A/R SS gift
Title: A Conversation in Another Universe
Author: Kate
Rating: all ages
Summary: a post-Revelations conversation in a universe where Laura never got caught stealing the election.
A/N: I really struggled with this and I had considered just packing it in, if only to get averita the sort of fic that she deserves. I sincerely hope that this fits the bill, but I'm afraid I fell far short of my own mark.
If she'd had a crystal ball or something in the scrolls to indicate the end result, the conversation never would have taken place.
"No."
"Bill-"
"Absolutely out of the question. And how could you even think, by any stretch of the imagination, that this is something I'd ever approve of?"
"Admiral Adama-"
"Don't even think about it, Laura. My answer is no. Helo is one of my officers and I trust him. More than that, he trusts me. I won't betray his trust like this."
"For gods' sakes, Bill, it's not a matter of trusting Lieutenant Agathon. And it's not even about the Cylon prisoner in the brig. It's about their child. She deserves a chance and she won't have that if we leave her with her mother in the brig."
"This is the most heavily guarded ship in the Fleet, and the brig is the most heavily guarded location in this ship."
"You're not thinking this through, Bill. What kind of life is growing up in your brig? Surely you wouldn't sentence a child to that?"
"Faking her death and letting her parents think she's gone forever is better?"
"At the risk of repeating myself, my primary concern is not her parents. My primary concerns are the security and stability of this Fleet and the life of the child. You really think you can protect her? At what price? Her very existence will sow malcontent and discord. There'll be demonstrations, riots, protests, and that's only if we're lucky? And what if your security guards aren't as good as you think they are, or as honorable?"
"Do you realize what you're saying?"
"They're human, aren't they? It would be the most natural thing in the world for anyone to want to strike out any way they could, and there aren't many opportunities. Look, Bill, I knew you'd have reservations about this course of action, considering your personal history, but can't you just forget for one moment-"
"Even if I do forget for one moment, that doesn't mean the factors simply disappear!"
"-forget for one moment that one of your officers is one of the people involved and tell me what you truly believe is the lesser of two evils? Lying to Helo and letting him believe that his daughter is dead, or the possibility that Hera's life will be forfeit the moment her existence becomes common knowledge? And I'm not even taking into consideration the fact that the Cylons could conceivably be extremely interested in the child, especially when I think about those disgusting breeding farms that Lieutenant Thrace briefed us on."
"There's a better way. I won't budge on this, Laura. There are lines you have to cross and then there are lines that should never be crossed. This is one of those lines I can't allow you to cross."
"All right." A long pause. "You know, Cottle tried to talk me out of bringing you in on this idea. Said you didn't have the stomach for it. But I thought that as Admiral of the Fleet, you'd be able to separate yourself long enough to see the pragmatic realities of the situation we have ourselves in."
**
It had happened much more quickly than even Laura would have expected. It wasn't nearly as public as she had feared it might be. It almost seemed as if the person who had gotten to Hera had simply wanted the child dead more than they wanted to make a public statement. She knew there was a chance it would happen, but that didn't stop the fury and the guilt of knowing that little Hera had saved her life and she had allowed herself to be blocked from returning the favor.
Inconceivably, things got even worse.
"The Cylon prisoner somehow escaped from Galactica's brig. Killed two of the guards, injured a number of people on her way to the hangar deck. Chief Tyrol shot and killed it before it got to a Raptor." Tory's voice was hard, unrelenting in renewed resentment against the Cylon.
"Tell me everything."
"There's not much else to tell. Colonel Tigh called while you were in with the Quorum."
"Tell me the Admiral has a briefing ready for me."
"Tigh didn't mention it."
"Thank you, Tory. Will you make arrangements for me to shuttle over to Galactica as soon as possible?"
**
"You would not believe the heart attack I just avoided. Thank the gods Dee has a photographic memory and took another look at the ballots, or we really would've been up shit creek without a paddle. I didn't even notice those misspelled ballots. We'll drink a toast later on to your boss's reelection."
**
"So that's it."
Both Adama and Roslin had been silent on the Raptor. Neither of them could think what to say, to each other, to anyone else. So they fell back on the familiar formalities that Roslin had insisted upon after the election.
"My first impression is that this happened at least a hundred years ago." Bill said quietly to her, leaning forward so that the other passenger in the Raptor wasn't privy to their conversation. "Long time before even the first Cylon war."
"Which means the Cylons didn't do this." Laura picked up on his train of thought, leaning back in her seat. She caught Lee's eye and gave him a wan half-smile. The major himself was far too shocked and dismayed by this latest chain of events to even notice that his father hadn't even spared him a glance since the landing party had split back up to make the return trip back to Galactica and the Fleet.
"You should see Cottle." Lee remarked as his hand twitched on his knee, looking a little uncomfortable.
