fic
Title: Places among stars
Author: applesred
Pairing: Adama/Roslin
Spoilers: Daybreak
Rating: PG
Words: 3108
Summary: Living wasn't part of the plan. Bridging the gap in Daybreak.
A/N: The poem, as well as the title, is by Stephen Crane.
He sits on the edge of the cliff and waits for the sun to settle into the mountains completely before he unstraps the Colonial-issue gun from his belt and points it to his temple.
A beat goes by, and stretches on to minutes. He cocks it and closes his eyes briefly, his finger ghosting on the trigger. A light breeze picks up from the east, whispering through his uniform. He is not sure how long he stays this way, his life in a barrel in his hand, but when he opens his eyes his arm is already stiff and stars are blinking at the sky.
He puts the gun down on the rock.
'Chicken,' Laura's voice beside him says with a hint of amusement.
*
He flattens the earth with the piece of the Raptor wing he uses as a makeshift shovel. It's past midday and he is just now realizing that he's been working since dawn without a bite to eat and, as if on cue, his stomach grumbles.
"There's still some crackers left in the survival kit." A shadow falls on the ground in front of him and he doesn't have to look up to know who it is. "Unless the plan is to starve yourself," she continues in that lilting voice. "Which I doubt is any less painful than death by gunshot wound."
He stands up with a grunt and his bones creaking, and looks straight ahead at the green fields past the cliff.
"Gods, this is like the coup all over again." She sighs. "Or talking to a brick wall."
His lips flatten into a thin line and he walks away from her; stops. He glances down at the discolored earth beneath his feet and backs away. His veins feel like they've been doused with ice.
"Like someone just walked over my grave," she comments.
*
The next day he wanders from the Raptor, bag slung on his shoulders, to gather rocks. She's been near him all day--disappearing for short bouts of time, but always ending up somewhere at the corner of his eye or humming behind him--and she hasn't said a single word. He thinks this passive aggressive style is another one of her neat tricks, but he grudgingly admits to himself that it is partially working. He's become a little more aware of her--he'd be lying if he said he never was--of the wind ruffling through her thick red hair, and her impatient gesture of tucking some of it back behind her ears.
He makes a few trips back and forth the Raptor, depositing the fist-sized rocks he finds at the clearing. By sunset, he has discovered a brook half a mile away from the cliff, as well as a small, dense forest. The rocks by the brook are smoother and rounder. Perfect. He kneels on the bank and scoops clear water in his hands to wash his face.
When he opens his eyes, he looks up and blinks away the droplets clinging to his lashes. She's standing in front of him, holding out a handful of polished rocks. She opens her mouth a little and closes it again, smiles ruefully instead. He stands up and takes them from her palms, careful not to touch her hands.
*
The silent treatment continues all the way until the next afternoon. He places one rock on top of another neatly, with the same precision reserved for military operations. He has to make sure that the rocks do not wash away with the storms, and buries them deep. She is perched serenely on a boulder for now. Half an hour ago she was pacing across the clearing and, before that, wandering the length of the small stream.
The corner of his mouth turns up slightly; she never could sit still in their meetings.
When he carefully balances the last polished stone on top of the marker, he puts his hands on his hips and surveys his work. It's perfect, He thinks, and he's done. He's done.
She has stopped pulling on the weeds and he can feel her gaze burning on the back of his head.
"Hand me those branches," he says, voice husky from misuse, and when he turns to her he barely catches her eyes widen in surprise, "will you?"
She reaches at her feet for the two clean-cut branches and hands it to him wordlessly. He plants it by the head of the marker, a poor substitute for a proper Fleet grave.
"It's done," He says.
She does not reply, only tilts her head familiarly, her lips a straight line.
He walks over to the cliff and sits down on the flat rock. He reaches for his sidearm and cocks it, feeling the steel weight of it on his palm. He turns it around in his fingers, contemplating it. Then he points the barrel at his temple.
