Fanfic: Sliver of Light Part 3
New Caprica Holding Facility
45 Days Ago
When she came around again, the door was open. This time there was no chair. Clutching her legs to her chest she scanned the room for the Cylon that surely lay in wait. Seeing no one, she dropped her head to her knees and tried to breathe.
Please. Just end it. Please.
When nothing was forthcoming she decided to make her way along the floor towards the opening, certain that deceit and further torment awaited her in the hallway. She was startled to find a body outside the door. Leoben. His head was lying in a pool of blood. She heard footsteps approaching quickly and she panicked, curling her body around her injured arm. She lifted her other arm in a feeble attempt to protect her head.
No blows came.
A gentle hand lit on her good shoulder.
A masked human, armed with an automatic rifle, had appeared at the door. When her head lifted and her eye met his, he knelt. He pressed two fingers to his head in a gesture she recognised as one of worship before he asked: "Can you walk?” He pressed her glasses into her left hand.
“If it’s out of here, then yes” she rasped with a confidence she didn’t remotely feel.
She did remember walking, about the length of the hallway. Cylon bodies were everywhere. They met three other masked humans at the end of the hall, all of whom also knelt briefly. She struggled to remember where this had happened before but the cloud of pain was too thick. She’d stumbled, exhausted, and they must have carried her as the next thing she knew was that she had never been happier to see Saul Tigh.
***
Colonial One. 0345
He stood there, suddenly uncertain at the sight of her. Unmarred.
Whole.
Beautiful.
The raptor flight had been a test of his control. The immediate threat over, his mind threatened to overwhelm him with sounds and images of her from that cell. He focussed instead on the day that he’d brought them all home from New Caprica. He’d caught sight of her as she exited her shuttle and they had shared a very public embrace. But then, so had everyone. He had relished the warmth and softness of her body and the scent he had been sure he would never inhale again. She had buried her face in his neck, placing a kiss there hidden from the on looking throng of humanity.
Yet, even this memory turned dark.
As he remembered now, she had gripped him fiercely but only with her left arm. Her right hand had settled weakly at his waist. He’d been too euphoric to notice then, too high on the success of the mission.
Now as he looked at her he could see it. Damn it he could see it. Shoulders not quite even. A cheekbone that just didn’t look quite right.
“You’re scaring me,” she said simply, honestly, hoping to shake him out of his funk. He hadn’t realised how long he’d been standing there. “You certainly didn’t wake me up at this hour to stare at me.“
He raised an eyebrow, eyes now focussed somewhere by his hands. “I was thinking about Admiral Cain,” he said slowly. “About what Kara said.”
He didn’t elaborate. He just waited.
Admiral Cain. Hearing the woman’s name sent a brief chill down her spine. She studied Adama’s face as if Kara’s words were to be found there.
I believe we were safer with her than we are without. Right.
Wrong.
“She was dangerous.” Her voice was a stern half-whisper, her eyes narrow.
He shifted on his feet and met her eyes for the first time.
“She would never have allowed for New Caprica.” His voice was heavy with regret. “She would never have let her guard down. Never stopped fighting,” until she crushed the CPU of the last remaining Cylon under her boot.
“You’re right,’ she said quietly. She had more to say but she let him marinade in that for a while. Then -
“And you, Colonel Tigh and your son would be dead. The civilian population would have been abandoned on New Caprica or Gods know where in space, ships stripped for supplies and personnel.’ She pressed a hand to her chest. “And my body wouldn’t have grown cold before she would have happily declared martial law.”
His eyebrows creased and she caught a sudden slight twitch of his cheek. From Adama, it was the equivalent of a girly gasp of shock. It was gone in an instant and his already cold glare hardened. “You don’t know that,” he grumbled.
She smiled then, a soft hiss of amusement escaping her nose.. “No, but then why should you get to do all the speculating?“ He didn’t smile as she’d hoped. She felt a distance between them that she could only bridge half way. He just left her there, waiting.
There was more to this, something more personal than this guilt over his supposed failure to the fleet. She just wished she didn’t have to work so hard to drag it out.
“Excuse me, Madam President, Admiral,’ Tory entered the room trailing fresh air. “There’s a call for the Admiral.”
He was out the door quickly enough that escape would have been a good word to describe the action. She could hear his voice clearly.
“Sit. Rep.” There was a long pause.
“Keep looking.” The receiver hit the cradle with bone-jarring force.
“What’s going on?” she asked sharply when he returned.
“We had an incident on Galactica. It’s being handled.”
Galactica. Right. Your turf, not mine.
Gods he wanted to touch her. She was right in front of him but she might as well have been on New Caprica for how close he felt at this moment. What he had seen in her cell had been horrible but it was also firmly in the past. Did he have any right to put her through it again just because he knew?
