Future Lives, a BSG fanfic
As you can tell from the title, this is a different take on Past Lives. With good reason, too, I should think. ;]
This is unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine.
Title: Future Lives
Author: Lily Winterwood
Rating: K
Fandom: BSG
Characters: Bill Adama, Laura Roslin, a little Lee Adama
Pairings: A/R
Summary: Post-Daybreak. Bill Adams and Laura Roslyn (misspellings intentional) discover a cabin while on a camping trip...
Disclaimer: I don't own BSG. If I did, certain people would still be alive. ;] And I also don't own the song "Another Now". Kate Alexa does.
Future Lives
“Laura! Hurry up!”
“Why the hell are you so fast, Bill?”
“I don’t know.” Bill Adams grins as he climbs to the top of the hill. Once there, he turns around to see his girlfriend Laura Roslyn stagger up the path as well. “I just feel like I’m treading familiar ground.”
“Well, that’s a load of bullshit, Bill. We’ve never been here before,” Laura gasps as she collapses down on a rock next to where he stands. “I’m thirsty and you have my water bottle.”
Bill shrugs off his backpack and pulls out Laura’s bottle. “Here,” he says, handing it to her. Turning his attention back to the far-stretching valley of treetops and grass below them, he adds, “Isn’t this place beautiful?”
“Mm,” Laura agrees, sipping pensively at her water. “Look at that sunrise. It’s just gorgeous.”
“Y’know, this place seems to be an ideal spot for a house,” Bill adds as he takes a seat next to her. “The rooms would have an easterly view just so the inhabitants can watch the sun creep out behind those mountains.”
“It’s almost heavenly,” Laura agrees, watching the sun’s rays peer out from behind the faraway mountains. “Strangely enough, I’m thankful that you woke me up at that ungodly hour and dragged me up this hill just so we can watch this sunrise. It’s so lovely. Reminds me of you.”
Bill smiles. “Should we return to the campground now?”
“Hell no!” Laura springs up and turns around. Behind them, the hill stretches on, disappearing into the grey mists of the morning. Through the fog, they can barely percieve several strange lumps of what seem to be rock, as well as what looks like trees. “Let’s wait for some better light and then explore!”
~~
The flamingoes take flight in a myriad of pink as the Raptor flies overhead. Laura Roslin gazes at them, spellbound.
“So much life,” she whispers, the last word coming out as a lingering whisper.
“It’s a rich continent,” Bill Adama replies, “More well-lived than all the Twelve Colonies put together.” He chuckles a little as he says that.
Laura smiles, and this time it stays on her face. Her hands, once clenched, fall with a nearly silent thud onto her lap.
Bill is scanning the countryside as he flies. “Just looking for a quiet little place for that cabin,” he says as he does so. “Maybe a garden… I don’t have much of a grand plan for it, but I hope that you do…”
The words die in his throat as he looks at her. At first it seems as if she has just fallen asleep.
But he knows that this sleep is one she’ll never wake from.
Bill takes her hand, feeling for a pulse. Her hand is cold and clammy, and there is none.
Death has come and taken Laura Roslin away from him. She in turn, takes his heart.
Desperately trying to hold in his sadness for the moment, Bill kisses the cold hand and removes his wedding ring, placing it on her finger. The tears fall as he kisses her hand again.
When he straightens up, he sees green hills rolling beneath him. “Right there,” he declares, “I’m going to build it right there for her.”
Without further ado, Bill Adama lands the Raptor.
~~
When the sun is fully in the sky, Laura takes Bill’s hand and they look at what the light reveals.
“It’s a house!” Laura exclaims, pointing to the stone and wood cabin. “How did I mistake it for a lump of rock in the half-light?”
“I’m sorely tempted to say something witty and stinging right now,” Bill mutters as she drags him to the cabin door. “Do you think it’s inhabited?” he asks aloud.
“I don’t think so,” Laura replies as she gives the wooden door a small push and it falls over. “The door would have had hinges, at the very least. Phew, this place stinks!”