The first time he held a gun, he was six. It was an air-rifle his father had given him, and the first time he shot a small swallow he looked down on it, wing at an odd angle from its fall. His father had told him that the first life you had to take was always hard; the rest would just follow.
He presses the gun closer to his skin until he's sure he's left a mark. Then with a short sigh he slowly pulls it away from his temple, frowns at it heavily, and with a small grunt, pulls back his arm and throws it as far away down the mountain as he can.
A moment of silence, then, "Well that was incredibly stupid," she says. "How are you supposed to go hunting now?"
*
He watches her profile in the fire light as she leans forward to warm her hands.
"What the frak am I supposed to call you?" He barks a little too loudly.
She looks up at him, a mildly pleased smirk on her lips. "Laura would be nice."
He shakes his head. "You just helped me bury you. You suggested using the wing for the shovel."
"Hmm, ironic, isn't it," she agrees. "Glad to know you listened though."
*
"So what's the plan?" he asks her. They are sitting side by side at the bank of the stream, close enough that he can feel the warmth of her through her red sweater. "What's happening? Did I hit my head too hard when I was carrying you out? Have to say, you weren't exactly as light as a feather."
She shoots him a look. "You should know that implying anything about a woman's weight never goes well, dead or otherwise."
He snorts and his eyes fall to Laura's hands, settled on her lap. "Well I don't really think that we need any of those pretenses, especially since--" He gestures.
Her eyebrows rise so high they almost disappear in her hairline.
Bill winces.
Laura waves her hand around, the light catching the gold. ''Since you tied me down to the old ball and chain while I was dead? I have to say, Admiral, you really know how to sweep a girl off her feet."
"You know, considering the situation, sweeping you off your feet was the last thing I had in mind," He says seriously. She accidentally splashes water on his only suit--his only clothing, he realizes, for the rest of his life--as she moves to stand up. He knows better, though, and he is not blind enough to miss the mirth dancing in her eyes, nor does she try so hard to hide it.
*
He can't remember how they got to talking about the fleet. But now she is pacing the small clearing agitatedly, hands on her hips. He is sitting on the floor of the Raptor and hasn't been paying much attention to what she's saying; he's a little caught up at watching her move, the frustrated gestures her hands make in the air, the anger in her voice. His chest aches a little at the sight. It is something he has not seen in a long while.
"--into the sun!" she snaps.
He winces a little.
'How was that a good idea?'
"Laura, everything on those ships is the root of all this," he attempts to explain. He clears his throat as she peers at him coldly from her glasses. "The people need a clean slate."
Her jaw sets. "You and Lee may have just undone everything we worked for."
He exhales, runs a hand across his temple. She is new again and refreshed and alive, while he is still old and tired; he has never felt more so. He does not care about the fleet anymore, can't find the strength in him to think about thirty thousand people. "You're not the dying leader anymore."
You're dead, is what he means, but he doesn't say it, and even then they both hear it lingering behind his words.
Her shoulder sets and her eyes narrow, and she turns around and walks away.
*
The next time he sees her is three days later. He opens his eyes, and winces at the pain at his back from lying on the Raptor seat, and blinks when he sees her standing over her makeshift grave, wearing her bright red dress and her hands tucked behind her.
"This is it," she says, her eyes still on the small pile of stones as he comes closer. "This is all we are. Long after you're gone, some storm will wash all this away and no one will know that the President of the Twelve Colonies once lived and led thirty thousand people to Earth."
He remains silent, watching the sun dance on her hair, making shadows on her clothes. He cannot console her; she doesn't expect him to.
She turns to him with a small, ironic smile. "I don't mind. But I've been the dying leader for so long, I've forgotten what else to be."
*
He runs out of survival kit crackers one day. He's been expecting it, has rationed them to the best he can, but days have turned to weeks and he has finally run out of food. So after his last breakfast of dry saltine crackers and water, he prepares his pack and a sturdy walking stick, and heads for the woods.
