Babytattoofic, Autumnal Costumed Festival edition!
Title: Tauron Tykes
Word count: 2700
Rating: T
Summary: The Roslin-Adamas go on offensive Cute Overload for a cultural celebration. Set several months after Tauron Trauma.
A/N: I realized today that in writing this series, I am inadvertently filling my own ridiculous prompt for the bsg_epics Charity Fic Drive, “attacks-never-happen AU babyfic set on Caprica.” How did that happen?
A/N2: Thanks to nixmom for the baby beta assistance. :)
The twins were napping, Bill was studying, and Laura was on a mission to clean up clutter. Their little wood-sided house tended to be easily overrun with baby gear, and she and Bill didn’t help matters with their tendencies to leave books and notes wherever they might find some open space on a table or countertop.
She started gathering up random papers, only vaguely checking to make sure nothing important was going into the trash bag. One bright yellow flyer caught her attention, and she paused to read it.
Someone had written “Bill and Laura--” in a flowing script at the top of the page. Laura read on.
OUR DAY CELEBRATION
Little Tauron, Caprica City
10-5 Tauron food festival
11 am Beautiful baby parade. Prizes will be awarded for the costumes that best express Tauron traditions.
2 pm Enforcers vs. bosses softball game
3:30 pm Noodle-eating contest
Music and dancing!
Craft vendors all day!
“Enforcers versus bosses?” Laura said aloud. That sounded like a terrible idea. She looked over the list of activities again. Whoever had addressed the flyer to them had also underlined “costumes” twice.
“Absolutely not,” she said, moving to stuff the flyer in the trash.
“Absolutely not what?” came a deep voice from behind her. Strong arms wrapped around her midsection, and Bill started kissing her neck.
“Mmmm.” Laura closed her eyes and let herself lean into him, angling her neck to give him better access. “That’s nice.”
“What are you so adamantly against?” he stopped kissing her long enough to ask.
She fished the yellow flyer out of the trash bag she was still holding. “Bill, what do you know about this?”
“Our Day? Or this flyer?”
Laura considered. “Both.”
He pulled her down to the couch with him. “Well, Our Day celebrates Tauron’s throwing off the shackles of our Virgon and Leonis oppressors.”
“Right,” Laura said. “Which is apparently now celebrated with intra-mob softball and noodle-eating contests?”
“Better than dirt-eating contests.” He grinned sheepishly at the offended look Laura gave him. “Hey, that’s modern life. You of all people know about The Transmutation of Cultural Identity in Postwar Diaspora.”
It was true. Laura was nearly finished her dissertation on cultural integration in schools across the Colonies. Cast in that perspective, Little Tauron’s celebration seemed slightly less crass. But only slightly.
“Anyway,” Bill continued, "Tsattie brought over the flyer. She thinks we should enter the twins in the baby parade.”
“And I’ll say it again, then,” Laura said. “Absolutely not.”
“How come?”
“Bill, I will not exploit our children in the name of cultural celebration. We can go to this thing if that’s what you want, expose the kids to some Tauron food and music. But a costumed baby parade seems...silly.” Her brow knit as she struggled to express her concerns. “Maybe even a little creepy.”
“It’s entertaining. And photogenic,” he said, then narrowed his eyes as he guessed the real reason for her recalcitrance. “You just don’t want to make them costumes!”
Laura leaned against him. “You know I’m hopeless at that kind of thing. That Viper apron you like so much might have been my only successful sewing project, ever,” she admitted. “And the thought of coming up with a theme and everything is overwhelming right now. I’m so close to finishing my dissertation, looking for a job is so time-consuming--”
"I know, sweetheart." He pulled her legs into his lap and began massaging her bare feet, eliciting a deep moan. "But my grandmother already came up with a pretty good concept. And she and I can take care of making the costumes."
"You?!" She laughed. "Making an outfit is a lot more involved than sewing on a button to your uniform." Lords knew he'd had enough practice with that, thanks to her.
He looked at her with those deep blue eyes, and she was gone. "Okay," she relented. "When were you planning on telling me about this, anyway?"
"Honestly?" He smirked. "I was thinking maybe once the costumes were done. They're gonna be so cute, you wouldn't be able to say no."
