Delphi's Scribe (The Other Times, Remembered Remix_ for miabicicletta
Title: Delphi’s Scribe (The Other Times, Remembered Remix)
Author: TBA
Characters: Bill Adama, Laura Roslin, Zak Adama, Lee Adama, Kara Thrace
Pairing: Adama/Roslin
Rating: M
Word count: ~7000
Summary: The book tells Bill its secrets, even as Laura refuses to.
Original story: The Book of Pythia by miabicicletta. Also, small touches from miabici’s related works The Road to Ithaka, Arms Full of Miracles (Every Blue Shade of Green, and The History Books Forgot About Us (the latter co-authored by sunshine_queen).
Author's Notes: Many thanks to my wonderful beta, and to miabici for having such an incredible body of work from which to draw.
αυτή είναι στο αίμα μου, όπως το φθηνό κρασί
He'd like to be able to understand the nuances of the ancient script, to read the entire crumbling thing, but he doesn't need to. Somehow, he already knows what it says.
It's the story of a man who loved a woman who left him too soon. Archaeological affinities aside, Bill fears that it’s his story. His affair with the red-haired goddess currently leaning over his kitchen counter, eating an apple, had once burned so bright he thought it might consume them both. But it has cooled in these late-summer days. She’s as much an enigma now as when she first came to him. Distant. Fleeting.
The book itself is back in his office in Cambridge, kept securely in temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions. The strange words scrawled across the stack of high-resolution printouts sent to him by the restoration team speak to him more through memory than language, undermining his long-held instincts to deduce from sight and touch and experiential inputs alone.
He flips through the notebook containing his first rough pass, from back to front, and his eyes come to rest on the top line of the front page, the first words he deciphered. “All things have gone past” gets a thick graphite line struck through it, and he scribbles “All this has previously happened” in the margin above. There’s no need for the plural when the introduction is clearly referring to something unitary, and big. A plethora; a myriad. Life, he thinks.
Laura leans over his shoulder, places a kiss to the side of his neck. It’s sticky. He turns his face so he can capture her lips, taste the sweetness mixed with tart unease. “Hey.”
“How’s the translation coming?”
He pushes his chair back so that he can pull her into his lap, welcoming her rare display of affection. “Not too bad. There are a lot of similarities to Greek, I’m just struggling with the syntax.”
Her head leans against his chest, and her fingers reach up to play with the salt-and-pepper hair that’s grown long enough to start curling over his collar. His heart pounds wildly against her shoulder; she’s a butterfly come to rest on his finger, threatening to leave her perch while he looks on in utter adoration. In search of what, he’s not quite sure. He wishes he did.
“You feel like going into town for dinner tonight?” He cherishes their quiet days at home together, but it would be good to get out after spending most of the day hunched over his notebooks. It would be good for her, too, he thinks. Though she’s spent all summer here, she rarely leaves the house, and he wants her to love this place as much as he does. To love him as much as he does her.
Laura hums noncommittally.
“Or we could cook here, then take a walk on the beach after.”
A quick nod lets him know this is amenable, and she kisses his cheek before wandering out the open sliding door into the olive grove.
A few hours later they’re strolling hand in hand, the sand soft beneath their bare feet. It’s not quite dark yet, and the blue-purple dusk is the same shade as the delicate skin just beneath her eyes. It neither suits her nor surprises him; she never seems to sleep through the night.
“When do you have to go to Athens next?”
He shrugs and snakes an arm around her waist. “End of the week, probably. Just for a day or two.” Long enough to stop at the library, do some research, make some copies, fax his findings. Will you still be here when I come back? he wants to ask.
“Why don’t you come along?” he says instead.
She laughs warily. “No, thank you. I had quite enough of Athens before I ended up here.” She rubs his arm fondly. “I know you’re cut out for danger and adventure, but the riots were a bit much for me.” He likes that she’s not shy about the fact that she doesn’t want to go, and it warms his heart a little that she seems sad when he has to go out of town.
He doesn’t push; it’s enough, for now, that she’s seemingly content to stay here in Delphi.
When they return to the house she turns to him needily, her fingers tugging at his belt loops and playing at his waist. Suddenly the bed seems too far away as they cross the threshold, and he ends up pushing her down onto the couch as she shimmies out of her panties and sundress.
“Bill, please,” she whispers, crooking her finger at him. He’s happy to comply, easing himself over her. She’s so small beneath him; smooth, warm limbs wrap around him for leverage, urging him closer.
His lips find hers, and he wants to kiss away her troubles. He thinks he might be succeeding, as she shifts and grinds against his thigh.
“Oh, gods,” she moans as his fingers find her center, circling her clit. It hadn’t taken him long to learn her body, deduce what she liked. He vaguely registers the oddity of her polytheistic invocation--had she said that before?--while his mouth finds its way down her neck to her breasts.
She arches against him, offering herself up, her arms pinned beneath her: a willing Prometheus inviting her avian lover to feast upon her immortal flesh. Soon his mouth replaces his fingers and her fingers twist in his hair. It’s pleasure mixed with pain, and his cock has grown achingly hard in its readiness to take her.
Her whimpers tell him that she’s close, so close, and her tugs at his neck and shoulders tell him that he needn’t wait any longer. He’s unhurried as moves back up her body and sheaths himself inside her in one sure stroke, unable to suppress the grin that comes on at the feeling of coming home--
(I never felt truly at home, anywhere, until these past few months, here, with you)
--and the thought slips away as universes shift, and galaxies collide, and there is only here, and now, and him, and her.
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
It wasn’t long after she finally told him her name (a few days after she first spent the night, his mind supplies helpfully) that he started searching for the answers to questions he wouldn’t ask. Just as he had recognized something familiar the moment he’d seen her in the market, and when he’d approached her on the rocks, so too had he realized that it wasn’t a casual vacation that had brought her so far from home and with so little agenda.
Convention and good manners would dictate against such intrusive snooping, but the ease of access to information paired with the fact that he’s fallen hard, and fast, leads Bill to his study after she leaves for the evening. “I can’t stay over three nights in a row,” she’d protested over his post-dinner entreaties, twisting away as his hands slipped under the hem of her shirt. Her tone is light but her jaw is set, and he resigns himself to her promise of returning in the morning so they can spend the day on the water.
Left with Google as his sole companion, then, he pushes his guilt aside long enough to do a quick search. His Queen of the Gods is actually Laura Eileen Roslin, admitted to practice law in the state of California since 1996. Four-time Los Angeles Marathon finisher and local fundraising chair for the Race for the Cure. There's a blurb about an “upcoming reunion” that happened four years ago next to a picture of her wearing a name tag, caught unaware while chatting at a Stanford alumni event. But he’d had to click through several pages to find that information. The first page of hits includes obituaries and news items informing him that Laura is the only surviving relative of Edward and Cheryl Roslin. Sister to the late Sandra Roslin-Matthews, a teacher who with her husband Ben had been expecting a baby sometime this July.
The lone photo of the accident is grotesque, an overhead shot of a burned-out shell twisted around a crumpled guardrail. His stomach churns and he quickly closes that browser tab, but reads the brief LA Times article several times over as he struggles to comprehend the extent of her loss. They’d been leaving Laura’s home in the Hollywood Hills after a baby shower. The driver, drunk of course, crossed over two lanes of traffic before losing control and colliding head-on with the younger sister's car. A terrible way to die.
Put in this context, her fascination with the tragic tales that pass for history in these parts suddenly makes more sense.
They could make a good story together, he thinks. One of the rare happy endings, maybe. Hera usually managed to make things turn out okay for herself. Although if Laura is Queen of the Gods, the metaphor extended to him is quite less immodest than he would normally indulge. He wipes his browser history--she uses his computer to check her email, occasionally--and wonders whether she’ll ever open up to him.