"Gathering," Laura says beside him, an amused note in her voice.
He glances at her as she walks along with him, squinting her eyes at the far trees for edible fruit.
"The first step for survival," She continues, and points him to the direction of a thick bush with plump red berries on its branches.
He kneels down to pluck them from their stems, and Laura presses her face close to them and inhales. "Mmm, smells good."
He murmurs in acquiescence. He fills his pack to the brim and chews a couple; they are juicy and robust, and he can't remember anything tasting so sweet.
"It's not something to live for," He says, looks at her to where she's nibbling one of the berries.
She hums noncommittedly.
"Are you?" He asks.
She stops, lowers her hand and stares at him with an unreadable expression and a fleeting emotion he can't name. It is enough, he thinks.
*
He makes a fire one night and they sit around it, warming their hands and looking to the stars. She is still wearing the dress and when he sees her and the glow of the light he remembers another time, some other night so long ago he's not so sure it can be real.
His expression turns a little wistful and she knows what he's thinking of, and tells him so.
He nods. "Better days."
"But this is all we have," she replies, stretching her legs in front of her, "and it's alright."
Later, when the fire has gone out and Laura is leaning on a large rock, her eyes closed and a small grin playing on her mouth, she tilts her head in his direction and says, "Read me something."
He has left all his books on Galactica. It is something he sorely regrets and thinks of once in a while, pages burning in the sun.
He closes his eyes. There is a passage ingrained in his memory, and he thinks he doesn't need the book when he already knows the words. "Places among the stars, soft gardens near the sun, keep your distant beauty; shed no beams upon my weak heart.
"Since she is here in a place of blackness, not your golden days nor your silver nights can call me to you."
He opens his eyes to see her grinning at him. "Stephen Crane. I didn't know your tastes extended beyond bloody murder and crime. Quoting poetry under the stars," She places a hand on her chest dramatically, "a man after my own heart."
He looks at her and sees her eyes dancing and the soft earth shifting from where she slides her ankle forward on the ground. She is here, in this Earth, alive and happy and whole. He has never been so tempted to touch her, and he gives in, bridging the gap between them with a hand on her cheek. She does not disappear, or dissolve into dust under his palm. She is warm and soft and everything he remembers her to be, and her grin fades into a soft smile.
He leans forward to press his lips to her temple, her eyebrow, the corner of her mouth, slowly at first, then more desperate. "What are you?" He whispers between kisses. "What are you?"
"I'm me," She says, and he feels her cool hands on his neck, on his chin. "I'm me."
*
"What are you doing?" She asks him.
He catches his breath, wiping his forehead on his sleeve and sets down the armfuls of wood and rock that he has been gathering the whole morning. "I've been thinking," He says, "that the Raptor is too small for both of us."
She nods, leaning her head against a tree. "Yes, it is."
"We won't be able to live bumping into each other every two feet."
"No, we won't."
He wants to ask if it's enough to make her stay, if what he's making is enough to contain her forever, but he already knows the answer, and spares her the question.
*
He finds her in the morning, stretched out on the grass. "You shouldn't build it beside the forest. The view you'll have will be of dead trees in the winter."
'You', she says, and not 'we', but he ignores it, settling beside her instead. He is silent for a while, then, "Living was never part of the plan."
He's not looking at her, but hears her smile when she says, "I know."
*
Sometimes he wakes up to seeing her sitting beside her grave. He has an image, once, of her own hand reaching up to drag her back to the earth, and he tells her this and she lets out peal after peal of laughter at the seriousness in his face.
"Gods forbid this turns into a horror movie," she says.
"You are a walking ghost," he points out.
She tilts her head in acquiescence. "Hmm, true."
But more often than not, she senses when he's stirring in the cramped seat of the Raptor and turns to wave at him with such a singular clarity in her eyes, so Laura, it's as if she never died and she isn't a mirage in his head; a shimmering thing in the sunlight.