“This isn’t about Cain,” her voice interrupted his thoughts. She had moved to sit behind her desk, arms folded across her breasts. “Is it?”
A pause. She was pushing now and she knew exactly where. Politicians.
“No,” he admitted gruffly.
His eyes dropped immediately to his hands which were clasped almost too tightly in front of his body. She watched, curiosity peaked, as he took a few steps towards her, hand reaching to pull something from the pocket of his duty uniform. Whatever it was, was tiny, making a light “plink” as he set it in front of her on the desk. She reached for her glasses and the object at the same time. It took a full minute for her mind to register what it was.
A filling. Her filling.
She dropped it as if it had stung her and he watched her other hand press lightly against the edge of the desk. Unconsciously, she pushed herself back from it, a wince crossing her features.
“Where - “ she breathed. She tried to settle her nerves as her tongue probed at the empty space in her mouth, where they’d had to pull the tooth.
So he knew.
Damn.
She was so tired of weakness. She didn’t want him to look at her and see a victim of torture or a willowy husk ravaged by disease. Gods, he’d already seen the latter. She wanted him to see an equal, a woman who loved him for exactly who and what he was.
A Cylon? her brain provided all too quickly.
Never.
The thought cracked a feeble barrier in her mind. Images assaulted her in a vivid, random flood.
A cold metallic chair.
A baby crying.
“You’re going to die.”
Repeated waking to the taste of her own blood.
Leoben’s thigh against her sex, his body across hers.
“You murder us in the streets …”
A sickening pop and a flood of agony.
Consuming, penetrating liquid cold.
Clouded vision, a hand like a vice around her neck.
“Names, now.”
A woman’s gentle hand, cupping her chin.
A solid fist against her jaw, a metallic lump in her mouth.
Two serpents, twisting in the watery, rippled haze of the sun.
A warm hand gliding over the skin of her back, heat flooding her very core.
“… to truly love … he’ll die too.”
Her body was shaking enough to rattle the chair. He was around the desk in seconds, warm hands steadying her shoulders, quieting the insolent chair.
She recovered quickly, moving up and away from him, shaking off his hands.
“Where did you get that?” she gestured weakly at the filling. Her voice was frayed but still functional.
In a puddle of blood on the floor of your cell. “I don’t really understand, ” he began staying close to her without making any contact. “I opened the hatch to my quarters and I ended up in your cell with the Godfrey cylon.”
“The incident on Galactica.“ She looked to him like she was going to be sick. “She asked all the questions.”
He kept his voice steady and calm as it seemed to have a calming effect on her. “I know.” Her hand was unsteady as it rose to lightly cover her mouth. “She said the Cylons were different. Some ability allowed her to access and display what must have been a part of her memory.” He paused, thinking. “She had me pick up your filling to prove the environment was real but I had no way to effect it.”
“Too bad.’ He wasn’t even really sure he’d heard that. She’d turned away from him.
“Your shoulder looks sore.” He wanted to give her confirmation while still trying to be comforting.
“It‘s better than it was.” Can’t lift my arm past shoulder level. As violated as she felt by the knowledge that he had somehow witnessed her ordeal, she was comforted by it all the same. When she’d reached the settlement, Cottle had told her that the Cylon had successfully reduced her shoulder but that he suspected a fracture. He couldn’t feel any displacement so he’d put her arm in a sling and left her with some expired painkillers and a list of exercises. Time reduced swelling and faded bruises, and she soon found herself busy, the exercises and lingering pain easily ignored. When her shuttle landed on Galactica, she had left the sling behind. It had angered Cottle but she knew Adama would have wanted to know what happened and she would have had to tell him about …
I have to ask. Fear stabbed yet another hole in her heart and constricted her lungs and throat. She really didn’t know how much he had seen. She had never planned on telling him.
He just stood, watching as tension rolled across the muscles of her back, and gave her time.
Finally she got angry. The Cylons had tried to break her with fear, had given it form and surrounded her with its smell and taste.
No longer.
These tactics would never work against a woman with no fear of death.
And Bill Adama? She was definitely not afraid of him.
Her back straightened and she turned to face him. Something hardened behind her eyes.
“Did you see Leoben?” she asked finally.
He could literally feel the exertion that was keeping her voice steady and her body taut. “Yes,’ he paused gathering his own strength. “He was the strong arm.”
She paled visibly. “After that.”
After? The words hit him like a towel-wrapped bar of soap to the abdomen. He had never considered that he hadn’t seen everything. He started putting pieces together in his mind. The distance that had opened between them since that fleeting embrace on the hanger deck. The way she struggled to hold herself together in front of him now. And she’s uncomfortable with my touch in a way she’s never been before.
Leoben.