He goes over to the couch and sits down wearily. It's late, and his findings (his transgressions, his breach) tumble wildly around his troubled mind. When he leans over to snag a dog-eared copy of Where Angels Fear to Tread from the pile of books beneath the coffee table (”Your thing for E.M. Forster is such an affectation,” his ex-wife’s haughty voice mocks him, as if the Brits have some kind of monopoly on the man), a coppery-gold strand catches his eye at the edge of the upholstery. He smiles, remembering how he’d played with her hair with her head in his lap while they shared a glass of wine and waited for dinner to finish cooking. Picking it up instead of the book, he twists it between his fingers. It reminds him of Ariadne’s gift to Theseus, the thread to help him find his way out of the minotaur’s maze.
Bill wonders whether Laura would regard him as Theseus or the bull-man.
Maybe she is Theseus, not Ariadne. “I don’t need to be saved,” he could see her insisting.
Intent on making her way through her trial and finding her way back home.
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
Weeks pass. New pages arrive in his inbox every few days. The book gradually tells him its (her?) secrets, even as Laura refuses to.
It’s part travel narrative (“the ship was not as seaworthy as I’d hoped”), part cautionary tale (“‘Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done,’ I told them the day before the destruction of our home worlds”), part elegy for the author’s “beautiful, bloody-minded, pragmatic” sometime paramour. The mysteriously bound volume causes Bill to reconsider everything he’s learned, to open his mind to new possibilities.
She listens earnestly, as captivated as he at the tale; it’s replaced the tried-and-true local yarns as their postcoital storytime. When he finishes the first translation and is accordingly caught up with his work, he makes a copy of it during a trip to Athens and brings it along as they spend a few days sailing.
It’s unreal, being out on the water, away from the world but for the occasional passing ship; their days full of speculation about what the story means, their nights full of each other. Somehow the farfetched details seem more plausible out here, sailing through the lonely sea with a vast tapestry of stars surrounding them.
A career made out of scrutinizing collective bargaining agreements has given her a talent for parsing the words, and together they try out different translations.
“Bill,” she says, looking up from where she’s sprawled on her stomach on the deck, reviewing a photocopy bleeding their competing red and gray pencils. “We all say such? What does that even mean? There’s no antecedent basis--it’s not in reference to anything. And it’s at least the third time I’ve seen this phrase.”
He eases down next to her to take a look. The sunny days have bronzed the bare skin of his chest, so much darker than her still-pale skin perpetually shaded by a wide-brimmed hat. He leans against her easily, and she curls herself around him as he ponders. “Well, what do you think it should be?”
“I think it’s an exhortation, not a description,” she offers. “We all ... um, agree.”
“Huh? No...”
“We all say so?”
That’s not quite right, either, but it’s close enough to trigger a familiar echo in his mind, a rumbling feeling from deep within.
He mumbles it tentatively at first, then remembers Laura’s suggestion; exhortation, right. “So say we all!”
She grins at him. “That’s your translation for this line. So say we all.”
“So say we all,” he says again, liking the authoritative way the words roll off his tongue. Sliding the paper beneath the edge of the towel to keep it from blowing away, he lowers his lips to hers. They’re in agreement on the words, and on this; they’re in sync, they’re so right.
He can’t remember ever being this happy.
Δ Δ Δ Δ
Back on land, the old insecurities and uncertainties return. Bill begins to let himself think of a return to the States-- plane tickets for two, seeing Boston through a newcomer’s eyes. A house empty too long, filled with love and companionship for the first time.
It is love. He thinks it, he feels it, he knows it.
(That’s what love is. Thoughts.)
He’s just not sure that she does.
His younger son comes to visit, and Bill can see that she recognizes something in Zak’s sadness. Still she doesn’t open up to him, although she and Zak seem to get along extraordinarily well. For that he is grateful, and a little jealous.
They make love quietly, while his son sleeps out in the yard. She’s tender and a little desperate; her heart beating, raw and open, in time with the roll of their hips, the staccato whimpers of yes and oh and there and Bill. One hand cups the side of her face as she rides him; the other slides between their bodies to give her as much pleasure as possible. The moonlight streaming in through the closed leaded-glass window gives her an otherworldly glow, and for a moment he fears she’s an apparition, something that might wisp away on a soft breeze or a god’s fancy, until her soft caresses turn to fingernails raking across his chest as she shudders around him in pleasure-- very real, very present.
She’s sweaty and he’s spent by the time she collapses beside him, tucking herself into his side.
He wraps his arm around her tight, tracing spirals across her slightly damp skin. It’s probably just the knowledge that Zak is out there in the grass, but for whatever reason he drifts off to sleep on a vision of lying beside her outdoors, under the stars, with rough sandbags beneath them and her hand firmly on his chest.
The morning after Zak leaves she wakes up in his arms for the fourth time in a row, surprising him; he’d come to think that she would go back to her normal escape artist routine as soon as his son was gone. He brings her coffee in bed instead of her usual spot on the porch. A lazy morning spent reading together, a little revising of the manuscript, is followed up by a surprisingly acrobatic midday lovemaking session on the couch. But a few hours later, spurred by his frustration and desperation that she see and finally acknowledge the way this thing between them has grown, rather than distract him with her lopsided smile and open arms, he makes the mistake of blurting out that he knows what happened to her family, the tragedy that brought her to him.
He thinks she doesn’t give him enough credit for his perceptiveness. He may not want to accept it, but he knows that just because she doesn’t leave then and there (--you can stay in the room, but get out of my head--where did that come from?), doesn’t mean she’s going to stay.
The following day he wakes early and goes for a walk to think in the serenity of the salt- and lemon-scented air. When she finds him sitting at the crumbling retaining wall and drapes herself over him, her lips brushing against the nape of his neck, the rim of his ear, he knows that he wants--needs-- this, for the rest of his days, and rolls the hard six.
I love you.
I know.
Season’s over.
It is.
It wasn’t enough.
It was too much.
Δ Δ Δ
After she leaves (”You always left me first,” a distant, vaguely accusatory version of her voice says in the back of his head, “except this time”--and somehow the thought comforts him, knowing that she’s on the other side of the world, not on the other side of the Styx), he tries to carry on as usual. Tending to his garden, pruning the trees, haggling over the price of fish (less, now that he is cooking for one). Working on his book. He works and works and works, driven by a need to think of anything but her. Except: he let her get too close, and she’s still there. In his book; looking over his shoulder as he translates, her voice low and husky in his ear. Edits that should have taken him hours now take days.
The prospect of returning home to Boston has lost the appeal it once held. After foolishly letting himself entertain thoughts that she might come with him, he’s not ready to return to his empty house, his empty life.
His department head emails to confirm that Bill will be back on campus by mid-September. Bill calls him back directly, promises that the book will be with the university press by Thanksgiving, and agrees to teach an undergrad course in the spring, in exchange for a few more weeks in Greece. Being surrounded by reminders of the ancients and the language more similar to that of the book than anything else he’s encountered is helping him, he tells himself. Except when it doesn’t.
His house grows oppressive--full of memories that contrast with his current solitude-- as the days trudge forward, away from that moment she looked over her shoulder and told him
“I’m sorry we didn’t have more time.”
Her apology recurs to him often, a constant dull ache residing alternately between his mind and his solar plexus, and he stews over it. She of all people should have been able to appreciate the fragility of what they’d had, the fleetingness of this life.
Three weeks after she left him and two weeks after she left town (according to the local gossips who gleefully filled him in over wine and olives one afternoon, oblivious to his discomfort), his restlessness takes over. He places a copy of his manuscript in one water-tight bag and pages filled with words he still needs to decipher in another. He loads up his dusty Saab with a few changes of clothes, a couple liters of water, and some snacks, and heads for the marina.
The old girl bobs regally in her slip, and he can’t help but remember the look of wonder on Laura’s face as she’d regarded his boat for the first time. How impressed and yet unsurprised she’d been when he told her he built most of it himself.