*
She has been coming to him less often. It is something he doesn't remark on, refuses to.
He is sitting on the stream bank with his feet in the water, listening to her as she goes on and on about things for the cabin--
"--walking distance to the stream, definitely, and the east window should face the sunlight. In the spring, maybe a garden for vegetables, and you'll go hunting and we'll have steak for the first time in years," her voice turns wistful, "and then carnations in the vases and if everything goes right, we'll find weed and live happily ever after."
He raises an eyebrow.
"Those are my terms," she says cheekily.
"Done," he says, hands up in surrender, chuckling, tracing the lines on her face with his fingers, wonders how she could be so real, and so temporary.
*
The last time he sees her, it is past midnight and he is sitting on his favorite spot on the cliff again, stargazing.
"Do you miss it?" she asks him. She places both hands on his shoulders, her chest pressed against his back, her chin in his hair.
"Sometimes," he admits, leaning back against her. "The view is always different from down here."
"Me too," she murmurs so softly, muffled against his hair, he wonders if he's supposed to hear it.
"I'm laying it out tomorrow," he tells her.
"Good. Building shelter," she replies with a small kiss on his head, "the next step to survival. Very good, Admiral."
"Thank you, Madam President."
"And is it also something to live for?" she asks.
He turns his head under her chin and presses his forehead against her arm.
They stay this way, long until the stars have faded and first light is coming through the skies and his eyes are fluttering shut no matter how hard he tries to keep them open.
And then, a shift behind him and he instinctively catches her wrist and mumbles, "Stay."
When he sleeps, it's with her arms around his shoulders and her warm breath on his cheek, and sometime in the morning he thinks he feels her lips on his temple, his nose, his eyelids, his ear; I'll see you soon, she's saying.
*
He finishes his work, stretches his arms and rests on the edge of the cliff, turning his face to the sun. "You should see the light we get here," he says.
Author: applesred
Pairing: Adama/Roslin
Spoilers: Daybreak
Rating: PG
Words: 3108
Summary: Living wasn't part of the plan. Bridging the gap in Daybreak.
A/N: The poem, as well as the title, is by Stephen Crane.
He sits on the edge of the cliff and waits for the sun to settle into the mountains completely before he unstraps the Colonial-issue gun from his belt and points it to his temple.
A beat goes by, and stretches on to minutes. He cocks it and closes his eyes briefly, his finger ghosting on the trigger. A light breeze picks up from the east, whispering through his uniform. He is not sure how long he stays this way, his life in a barrel in his hand, but when he opens his eyes his arm is already stiff and stars are blinking at the sky.
He puts the gun down on the rock.
'Chicken,' Laura's voice beside him says with a hint of amusement.
*
He flattens the earth with the piece of the Raptor wing he uses as a makeshift shovel. It's past midday and he is just now realizing that he's been working since dawn without a bite to eat and, as if on cue, his stomach grumbles.
"There's still some crackers left in the survival kit." A shadow falls on the ground in front of him and he doesn't have to look up to know who it is. "Unless the plan is to starve yourself," she continues in that lilting voice. "Which I doubt is any less painful than death by gunshot wound."
He stands up with a grunt and his bones creaking, and looks straight ahead at the green fields past the cliff.
"Gods, this is like the coup all over again." She sighs. "Or talking to a brick wall."
His lips flatten into a thin line and he walks away from her; stops. He glances down at the discolored earth beneath his feet and backs away. His veins feel like they've been doused with ice.
"Like someone just walked over my grave," she comments.
*
The next day he wanders from the Raptor, bag slung on his shoulders, to gather rocks. She's been near him all day--disappearing for short bouts of time, but always ending up somewhere at the corner of his eye or humming behind him--and she hasn't said a single word. He thinks this passive aggressive style is another one of her neat tricks, but he grudgingly admits to himself that it is partially working. He's become a little more aware of her--he'd be lying if he said he never was--of the wind ruffling through her thick red hair, and her impatient gesture of tucking some of it back behind her ears.