* * *
She had to admit that Bill was right: her children looked good enough to eat, dressed in their Our Day outfits. She would have been powerless to resist their charm.
Sephie stood up, wobbly in the bucket that was doubling as a muffin tin, set on top of a red wagon wrapped in tinfoil. “Ba ba ba!” she cried happily, banging her fist against the rim.
Phin looked less than pleased in his adjoining bucket. “Duh,” he called to Bill.
He pouted beneath his puffy popover hat and threatened to tear it off, and Laura held her breath. “Smile, buddy,” Bill coaxed as he looked through the viewfinder of a camera. Phin sucked in a deep breath, and his lower lip quavered.
“Bill, take the frakking photo. He’s about to go supernova!” Laura whispered.
“Over here, muffin. Smile for Daddy,” Bill said, giving up on his son for the moment. Bill’s pet name for his daughter had never been so fitting; if Laura were going to compare her children to food, she would have thought first of their Aerilon melon-like heads, but at the moment, they were all muffin. Sephie grinned, showing off her several teeth, and Bill snapped a shot. A moment later, Phin’s hat flew out of the wagon and he burst into tears.
“No, Phineus!” Laura picked it up and pulled it resolutely over his dark hair, puffing it back up where it had flattened in its impact with the floor. “No one will know that you’re a Tauron cherry cake without your hat, honey.” She looked at his brown- and pink-swirled sunsuit approvingly, even as he cried, and turned to Bill. “I really have to hand it to you. These costumes are great.”
“Told you I could sew,” Bill said, straightening out Sephie in her bucket as she had apparently gotten her legs tangled up. She was bouncing around so much, Laura feared she might manage to somehow launch herself out of the wagon entirely. At a year old, the girl already had the well-muscled legs of a pyramid player.
“I think we’re ready,” Laura said, shouldering the diaper bag and grabbing her sunglasses from a small table next to the front door. “As long as we don’t lose our souffled toppings on the way there, we’re good to go.”
“Yes, sir.” Bill saluted and followed Laura out the door, pulling the wagon behind him.
They heard the festival before they saw it, a thumping dance beat blaring from speakers with a heavy bass completely inappropriate for mid-morning. “We should have brought ear protection for them!” Laura called from her station behind the wagon.
“Ah, they’ll be fine.” Bill waved for her to come up and join him. “Where do we need to go for this parade, exactly?” she asked.
“Into the park. There should be signs and stuff once we get closer.” He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her closer, letting his hand linger on the bare skin of her lower back, exposed by her apron-style halter top, and let his fingers roam over where he knew her tattoo of the Gemenon twins was. “I just have to tell you before we’re in a big crowd of people...you look absolutely gorgeous.”
She beamed beneath her large sunglasses. “Thank you, honey. You’re looking quite appealing, yourself. Very Tauron,” she added with an approving nod to his tattooed arms. Her heart clenched at the thought of all the tattoos that weren’t exposed, that only she could see. The ones that marked him as hers.
“I think we need to go this way,” Laura said as they came to a wide shaded path into the park. Phin looked in danger of falling asleep, with his little melon-head nodding down towards his chin, while Sephie was still bouncing away in her bucket. She was starting to see other baby parade participants going in that direction, most in wagons similar to theirs but some in more elaborately constructed floats.
“Ma ma ma,” chanted Sephie as they made their way to the staging area.
“Why does it always have to be ‘Ma’?” asked Bill, looking back at Sephie resentfully. “Why never ‘dad’?”
Laura hummed. “Guess she just likes me better,” she suggested with a toss of her hair. “Right, baby?”
“Da da.” Sephie changed her tune. “Da da.”
Bill stopped walking and handed the wagon handle to Laura before scooping Sephie out of her bucket. “Very good, muffin! I knew you wouldn’t let your mother get away with that.” He kissed her chubby cheeks, and she squirmed against him. “Da.”
“Bill--” Laura warned.
Sephie threw her head back and squealed.
“I know you’re excited, Bill, but you just got her all riled up,” Laura said, picking up the popover hat that had fallen off and tugging it back over Sephie’s head. “Let’s go get them signed in, and we can go over our vocabulary later.”