He has no agenda, other than confronting directly some of his most treasured (painful) memories in an effort to find a way forward. During the day, his head feels clearer as he sails, tacking back and forth across the Gulf of Corinth. He drops anchor far from shore and works on the book for a few hours each morning, then sails toward the coast when his stomach reminds him that he’s no god, he requires food just like all the other mere mortals.
During the nighttime, though, the sea’s charms are lost on him. He tries sleeping above deck, under the stars; all he can think about is Laura curled up against his chest (too strangely light now), looking up at the constellations and asking him to tell her the stories of how each one came to scatter the sky. The cabin is worse. The rack was never really big enough for two people, yet it feels empty without her. Over and over again he remembers their bodies rocking in counterpoint to the waves, bringing her to one climax after another because, after all, they had all the time in the world out here, islanded in this stream of stars. He remembers collapsing onto her, his face in the crook of her neck, utterly spent, utterly content because everything in his life up to that point had been leading up to that moment. He wonders why he was so foolish as to let himself fall asleep then, when he should have been awake for it all.
When sleep does come, it’s haunted by visions of her. Laura looks different in these dreams, somehow. Her hair is sometimes dark and stiffly straight, and her clothing more formal than anything he’d seen her wear, though he supposes not inappropriate for her life as a lawyer back in California. This Laura is older, yet familiar. The best dream is one in which they’re surrounded by candles, happy and sated as he drops countless kisses against her shoulder blade and she strokes his forearm in response. In this dream, he’s able to fall asleep, certain that she’ll still be there in his arms when they wake up the next morning. In his dream, she’s waited so long to come to his bed (or he to hers?) that she’s not inclined to escape his embrace in the night for the solitude of a porch swing.
He remembers how, as soon as they got back from that first overnight trip on the boat, he returned and his translation flowed like he was a mere conduit for something bigger, something out of his control.
To an extent he finds that happening again for him, more refined now but no less overwhelming. He loses track of the days as he churns through pages and puzzles out words. “We traveled through . . . galaxies, at first for our people but ultimately for ourselves, too. We earned our rest at last, yet I am all alone on my hill,” he says aloud, trying to find a cadence to the prose. He’s pretty sure he’s taken some liberties, but his translation is instinctual, and he’ll let his editors debate the semantics later.
“I’ll never be free of her,” Bill says. The author’s admission is his own. “Nor do I want to be.”
The morning he returns to Itea, he heads straight to the hardware store on Kapodistriou for a can of weatherproof paint and a brush. His sloop finally has a name.
Laura.
Δ Δ
His old Saab isn’t a quiet car, its growly diesel engine even louder than that of the rusting Volvo 740 he drives back home, and he shouldn’t be surprised when it alerts his unexpected guests to his arrival.
“Where the hell have you been, old man?” Kara practically pulls him out of his car and slaps his back excitedly. “We were about to give up on you.”
“Would have already, but for your extraordinarily stocked wine cellar,” Lee adds drolly, coming off the porch to join them. “And the fact that you don’t lock your windows.”
Bill hoists the battered leather bag containing his work over his shoulder and starts toward the walkway up to the house. “I was sailing. Come on back in, then, and tell me what brings you guys to this corner of the world.”
“I have to ask, even though I know you’re an absolute Luddite,” Lee says as Bill fumbles with his keys, only to find that the door is already open. “What happened to your cell phone? We’ve been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh,” Bill says. He fishes the compact gray flip phone out of a pocket of his bag. The display, of course, is dim. “Battery’s dead.”
Lee and Kara roll their eyes at one another and follow him inside.
"So how long were you out there?" Kara asks.
Bill tosses his bag to the floor and pours himself a hearty slug of ouzo before answering. "A few days, I guess."
Lee and Kara exchange a concerned glance. "By yourself?"
He strokes his newly-bearded chin and shoots his almost-daughter an annoyed look. "Yes."
Kara throws up her hands. "Zak mentioned meeting someone when he was here a couple weeks ago. Thought you might have been out with her, that's all."
"No," Bill says shortly. Then he does a double take. "You talked to Zak?"
Lee nods. "Yeah. He stopped off in London for a few days between Paris and Boston."
Bill's relieved to hear that the rift between his sons has begun to mend, but it strains his shattered heart all over again to remember that it was Laura who had succeeded in lifting Zak out of his bitter funk. A physical pain shoots through his chest, and he slumps over the counter.
"Dad? You all right?"
Bill swallows thickly. His throat's constricted; dealing with his pain on his own was one thing, but he hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to talk about her with other people. Kara hands him a glass of water wordlessly, clasps his shoulder briefly in concern. Bill takes a deep breath.
"I'm fine," he says after taking a long sip. They're looking at him expectantly, so he adds, "She left."
Lee nods sympathetically, while Kara's fingers twitch around the camera he hadn't noticed until now, hanging from a macramé cord around her neck. Lee changes the subject, though Kara looks annoyed at him for it. "So how's work, then?"
Bill shrugs. After talking to Laura about it all summer, he's loath to go through the details again with others, even his son. But he supposes he'll have to get used to it. "I'm working on a pretty exciting project at the moment. Found this book in Africa over ten years ago, then forgot about it. Carbon dating puts it at 150,000 years old, yet it's bound using techniques that weren’t developed until thousands of years later. And it's written essentially in ancient Greek." He doesn't feel like getting into the implications of all that, nor the professional isolation that it's caused him, but he's proud of the work he (they, his traitorous, chivalrous mind invokes his red-headed amanuensis) have done, so he adds, "I've translated most of the text. It's a destruction narrative of sorts."
"Of course you have," says Lee, who speaks five languages, just as Kara says, "Of course it is."
"So how long are you planning on staying here? I'd have thought you might have gone back to the States by now." Lee pours himself a glass of wine from the open bottle sitting on the counter. "Not that we're complaining, of course."
Bill sighs; he's been asking himself the same question, and he's still not entirely sure of the answer. "I've been asked to present at a conference in Vancouver in about a month. Until then--" he holds out his arms, indicating the comfortably modest house "--I'm just working on my manuscript, and I can do that anywhere, so--"
"I want to see this boat of yours," Kara interrupts. "Also, you have no food here. What do you say we go grab some grub, walk down to the marina afterward?" She looks at both men, each holding a glass, and adds, "I'll drive."
Dinner passes companionably, both of them filling Bill in on their latest exploits--Lee's successful summer spent interning in the Home Office, Kara's upcoming shows in Oslo and Stockholm--but seeing the easy affection between them, even though he loves them both and is glad to see them happy, makes him more morose instead of lifting his spirits. He and Laura had been like that for weeks, maybe a month. Now he feels interminably old and irrelevant in the shiny vibrant effusion of the young people across the table.
Their interest in the boat brightens him, though. The lights have come on at the marina and the surface of the water has lost its glittery sheen, replaced by vague shadowed waves with moon-frosted caps. He stops at the end of the pier and looks out for a few moments, wondering how it came to pass that Fortuna saw fit to throw him off her wheel, forcing him to tread in these ominous waters.
“Is that it?” Lee asks, forcing Bill out of his reverie. He reads off the registration tag near the bow. “Nebula-7242-Constellation, right?”
Bill forces himself to look up at the latest adornment. Laura. “Yeah, this is it.” Her.
He reaches out and grabs the mooring, feeling the lines tied tight and true. Gazing out over the water again, he wonders if painting his devotion right along the hull might have been a mistake.
Kara toys with her camera. She snaps a few photos of the boats lined up along the marina before she turns the lens toward Bill and takes a single shot. A million shutters might be contracting at any given moment in this world, a billion moments in time marking the forward-facing progression from one lifetime to the next, but Kara makes hers count.
Lee scrambles from the dock onto the sloop--he’s always been an explorer, and neither adulthood nor his staid chosen profession have entirely quashed his childish enthusiasm for new things--and Kara sidles up next to Bill.
“You,” she declares, “are miserable, old man.”
