She sighs and drops the watch back on top of the rest of it, a single life contained in a single box. This is what they all get stripped down to in the end. A few personal mementos that no one else can understand and all the private secrets laid bare. Travers - call sign Woodstock - had horrible taste in clothes, good taste in jewelry, read classic literature and apparently really wanted two very large men to assault him in the mess hall.

Life's funny like that.

Kara taps her pen on the form, wondering why she's still filling these out. There's no command headquarters to send them back to, no one left who cares. She wants to ball the paper up and toss it aside, but she can't and she won't. Impulse and disobeying orders are all well and good when it's her ass on the line, but this is different. She's not sure how or why, but it is.

There's a piece of paper that comes with each blank form. A name, a rank, a serial number. Occasionally there are dog tags attached, if anyone was around to claim them, if there were enough pieces left to claim. But mostly it's just some slip of paper that boils a life down to a few words that she has to print neatly in the blocks and send off to nowhere.

She thinks when they get to Earth, if they get to Earth, and they set up new fleet headquarters, someone's going to have a full time job just entering all the people who have died serving the Colonies. Faceless names that no one will remember save a few people too drunk to care anymore and a computer that's probably going to turn around someday and stab them in the back.

Travers. Marcus. 19. Male. Single..

He's the first today, so her hand only shakes a little.

Karl stands at the front of the room and raises his glass. "To Woodstock."

There's an echo that fills the small room and then the whisper of booze and glasses. There aren't any tears. They don't cry about this anymore. Too many have died, and there just aren't any tears left. Afterwards, maybe, in the quiet of the racks, people will cry or frak or fight, and everything will be traced back to this moment, or the moment the Cylons destroyed everything, or some other moment when everything maybe made a little sense just before it all went to hell.

He drains his glass and slams it on the table, and suddenly there's a drumbeat of glass and plastic and wood around the room as everyone else follows suit. It used to be that, when someone died, he knew them. They were a fellow pilot or a fellow officer or a fellow rack mate, but now it's just as likely that two weeks ago they were scratching their ass on a civilian ship and got the urge to fly themselves a crotch rocket or have a little self-respect and get in a Raptor.

Never met the man he's mourning, he realizes as he upends his glass and pours another round for him and the people in his immediate vicinity. Probably no one in the room ever did. He raises his glass again, wonders what the guy's real name was. "To Woodstock."

Wonders if there'll be anyone left alive to mourn him.

Bill gazes out the window, ignoring the soft words whispered behind him. Not whispered, he supposes, knowing that the conversation is meant to include him, should he deign to listen. Instead he hears the distant comm. chatter from earlier. The seductive quiet, the light banter. He thinks of the days when flying a routine simulation was likely to be just that and not a prelude to war.

To death.

On his desk are medical and personnel records of the men he lost today. He makes it his business to know their names and faces, their parents' names so that, should he ever meet them, he has more than a banal reply to any question they might ask. He's begun to think though, that a banal reply might be the best thing he could offer.

He reads through them and realizes each time that nothing is the right thing. When Zak died, he heard plenty of right words and heartfelt condolences, and not a single one of them was what he needed to hear. He wonders what would act as panacea if someone were to stand in his door and tell him that Lee was gone.

He makes a noise and conversation behind him stops. Forcing himself to turn, he offers the closest he gets to a smile these days and rejoins Saul and Ellen at the table. He lost three boys today, and he's almost sure he should feel guilty that he's so thankful none of them was his own.

Lee glances up at the three boxes sitting on the table beside the hatch. Getting to his feet, he walks over to them and sets them side by side. Names and addresses stand out boldly in black on the white background. He reads them aloud, as if it makes a difference, as if their names carry weight. The services will come, their bodies - or some facsimile - committed to the deep.

The room is filled with the boxes. He walks around it, touching them as he goes. He pauses and reads a name and then another, wondering what lies inside them. Before the Cylons…before, they would have been sent to their proper resting places. To the colonies, to their homes, to their families. Memories unlocked like Pandora's box, flooding the room with secrets best kept and things no one wants to know.

That's the worst part of death, he thinks.

He remembers opening an identical white box, Zak's name written by an unknown hand. Books he'd never read and clothes he'd never seen and letters that were none of his business. He'd burned everything and run his hands through the ashes, smelling death on his fingertips for weeks.

He gathers the boxes in his arms, as many as he can manage, and carts them through the corridors. He runs into a few people who stare at him strangely, but follow along, some of them running back to gather boxes as well.

They stand at the airlock and Lee reads the names off as he places them behind the seal. Marcus Travers, Elizabeth Martins, Valore Mistorev, Matthew Rennie. Name after name, box after box. Lee looks up as he places the last one, the airlock packed tight with a hundred lifetimes.

There are pilots and personnel crowded in the room as thick as the boxes, other lives not yet sacrificed. Other lives that, maybe tonight, feel a little safer for every other loss.