The air is musty and dusty inside the cabin. Sure enough, the former occupant had thought of the very same idea of windows facing east, as the sunlight pours in through them onto the dusty wooden floor. But how long ago did someone occupy the house?
“This dust must be ancient,” Bill remarks as he bends down and swipes some from the floor.
“This is quite a mystery!” Laura adds, nearly bouncing with glee. “There is glass in the windows but crude, handmade furnishings. The clothes lying on that bed don’t look primal at all, either. This whole cabin is coated in what must be centuries of dust. How the heck can technologically advanced things get into this crude little cabin and accumulate so much dust?”
“It’s in a remote location,” Bill points out. “Maybe the occupant was a pilot and his plane crashed. He survived and became somewhat of a hermit and then died quietly.”
“That’s likely,” Laura agrees, turning back to the doorway. “I see two graves, though.”
“What?”
“Look!” Laura grabs his hand again and points to two piles of rock. “Those must be graves!”
“They might not,” Bill retorts. “How do we know?”
Laura shrugs, drops her backpack down, and runs towards the piles of rock. “I just have a feeling that they’re graves,” she yells over her shoulder. “I don’t know why.”
~~
It is time to do the dreaded task of burying the body of the woman he loved and still loves.
Bill has made several trips back to the landing spot to gather what supplies might be spared for a former Admiral of the Fleet, and he has also managed to salvage several mementos from his quarters. There isn’t much, but it’s a start.
He digs Laura’s grave, weeping all the while. Her body still lies in the Raptor, and only now does he take her out and carry her to her final resting spot.
Bill marks the place with a pile of stones and a sapling of a laurel tree he finds not too far away. After a few moments, he crosses over to the other side of the hill, taking a seat on the stone.
“I laid out the cabin today,” he says, speaking as if Laura was still there, sitting next to him. “It’s going to have an easterly view. You should see the light that we get here when the sun comes up from behind those mountains. It’s almost heavenly.”
He pauses for a moment. “Reminds me of you.”
When he closes his eyes and feels the wind at his cheek, Bill imagines that a certain red-haired angel has kissed him.
~~
Bill catches up with her at the rocks. At one pile there is a massive tree growing at the head, like a living tombstone. “Isn’t that a laurel tree?” he asks her.
Laura shrugs. “I’m a teacher, not a botanist.”
“Good point.” Bill moves forward nonetheless, carefully stepping on the stones as if afraid that one step too heavy will wake a body buried underneath. He presses his palm to the trunk. “I still feel like I’m treading familiar ground,” he murmurs. “It’s like I’ve been here before.”
“Well, I haven’t.” Laura looks at the second stone pile. “See?” she suddenly cries, “I told you these two are graves! There’s a headstone on that one and everything!”
“Well, then, let’s see who died,” Bill replies, turning away from the tree.
The gravestone is a simple tablet, with a few words carved into it. “All I can read is what I think is the name. There’s no date,” Laura admits as she peers at the tablet. “Can you read it?”
“Did I decode the Rosetta Stone?”
“Touché, Bill.” Laura sighs. “Who do you think ‘William Adama’ is?”
“All I know is that ‘William Adama’ has a name creepily similar to mine. By the way, did you see what was carved onto the trunk of the laurel tree?”
“No, I didn’t,” Laura replies. “What was it?”
“Someone named ‘Laura Roslin-Adama’,” replies Bill.
That gets Laura’s attention. “This is not funny,” she snaps.
“It was carved onto the tree!” Bill raises his hands in a gesture of peace. “I tell it like it is!”
~~
Building a cabin from scratch is back-breaking labor, but to Bill it is a labor of love.
Every day he carries stone and drags lumber up the hill. Every day the walls get a little thicker, a little higher.
When the cabin is done, Bill admires it and wishes Laura was there to admire it, too.
“The cabin’s done, Laura. There’s a stream running by at the base of this hill. The water’s clear, but not as clear as glass. Nothing’s perfect, because you’re not here.”