He makes a few trips back and forth the Raptor, depositing the fist-sized rocks he finds at the clearing. By sunset, he has discovered a brook half a mile away from the cliff, as well as a small, dense forest. The rocks by the brook are smoother and rounder. Perfect. He kneels on the bank and scoops clear water in his hands to wash his face.
When he opens his eyes, he looks up and blinks away the droplets clinging to his lashes. She's standing in front of him, holding out a handful of polished rocks. She opens her mouth a little and closes it again, smiles ruefully instead. He stands up and takes them from her palms, careful not to touch her hands.
*
The silent treatment continues all the way until the next afternoon. He places one rock on top of another neatly, with the same precision reserved for military operations. He has to make sure that the rocks do not wash away with the storms, and buries them deep. She is perched serenely on a boulder for now. Half an hour ago she was pacing across the clearing and, before that, wandering the length of the small stream.
The corner of his mouth turns up slightly; she never could sit still in their meetings.
When he carefully balances the last polished stone on top of the marker, he puts his hands on his hips and surveys his work. It's perfect, He thinks, and he's done. He's done.
She has stopped pulling on the weeds and he can feel her gaze burning on the back of his head.
"Hand me those branches," he says, voice husky from misuse, and when he turns to her he barely catches her eyes widen in surprise, "will you?"
She reaches at her feet for the two clean-cut branches and hands it to him wordlessly. He plants it by the head of the marker, a poor substitute for a proper Fleet grave.
"It's done," He says.
She does not reply, only tilts her head familiarly, her lips a straight line.
He walks over to the cliff and sits down on the flat rock. He reaches for his sidearm and cocks it, feeling the steel weight of it on his palm. He turns it around in his fingers, contemplating it. Then he points the barrel at his temple.
The first time he held a gun, he was six. It was an air-rifle his father had given him, and the first time he shot a small swallow he looked down on it, wing at an odd angle from its fall. His father had told him that the first life you had to take was always hard; the rest would just follow.
He presses the gun closer to his skin until he's sure he's left a mark. Then with a short sigh he slowly pulls it away from his temple, frowns at it heavily, and with a small grunt, pulls back his arm and throws it as far away down the mountain as he can.
A moment of silence, then, "Well that was incredibly stupid," she says. "How are you supposed to go hunting now?"
*
He watches her profile in the fire light as she leans forward to warm her hands.
"What the frak am I supposed to call you?" He barks a little too loudly.
She looks up at him, a mildly pleased smirk on her lips. "Laura would be nice."
He shakes his head. "You just helped me bury you. You suggested using the wing for the shovel."
"Hmm, ironic, isn't it," she agrees. "Glad to know you listened though."
*
"So what's the plan?" he asks her. They are sitting side by side at the bank of the stream, close enough that he can feel the warmth of her through her red sweater. "What's happening? Did I hit my head too hard when I was carrying you out? Have to say, you weren't exactly as light as a feather."
She shoots him a look. "You should know that implying anything about a woman's weight never goes well, dead or otherwise."
He snorts and his eyes fall to Laura's hands, settled on her lap. "Well I don't really think that we need any of those pretenses, especially since--" He gestures.
Her eyebrows rise so high they almost disappear in her hairline.
Bill winces.
Laura waves her hand around, the light catching the gold. ''Since you tied me down to the old ball and chain while I was dead? I have to say, Admiral, you really know how to sweep a girl off her feet."
"You know, considering the situation, sweeping you off your feet was the last thing I had in mind," He says seriously. She accidentally splashes water on his only suit--his only clothing, he realizes, for the rest of his life--as she moves to stand up. He knows better, though, and he is not blind enough to miss the mirth dancing in her eyes, nor does she try so hard to hide it.