Bill carried Sephie the rest of the way while Laura pulled Phin, who had indeed fallen asleep, in the wagon. Within twenty minutes they were signed in as “Persephone and Phineus Roslin-Adama, Tauron Cherry Cake” and queued up in a line of a couple dozen participants.
It looked like they were about to start. Laura picked up Phin gently and tickled his cheek. “Come on, baby. You have to wake up so you can smile and be the cutest cherry cake ever,” she whispered to him. He yawned, stretched, and promptly started to cry.
Looking over at them, Bill laughed. “Don’t worry, Laura. He’ll get it together when it counts. Right, buddy?”
Shrugging, she returned a now-awake Phin to his bucket and arranged his hat and outfit one last time. “Here we go, kids.”
“Go! Go!” Sephie echoed. Bill placed her alongside her brother and they began to move.
The parade route was short, but traversed at painstakingly slow speed as several of the fancier floats experienced mechanical issues. They made their way from the east end of the park toward the center, where the festivities were largely taking place, and through the crowds that had gathered. When Bill noticed a table of three distinguished-looking people taking in the parade from a table draped in Tauron’s colors, watching each float and making notations on paper in front of them, he nudged Laura.
“There are the judges. We’ve gotta get the kids to smile at them.”
“Oh!” Laura needed no further direction, but turned around and started making faces at her children, blowing them raspberries. It worked; Sephie grinned first, always the easier to please of the two, and Phin followed suit, his green eyes lighting up beneath his muffin-top hat. Their heads leaned toward one another's, cherry cakes in danger of deflating but adorable all the same as Sephie grabbed Phin's hand.
“Very good,” Laura encouraged them. “Just a little bit more...big smiles, that's it...” As soon as they were clear of the judges’ table, she breathed a sigh of relief and flagged slightly against Bill.
“Thought you thought baby parades were creepy,” he teased her. “You seem pretty invested now.”
“Now that I’m here...” She shrugged. “Of course I want them to win.”
“They will,” Bill said confidently. “Their costumes look great. And there are two of them. That’s twice as much cuteness as any of the other floats.”
* * *
Bill and Laura sat beneath a tree, taking turns feeding the kids their bottles and each other some Tauron beef stew. The kids’ muffin hats had been swapped out for laurel wreaths when they’d been named the victors of the baby parade. Phin’s was threatening to slide over his left eye; Laura reached out and straightened it.
“Pank oo,” Phin said.
Laura looked at him disbelievingly. “Say that again, Phineus?”
“Pank...oo,” he tried again, more tentatively.
Bill looked up from feeding Sephie. “Did he just--”
Laura nodded.
“Oh gods,” Bill said. “We’ve raised the most polite one-year-old on the planet.”
“Figures that the quiet one would say a real sentence when he finally talked for the first time,” Laura mused.
“I think she’s finished,” Bill said. “Want to pack up and make our way home?”
“Sure,” Laura replied. “Phin, what do you think? Ready to go?”
“‘eady,” Phin said.
“Go, go!” Sephie added.
“All right, then.” Laura sat with the kids while Bill packed up their bottles and trash. “Don’t forget their hats, honey,” Laura said.
“As if I could. They took Tsattie forever to make,” he said, picking them up and placing them in the wagon.
“And she told me back when we were still dating that making Tauron cherry cake wasn’t really so difficult,” she said, lifting up Sephie and settling her back in her bucket. Bill did the same for Phin, and they set off into the crowd.
They were skirting the edge of the dance floor, the twins nodding their heads jerkily in response to hearing the music, when a shrill voice called out. “Bill Adama?”
Bill and Laura both turned toward the voice. A thin blonde materialized out of the crowd, stepping toward them.
“Oh my gods,” the woman said, laughing into her ambrosia cocktail, clearly not her first. “You breeded.”
“Hello, Carolanne,” Bill said, standing stiffly. Laura reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Uh...this is my wife, Laura.”
“What a pleasure,” the woman said to Laura. “And who are these little...things?”
“Phineus and Sephie. They’re a year old,” he said, anticipating her question. He’d taken the kids to the park plenty of times; he knew the drill.
