FF: "Memento" (K)
Memento
She happened upon it accidentally one evening.
She had been alone in his quarters. (She was always reminding herself that they were still his quarters in spite of the fact that she had been living there with him for weeks now. Somehow changing that simple pronoun from the singular to the plural, even if just in her own thoughts, felt like opening a door whose threshold she was not ready to cross.) He was on shift in the CIC and like every other night, her workload stretched on before her, never ending.
After an hour or so of the usual paperwork, her stapler or, rather, his stapler, clicked empty. She walked over to his desk and sat down, began rummaging through the drawers, figuring it stood to reason that if he possessed a stapler, he must have more staples lying around somewhere.
In the bottom most drawer was an old cardboard shoebox. Having struck out everywhere else in her search, she pulled out the box and set it on the desk, removing the cover. She was entirely unprepared for what lay inside.
The box was full of the sort of things one collects over a lifetime. Letters, photos, pictures that Lee and Zak had drawn for their father when they were boys. And lying on the very top of Bill Adama's memories was something that had once belonged to her: a lock of her hair.
The auburn tress was bound with a pink ribbon. In her shock over the discovery, she found herself wondering where in the worlds he had procured a length of pink ribbon.
She gingerly picked the lock up and smiled wistfully. Was it really only a month ago that she had hair this long? The Doloxan had been causing her hair to fall out at an alarming rate, making her feel like she was shedding everywhere, so she had determined to simply expedite the inevitable and shave the remainder off.
She had thought it would be simple enough, something she could do herself. But she couldn't quite angle the razor properly on the back of her head. And so, with infinite care, he had finished the job for her.
As he completed the final stroke of the blade over her scalp, he allowed his fingers to wipe away the bits of shaving cream at her temples, his touch lingering a heartbeat too long to be considered solely functional. Still facing the sink, she bowed her head slightly, almost as though in prayer, and would not raise her eyes to find his in the mirror. She was afraid of what she might see. Or what she might not see.
Afterwards, when he had departed for the main room, she had swept up the long strands from the floor of the head and thrown them away. Certainly a private could have performed this task, and one usually came in to clean the head, but it seemed so personal a thing, gathering up a part of herself for disposal.
She realizes now that he must have salvaged an auburn lock from the wastepaper basket after she had fallen asleep that night and she is frightened by what this sentimental gesture represents, of how intimate the mere fact of this particular possession feels.
She isn't blind. She is very aware of the way his gaze lingers on her body when he thinks he is unobserved, the way in which his smile lights up and his eyes glow whenever she walks into a room. Of the...well, there was no other word to describe it, nor could she any longer deny it: the love in his voice, pure, simple and deep when the Admiral and the President were done for the day and only Bill and Laura remained, speaking of everything and nothing as evening turned to night.
And most of all, sweetest of all, she was aware of how they said so much in exchanges of silent looks. The intensity in his eyes, that bottomless sea, making the gaze almost physically palpable. Communicating their longing, their regret and a still abstract but complicated sort of promise. A promise that she was his and he was hers. Thus it had been since New Caprica. As it was today. And as it would be in the future and for all the rest of their days.
When her attention at last is torn away from the piece of her he had secreted away, she notices that underneath the swathe of auburn is an envelope, her name written in his untidy scrawl across the center.
Her curiosity piqued, and since it was after all addressed to her, she opened the unsealed envelope, removed its contents and began to read.
Laura,
Years have passed in my silent longing
And I am sustained only by the sight of your smile
And the memory of that lone night
Spent on solid ground, the stars shining above us
When I held you in my arms
And we spoke in code
Of a future that might be lived together
That night, so long ago now
So far away from where we are
And yet, alone in my bed
I can still feel you next to me
The phantom of your body
Pressed into mine
And I dream of the cabin
You wanted to build
Mountains, a stream running into a lake
The water so clear
It's like looking through glass
I imagine the life
We could have shared
Building that cabin together
And finding a true home there
Finding a home in each other
And I see now that even amidst
The darkness in the void of deep space,
You have become my home
A home built of respect, friendship
And the forbidden, unspoken love
I carry for you always in my heart
A love expressed solely through
Shy smiles and lingering looks
Even in these silent exchanges
I know my heart must show through
You must know by now
What it is I feel for you
Or is it that you won't let yourself see
Needing those impenetrable walls
To be the wartime leader
That fate and circumstance demand
Still, there are those fleeting moments
When the walls disappear
And I swear that a flicker in your eyes
Tells me that you know as well as I:
Our souls are entwined.
Her breath caught at the first words on the page and it seemed to her she didn't get it back until the very last line. All the things she had wondered about, and in her weaker moments dared to hope about, all of it was staring up at her from the page and she was frightened to look away, lest it should all disappear.
She realized suddenly how heavily she was breathing, how quickly her heart beat. Folding the pages, she put them back in the envelope and the envelope back in the box along with the lock of her hair, hurriedly returning the cover to the box and the box back to the drawer.
Something fluttered in her chest and stomach and she forced it back down. She couldn't afford to be sentimental. She was the Dying Leader, after all (and since she was once again dying, didn't that also mean that they were nearing the end of their voyage?). She had to be strong, stay detached, she couldn't afford any distractions, no matter how much they could quite possibly mean, what he could mean to her.
She stood from the desk and went back to work without a backwards glance.