The Very Edges Of Where We Take Shape
SUMMARY: He wasn't in love with her, not yet, but he was perilously close and knew it.
PAIRING: Adama/Roslin
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Unfinished Business
DISCLAIMER: Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Proceed at your own risk. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. For recreational purposes only. Driver does not carry cash. And, as always, thank you for choosing Aloysia Airlines for your direct flight from canon to fanfic.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks to the awesome beta team of dashakay and hummingfly67 for tidying this up and fixing my stupid mistakes. The title is from John Hollander's Swan and Shadow.
***
There had been a growing fad for Aerelon cuisine on Caprica in the months before the attack. A certain class of stylish people prided themselves on their wholesome, rustic sensibilities as they used their manicured fingers to eat coarse pieces of meat, bread, and vegetables from carved wooden bowls at their smart dinner parties.
Bill Adama sat with his back to the evening sun and poked the smoldering branches with a stick, wondering if roasting sweet potatoes in the dirt of a glorified refugee camp would be fashionably ironic for the cream of Caprican society. Carolanne had liked that sort of thing, stylized déshabillé and pretense. She regarded it as clever. It was kin to Ellen's brazen come-ons, really; artful in its very artlessness.
He judged the potatoes done, their skins brown and crisp as autumn leaves. Using the forked stick, he guided them from the ashes to cool, then lay the stick on the ground next to his silver knife and a little jar of flavored oil. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist, itchy and irritable amid strange biting insects. He slapped at one, feeling smug at the vanquishing of an enemy, at the powdery smear it left behind on his forearm. Steam rose from his dinner, and he stretched out on the remains of the riverbed to listen to the low bass of frogs. A hawk called out and circled once, twice, then disappeared among the trees.
"Are you still hung over?" Laura asked from several yards off, amusement fringing the edges of her gentle voice.
"I don't think so," he replied, still staring upwards. "My hearing gets all sensitive when I am, and I didn't notice you come up." He turned to look at her, watching as she settled next to him and gathered her dusty blue skirt about her bare feet. There was dried mud on the right instep, and the nails were the same near-pink as the underside of a seashell. "I made potatoes," he added for no particular reason, as she could clearly see them.
She set a dark bottle in the grass. "Good," she said. "All this rich celebration food is getting to be a bit much. I have wine."
"Wine's nice."
"Not this wine." A wet popping sound as she tugged the stopper out, and then the liquid noises of drinking. Laura moved efficiently, with the spare grace of a pencil sketch. She wiped her stained lips with the back of her hand and offered him the bottle.
Bill sat up to accept it, hoisting it briefly in appreciation before taking a swig. He winced at the sour bite of it, but after a second, a deeper flavor emerged and his mouth felt warm and heavy. He took another drink before passing the bottle back.
"It's a pretty night for a walk," he remarked, by way of discovering what brought her out here with a bottle of wine.
"It is," she said agreeably, tilting her head back to drink. She wrinkled her nose as she swallowed.
He sensed silence in her like an archangel - a guardian thing that wrapped her safely in half-answers and in whose feathered embrace she'd comfortably retreated. She was both regal and maddening, depending on which side of her he found himself. He took the bottle from her and rolled it between his hands, listening to the small, sloshing echoes from within. "Lee's getting married. Dualla." He thought he should practice saying it.
Her smile went all the way up to her eyes. "I heard. And Kara this morning. Congratulations, Bill. They're all leaving the nest."
He made a gruff, non-committal noise and leaned the half-empty bottle against a wide furrow in the dirt. "Cally and the Chief having a baby," he mused. "Can't say I saw that one coming. But good for them." A papery moth blundered against his forehead and he blinked, startled.
Laura smiled again, her tongue poking ever so slightly through very white teeth. She picked up the stick he had dropped and used it to scratch swirling designs in the dirt by her foot. Her sleeveless shirt was the color of good milk chocolate and made her eyes look greener. "This really feels like a society now, doesn't it? A civilization. Weddings, babies..."
He didn't ask her about the Cylon baby, though he could all but feel her thinking about it. The strange little animal whose blood thrummed in her veins. "Where are your shoes?" he asked, reaching over to poke her ankle. "Civilized people wear them."
"It's warm," she replied, and it seemed all the explanation he was going to receive.
He leaned forward and retrieved the potatoes, splitting them open with his knife, and pouring a dollop of oil on top. He passed one to Laura, who sniffed it appreciatively.