“Wow,” said the blonde.
“What are you doing here?” Bill asked. “Didn’t know you were into Tauron culture.” The woman was obviously Caprican, her coloring as far from Tauron as one could get.
She glanced over her shoulder and waved toward a burly, tattooed man with greasy dark hair. “Let’s just say I got a taste for Tauron...noodles....while dating you, Bill.”
Laura turned to him, eyebrow arched.
“Long time ago,” Bill said coolly.
“Once you go Tauron, you never go back,” she shrugged. “Right, Laura?”
“Sure.” Laura was beginning to look amused. “We’ve really got to get these two home. Enjoy the festival.”
“Nice running into you, Bill,” Carolanne said with a wave. “And Laura.” The blonde looked her over appraisingly for the first time, taking in the delicate vine tattoos decorating the space beneath her collarbones before letting her gaze drop lower. At Laura’s uncomfortable crossing of her arms over her chest, the blonde shifted her eyes shifted over to the oblivious toddlers, who appeared engaged in a nonsense conversation of some sort. “Never would have taken you for the type, Bill.”
“Take care, Carolanne,” he said, wrapping an arm around Laura’s shoulders and pulling the wagon behind them.
“That was weird, Bill,” Laura whispered once they were out of earshot. “How long ago did you date her?”
Bill thought. “Right after the war ended. So, almost ten years ago, I guess.”
“Was it serious?”
He leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Never.”
* * *
The twins, exhausted after their outing, had fallen asleep on the way home and didn’t wake when Bill and Laura got them into their crib. There were two, and Bill and Laura had been trying to encourage them to sleep independently, but there was a better chance they’d nap longer and entertain themselves once they did wake up if they napped together. Bill grabbed the monitor and tugged Laura into their bedroom.
She started giggling softly as he untied her halter and tossed it to the ground. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I can’t believe they won.” She slid off her skirt and lay back on the bed, smiling contentedly.
“You’re too modest.” Having stripped off his own clothes, he lowered himself next to her and leaned down to give her a kiss. “You make beautiful babies, Laura.”
She pulled him closer. “Same goes for you, Bill.”
Next story: Tauron Treat
Word count: 2700
Rating: T
Summary: The Roslin-Adamas go on offensive Cute Overload for a cultural celebration. Set several months after Tauron Trauma.
A/N: I realized today that in writing this series, I am inadvertently filling my own ridiculous prompt for the bsg_epics Charity Fic Drive, “attacks-never-happen AU babyfic set on Caprica.” How did that happen?
A/N2: Thanks to nixmom for the baby beta assistance. :)
The twins were napping, Bill was studying, and Laura was on a mission to clean up clutter. Their little wood-sided house tended to be easily overrun with baby gear, and she and Bill didn’t help matters with their tendencies to leave books and notes wherever they might find some open space on a table or countertop.
She started gathering up random papers, only vaguely checking to make sure nothing important was going into the trash bag. One bright yellow flyer caught her attention, and she paused to read it.
Someone had written “Bill and Laura--” in a flowing script at the top of the page. Laura read on.
OUR DAY CELEBRATION
Little Tauron, Caprica City
10-5 Tauron food festival
11 am Beautiful baby parade. Prizes will be awarded for the costumes that best express Tauron traditions.
2 pm Enforcers vs. bosses softball game
3:30 pm Noodle-eating contest
Music and dancing!
Craft vendors all day!
“Enforcers versus bosses?” Laura said aloud. That sounded like a terrible idea. She looked over the list of activities again. Whoever had addressed the flyer to them had also underlined “costumes” twice.
“Absolutely not,” she said, moving to stuff the flyer in the trash.
“Absolutely not what?” came a deep voice from behind her. Strong arms wrapped around her midsection, and Bill started kissing her neck.
“Mmmm.” Laura closed her eyes and let herself lean into him, angling her neck to give him better access. “That’s nice.”
“What are you so adamantly against?” he stopped kissing her long enough to ask.
She fished the yellow flyer out of the trash bag she was still holding. “Bill, what do you know about this?”
“Our Day? Or this flyer?”
Laura considered. “Both.”