*
He can't remember how they got to talking about the fleet. But now she is pacing the small clearing agitatedly, hands on her hips. He is sitting on the floor of the Raptor and hasn't been paying much attention to what she's saying; he's a little caught up at watching her move, the frustrated gestures her hands make in the air, the anger in her voice. His chest aches a little at the sight. It is something he has not seen in a long while.
"--into the sun!" she snaps.
He winces a little.
'How was that a good idea?'
"Laura, everything on those ships is the root of all this," he attempts to explain. He clears his throat as she peers at him coldly from her glasses. "The people need a clean slate."
Her jaw sets. "You and Lee may have just undone everything we worked for."
He exhales, runs a hand across his temple. She is new again and refreshed and alive, while he is still old and tired; he has never felt more so. He does not care about the fleet anymore, can't find the strength in him to think about thirty thousand people. "You're not the dying leader anymore."
You're dead, is what he means, but he doesn't say it, and even then they both hear it lingering behind his words.
Her shoulder sets and her eyes narrow, and she turns around and walks away.
*
The next time he sees her is three days later. He opens his eyes, and winces at the pain at his back from lying on the Raptor seat, and blinks when he sees her standing over her makeshift grave, wearing her bright red dress and her hands tucked behind her.
"This is it," she says, her eyes still on the small pile of stones as he comes closer. "This is all we are. Long after you're gone, some storm will wash all this away and no one will know that the President of the Twelve Colonies once lived and led thirty thousand people to Earth."
He remains silent, watching the sun dance on her hair, making shadows on her clothes. He cannot console her; she doesn't expect him to.
She turns to him with a small, ironic smile. "I don't mind. But I've been the dying leader for so long, I've forgotten what else to be."
*
He runs out of survival kit crackers one day. He's been expecting it, has rationed them to the best he can, but days have turned to weeks and he has finally run out of food. So after his last breakfast of dry saltine crackers and water, he prepares his pack and a sturdy walking stick, and heads for the woods.
"Gathering," Laura says beside him, an amused note in her voice.
He glances at her as she walks along with him, squinting her eyes at the far trees for edible fruit.
"The first step for survival," She continues, and points him to the direction of a thick bush with plump red berries on its branches.
He kneels down to pluck them from their stems, and Laura presses her face close to them and inhales. "Mmm, smells good."
He murmurs in acquiescence. He fills his pack to the brim and chews a couple; they are juicy and robust, and he can't remember anything tasting so sweet.
"It's not something to live for," He says, looks at her to where she's nibbling one of the berries.
She hums noncommittedly.
"Are you?" He asks.
She stops, lowers her hand and stares at him with an unreadable expression and a fleeting emotion he can't name. It is enough, he thinks.
*
He makes a fire one night and they sit around it, warming their hands and looking to the stars. She is still wearing the dress and when he sees her and the glow of the light he remembers another time, some other night so long ago he's not so sure it can be real.
His expression turns a little wistful and she knows what he's thinking of, and tells him so.
He nods. "Better days."
"But this is all we have," she replies, stretching her legs in front of her, "and it's alright."
Later, when the fire has gone out and Laura is leaning on a large rock, her eyes closed and a small grin playing on her mouth, she tilts her head in his direction and says, "Read me something."
He has left all his books on Galactica. It is something he sorely regrets and thinks of once in a while, pages burning in the sun.
He closes his eyes. There is a passage ingrained in his memory, and he thinks he doesn't need the book when he already knows the words. "Places among the stars, soft gardens near the sun, keep your distant beauty; shed no beams upon my weak heart.
"Since she is here in a place of blackness, not your golden days nor your silver nights can call me to you."
He opens his eyes to see her grinning at him. "Stephen Crane. I didn't know your tastes extended beyond bloody murder and crime. Quoting poetry under the stars," She places a hand on her chest dramatically, "a man after my own heart."