Tears roll down his cheeks. “You’re not here,” he repeats, his voice like a whisper. “But now that there’s no one around except your memory and me, I love to play pretend.” Saying that, he wipes his tears with the sleeve of his jacket. “I set the table for two all the time. I read aloud. I curl up to a pillow at night. I go about pretending that you’re still here, but you’re not.”
After a moment, Bill walks over to Laura’s grave. The laurel sapling is growing rapidly, branches shooting upwards towards the sky and leaves and flowers blooming from them. “I’m going to write a book, Laura,” he says. “It’s going to be about you, me, and our story.”
~~
“Laura Roslin-Adama,” Laura reads. “Once again, the rest is undecipherable. Is it code?”
“Maybe just an older form of English,” Bill answers. “Why don’t we head back into the cabin?”
The couple does so, heading back into the musty warmth of the little stone cabin. Once there, Laura promptly removes a thick layer of dust off of the bed so she can sit.
“That’s disrespectful to the dead,” Bill remarks as she holds up a faded old blanket.
“It’s not like the ghosts of William Adama and Laura Roslin are going to pop in any moment and punish me for disturbing their stuff,” Laura retorts. “I bet this blanket was hers.”
“And the strange suit is his,” Bill adds, gesturing towards a faded, almost white suit. “It looks like a space suit, now that I come to think of it.”
“And the helmet’s right there!” adds Laura, pointing to the top of the bookshelf. She gets up and dusts off the spines of the books on the fourth shelf. “Wow, there’s a lot of reading material here,” she murmurs appreciatively.
“Did you also notice how there’s no corners on anything?” Bill adds, looking around him. “Look at the bookshelf and the chairs and the bed!”
“And even the photographs!” Laura adds, pointing to the de-cornered picture frames. “Wait, photographs?”
Bill moves to stand next to her and dusts off the photo, revealing a picture of a man and a woman. “They’re older than I expected,” he remarks.
Laura nods, looking at the photograph. The man is dressed in what obviously is some sort of uniform, and the woman wears a suit. Her hand is resting on his chest. Even though the photo has faded over time, there is no mistaking the smiles on their faces. “They were married,” she whispers. “Laura Roslin and William Adama.”
“She must have been very beautiful,” agrees Bill, looking pointedly at the Laura next to him. “Why don’t we look at the other photos?”
“Who’s disrespecting the dead now?” Laura asks, raising an eyebrow as he dusts off another photo. “Oh my, that’s a beautiful dress,” she whispers, looking at the Laura in the photograph. “Look at the smile on her face…”
~~
There are numerous photographs of Laura in the cabin. Though there are photos of the Agathons, of Kara and Lee, and of Saul and Ellen, Laura makes the most appearances.
Bill is now working on his book. He sits at the desk, occasionally gazing out the window, occasionally gazing at a photograph of Laura on his desk.
“I’m breathing in and breathing out,” he mutters as he writes. “I’m wide awake but I can’t hear a sound.”
“When I’m breathing in, I just think about,” another voice says. “Another you, another me, another now.”
Bill turns around to see Laura gazing at him.
~~
It is already in the afternoon when Bill and Laura decide to eat lunch in the cabin. By then, they had rid the entire cabin of dust, uncovering memories as they went.
They sit and eat at the crude wooden table with only two chairs. The table is set for two, just like everything else in the cabin except for the bed. Laura gazes out the window as she nibbles at her sandwich. “There’s a story here somewhere,” she suddenly says. “Remember the wardrobe?” she guestures vaguely to the wardrobe behind her. “Only his clothes are in there. All of her outfits are in the trunk.”
“And the bed! There’s only room for one,” adds Bill. “This whole place feels as if only one person actually lived there, but he constantly pretended he had a companion.”
“But the companion wasn’t really made up,” added Laura. “She appears in many photographs and she has a grave.”
Bill nods. “He outlived her,” he agrees.
~~
“I’ve gone mad,” Bill whispers.
Laura smiles at him. “To anyone else, you have. But there is no one around, so why bother?” She leans forward as if to kiss him. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” Bill replies, his voice thick with emotion.