He pulled her down to the couch with him. “Well, Our Day celebrates Tauron’s throwing off the shackles of our Virgon and Leonis oppressors.”
“Right,” Laura said. “Which is apparently now celebrated with intra-mob softball and noodle-eating contests?”
“Better than dirt-eating contests.” He grinned sheepishly at the offended look Laura gave him. “Hey, that’s modern life. You of all people know about The Transmutation of Cultural Identity in Postwar Diaspora.”
It was true. Laura was nearly finished her dissertation on cultural integration in schools across the Colonies. Cast in that perspective, Little Tauron’s celebration seemed slightly less crass. But only slightly.
“Anyway,” Bill continued, "Tsattie brought over the flyer. She thinks we should enter the twins in the baby parade.”
“And I’ll say it again, then,” Laura said. “Absolutely not.”
“How come?”
“Bill, I will not exploit our children in the name of cultural celebration. We can go to this thing if that’s what you want, expose the kids to some Tauron food and music. But a costumed baby parade seems...silly.” Her brow knit as she struggled to express her concerns. “Maybe even a little creepy.”
“It’s entertaining. And photogenic,” he said, then narrowed his eyes as he guessed the real reason for her recalcitrance. “You just don’t want to make them costumes!”
Laura leaned against him. “You know I’m hopeless at that kind of thing. That Viper apron you like so much might have been my only successful sewing project, ever,” she admitted. “And the thought of coming up with a theme and everything is overwhelming right now. I’m so close to finishing my dissertation, looking for a job is so time-consuming--”
"I know, sweetheart." He pulled her legs into his lap and began massaging her bare feet, eliciting a deep moan. "But my grandmother already came up with a pretty good concept. And she and I can take care of making the costumes."
"You?!" She laughed. "Making an outfit is a lot more involved than sewing on a button to your uniform." Lords knew he'd had enough practice with that, thanks to her.
He looked at her with those deep blue eyes, and she was gone. "Okay," she relented. "When were you planning on telling me about this, anyway?"
"Honestly?" He smirked. "I was thinking maybe once the costumes were done. They're gonna be so cute, you wouldn't be able to say no."
* * *
She had to admit that Bill was right: her children looked good enough to eat, dressed in their Our Day outfits. She would have been powerless to resist their charm.
Sephie stood up, wobbly in the bucket that was doubling as a muffin tin, set on top of a red wagon wrapped in tinfoil. “Ba ba ba!” she cried happily, banging her fist against the rim.
Phin looked less than pleased in his adjoining bucket. “Duh,” he called to Bill.
He pouted beneath his puffy popover hat and threatened to tear it off, and Laura held her breath. “Smile, buddy,” Bill coaxed as he looked through the viewfinder of a camera. Phin sucked in a deep breath, and his lower lip quavered.
“Bill, take the frakking photo. He’s about to go supernova!” Laura whispered.
“Over here, muffin. Smile for Daddy,” Bill said, giving up on his son for the moment. Bill’s pet name for his daughter had never been so fitting; if Laura were going to compare her children to food, she would have thought first of their Aerilon melon-like heads, but at the moment, they were all muffin. Sephie grinned, showing off her several teeth, and Bill snapped a shot. A moment later, Phin’s hat flew out of the wagon and he burst into tears.
“No, Phineus!” Laura picked it up and pulled it resolutely over his dark hair, puffing it back up where it had flattened in its impact with the floor. “No one will know that you’re a Tauron cherry cake without your hat, honey.” She looked at his brown- and pink-swirled sunsuit approvingly, even as he cried, and turned to Bill. “I really have to hand it to you. These costumes are great.”
“Told you I could sew,” Bill said, straightening out Sephie in her bucket as she had apparently gotten her legs tangled up. She was bouncing around so much, Laura feared she might manage to somehow launch herself out of the wagon entirely. At a year old, the girl already had the well-muscled legs of a pyramid player.
“I think we’re ready,” Laura said, shouldering the diaper bag and grabbing her sunglasses from a small table next to the front door. “As long as we don’t lose our souffled toppings on the way there, we’re good to go.”
“Yes, sir.” Bill saluted and followed Laura out the door, pulling the wagon behind him.