“Yeah,” he admits, draping an arm over her shoulders. “But you’re not.”
Her responding hum is at once satisfied and sympathetic. She gestures toward the black cursive script. “Tell me about her.”
“The boat?”
She shakes her head firmly. “No.”
It feels strange to be the one opening up to Kara, after so many visits in which she sought his advice about dealing with his sons. “I love her,” he admits, echoing the refrain Kara always came back to in her moments of frustration regarding the Brothers Adama: I love them both. It’s his most fundamental truth.
“The one who came by when I was here at the beginning of the summer?”
He nods. “She stayed through the end of August.”
Lank strands of blond hair swing back and forth as Kara shakes her head disapprovingly. “Want me to tell her off for you?”
For a moment he wonders what it would be like to see them together, Laura and Kara, in the same place. Discussing him--his two favorite women. Sitting on the couch together in the living room of his house on Acacia Street, passing a sweet-cheeked baby between them....Embracing one another in the thrill of an unexpected victory, celebrating a danger passed....The flash of a silver firearm in dark shadows, Laura rubbing bleary eyes as a wraithlike version of Kara screeches out confused, threatening words... His eyes open wide, and he tries to push the images aside.
Kara’s joking offer to confront Laura suddenly seems a real threat (all of this has happened before), and though he knows it’s irrational, he feels his anger building.
“C’mon,” Kara wheedles, socking her fist against the flat palm of her other hand. “Just tell me her name. Laura what?”
“We’re done here,” Bill grinds out through suddenly clenched teeth, and stalks off to join Lee on the boat.
Lee and Kara spend two nights with him at his house. Neither one of them is foolhardy enough to mention Laura again, though he sees (and resents, just a little) the pitying way they look at him.
When they take their leave, their goodbyes are meant to last until Christmas.
Bill takes the manuscript to the highest point on his property and looks west.
Δ
He’s been in Vancouver for less than a day when he thinks he recognizes a familiar face across the lobby of the crowded conference.
At first he attributes it to jet lag and tries to ignore the way his pulse has sped up and his palms have begun to sweat. Europe to the West Coast has never played particularly well for him, and he hadn’t been sleeping well even before leaving Greece.
The broken hope in his heart reasserts itself against the rational part of his mind, though, and he forces himself to keep his head up, to stay where he is, as she approaches, even as he steels himself for the possibility that it’s just another memory manifest from his despair.
“Laura?” he asks disbelievingly. He’s moments away from presenting the most important work he’s ever done to a crowd of international superstars in his field--and he’s cracking up, seeing something that can’t be. Maybe he is as delusional as Dr. Baltar said; untethered from reality. The thought fills him with horror and dread as he feels his confidence in his (their) work slip away. Just a crazy old man.
He’s frozen in place as the crowd parts for her, the clacking of her heels against the pink marble floor the only thing he can hear despite the multilingual din of his colleagues catching up with one another.
She steps closer, even as she looks ready to bolt back through the crowd and out of the atrium, and Bill says her name again, reaches out to touch her shoulder to confirm that she’s really there before she can turn to leave. “Laura.”
His touch is light against the material of her lavender jacket but she’s trembling beneath his fingers, obviously unsure what to say. And to Bill’s immense relief, she’s definitely corporeal, not an apparition. Her green eyes are tinged with a different kind of grief than he’s used to seeing there.
“I had to--” she begins, then cuts herself off. She leans forward as if to embrace him but stops short. “Hi,” she tries again.
(’You’re here; oh, you’re here,’ that traitorous inner voice reminds him. A memory from another time, another place, her writhing beneath him in the dark of night; his responding promise, ’I would find you anywhere.’ And he would, except now she’s found him.)
He shakes his head back and forth, still not sure whether to believe that she’s really here in front of him, too damaged to let himself think that she’s actually come back. For him. Not for the book (their story), not out of penance for the way she’d left, but for him. “Why are you here, Laura?”
She steps back, and his hand falls from her shoulder. Not knowing what to do with it, he folds his arms nervously in front of him, bracing for her reply.
“I honestly don’t know,” she whispers, then clears her throat and speaks more clearly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”
The crystal-refracted lights of the massive chandelier flicker on and off, pulling him out of the trancelike moment, changing their course from a descent into past regrets toward a chance for a more hopeful discourse -- a future that would have to wait for the time being, the throngs of people filing by remind him. “I have to go in there,” he says with a tilt of his head toward the auditorium, reluctant to look away from her face. He wants nothing more than to clasp her to him, bury his face in her hair, and confess how very much he’d missed her. But he’s made himself vulnerable to her before, to his detriment. Thus at the moment, the most he can do is ask, “Will you still be here? After the talk?”
Laura gives him a relieved smile and nods, and Bill feels his confidence return. “Okay,” he says, and he reaches down to take her hand and place a kiss to her knuckles before leaving.
From the stage, the lights make it difficult to see into the crowd, but Bill can’t help but squint and look for her as he explains the anomalous book to his skeptical colleagues. Within the first few minutes, after he’s set forth the thorough science--the chemistry and calculus, the independent lab work corroborating his conclusions--the atmosphere warms and he can tell he’s got people sitting at the edges of their plush red-velvet seats.
He’s finally relaxed and gotten into his element-- telling the story of how he found it, forgot it, and spent months translating it-- when he sees an usher leading a dark-haired woman in a light-colored suit firmly toward the side exit.
“And I had help,” he tells the crowd, even though the door has closed behind her, “from someone who believed in me, believed in this book. And this story wouldn’t have been possible without her.”
The question-and-answer session following his presentation goes quickly; the conference organizers are diligent about limiting the number of questions in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the schedule. For the most part the attendees are respectful if not not necessarily receptive to his heretical proposal for a new timeline for Middle Paleolithic language development. And he’s got his supporters there: Billy and Felix, a handful of grad student advisees. But as much as he’d looked forward to this, for all he’d thrown himself into his work in the past months, he can’t wait to get off the stage.
He nods with a polite smile at the young students who congratulate him on his work, but his eyes never stop searching for her. He’s not sure what to expect when he finally exits the building and sees her sitting at the edge of the fountain. She looks almost peaceful in the waning sun’s red-gold light.
He wonders exactly what she’s decided, sitting out here. He eases down beside her, and she doesn’t speak (neither of them do), but she does shift slightly closer to him and emit a content sigh.
Long moments pass. It might have been considered companionable if they knew where they stood with one another, but Bill still can’t tell whether she’s come here to make amends or to crush his heart all over again, and thus whatever serenity seems to have come over Laura, he doesn’t share. The stalemate is broken when her fingers move to twine with his, and he shifts away, needing to see her face. Needing to know what this means. “Laura, what--?”
“I love you.”
He’s waited so long to hear those words from her for the first time. (’In this lifetime,’ protests a memory as his eyes close, ’she’s said it first, before’, and he thinks of the book, and how its author had responded to his beloved’s heartfelt confession with what Bill had deemed a pretty dickish ’About time’--but translated all the same.)
“Bill?” She leans toward him, and he thinks back to their last moments together, sitting on a low stone wall not so different from this poured-concrete fountain, and how desperate he’d been to hear these words then.
“I love you, Bill. I love you, I do.” Laura begins to giggle nervously, and his heart melts to see this vulnerable, open side of her at last. “I don’t know why--oh, Bill, I’m so sorry.”
“C’mere,” he says, his words catching deep in his constricted throat. He wraps an arm around her and pulls her close; her head still fits perfectly against his chest, his body still responds to her presence with that familiar tingling mitochondrially deep. “I’ve always loved you,” he says, his lips against her ear, and she hums in agreement, in acquiescence-- no longer will she deny the thing that he knew instinctually, from memory, from the first times (this time) he saw her admiring apples in the market, sunning herself on a rock by the beach, smiling at him across the bow of his boat.