"I will," she reassured him, looking from him to his father. "I owe both of you apologies, and explanations."
Lee's eyes widened as his face turned white and then green. Barely stuttering out a protest, he looked over at his father, whose own expression had never changed. Almost as if she was trying to discuss the weather with him.
"I don't believe anything you have to say to my son is any of my business, Madam President." the admiral remarked stoically, moving further away from both of them, trying to avoid the President's penetrating gaze.
"Any more than anything you have to say to my father is any of mine." Lee echoed his father's sentiments.
"Of course not." Laura remarked, shaking her head. "I had hoped to speak with the two of you separately, anyway."
**
"For a moment, I thought you weren't going to see me."
Laura watched carefully from the couch as Bill poured himself a drink and walked over to his desk. His movements were slow and deliberate, measured in an attempt to avoid being engaged in conversation. He sat down with a barely audible sigh and finally looked at her. "We do have to come up with a plan here. We need to discuss what to tell the Fleet while we're figuring out what the hell to do next."
"And we will." Laura replied, crossing her legs. "But that's not what I wanted to discuss with you."
"I don't want to have this discussion." Bill took a long sip of his ambrosia, shaking his head.
"Too bad. We haven't had a real conversation between the two of us in longer than I care to remember and we need to address that."
She regretted her choice of words and attitude when his head snapped up, his eyes glittering with anger. "If I recall correctly, Madam President, you were the one who decided out of the blue that you were again in need of my son's services as your military advisor. You were the one who stepped back farther than I ever stepped back after you were reelected, and you are the one who's been dictating terms of our relationship for the past year and a half!"
She had been watching him carefully throughout his rant and therefore was not terribly surprised when he nearly erupted out of his chair. She stood up as well, walking over to the desk as he retreated back to the bookshelf. Taking a deep breath, she used his name for the first time in long time. "Bill," she said quietly, wishing she could touch him. But she'd thrown that right back in his face when she'd stepped back from him. "The cancer has returned. I know you know. I know someone told you."
"You should have told me." Bill finally turned to look at her. The deep pain she saw etched in his face wringed her heart a little. For the first time, she began to wonder if she had really, truly made the right decision when she'd closed the book on the election so long ago. Yes, the Fleet was still together and whole, they had made it to Earth, but there were still the Cylons out there, and five or six models they had yet to identify.
"I should have. I'm sorry." she said, stepping up to stand carefully beside him at the bookshelf.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then Bill raised the glass to his lips again.
"How many of these books have you actually read?" she asked. She'd always suspected that she knew the answer (all of them), but she would like to have it confirmed, if only for the sake of her own curiosity.
He snorted. "I've had a lot of free time the past year and a half. Even if I hadn't already read all of them, I would have finished off the stragglers."
She smiled; if she didn't, she might cry. "You're still the luckiest person I know with all these books out here at the end of the world."
"My library was always open to you," he replied. "Even after..." he stopped abruptly and took another sip.
"I didn't want to intrude." she confessed quietly. "But that's one of the matters we need to discuss." She brought her hand up to rest lightly on his shoulder. He shrugged it off immediately, turning away from her. "You know we have to talk about this, Bill."
"For the sake of our working relationship?" His voice was sour, bitter now. "We've been doing just fine."
"For your sake. And your son's." She was treading on extremely thin ice. She knew it. But it had to be discussed.
He wheeled around to face her. "Don't you dare talk to me about Lee, Laura! We don't discuss him. Ever." Even now, over a year later, the memory of his son's betrayal was still enough to give him dry heaves. At the time, he had spent half the night in the bathroom after going on a bender. But it hadn't helped.
"It never happened." Laura grabbed his arm, mostly to keep him facing her. She took the glass out of his hand and placed it somewhere out of the way. "Bill, I never slept with your son. Even in a situation where I would have even considered it, he never would have. It didn't happen, Bill. We let you believe it did, but it didn't."
"Why?" he rasped out, his head automatically starting to shake in denial, but she could read the hope in his eyes. Hope that his son hadn't been that insensitive to his feelings, hope that maybe she would have possibly felt the same way about him that he felt about her. "Knowing how I feel about you, why would you let me believe such a thing? Why?"
"Because it was far kinder than the truth. And I couldn't bring you down with me." she replied, surprised at the jolt of electricity she felt as Bill twisted his arm in her grasp in order to reach down and grab her hand. She squeezed it, thrown by the touch. It had been so long since he had touched her of his own volition, and even longer since she had allowed it.
"Bring me down with you?" he asked, shaking his head. "Laura, I don't understand. After the election, you said, you and my son said--"
"I know what we said." Laura led him over to the couch. "It was my story. Lee only went along with it to protect you from the truth. It was too late by then and you wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. That would've killed you."
"What truth?"
