years.

He had always been my wingman through my worst days, never turning back no matter how heavy the fire I was taking was, and I was his wingman now and would be until the day I died.

I didn’t care where he wanted to take his ship, I just made damn sure that the coordinates were properly set and the FTL drives ready. I didn’t care why some frakkers decided that they didn’t like serving under his command, I just made damn sure that they learned never to express those thoughts again—and if my fists happened to rearrange their faces a bit and I left them pissing blood for a few days, then they deserved it. After the cylon attack, when that agent planted that bomb in our corridor and it blew, I didn’t care that I might die and could feel debris hitting me, I just made damn sure that I leapt between Bill and the explosion and shoved him down.

Bill Adama saved my life when nobody, not even me, thought it was worth saving. I still don’t know why and I will never know what he sees in me that makes him call me his best friend. All I know is that I will do anything to protect him and our friendship and no matter where he decides to fly his viper or his battlestar, I’ll be his wingman until the end.