"When my sisters came to visit, we'd go to this little café for pumpkin muffins," she told him. "They had a sort of vanilla mousse or cream inside. I could have eaten a dozen at a sitting." Her expression was wistful, and he was not fool enough to think it was about the pastry.
He raised his potato. "To bakeries," he offered.
She tapped hers against it. "To bakeries."
They ate, chewing in silence, as the sun nestled lower against the horizon.
"Baltar's going to frak this up," Laura observed casually, as though remarking upon the likelihood of a picnic being rained out. "Somehow, some way." She licked her fingers, which shone with oil, then dried them on the sparse grass. She picked up the wine and drank.
"He's proven to be resourceful in that department," Bill agreed. "But what happened to taking a break? I thought you just wanted to enjoy things as they are. Be mellow."
"I was stoned, Bill."
He chuckled, then looked meaningfully at the bottle. "Yes, you were."
They stared at one another for a moment before her silver laughter bubbled up like a spring. "We're ridiculous," she said. "We're old, tired, washed-up, ridiculous people."
"We've earned it." He reached over and took the bottle. Then he finished her wine.
She leaned back on her elbows, chin tipped up to bare her throat. "I had an affair with Richard Adar," she told him, hair skimming the grass.
Her casual tone belied her tension. He sensed it, felt her awaiting his reply to see if this confession shattered any illusions he held or whether it confirmed something he had suspected. He paused a moment longer to note the way her current pose pushed her breasts forward. "Well," he said, "I'll concede that Adar wasn't a total moron, then."
She laughed in a sad, distant way, but seemed to like his answer. "It couldn't go anywhere, of course, and I…I pretended that was romantic."
There was nothing to say and he didn't try.
Laura shook her head and gave him a rueful smile. "I don't mean to be maudlin. When is Lee getting married?"
"Not sure. I don't think he even knew he was going to until-" He bit off the end of the sentence and shrugged. "He didn't say."
"Ah." She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms about them, staring out with a peaceful expression.
He let the time go lightly with her there in the soft violet evening, the shadows lengthening quietly around the roots of trees and filling up the hollow places like rain. He extended a hand across the space between them, and she dropped her own hand from her knee to catch his. Her fingers were long and tapered with narrow nails, and he ran his thumb over the fine bones of her knuckles.
"It's good here," he said after a time. "You're right. It's a society."
"We're getting there," she said. "But we need better leadership. Baltar…" She shook her head.
"You miss being the President."
"I miss having a President."
"No wonder you're so suited to politics. You're good at answering questions," he informed her, smiling.
"That was a statement, not a question." Her voice was lofty, but she winked.
"Well, he's not king. We'll oust him sooner or later and New Caprica can plug along and build bakeries full of pumpkin muffins."
"What about Earth?" she queried.
"What about it?" He stroked her wrist absently, the tempo of her pulse a soothing metronome.
"We promised -"
"I promised. I'll take the responsibility for it."
"You will? Because I'm not dying now?" she inquired coolly. "So you don't have to pretend to believe the prophecy anymore?"
He squeezed her fingers, probably too hard, and watched the clouds turn into islands of molten fire in the indigo ocean of the sky. "I believe what I have to believe."
Her eyes crinkled fondly at the corners as she studied him, head cocked to one side. "Maybe you ought to be in politics."
Bill laughed abruptly and glanced her way. "Gods forbid."
"Oh, I think you should give a try. It'll teach you some humility. There's more to life than having your every command obeyed without question, Admiral."
"Do you really believe that?"
"I believe I should."
A breeze picked up from the east, setting the small animals alert for the scents of food and predators. A feather wafted by, curved like a beckoning finger, and tangled itself in a skein of Laura's hair.
"Tell me about your cabin," he said, letting go of her hand to pluck the feather free. He slid closer but didn't touch her again.
"No."
He looked up, surprised.
"It makes me feel dissatisfied with now," she explained. "If I talk about the things I want and don't have." She chewed her lower lip, looking mildly self-conscious. "It's all too tenuous, Bill, and I'm determined to savor the hell out of it."
He put his hand on her shoulder then, fingers stretching down to brush against the hard span of her collarbone. She stiffened for the briefest of seconds, then relaxed and let her head fall against him, glossy hair tumbling down his sleeve. He dropped his arm to her waist, which was slim as a girl's.
"So where's the line between hope and dissatisfaction?" he asked.
"Mmm. I think you can only know in retrospect. If you get what you wanted, you were hopeful. If not, you were dissatisfied."