They heard the festival before they saw it, a thumping dance beat blaring from speakers with a heavy bass completely inappropriate for mid-morning. “We should have brought ear protection for them!” Laura called from her station behind the wagon.
“Ah, they’ll be fine.” Bill waved for her to come up and join him. “Where do we need to go for this parade, exactly?” she asked.
“Into the park. There should be signs and stuff once we get closer.” He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her closer, letting his hand linger on the bare skin of her lower back, exposed by her apron-style halter top, and let his fingers roam over where he knew her tattoo of the Gemenon twins was. “I just have to tell you before we’re in a big crowd of people...you look absolutely gorgeous.”
She beamed beneath her large sunglasses. “Thank you, honey. You’re looking quite appealing, yourself. Very Tauron,” she added with an approving nod to his tattooed arms. Her heart clenched at the thought of all the tattoos that weren’t exposed, that only she could see. The ones that marked him as hers.
“I think we need to go this way,” Laura said as they came to a wide shaded path into the park. Phin looked in danger of falling asleep, with his little melon-head nodding down towards his chin, while Sephie was still bouncing away in her bucket. She was starting to see other baby parade participants going in that direction, most in wagons similar to theirs but some in more elaborately constructed floats.
“Ma ma ma,” chanted Sephie as they made their way to the staging area.
“Why does it always have to be ‘Ma’?” asked Bill, looking back at Sephie resentfully. “Why never ‘dad’?”
Laura hummed. “Guess she just likes me better,” she suggested with a toss of her hair. “Right, baby?”
“Da da.” Sephie changed her tune. “Da da.”
Bill stopped walking and handed the wagon handle to Laura before scooping Sephie out of her bucket. “Very good, muffin! I knew you wouldn’t let your mother get away with that.” He kissed her chubby cheeks, and she squirmed against him. “Da.”
“Bill--” Laura warned.
Sephie threw her head back and squealed.
“I know you’re excited, Bill, but you just got her all riled up,” Laura said, picking up the popover hat that had fallen off and tugging it back over Sephie’s head. “Let’s go get them signed in, and we can go over our vocabulary later.”
Bill carried Sephie the rest of the way while Laura pulled Phin, who had indeed fallen asleep, in the wagon. Within twenty minutes they were signed in as “Persephone and Phineus Roslin-Adama, Tauron Cherry Cake” and queued up in a line of a couple dozen participants.
It looked like they were about to start. Laura picked up Phin gently and tickled his cheek. “Come on, baby. You have to wake up so you can smile and be the cutest cherry cake ever,” she whispered to him. He yawned, stretched, and promptly started to cry.
Looking over at them, Bill laughed. “Don’t worry, Laura. He’ll get it together when it counts. Right, buddy?”
Shrugging, she returned a now-awake Phin to his bucket and arranged his hat and outfit one last time. “Here we go, kids.”
“Go! Go!” Sephie echoed. Bill placed her alongside her brother and they began to move.
The parade route was short, but traversed at painstakingly slow speed as several of the fancier floats experienced mechanical issues. They made their way from the east end of the park toward the center, where the festivities were largely taking place, and through the crowds that had gathered. When Bill noticed a table of three distinguished-looking people taking in the parade from a table draped in Tauron’s colors, watching each float and making notations on paper in front of them, he nudged Laura.
“There are the judges. We’ve gotta get the kids to smile at them.”
“Oh!” Laura needed no further direction, but turned around and started making faces at her children, blowing them raspberries. It worked; Sephie grinned first, always the easier to please of the two, and Phin followed suit, his green eyes lighting up beneath his muffin-top hat. Their heads leaned toward one another's, cherry cakes in danger of deflating but adorable all the same as Sephie grabbed Phin's hand.
“Very good,” Laura encouraged them. “Just a little bit more...big smiles, that's it...” As soon as they were clear of the judges’ table, she breathed a sigh of relief and flagged slightly against Bill.
“Thought you thought baby parades were creepy,” he teased her. “You seem pretty invested now.”
“Now that I’m here...” She shrugged. “Of course I want them to win.”
“They will,” Bill said confidently. “Their costumes look great. And there are two of them. That’s twice as much cuteness as any of the other floats.”