She’s in his blood, like the sweet wine made of ancient grapes they’d shared from a single glass all those lazy summer nights. And now, with her finally in his arms again, he knows he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Author: TBA
Characters: Bill Adama, Laura Roslin, Zak Adama, Lee Adama, Kara Thrace
Pairing: Adama/Roslin
Rating: M
Word count: ~7000
Summary: The book tells Bill its secrets, even as Laura refuses to.
Original story: The Book of Pythia by miabicicletta. Also, small touches from miabici’s related works The Road to Ithaka, Arms Full of Miracles (Every Blue Shade of Green, and The History Books Forgot About Us (the latter co-authored by sunshine_queen).
Author's Notes: Many thanks to my wonderful beta, and to miabici for having such an incredible body of work from which to draw.
αυτή είναι στο αίμα μου, όπως το φθηνό κρασί
He'd like to be able to understand the nuances of the ancient script, to read the entire crumbling thing, but he doesn't need to. Somehow, he already knows what it says.
It's the story of a man who loved a woman who left him too soon. Archaeological affinities aside, Bill fears that it’s his story. His affair with the red-haired goddess currently leaning over his kitchen counter, eating an apple, had once burned so bright he thought it might consume them both. But it has cooled in these late-summer days. She’s as much an enigma now as when she first came to him. Distant. Fleeting.
The book itself is back in his office in Cambridge, kept securely in temperature- and humidity-controlled conditions. The strange words scrawled across the stack of high-resolution printouts sent to him by the restoration team speak to him more through memory than language, undermining his long-held instincts to deduce from sight and touch and experiential inputs alone.
He flips through the notebook containing his first rough pass, from back to front, and his eyes come to rest on the top line of the front page, the first words he deciphered. “All things have gone past” gets a thick graphite line struck through it, and he scribbles “All this has previously happened” in the margin above. There’s no need for the plural when the introduction is clearly referring to something unitary, and big. A plethora; a myriad. Life, he thinks.
Laura leans over his shoulder, places a kiss to the side of his neck. It’s sticky. He turns his face so he can capture her lips, taste the sweetness mixed with tart unease. “Hey.”
“How’s the translation coming?”
He pushes his chair back so that he can pull her into his lap, welcoming her rare display of affection. “Not too bad. There are a lot of similarities to Greek, I’m just struggling with the syntax.”
Her head leans against his chest, and her fingers reach up to play with the salt-and-pepper hair that’s grown long enough to start curling over his collar. His heart pounds wildly against her shoulder; she’s a butterfly come to rest on his finger, threatening to leave her perch while he looks on in utter adoration. In search of what, he’s not quite sure. He wishes he did.
“You feel like going into town for dinner tonight?” He cherishes their quiet days at home together, but it would be good to get out after spending most of the day hunched over his notebooks. It would be good for her, too, he thinks. Though she’s spent all summer here, she rarely leaves the house, and he wants her to love this place as much as he does. To love him as much as he does her.
Laura hums noncommittally.
“Or we could cook here, then take a walk on the beach after.”
A quick nod lets him know this is amenable, and she kisses his cheek before wandering out the open sliding door into the olive grove.
A few hours later they’re strolling hand in hand, the sand soft beneath their bare feet. It’s not quite dark yet, and the blue-purple dusk is the same shade as the delicate skin just beneath her eyes. It neither suits her nor surprises him; she never seems to sleep through the night.
“When do you have to go to Athens next?”
He shrugs and snakes an arm around her waist. “End of the week, probably. Just for a day or two.” Long enough to stop at the library, do some research, make some copies, fax his findings. Will you still be here when I come back? he wants to ask.
“Why don’t you come along?” he says instead.
She laughs warily. “No, thank you. I had quite enough of Athens before I ended up here.” She rubs his arm fondly. “I know you’re cut out for danger and adventure, but the riots were a bit much for me.” He likes that she’s not shy about the fact that she doesn’t want to go, and it warms his heart a little that she seems sad when he has to go out of town.
He doesn’t push; it’s enough, for now, that she’s seemingly content to stay here in Delphi.
When they return to the house she turns to him needily, her fingers tugging at his belt loops and playing at his waist. Suddenly the bed seems too far away as they cross the threshold, and he ends up pushing her down onto the couch as she shimmies out of her panties and sundress.
“Bill, please,” she whispers, crooking her finger at him. He’s happy to comply, easing himself over her. She’s so small beneath him; smooth, warm limbs wrap around him for leverage, urging him closer.
His lips find hers, and he wants to kiss away her troubles. He thinks he might be succeeding, as she shifts and grinds against his thigh.
“Oh, gods,” she moans as his fingers find her center, circling her clit. It hadn’t taken him long to learn her body, deduce what she liked. He vaguely registers the oddity of her polytheistic invocation--had she said that before?--while his mouth finds its way down her neck to her breasts.
She arches against him, offering herself up, her arms pinned beneath her: a willing Prometheus inviting her avian lover to feast upon her immortal flesh. Soon his mouth replaces his fingers and her fingers twist in his hair. It’s pleasure mixed with pain, and his cock has grown achingly hard in its readiness to take her.
Her whimpers tell him that she’s close, so close, and her tugs at his neck and shoulders tell him that he needn’t wait any longer. He’s unhurried as moves back up her body and sheaths himself inside her in one sure stroke, unable to suppress the grin that comes on at the feeling of coming home--
(I never felt truly at home, anywhere, until these past few months, here, with you)
--and the thought slips away as universes shift, and galaxies collide, and there is only here, and now, and him, and her.
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
It wasn’t long after she finally told him her name (a few days after she first spent the night, his mind supplies helpfully) that he started searching for the answers to questions he wouldn’t ask. Just as he had recognized something familiar the moment he’d seen her in the market, and when he’d approached her on the rocks, so too had he realized that it wasn’t a casual vacation that had brought her so far from home and with so little agenda.
Convention and good manners would dictate against such intrusive snooping, but the ease of access to information paired with the fact that he’s fallen hard, and fast, leads Bill to his study after she leaves for the evening. “I can’t stay over three nights in a row,” she’d protested over his post-dinner entreaties, twisting away as his hands slipped under the hem of her shirt. Her tone is light but her jaw is set, and he resigns himself to her promise of returning in the morning so they can spend the day on the water.
Left with Google as his sole companion, then, he pushes his guilt aside long enough to do a quick search. His Queen of the Gods is actually Laura Eileen Roslin, admitted to practice law in the state of California since 1996. Four-time Los Angeles Marathon finisher and local fundraising chair for the Race for the Cure. There's a blurb about an “upcoming reunion” that happened four years ago next to a picture of her wearing a name tag, caught unaware while chatting at a Stanford alumni event. But he’d had to click through several pages to find that information. The first page of hits includes obituaries and news items informing him that Laura is the only surviving relative of Edward and Cheryl Roslin. Sister to the late Sandra Roslin-Matthews, a teacher who with her husband Ben had been expecting a baby sometime this July.
The lone photo of the accident is grotesque, an overhead shot of a burned-out shell twisted around a crumpled guardrail. His stomach churns and he quickly closes that browser tab, but reads the brief LA Times article several times over as he struggles to comprehend the extent of her loss. They’d been leaving Laura’s home in the Hollywood Hills after a baby shower. The driver, drunk of course, crossed over two lanes of traffic before losing control and colliding head-on with the younger sister's car. A terrible way to die.
Put in this context, her fascination with the tragic tales that pass for history in these parts suddenly makes more sense.
They could make a good story together, he thinks. One of the rare happy endings, maybe. Hera usually managed to make things turn out okay for herself. Although if Laura is Queen of the Gods, the metaphor extended to him is quite less immodest than he would normally indulge. He wipes his browser history--she uses his computer to check her email, occasionally--and wonders whether she’ll ever open up to him.