She laughed a little at her own joke, which he liked. He liked a number of things about her, namely that after years of waking up next to breathtaking women with soft bodies and hard eyes, here he was reaching for someone's hand like an awkward teenager. He traced the ridge of her lower spine.
The night came whispering down, draping itself quietly around them. He saw fireflies - or whatever passed for fireflies here - sparking through the darkness like blips on DRADIS. They made him think of lemonade and cut grass, of his boys in summer with glass jars and sticky faces, and Carolanne like a blonde goddess watching it all with her beautiful, haughty smile.
He drew a long breath through his nose, filling it with Laura's paper-and-air scent, and the vapors of the sharp wine. She did not favor perfume, which he found both sensible and peculiarly erotic. There was an honesty in it, an absence of the usual barriers people created to filter who they were from whom they wished to appear to be. He wasn't in love with her, not yet, but he was perilously close and knew it.
"Laura," he began, without a full grasp of what was to follow. "I -"
She turned and kissed him, her mouth sweet with the ghosts of purple fruits, and her dewdrop fingers cool at the back of his neck. He felt her smiling against his lips, felt her laugh, and ran his hand up her back to catch her hair as he kissed her. He tasted cherries and starch on her tongue, and the finer essence of her own flavor beneath the top notes. He longed to slip his hand up under the folds of her skirt and slide it along her lean thigh. To push her down in the cradling banks of the ancient river and make her ask for the things she wanted. Instead, he pulled back and cupped her face in the curve of his palm, watching her watch him in the light of the gibbous moon.
She rose and steadied herself on his shoulder. "Good night, Bill," she said, pulling a little flashlight from her pocket.
"Good night, Laura."
"The wine was terrible."
"It was."
"But the potatoes were good."
Her fingers trailed across his cheek as she stepped away and moved forward into the dark. A tiny light sparked and bobbed like a will o' the wisp. It moved down the hill, turned left, and the gossamer night swallowed her up. The breeze picked up again, stronger this time, and played haunting notes across the mouth of the wine bottle.
Anticipation coiled in his stomach, warm and pleasant, and he thought about waking up next to her in a patch of straw colored light. Of her hair tickling the side of his face. Of a cabin by a mountain lake.
He thought there ought to be something to hope for.
***
PAIRING: Adama/Roslin
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Unfinished Business
DISCLAIMER: Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement. Proceed at your own risk. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. For recreational purposes only. Driver does not carry cash. And, as always, thank you for choosing Aloysia Airlines for your direct flight from canon to fanfic.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks to the awesome beta team of dashakay and hummingfly67 for tidying this up and fixing my stupid mistakes. The title is from John Hollander's Swan and Shadow.
***
There had been a growing fad for Aerelon cuisine on Caprica in the months before the attack. A certain class of stylish people prided themselves on their wholesome, rustic sensibilities as they used their manicured fingers to eat coarse pieces of meat, bread, and vegetables from carved wooden bowls at their smart dinner parties.
Bill Adama sat with his back to the evening sun and poked the smoldering branches with a stick, wondering if roasting sweet potatoes in the dirt of a glorified refugee camp would be fashionably ironic for the cream of Caprican society. Carolanne had liked that sort of thing, stylized déshabillé and pretense. She regarded it as clever. It was kin to Ellen's brazen come-ons, really; artful in its very artlessness.
He judged the potatoes done, their skins brown and crisp as autumn leaves. Using the forked stick, he guided them from the ashes to cool, then lay the stick on the ground next to his silver knife and a little jar of flavored oil. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist, itchy and irritable amid strange biting insects. He slapped at one, feeling smug at the vanquishing of an enemy, at the powdery smear it left behind on his forearm. Steam rose from his dinner, and he stretched out on the remains of the riverbed to listen to the low bass of frogs. A hawk called out and circled once, twice, then disappeared among the trees.
"Are you still hung over?" Laura asked from several yards off, amusement fringing the edges of her gentle voice.
"I don't think so," he replied, still staring upwards. "My hearing gets all sensitive when I am, and I didn't notice you come up." He turned to look at her, watching as she settled next to him and gathered her dusty blue skirt about her bare feet. There was dried mud on the right instep, and the nails were the same near-pink as the underside of a seashell. "I made potatoes," he added for no particular reason, as she could clearly see them.
She set a dark bottle in the grass. "Good," she said. "All this rich celebration food is getting to be a bit much. I have wine."