The conclusion he drew only served to break his heart and send such a feeling of rage through his body that he feared it was visible to her. Gods. He walked slowly past her, trying to rein in his emotions while his face was turned. He sat down on her couch, not sure he wanted to be standing for the answer to his next question. Taking a sharp drag of air through his nose, he asked “He didn’t - ‘
Rape you.
He couldn’t say the words. Couldn’t say them because he was holding on to a memory. They had explored something on New Caprica. Something that as Admiral of the Fleet and President of the Colonies wasn‘t even a possibility. He had been gentle, it had been a long time for both of them, their lovemaking sweet confirmation of what had resonated between them for more than a year. He remembered every touch, every taste as if they occurred minutes not months ago. The mere thought of Leoben -
“No,” she said quietly. “It never got that far.” She didn’t have to tell him how close it was or why Leoben stopped. So Adama hadn’t seen everything. His concern washed over her and she opted for the truth. “He was having more fun frakking with my mind.”
He should have felt more relief as the breath he was holding left him in a rush. “Frak Leoben. I wouldn’t give anything he said an ounce of credence,” he snapped, a hint of command in his voice.
“He knows about the prophecies of Pythia. Senses that my continued survival has something to do with the Cylons.” I know you, Laura Roslin.. “He got into my head, Bill,” she confessed openly.
“Let it go.”
He found her eyes and as much as dared her to look away. “You have to let him go. That model is insidious. He plants seeds in your head. You have to let them go or before you know it you’ll be overrun. He’s just one more weapon the Cylons have.” A gun without a barrel or trigger.
He was quiet then and she could almost feel him sinking into the pit of guilt he seemed to find so comforting lately. She waited. She had learned, through time and intimacy, that Bill Adama did have a lot to say. You just had to be willing to wait. Or, she thought back to better days on New Caprica, give him the time to show you.
“I’m sorry, Laura,“ his voice was a low rumble, his gaze dark. “I was tired. I wanted to believe that we were safe. Convincing you to hand the election back to Baltar was probably the second worst command decision I’ve ever made. If I had been an Admiral that day, Leoben would never have touched you.” He matched her confession, eyes stinging with regret. He made mistakes and she, and so many others, paid for them. He would not hide from what he had done.
“No, Bill. I‘m no victim here.” She looked at him earnestly, dropping her hands and finally relaxing. “I chose to lead the resistance, told lies, stashed weapons. I did what had to be done and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. You didn’t put me in a cell with a bunch of Cylons, I did.” Clarity. It had taken a military coup, a planetary occupation and plenty of knocks to the head but she had it now. Clarity. She sat down beside him on the sofa, not touching but close enough to catch his scent between them. “I had time in that cell. Time to think.” To have a vision. “This war is horror. That we are the remnant of billions of lives is an unfathomable weight on those of us that survived. But if I can be selfish, for just this moment, then this war has given me my life.”
He was transfixed. Lost in her words, in her steady gaze, in her nearness.
“If the Cylons had never attacked then I would have died a senseless, lonely death on Caprica.” Her voice was steady, her body calm. “If Karl Agathon hadn’t fallen in love with a Cylon whose programmed so perfectly human and who bore his child, then I would have died on Galactica, leaving you alone with this terrible burden.”
She pauses, images from her vision sliding across her minds eye. Hera’s role was yet to unfold and for now, beyond her control. She is overwhelmed by another current that permeates the fabric of the vision.
I am not alone.
The burden is shared. Two serpents dance the same dance.
I will not be afraid to find comfort here.
She reached over and slipped her hand underneath his, gently lacing their fingers. They made a beautiful pattern, light and dark. He closed his eyes briefly at the welcome warmth of her touch.
“But I’m still here. My life now is a gift. From the Gods? The Cylons?” She sighed. “I don’t know. I just know that I’m not afraid anymore. Pythia or not, death or not, I will expend every last bit of the life that’s been given me to bring these people home.” Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, his dark gaze a mirror image.
Gently, he pulled on the hand in his grasp and she offered no resistance, settling against his shoulder as if she had never left it.
“We all have to follow the path that’s laid out for us,” she felt the words through the warmth of his chest. “But we don’t always have to walk alone. The Gods lift those who lift each other.” His voice was rough, heavy with the emotion he’d spent the day burying. The images in his head would not soon go away. But he had his answer. He would never give the Cylons even a hint of Earth. Even if it killed her. And maybe, in time, she could teach him to let go of his fear.
She reached up to touch his face and found a wetness there that he made no move to hide. And then she smiled. And she was whole. And beautiful. And his.
He kissed a tear from her cheek before she settled back against his chest, warm in the comfort of his arms.
“New Caprica was a mistake,” she said quietly, her breath warm on his neck. “But I can’t help it, sometimes, I wish we had just one more minute there.” His arms tightened and she felt him smile into her hair. He gestured to the tiny windows dotting the cabin of Colonial One.
“We still have plenty of stars.”
***
Fin.