He goes over to the couch and sits down wearily. It's late, and his findings (his transgressions, his breach) tumble wildly around his troubled mind. When he leans over to snag a dog-eared copy of Where Angels Fear to Tread from the pile of books beneath the coffee table (”Your thing for E.M. Forster is such an affectation,” his ex-wife’s haughty voice mocks him, as if the Brits have some kind of monopoly on the man), a coppery-gold strand catches his eye at the edge of the upholstery. He smiles, remembering how he’d played with her hair with her head in his lap while they shared a glass of wine and waited for dinner to finish cooking. Picking it up instead of the book, he twists it between his fingers. It reminds him of Ariadne’s gift to Theseus, the thread to help him find his way out of the minotaur’s maze.
Bill wonders whether Laura would regard him as Theseus or the bull-man.
Maybe she is Theseus, not Ariadne. “I don’t need to be saved,” he could see her insisting.
Intent on making her way through her trial and finding her way back home.
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
Weeks pass. New pages arrive in his inbox every few days. The book gradually tells him its (her?) secrets, even as Laura refuses to.
It’s part travel narrative (“the ship was not as seaworthy as I’d hoped”), part cautionary tale (“‘Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done,’ I told them the day before the destruction of our home worlds”), part elegy for the author’s “beautiful, bloody-minded, pragmatic” sometime paramour. The mysteriously bound volume causes Bill to reconsider everything he’s learned, to open his mind to new possibilities.
She listens earnestly, as captivated as he at the tale; it’s replaced the tried-and-true local yarns as their postcoital storytime. When he finishes the first translation and is accordingly caught up with his work, he makes a copy of it during a trip to Athens and brings it along as they spend a few days sailing.
It’s unreal, being out on the water, away from the world but for the occasional passing ship; their days full of speculation about what the story means, their nights full of each other. Somehow the farfetched details seem more plausible out here, sailing through the lonely sea with a vast tapestry of stars surrounding them.
A career made out of scrutinizing collective bargaining agreements has given her a talent for parsing the words, and together they try out different translations.
“Bill,” she says, looking up from where she’s sprawled on her stomach on the deck, reviewing a photocopy bleeding their competing red and gray pencils. “We all say such? What does that even mean? There’s no antecedent basis--it’s not in reference to anything. And it’s at least the third time I’ve seen this phrase.”
He eases down next to her to take a look. The sunny days have bronzed the bare skin of his chest, so much darker than her still-pale skin perpetually shaded by a wide-brimmed hat. He leans against her easily, and she curls herself around him as he ponders. “Well, what do you think it should be?”
“I think it’s an exhortation, not a description,” she offers. “We all ... um, agree.”
“Huh? No...”
“We all say so?”
That’s not quite right, either, but it’s close enough to trigger a familiar echo in his mind, a rumbling feeling from deep within.
He mumbles it tentatively at first, then remembers Laura’s suggestion; exhortation, right. “So say we all!”
She grins at him. “That’s your translation for this line. So say we all.”
“So say we all,” he says again, liking the authoritative way the words roll off his tongue. Sliding the paper beneath the edge of the towel to keep it from blowing away, he lowers his lips to hers. They’re in agreement on the words, and on this; they’re in sync, they’re so right.
He can’t remember ever being this happy.
Δ Δ Δ Δ
Back on land, the old insecurities and uncertainties return. Bill begins to let himself think of a return to the States-- plane tickets for two, seeing Boston through a newcomer’s eyes. A house empty too long, filled with love and companionship for the first time.
It is love. He thinks it, he feels it, he knows it.
(That’s what love is. Thoughts.)
He’s just not sure that she does.
His younger son comes to visit, and Bill can see that she recognizes something in Zak’s sadness. Still she doesn’t open up to him, although she and Zak seem to get along extraordinarily well. For that he is grateful, and a little jealous.
They make love quietly, while his son sleeps out in the yard. She’s tender and a little desperate; her heart beating, raw and open, in time with the roll of their hips, the staccato whimpers of yes and oh and there and Bill. One hand cups the side of her face as she rides him; the other slides between their bodies to give her as much pleasure as possible. The moonlight streaming in through the closed leaded-glass window gives her an otherworldly glow, and for a moment he fears she’s an apparition, something that might wisp away on a soft breeze or a god’s fancy, until her soft caresses turn to fingernails raking across his chest as she shudders around him in pleasure-- very real, very present.
She’s sweaty and he’s spent by the time she collapses beside him, tucking herself into his side.
He wraps his arm around her tight, tracing spirals across her slightly damp skin. It’s probably just the knowledge that Zak is out there in the grass, but for whatever reason he drifts off to sleep on a vision of lying beside her outdoors, under the stars, with rough sandbags beneath them and her hand firmly on his chest.
The morning after Zak leaves she wakes up in his arms for the fourth time in a row, surprising him; he’d come to think that she would go back to her normal escape artist routine as soon as his son was gone. He brings her coffee in bed instead of her usual spot on the porch. A lazy morning spent reading together, a little revising of the manuscript, is followed up by a surprisingly acrobatic midday lovemaking session on the couch. But a few hours later, spurred by his frustration and desperation that she see and finally acknowledge the way this thing between them has grown, rather than distract him with her lopsided smile and open arms, he makes the mistake of blurting out that he knows what happened to her family, the tragedy that brought her to him.
He thinks she doesn’t give him enough credit for his perceptiveness. He may not want to accept it, but he knows that just because she doesn’t leave then and there (--you can stay in the room, but get out of my head--where did that come from?), doesn’t mean she’s going to stay.
The following day he wakes early and goes for a walk to think in the serenity of the salt- and lemon-scented air. When she finds him sitting at the crumbling retaining wall and drapes herself over him, her lips brushing against the nape of his neck, the rim of his ear, he knows that he wants--needs-- this, for the rest of his days, and rolls the hard six.
I love you.
I know.
Season’s over.
It is.
It wasn’t enough.
It was too much.
Δ Δ Δ
After she leaves (”You always left me first,” a distant, vaguely accusatory version of her voice says in the back of his head, “except this time”--and somehow the thought comforts him, knowing that she’s on the other side of the world, not on the other side of the Styx), he tries to carry on as usual. Tending to his garden, pruning the trees, haggling over the price of fish (less, now that he is cooking for one). Working on his book. He works and works and works, driven by a need to think of anything but her. Except: he let her get too close, and she’s still there. In his book; looking over his shoulder as he translates, her voice low and husky in his ear. Edits that should have taken him hours now take days.
The prospect of returning home to Boston has lost the appeal it once held. After foolishly letting himself entertain thoughts that she might come with him, he’s not ready to return to his empty house, his empty life.
His department head emails to confirm that Bill will be back on campus by mid-September. Bill calls him back directly, promises that the book will be with the university press by Thanksgiving, and agrees to teach an undergrad course in the spring, in exchange for a few more weeks in Greece. Being surrounded by reminders of the ancients and the language more similar to that of the book than anything else he’s encountered is helping him, he tells himself. Except when it doesn’t.
His house grows oppressive--full of memories that contrast with his current solitude-- as the days trudge forward, away from that moment she looked over her shoulder and told him
“I’m sorry we didn’t have more time.”
Her apology recurs to him often, a constant dull ache residing alternately between his mind and his solar plexus, and he stews over it. She of all people should have been able to appreciate the fragility of what they’d had, the fleetingness of this life.
Three weeks after she left him and two weeks after she left town (according to the local gossips who gleefully filled him in over wine and olives one afternoon, oblivious to his discomfort), his restlessness takes over. He places a copy of his manuscript in one water-tight bag and pages filled with words he still needs to decipher in another. He loads up his dusty Saab with a few changes of clothes, a couple liters of water, and some snacks, and heads for the marina.
The old girl bobs regally in her slip, and he can’t help but remember the look of wonder on Laura’s face as she’d regarded his boat for the first time. How impressed and yet unsurprised she’d been when he told her he built most of it himself.