"Wine's nice."
"Not this wine." A wet popping sound as she tugged the stopper out, and then the liquid noises of drinking. Laura moved efficiently, with the spare grace of a pencil sketch. She wiped her stained lips with the back of her hand and offered him the bottle.
Bill sat up to accept it, hoisting it briefly in appreciation before taking a swig. He winced at the sour bite of it, but after a second, a deeper flavor emerged and his mouth felt warm and heavy. He took another drink before passing the bottle back.
"It's a pretty night for a walk," he remarked, by way of discovering what brought her out here with a bottle of wine.
"It is," she said agreeably, tilting her head back to drink. She wrinkled her nose as she swallowed.
He sensed silence in her like an archangel - a guardian thing that wrapped her safely in half-answers and in whose feathered embrace she'd comfortably retreated. She was both regal and maddening, depending on which side of her he found himself. He took the bottle from her and rolled it between his hands, listening to the small, sloshing echoes from within. "Lee's getting married. Dualla." He thought he should practice saying it.
Her smile went all the way up to her eyes. "I heard. And Kara this morning. Congratulations, Bill. They're all leaving the nest."
He made a gruff, non-committal noise and leaned the half-empty bottle against a wide furrow in the dirt. "Cally and the Chief having a baby," he mused. "Can't say I saw that one coming. But good for them." A papery moth blundered against his forehead and he blinked, startled.
Laura smiled again, her tongue poking ever so slightly through very white teeth. She picked up the stick he had dropped and used it to scratch swirling designs in the dirt by her foot. Her sleeveless shirt was the color of good milk chocolate and made her eyes look greener. "This really feels like a society now, doesn't it? A civilization. Weddings, babies..."
He didn't ask her about the Cylon baby, though he could all but feel her thinking about it. The strange little animal whose blood thrummed in her veins. "Where are your shoes?" he asked, reaching over to poke her ankle. "Civilized people wear them."
"It's warm," she replied, and it seemed all the explanation he was going to receive.
He leaned forward and retrieved the potatoes, splitting them open with his knife, and pouring a dollop of oil on top. He passed one to Laura, who sniffed it appreciatively.
"When my sisters came to visit, we'd go to this little café for pumpkin muffins," she told him. "They had a sort of vanilla mousse or cream inside. I could have eaten a dozen at a sitting." Her expression was wistful, and he was not fool enough to think it was about the pastry.
He raised his potato. "To bakeries," he offered.
She tapped hers against it. "To bakeries."
They ate, chewing in silence, as the sun nestled lower against the horizon.
"Baltar's going to frak this up," Laura observed casually, as though remarking upon the likelihood of a picnic being rained out. "Somehow, some way." She licked her fingers, which shone with oil, then dried them on the sparse grass. She picked up the wine and drank.
"He's proven to be resourceful in that department," Bill agreed. "But what happened to taking a break? I thought you just wanted to enjoy things as they are. Be mellow."
"I was stoned, Bill."
He chuckled, then looked meaningfully at the bottle. "Yes, you were."
They stared at one another for a moment before her silver laughter bubbled up like a spring. "We're ridiculous," she said. "We're old, tired, washed-up, ridiculous people."
"We've earned it." He reached over and took the bottle. Then he finished her wine.
She leaned back on her elbows, chin tipped up to bare her throat. "I had an affair with Richard Adar," she told him, hair skimming the grass.
Her casual tone belied her tension. He sensed it, felt her awaiting his reply to see if this confession shattered any illusions he held or whether it confirmed something he had suspected. He paused a moment longer to note the way her current pose pushed her breasts forward. "Well," he said, "I'll concede that Adar wasn't a total moron, then."
She laughed in a sad, distant way, but seemed to like his answer. "It couldn't go anywhere, of course, and I…I pretended that was romantic."
There was nothing to say and he didn't try.
Laura shook her head and gave him a rueful smile. "I don't mean to be maudlin. When is Lee getting married?"
"Not sure. I don't think he even knew he was going to until-" He bit off the end of the sentence and shrugged. "He didn't say."
"Ah." She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms about them, staring out with a peaceful expression.
He let the time go lightly with her there in the soft violet evening, the shadows lengthening quietly around the roots of trees and filling up the hollow places like rain. He extended a hand across the space between them, and she dropped her own hand from her knee to catch his. Her fingers were long and tapered with narrow nails, and he ran his thumb over the fine bones of her knuckles.