He looks at her and sees her eyes dancing and the soft earth shifting from where she slides her ankle forward on the ground. She is here, in this Earth, alive and happy and whole. He has never been so tempted to touch her, and he gives in, bridging the gap between them with a hand on her cheek. She does not disappear, or dissolve into dust under his palm. She is warm and soft and everything he remembers her to be, and her grin fades into a soft smile.
He leans forward to press his lips to her temple, her eyebrow, the corner of her mouth, slowly at first, then more desperate. "What are you?" He whispers between kisses. "What are you?"
"I'm me," She says, and he feels her cool hands on his neck, on his chin. "I'm me."
*
"What are you doing?" She asks him.
He catches his breath, wiping his forehead on his sleeve and sets down the armfuls of wood and rock that he has been gathering the whole morning. "I've been thinking," He says, "that the Raptor is too small for both of us."
She nods, leaning her head against a tree. "Yes, it is."
"We won't be able to live bumping into each other every two feet."
"No, we won't."
He wants to ask if it's enough to make her stay, if what he's making is enough to contain her forever, but he already knows the answer, and spares her the question.
*
He finds her in the morning, stretched out on the grass. "You shouldn't build it beside the forest. The view you'll have will be of dead trees in the winter."
'You', she says, and not 'we', but he ignores it, settling beside her instead. He is silent for a while, then, "Living was never part of the plan."
He's not looking at her, but hears her smile when she says, "I know."
*
Sometimes he wakes up to seeing her sitting beside her grave. He has an image, once, of her own hand reaching up to drag her back to the earth, and he tells her this and she lets out peal after peal of laughter at the seriousness in his face.
"Gods forbid this turns into a horror movie," she says.
"You are a walking ghost," he points out.
She tilts her head in acquiescence. "Hmm, true."
But more often than not, she senses when he's stirring in the cramped seat of the Raptor and turns to wave at him with such a singular clarity in her eyes, so Laura, it's as if she never died and she isn't a mirage in his head; a shimmering thing in the sunlight.
*
She has been coming to him less often. It is something he doesn't remark on, refuses to.
He is sitting on the stream bank with his feet in the water, listening to her as she goes on and on about things for the cabin--
"--walking distance to the stream, definitely, and the east window should face the sunlight. In the spring, maybe a garden for vegetables, and you'll go hunting and we'll have steak for the first time in years," her voice turns wistful, "and then carnations in the vases and if everything goes right, we'll find weed and live happily ever after."
He raises an eyebrow.
"Those are my terms," she says cheekily.
"Done," he says, hands up in surrender, chuckling, tracing the lines on her face with his fingers, wonders how she could be so real, and so temporary.
*
The last time he sees her, it is past midnight and he is sitting on his favorite spot on the cliff again, stargazing.
"Do you miss it?" she asks him. She places both hands on his shoulders, her chest pressed against his back, her chin in his hair.
"Sometimes," he admits, leaning back against her. "The view is always different from down here."
"Me too," she murmurs so softly, muffled against his hair, he wonders if he's supposed to hear it.
"I'm laying it out tomorrow," he tells her.
"Good. Building shelter," she replies with a small kiss on his head, "the next step to survival. Very good, Admiral."
"Thank you, Madam President."
"And is it also something to live for?" she asks.
He turns his head under her chin and presses his forehead against her arm.
They stay this way, long until the stars have faded and first light is coming through the skies and his eyes are fluttering shut no matter how hard he tries to keep them open.
And then, a shift behind him and he instinctively catches her wrist and mumbles, "Stay."
When he sleeps, it's with her arms around his shoulders and her warm breath on his cheek, and sometime in the morning he thinks he feels her lips on his temple, his nose, his eyelids, his ear; I'll see you soon, she's saying.
*
He finishes his work, stretches his arms and rests on the edge of the cliff, turning his face to the sun. "You should see the light we get here," he says.