Laura smiles. “I love our cabin. It’s very nice of you to set a place at the table for me, too.” She pauses, her eyes falling upon the book. “You’re writing a book?”
“I’m nowhere close to ending,” Bill admits. “It’s about you and me.”
Her green eyes are filled with so much happiness that some of the joy spills over, and for the first time in ages, Bill Adama feels a smile creeping onto his face.
~~
There is a desk in front of the windows. Earlier that day Laura had dusted it off, revealing another photograph of Laura Roslin. She had also revealed a book.
Old with age, the de-cornered pages are covered with someone’s firm, flowing script. Next to it is a what seems to be a pen and three pins.
“The pins are strangely shaped,” Bill murmurs as he takes one of them. “Two of them look like a diamond on top of a hexagon, and the last one looks like…”
“Pilot wings,” finishes Laura. She takes the book and gazes at it. “If only we can read this! I think it’s a diary or at least a book detailing their tale.”
“Well, we can’t read it, at any rate.” Bill looks at the darkening sky outside. “Come on, let’s head back to the campground and leave William Adama and Laura Roslin to rest in peace.”
Laura agrees, setting the book back down. They gather their things and exit the cabin, raising the wooden door back up behind them.
“I stil wonder what happened to them,” Bill admits as they hike downhill. “Maybe they were transcendentalists who shied away from society.”
“Maybe William Adama was a pilot taking his wife out for a ride and she died,” Laura says thoughtfully. “Distraught, William lands here and starts a new life.”
“But then why and how did Laura Roslin die in the first place?” Bill asks as he pauses to kiss her.
“That,” Laura replies as they break apart, “We’ll never know.”
~~
“Come with me,” Laura whispers into Bill’s ear. “Come with me to Elysium.”
Bill looks at his finished book. “One last thing,” he says quietly, flipping to the front. He picks his pen up and writes a note on the inside front cover, then sets the pen down, removes his pilot’s wings and Admiral pins, and places his hand in hers. “I won’t lose you this time,” he says. “I love you.”
When Lee enters his father’s cabin, he discovers his father sitting at his desk, dead. There is a book on the desk, and he opens it.
“To whomever it may concern,” he reads, “Please bury my body next to Laura’s and leave this cabin and its memories alone.” Tears roll down Lee’s cheeks as he closes the book. “I won’t fail you in your last wishes, dad,” he murmurs, taking the body of the Old Man and dragging him out to the gravesite.
When Lee is finished with the burial, he takes a stone and carves away at it until he has “Here lies Admiral William Adama: a great leader, a better father, and the best lover” engraved on it. He then goes to the laurel tree and carves out “Here lies Laura Roslin-Adama, whose frail hands imprinted many hearts” on its trunk.
He finishes by fashioning a plank for a door and using it to seal the cabin off from the outside world, and leaves with one final goodbye.
“Rest in peace, mom, dad.”
This is unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine.
Title: Future Lives
Author: Lily Winterwood
Rating: K
Fandom: BSG
Characters: Bill Adama, Laura Roslin, a little Lee Adama
Pairings: A/R
Summary: Post-Daybreak. Bill Adams and Laura Roslyn (misspellings intentional) discover a cabin while on a camping trip...
Disclaimer: I don't own BSG. If I did, certain people would still be alive. ;] And I also don't own the song "Another Now". Kate Alexa does.
Future Lives
“Laura! Hurry up!”
“Why the hell are you so fast, Bill?”
“I don’t know.” Bill Adams grins as he climbs to the top of the hill. Once there, he turns around to see his girlfriend Laura Roslyn stagger up the path as well. “I just feel like I’m treading familiar ground.”
“Well, that’s a load of bullshit, Bill. We’ve never been here before,” Laura gasps as she collapses down on a rock next to where he stands. “I’m thirsty and you have my water bottle.”
Bill shrugs off his backpack and pulls out Laura’s bottle. “Here,” he says, handing it to her. Turning his attention back to the far-stretching valley of treetops and grass below them, he adds, “Isn’t this place beautiful?”