"It's good here," he said after a time. "You're right. It's a society."
"We're getting there," she said. "But we need better leadership. Baltar…" She shook her head.
"You miss being the President."
"I miss having a President."
"No wonder you're so suited to politics. You're good at answering questions," he informed her, smiling.
"That was a statement, not a question." Her voice was lofty, but she winked.
"Well, he's not king. We'll oust him sooner or later and New Caprica can plug along and build bakeries full of pumpkin muffins."
"What about Earth?" she queried.
"What about it?" He stroked her wrist absently, the tempo of her pulse a soothing metronome.
"We promised -"
"I promised. I'll take the responsibility for it."
"You will? Because I'm not dying now?" she inquired coolly. "So you don't have to pretend to believe the prophecy anymore?"
He squeezed her fingers, probably too hard, and watched the clouds turn into islands of molten fire in the indigo ocean of the sky. "I believe what I have to believe."
Her eyes crinkled fondly at the corners as she studied him, head cocked to one side. "Maybe you ought to be in politics."
Bill laughed abruptly and glanced her way. "Gods forbid."
"Oh, I think you should give a try. It'll teach you some humility. There's more to life than having your every command obeyed without question, Admiral."
"Do you really believe that?"
"I believe I should."
A breeze picked up from the east, setting the small animals alert for the scents of food and predators. A feather wafted by, curved like a beckoning finger, and tangled itself in a skein of Laura's hair.
"Tell me about your cabin," he said, letting go of her hand to pluck the feather free. He slid closer but didn't touch her again.
"No."
He looked up, surprised.
"It makes me feel dissatisfied with now," she explained. "If I talk about the things I want and don't have." She chewed her lower lip, looking mildly self-conscious. "It's all too tenuous, Bill, and I'm determined to savor the hell out of it."
He put his hand on her shoulder then, fingers stretching down to brush against the hard span of her collarbone. She stiffened for the briefest of seconds, then relaxed and let her head fall against him, glossy hair tumbling down his sleeve. He dropped his arm to her waist, which was slim as a girl's.
"So where's the line between hope and dissatisfaction?" he asked.
"Mmm. I think you can only know in retrospect. If you get what you wanted, you were hopeful. If not, you were dissatisfied."
She laughed a little at her own joke, which he liked. He liked a number of things about her, namely that after years of waking up next to breathtaking women with soft bodies and hard eyes, here he was reaching for someone's hand like an awkward teenager. He traced the ridge of her lower spine.
The night came whispering down, draping itself quietly around them. He saw fireflies - or whatever passed for fireflies here - sparking through the darkness like blips on DRADIS. They made him think of lemonade and cut grass, of his boys in summer with glass jars and sticky faces, and Carolanne like a blonde goddess watching it all with her beautiful, haughty smile.
He drew a long breath through his nose, filling it with Laura's paper-and-air scent, and the vapors of the sharp wine. She did not favor perfume, which he found both sensible and peculiarly erotic. There was an honesty in it, an absence of the usual barriers people created to filter who they were from whom they wished to appear to be. He wasn't in love with her, not yet, but he was perilously close and knew it.
"Laura," he began, without a full grasp of what was to follow. "I -"
She turned and kissed him, her mouth sweet with the ghosts of purple fruits, and her dewdrop fingers cool at the back of his neck. He felt her smiling against his lips, felt her laugh, and ran his hand up her back to catch her hair as he kissed her. He tasted cherries and starch on her tongue, and the finer essence of her own flavor beneath the top notes. He longed to slip his hand up under the folds of her skirt and slide it along her lean thigh. To push her down in the cradling banks of the ancient river and make her ask for the things she wanted. Instead, he pulled back and cupped her face in the curve of his palm, watching her watch him in the light of the gibbous moon.
She rose and steadied herself on his shoulder. "Good night, Bill," she said, pulling a little flashlight from her pocket.
"Good night, Laura."
"The wine was terrible."
"It was."
"But the potatoes were good."
Her fingers trailed across his cheek as she stepped away and moved forward into the dark. A tiny light sparked and bobbed like a will o' the wisp. It moved down the hill, turned left, and the gossamer night swallowed her up. The breeze picked up again, stronger this time, and played haunting notes across the mouth of the wine bottle.
Anticipation coiled in his stomach, warm and pleasant, and he thought about waking up next to her in a patch of straw colored light. Of her hair tickling the side of his face. Of a cabin by a mountain lake.
He thought there ought to be something to hope for.
***