Laura took a deep breath. She had feared this moment for almost two years and now that it was here, there was nothing to do but to make her confession and hope for absolution. Even if absolution wasn't forthcoming, at least she would have repaired some of the damage she'd done before she died. "The election was a foregone conclusion, Bill. It was fixed. Even if I had won fairly, it was by a far less significant margin than was officially reported."
Bill didn't reply, so she went on, gaining courage as she kept speaking. "I didn't know about it beforehand, but Tory had spent enough time making unlogged phone calls and disappearing for just long enough that when I was told what she had done, I knew I should have suspected. But I honestly..." she trailed off, shrugging. "When I confronted her, she confessed. I went to bed that evening with the full intention of telling you what had happened and weighing our options."
"Options?" Bill finally found his voice after a few minutes of giving her his absolute undivided attention. "There should have been only one optional response. Laura, you didn't know. It wasn't your fault."
Laura couldn't help the bitter smile from forming on her face. "And that's partly why I decided it was better to keep silent. Your response right now. It was the same response you had when Cottle and I brought your attention to our plan to safeguard the Cylon baby."
Bill's eyes darkened. "Don't throw that in my face, Laura. You don't think I regretted not listening to you?"
"I know you did. But the same thing could have happened even if you had listened to us. There was always a chance the Cylons could have found out about her, or someone else could have found out."
"That's why you pulled away? Why you lied to me? So you could keep being the President?" he asked. Even as the words tumbled out of his mouth, he knew there was something he was missing, because that couldn't be all there was to it. She'd just proven that she could lie like a rug to him if it suited her, but he knew that ambition for the sake of ambition itself was not one of her vices.
"To keep Baltar from becoming President." Laura corrected him quietly. "Not only is he narcissistic, vain, self-centered, mentally imbalanced, and out for himself, he's also a traitor. I had a vision, just before I was supposed to die, a vision of something I saw the last time I was on Caprica. I saw Baltar with the blonde Cylon model we now know as a Six."
"Why the hell didn't you ever say anything?" he demanded. "You'd been secretive before, Laura, but this..." he shook his head helplessly. "Why? And I know that if I'd tried to stop you and you thought you were right, you wouldn't have let me stop you."
"And would you have allowed me to remain President? Illegally?" Laura asked skeptically. "Bill, don't lie to yourself. You wouldn't have been able to live with a deception of this magnitude."
"So that's why you allowed me to think you slept with my son. Because you were trying to protect me." He looked straight at her, into her eyes, for the first time in what seemed an eternity.
"Yes." Laura met his stare evenly. "I never wanted to hurt you, Bill. But I knew that as long as I was President, this would have eaten away at you. Likely the only case of contagious cancer. Would've jumped from me and moved right into your heart. Do you really think I could have lived with that? And that's only if-" She stopped suddenly, averting her eyes.
"If?" he prodded, leaning forward.
"I was afraid you'd talk me out of it. To be more specific, I was afraid I'd let you talk me out of it."
He leaned back on the couch, shaking his head. “That’s why you pulled away from me. To protect me.”
She chuckled mirthlessly. “No, that was to protect myself.” At his obvious confusion, she went on. “I knew the dance I was signing up for the moment I decided to keep silent about the election. It’s a long, awful dance and it’s been worth it, if only because we’ve kept our people alive. You know it would’ve only been a matter of time before the Cylons found us on that planet Baltar would have tried to settle us on.”
“That doesn’t explain my son’s involvement.” Bill remarked, reaching for her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she allowed him to take it. “You told me why he agreed to the cover story, but you didn’t tell me how he found out.”
“His wife told him.” Laura informed him.
“Dualla was involved in this?” Bill asked, running his thumb along her knuckles. There was something inside him telling him that he should be very disturbed to discover this sort of behavior among members of his own crew, but right now he was just so relieved that his assumptions had been proven wrong that he couldn’t really bring himself to care. And it was really so long ago, would there be any real point to bringing the issue to light now?
He sighed heavily, suddenly very tired. He looked at her, realizing that she looked as tired as he felt. And he wasn’t even fighting breast cancer.
“I wish I could’ve omitted parts of the story, Bill. But you need to hear everything. I didn’t want to risk losing your respect, your regard. I didn’t want to lose your friendship.” Laura said. “And I lost it anyway when I realized that I couldn’t build anything more with you with that sort of lie hanging between us.”
“So you punished yourself. And me along with you.” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Bill.”
He sighed quietly. “So where does this leave us?”
“We’ve landed on a nuclear wasteland, we have forty thousand people out there who are going to want an explanation, we’re quickly running out of options regarding food, water, and other necessary supplies, and we still don’t even know what at least three Cylons look like.” Bill replied.
“That’s pretty frakked up.” Laura replied. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll figure something out. We always do.”
.