* * *
Bill and Laura sat beneath a tree, taking turns feeding the kids their bottles and each other some Tauron beef stew. The kids’ muffin hats had been swapped out for laurel wreaths when they’d been named the victors of the baby parade. Phin’s was threatening to slide over his left eye; Laura reached out and straightened it.
“Pank oo,” Phin said.
Laura looked at him disbelievingly. “Say that again, Phineus?”
“Pank...oo,” he tried again, more tentatively.
Bill looked up from feeding Sephie. “Did he just--”
Laura nodded.
“Oh gods,” Bill said. “We’ve raised the most polite one-year-old on the planet.”
“Figures that the quiet one would say a real sentence when he finally talked for the first time,” Laura mused.
“I think she’s finished,” Bill said. “Want to pack up and make our way home?”
“Sure,” Laura replied. “Phin, what do you think? Ready to go?”
“‘eady,” Phin said.
“Go, go!” Sephie added.
“All right, then.” Laura sat with the kids while Bill packed up their bottles and trash. “Don’t forget their hats, honey,” Laura said.
“As if I could. They took Tsattie forever to make,” he said, picking them up and placing them in the wagon.
“And she told me back when we were still dating that making Tauron cherry cake wasn’t really so difficult,” she said, lifting up Sephie and settling her back in her bucket. Bill did the same for Phin, and they set off into the crowd.
They were skirting the edge of the dance floor, the twins nodding their heads jerkily in response to hearing the music, when a shrill voice called out. “Bill Adama?”
Bill and Laura both turned toward the voice. A thin blonde materialized out of the crowd, stepping toward them.
“Oh my gods,” the woman said, laughing into her ambrosia cocktail, clearly not her first. “You breeded.”
“Hello, Carolanne,” Bill said, standing stiffly. Laura reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Uh...this is my wife, Laura.”
“What a pleasure,” the woman said to Laura. “And who are these little...things?”
“Phineus and Sephie. They’re a year old,” he said, anticipating her question. He’d taken the kids to the park plenty of times; he knew the drill.
“Wow,” said the blonde.
“What are you doing here?” Bill asked. “Didn’t know you were into Tauron culture.” The woman was obviously Caprican, her coloring as far from Tauron as one could get.
She glanced over her shoulder and waved toward a burly, tattooed man with greasy dark hair. “Let’s just say I got a taste for Tauron...noodles....while dating you, Bill.”
Laura turned to him, eyebrow arched.
“Long time ago,” Bill said coolly.
“Once you go Tauron, you never go back,” she shrugged. “Right, Laura?”
“Sure.” Laura was beginning to look amused. “We’ve really got to get these two home. Enjoy the festival.”
“Nice running into you, Bill,” Carolanne said with a wave. “And Laura.” The blonde looked her over appraisingly for the first time, taking in the delicate vine tattoos decorating the space beneath her collarbones before letting her gaze drop lower. At Laura’s uncomfortable crossing of her arms over her chest, the blonde shifted her eyes shifted over to the oblivious toddlers, who appeared engaged in a nonsense conversation of some sort. “Never would have taken you for the type, Bill.”
“Take care, Carolanne,” he said, wrapping an arm around Laura’s shoulders and pulling the wagon behind them.
“That was weird, Bill,” Laura whispered once they were out of earshot. “How long ago did you date her?”
Bill thought. “Right after the war ended. So, almost ten years ago, I guess.”
“Was it serious?”
He leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Never.”
* * *
The twins, exhausted after their outing, had fallen asleep on the way home and didn’t wake when Bill and Laura got them into their crib. There were two, and Bill and Laura had been trying to encourage them to sleep independently, but there was a better chance they’d nap longer and entertain themselves once they did wake up if they napped together. Bill grabbed the monitor and tugged Laura into their bedroom.
She started giggling softly as he untied her halter and tossed it to the ground. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I can’t believe they won.” She slid off her skirt and lay back on the bed, smiling contentedly.
“You’re too modest.” Having stripped off his own clothes, he lowered himself next to her and leaned down to give her a kiss. “You make beautiful babies, Laura.”
She pulled him closer. “Same goes for you, Bill.”
Next story: Tauron Treat