He has no agenda, other than confronting directly some of his most treasured (painful) memories in an effort to find a way forward. During the day, his head feels clearer as he sails, tacking back and forth across the Gulf of Corinth. He drops anchor far from shore and works on the book for a few hours each morning, then sails toward the coast when his stomach reminds him that he’s no god, he requires food just like all the other mere mortals.
During the nighttime, though, the sea’s charms are lost on him. He tries sleeping above deck, under the stars; all he can think about is Laura curled up against his chest (too strangely light now), looking up at the constellations and asking him to tell her the stories of how each one came to scatter the sky. The cabin is worse. The rack was never really big enough for two people, yet it feels empty without her. Over and over again he remembers their bodies rocking in counterpoint to the waves, bringing her to one climax after another because, after all, they had all the time in the world out here, islanded in this stream of stars. He remembers collapsing onto her, his face in the crook of her neck, utterly spent, utterly content because everything in his life up to that point had been leading up to that moment. He wonders why he was so foolish as to let himself fall asleep then, when he should have been awake for it all.
When sleep does come, it’s haunted by visions of her. Laura looks different in these dreams, somehow. Her hair is sometimes dark and stiffly straight, and her clothing more formal than anything he’d seen her wear, though he supposes not inappropriate for her life as a lawyer back in California. This Laura is older, yet familiar. The best dream is one in which they’re surrounded by candles, happy and sated as he drops countless kisses against her shoulder blade and she strokes his forearm in response. In this dream, he’s able to fall asleep, certain that she’ll still be there in his arms when they wake up the next morning. In his dream, she’s waited so long to come to his bed (or he to hers?) that she’s not inclined to escape his embrace in the night for the solitude of a porch swing.
He remembers how, as soon as they got back from that first overnight trip on the boat, he returned and his translation flowed like he was a mere conduit for something bigger, something out of his control.
To an extent he finds that happening again for him, more refined now but no less overwhelming. He loses track of the days as he churns through pages and puzzles out words. “We traveled through . . . galaxies, at first for our people but ultimately for ourselves, too. We earned our rest at last, yet I am all alone on my hill,” he says aloud, trying to find a cadence to the prose. He’s pretty sure he’s taken some liberties, but his translation is instinctual, and he’ll let his editors debate the semantics later.
“I’ll never be free of her,” Bill says. The author’s admission is his own. “Nor do I want to be.”
The morning he returns to Itea, he heads straight to the hardware store on Kapodistriou for a can of weatherproof paint and a brush. His sloop finally has a name.
Laura.
Δ Δ
His old Saab isn’t a quiet car, its growly diesel engine even louder than that of the rusting Volvo 740 he drives back home, and he shouldn’t be surprised when it alerts his unexpected guests to his arrival.
“Where the hell have you been, old man?” Kara practically pulls him out of his car and slaps his back excitedly. “We were about to give up on you.”
“Would have already, but for your extraordinarily stocked wine cellar,” Lee adds drolly, coming off the porch to join them. “And the fact that you don’t lock your windows.”
Bill hoists the battered leather bag containing his work over his shoulder and starts toward the walkway up to the house. “I was sailing. Come on back in, then, and tell me what brings you guys to this corner of the world.”
“I have to ask, even though I know you’re an absolute Luddite,” Lee says as Bill fumbles with his keys, only to find that the door is already open. “What happened to your cell phone? We’ve been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh,” Bill says. He fishes the compact gray flip phone out of a pocket of his bag. The display, of course, is dim. “Battery’s dead.”
Lee and Kara roll their eyes at one another and follow him inside.
"So how long were you out there?" Kara asks.
Bill tosses his bag to the floor and pours himself a hearty slug of ouzo before answering. "A few days, I guess."
Lee and Kara exchange a concerned glance. "By yourself?"
He strokes his newly-bearded chin and shoots his almost-daughter an annoyed look. "Yes."
Kara throws up her hands. "Zak mentioned meeting someone when he was here a couple weeks ago. Thought you might have been out with her, that's all."
"No," Bill says shortly. Then he does a double take. "You talked to Zak?"
Lee nods. "Yeah. He stopped off in London for a few days between Paris and Boston."
Bill's relieved to hear that the rift between his sons has begun to mend, but it strains his shattered heart all over again to remember that it was Laura who had succeeded in lifting Zak out of his bitter funk. A physical pain shoots through his chest, and he slumps over the counter.
"Dad? You all right?"
Bill swallows thickly. His throat's constricted; dealing with his pain on his own was one thing, but he hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to talk about her with other people. Kara hands him a glass of water wordlessly, clasps his shoulder briefly in concern. Bill takes a deep breath.
"I'm fine," he says after taking a long sip. They're looking at him expectantly, so he adds, "She left."
Lee nods sympathetically, while Kara's fingers twitch around the camera he hadn't noticed until now, hanging from a macramé cord around her neck. Lee changes the subject, though Kara looks annoyed at him for it. "So how's work, then?"
Bill shrugs. After talking to Laura about it all summer, he's loath to go through the details again with others, even his son. But he supposes he'll have to get used to it. "I'm working on a pretty exciting project at the moment. Found this book in Africa over ten years ago, then forgot about it. Carbon dating puts it at 150,000 years old, yet it's bound using techniques that weren’t developed until thousands of years later. And it's written essentially in ancient Greek." He doesn't feel like getting into the implications of all that, nor the professional isolation that it's caused him, but he's proud of the work he (they, his traitorous, chivalrous mind invokes his red-headed amanuensis) have done, so he adds, "I've translated most of the text. It's a destruction narrative of sorts."
"Of course you have," says Lee, who speaks five languages, just as Kara says, "Of course it is."
"So how long are you planning on staying here? I'd have thought you might have gone back to the States by now." Lee pours himself a glass of wine from the open bottle sitting on the counter. "Not that we're complaining, of course."
Bill sighs; he's been asking himself the same question, and he's still not entirely sure of the answer. "I've been asked to present at a conference in Vancouver in about a month. Until then--" he holds out his arms, indicating the comfortably modest house "--I'm just working on my manuscript, and I can do that anywhere, so--"
"I want to see this boat of yours," Kara interrupts. "Also, you have no food here. What do you say we go grab some grub, walk down to the marina afterward?" She looks at both men, each holding a glass, and adds, "I'll drive."
Dinner passes companionably, both of them filling Bill in on their latest exploits--Lee's successful summer spent interning in the Home Office, Kara's upcoming shows in Oslo and Stockholm--but seeing the easy affection between them, even though he loves them both and is glad to see them happy, makes him more morose instead of lifting his spirits. He and Laura had been like that for weeks, maybe a month. Now he feels interminably old and irrelevant in the shiny vibrant effusion of the young people across the table.
Their interest in the boat brightens him, though. The lights have come on at the marina and the surface of the water has lost its glittery sheen, replaced by vague shadowed waves with moon-frosted caps. He stops at the end of the pier and looks out for a few moments, wondering how it came to pass that Fortuna saw fit to throw him off her wheel, forcing him to tread in these ominous waters.
“Is that it?” Lee asks, forcing Bill out of his reverie. He reads off the registration tag near the bow. “Nebula-7242-Constellation, right?”
Bill forces himself to look up at the latest adornment. Laura. “Yeah, this is it.” Her.
He reaches out and grabs the mooring, feeling the lines tied tight and true. Gazing out over the water again, he wonders if painting his devotion right along the hull might have been a mistake.
Kara toys with her camera. She snaps a few photos of the boats lined up along the marina before she turns the lens toward Bill and takes a single shot. A million shutters might be contracting at any given moment in this world, a billion moments in time marking the forward-facing progression from one lifetime to the next, but Kara makes hers count.
Lee scrambles from the dock onto the sloop--he’s always been an explorer, and neither adulthood nor his staid chosen profession have entirely quashed his childish enthusiasm for new things--and Kara sidles up next to Bill.
“You,” she declares, “are miserable, old man.”
“Yeah,” he admits, draping an arm over her shoulders. “But you’re not.”
