Bill stands all alone in his offices, at his desk, suddenly claustrophobic. The space is too small. Space is too small. He stares at the ceiling in silence, and erupts in a guttural shout. He sweeps everything off the desk in one spastic movement and begins to weep.

Saul walks. Every movement a study in control. He's been waiting for two things: to be a hero, and to die.

Bill loses control; the enemy is pressing in. On all sides. They look like us now. Down to our blood.

Bill stares at himself in the mirror: a double, a face he knows from every single day. Bill drinks scotch straight from the decanter in great galloping mouthfuls, feeling it burn. Bill stares at himself in the mirror, and strikes out: a double. A face he barely recognizes.

Saul stands in a circle of light, surrounded by Marines. He is calm, and he is beautiful.

Lee gathers his father, ungainly, in his arms on the bathroom floor, murmuring nonsense. Lee is pinned against the doorframe with his father in his arms, in his lap. "Okay," he says. As though anything can ever be okay. As though Saul didn't just kill them both. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die: you're not a man until you've seen your father, naked, off the pedestal and crying on the bathroom floor. Until the projection dies and you're looking at the blank, tired screen. Until you live through that. Bill weeps in his son's lap, flapping useless arms; his sobs rage from so deep a place they sound bloody.

"Dad, Dad. Dad, listen. No one suspected. No one. Not with his record, what he did on New Caprica. His eye, his... What happened to his wi... Come on, let's get up." He slides out from behind Bill but there's no stopping Bill now. He falls against the jamb uncradled. "What have I done? All the people I've sent to die. For what? For what?" For Earth. Bill laughs, almost, through the tears: "There is no Earth. It's a frakkin' joke. There is no Earth."

(You're right. There's no Earth. It's all a legend. Then why? Because it's not enough to just live, you have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth. They'll never forgive you. Maybe, but in the meantime, I've given all of us a fighting chance to survive. And isn't that what you said was the most important thing? The survival of the human race?)

Saliva drips from his father's mouth, onto his hand. Until you live through this you will not be a man. All fathers are Gods until they are outgrown; until they are rescued by their sons: This is the secret and the meaning of the Fisher King. He brings life to the river and water to the shore. Watch it go around and around.