Her responding hum is at once satisfied and sympathetic. She gestures toward the black cursive script. “Tell me about her.”
“The boat?”
She shakes her head firmly. “No.”
It feels strange to be the one opening up to Kara, after so many visits in which she sought his advice about dealing with his sons. “I love her,” he admits, echoing the refrain Kara always came back to in her moments of frustration regarding the Brothers Adama: I love them both. It’s his most fundamental truth.
“The one who came by when I was here at the beginning of the summer?”
He nods. “She stayed through the end of August.”
Lank strands of blond hair swing back and forth as Kara shakes her head disapprovingly. “Want me to tell her off for you?”
For a moment he wonders what it would be like to see them together, Laura and Kara, in the same place. Discussing him--his two favorite women. Sitting on the couch together in the living room of his house on Acacia Street, passing a sweet-cheeked baby between them....Embracing one another in the thrill of an unexpected victory, celebrating a danger passed....The flash of a silver firearm in dark shadows, Laura rubbing bleary eyes as a wraithlike version of Kara screeches out confused, threatening words... His eyes open wide, and he tries to push the images aside.
Kara’s joking offer to confront Laura suddenly seems a real threat (all of this has happened before), and though he knows it’s irrational, he feels his anger building.
“C’mon,” Kara wheedles, socking her fist against the flat palm of her other hand. “Just tell me her name. Laura what?”
“We’re done here,” Bill grinds out through suddenly clenched teeth, and stalks off to join Lee on the boat.
Lee and Kara spend two nights with him at his house. Neither one of them is foolhardy enough to mention Laura again, though he sees (and resents, just a little) the pitying way they look at him.
When they take their leave, their goodbyes are meant to last until Christmas.
Bill takes the manuscript to the highest point on his property and looks west.
Δ
He’s been in Vancouver for less than a day when he thinks he recognizes a familiar face across the lobby of the crowded conference.
At first he attributes it to jet lag and tries to ignore the way his pulse has sped up and his palms have begun to sweat. Europe to the West Coast has never played particularly well for him, and he hadn’t been sleeping well even before leaving Greece.
The broken hope in his heart reasserts itself against the rational part of his mind, though, and he forces himself to keep his head up, to stay where he is, as she approaches, even as he steels himself for the possibility that it’s just another memory manifest from his despair.
“Laura?” he asks disbelievingly. He’s moments away from presenting the most important work he’s ever done to a crowd of international superstars in his field--and he’s cracking up, seeing something that can’t be. Maybe he is as delusional as Dr. Baltar said; untethered from reality. The thought fills him with horror and dread as he feels his confidence in his (their) work slip away. Just a crazy old man.
He’s frozen in place as the crowd parts for her, the clacking of her heels against the pink marble floor the only thing he can hear despite the multilingual din of his colleagues catching up with one another.
She steps closer, even as she looks ready to bolt back through the crowd and out of the atrium, and Bill says her name again, reaches out to touch her shoulder to confirm that she’s really there before she can turn to leave. “Laura.”
His touch is light against the material of her lavender jacket but she’s trembling beneath his fingers, obviously unsure what to say. And to Bill’s immense relief, she’s definitely corporeal, not an apparition. Her green eyes are tinged with a different kind of grief than he’s used to seeing there.
“I had to--” she begins, then cuts herself off. She leans forward as if to embrace him but stops short. “Hi,” she tries again.
(’You’re here; oh, you’re here,’ that traitorous inner voice reminds him. A memory from another time, another place, her writhing beneath him in the dark of night; his responding promise, ’I would find you anywhere.’ And he would, except now she’s found him.)
He shakes his head back and forth, still not sure whether to believe that she’s really here in front of him, too damaged to let himself think that she’s actually come back. For him. Not for the book (their story), not out of penance for the way she’d left, but for him. “Why are you here, Laura?”
She steps back, and his hand falls from her shoulder. Not knowing what to do with it, he folds his arms nervously in front of him, bracing for her reply.
“I honestly don’t know,” she whispers, then clears her throat and speaks more clearly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”
The crystal-refracted lights of the massive chandelier flicker on and off, pulling him out of the trancelike moment, changing their course from a descent into past regrets toward a chance for a more hopeful discourse -- a future that would have to wait for the time being, the throngs of people filing by remind him. “I have to go in there,” he says with a tilt of his head toward the auditorium, reluctant to look away from her face. He wants nothing more than to clasp her to him, bury his face in her hair, and confess how very much he’d missed her. But he’s made himself vulnerable to her before, to his detriment. Thus at the moment, the most he can do is ask, “Will you still be here? After the talk?”
Laura gives him a relieved smile and nods, and Bill feels his confidence return. “Okay,” he says, and he reaches down to take her hand and place a kiss to her knuckles before leaving.
From the stage, the lights make it difficult to see into the crowd, but Bill can’t help but squint and look for her as he explains the anomalous book to his skeptical colleagues. Within the first few minutes, after he’s set forth the thorough science--the chemistry and calculus, the independent lab work corroborating his conclusions--the atmosphere warms and he can tell he’s got people sitting at the edges of their plush red-velvet seats.
He’s finally relaxed and gotten into his element-- telling the story of how he found it, forgot it, and spent months translating it-- when he sees an usher leading a dark-haired woman in a light-colored suit firmly toward the side exit.
“And I had help,” he tells the crowd, even though the door has closed behind her, “from someone who believed in me, believed in this book. And this story wouldn’t have been possible without her.”
The question-and-answer session following his presentation goes quickly; the conference organizers are diligent about limiting the number of questions in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the schedule. For the most part the attendees are respectful if not not necessarily receptive to his heretical proposal for a new timeline for Middle Paleolithic language development. And he’s got his supporters there: Billy and Felix, a handful of grad student advisees. But as much as he’d looked forward to this, for all he’d thrown himself into his work in the past months, he can’t wait to get off the stage.
He nods with a polite smile at the young students who congratulate him on his work, but his eyes never stop searching for her. He’s not sure what to expect when he finally exits the building and sees her sitting at the edge of the fountain. She looks almost peaceful in the waning sun’s red-gold light.
He wonders exactly what she’s decided, sitting out here. He eases down beside her, and she doesn’t speak (neither of them do), but she does shift slightly closer to him and emit a content sigh.
Long moments pass. It might have been considered companionable if they knew where they stood with one another, but Bill still can’t tell whether she’s come here to make amends or to crush his heart all over again, and thus whatever serenity seems to have come over Laura, he doesn’t share. The stalemate is broken when her fingers move to twine with his, and he shifts away, needing to see her face. Needing to know what this means. “Laura, what--?”
“I love you.”
He’s waited so long to hear those words from her for the first time. (’In this lifetime,’ protests a memory as his eyes close, ’she’s said it first, before’, and he thinks of the book, and how its author had responded to his beloved’s heartfelt confession with what Bill had deemed a pretty dickish ’About time’--but translated all the same.)
“Bill?” She leans toward him, and he thinks back to their last moments together, sitting on a low stone wall not so different from this poured-concrete fountain, and how desperate he’d been to hear these words then.
“I love you, Bill. I love you, I do.” Laura begins to giggle nervously, and his heart melts to see this vulnerable, open side of her at last. “I don’t know why--oh, Bill, I’m so sorry.”
“C’mere,” he says, his words catching deep in his constricted throat. He wraps an arm around her and pulls her close; her head still fits perfectly against his chest, his body still responds to her presence with that familiar tingling mitochondrially deep. “I’ve always loved you,” he says, his lips against her ear, and she hums in agreement, in acquiescence-- no longer will she deny the thing that he knew instinctually, from memory, from the first times (this time) he saw her admiring apples in the market, sunning herself on a rock by the beach, smiling at him across the bow of his boat.
She’s in his blood, like the sweet wine made of ancient grapes they’d shared from a single glass all those lazy summer nights. And now, with her finally in his arms again, he knows he wouldn’t have it any other way.