“Mm,” Laura agrees, sipping pensively at her water. “Look at that sunrise. It’s just gorgeous.”
“Y’know, this place seems to be an ideal spot for a house,” Bill adds as he takes a seat next to her. “The rooms would have an easterly view just so the inhabitants can watch the sun creep out behind those mountains.”
“It’s almost heavenly,” Laura agrees, watching the sun’s rays peer out from behind the faraway mountains. “Strangely enough, I’m thankful that you woke me up at that ungodly hour and dragged me up this hill just so we can watch this sunrise. It’s so lovely. Reminds me of you.”
Bill smiles. “Should we return to the campground now?”
“Hell no!” Laura springs up and turns around. Behind them, the hill stretches on, disappearing into the grey mists of the morning. Through the fog, they can barely percieve several strange lumps of what seem to be rock, as well as what looks like trees. “Let’s wait for some better light and then explore!”
~~
The flamingoes take flight in a myriad of pink as the Raptor flies overhead. Laura Roslin gazes at them, spellbound.
“So much life,” she whispers, the last word coming out as a lingering whisper.
“It’s a rich continent,” Bill Adama replies, “More well-lived than all the Twelve Colonies put together.” He chuckles a little as he says that.
Laura smiles, and this time it stays on her face. Her hands, once clenched, fall with a nearly silent thud onto her lap.
Bill is scanning the countryside as he flies. “Just looking for a quiet little place for that cabin,” he says as he does so. “Maybe a garden… I don’t have much of a grand plan for it, but I hope that you do…”
The words die in his throat as he looks at her. At first it seems as if she has just fallen asleep.
But he knows that this sleep is one she’ll never wake from.
Bill takes her hand, feeling for a pulse. Her hand is cold and clammy, and there is none.
Death has come and taken Laura Roslin away from him. She in turn, takes his heart.
Desperately trying to hold in his sadness for the moment, Bill kisses the cold hand and removes his wedding ring, placing it on her finger. The tears fall as he kisses her hand again.
When he straightens up, he sees green hills rolling beneath him. “Right there,” he declares, “I’m going to build it right there for her.”
Without further ado, Bill Adama lands the Raptor.
~~
When the sun is fully in the sky, Laura takes Bill’s hand and they look at what the light reveals.
“It’s a house!” Laura exclaims, pointing to the stone and wood cabin. “How did I mistake it for a lump of rock in the half-light?”
“I’m sorely tempted to say something witty and stinging right now,” Bill mutters as she drags him to the cabin door. “Do you think it’s inhabited?” he asks aloud.
“I don’t think so,” Laura replies as she gives the wooden door a small push and it falls over. “The door would have had hinges, at the very least. Phew, this place stinks!”
The air is musty and dusty inside the cabin. Sure enough, the former occupant had thought of the very same idea of windows facing east, as the sunlight pours in through them onto the dusty wooden floor. But how long ago did someone occupy the house?
“This dust must be ancient,” Bill remarks as he bends down and swipes some from the floor.
“This is quite a mystery!” Laura adds, nearly bouncing with glee. “There is glass in the windows but crude, handmade furnishings. The clothes lying on that bed don’t look primal at all, either. This whole cabin is coated in what must be centuries of dust. How the heck can technologically advanced things get into this crude little cabin and accumulate so much dust?”
“It’s in a remote location,” Bill points out. “Maybe the occupant was a pilot and his plane crashed. He survived and became somewhat of a hermit and then died quietly.”
“That’s likely,” Laura agrees, turning back to the doorway. “I see two graves, though.”
“What?”
“Look!” Laura grabs his hand again and points to two piles of rock. “Those must be graves!”
“They might not,” Bill retorts. “How do we know?”
Laura shrugs, drops her backpack down, and runs towards the piles of rock. “I just have a feeling that they’re graves,” she yells over her shoulder. “I don’t know why.”
~~
It is time to do the dreaded task of burying the body of the woman he loved and still loves.
Bill has made several trips back to the landing spot to gather what supplies might be spared for a former Admiral of the Fleet, and he has also managed to salvage several mementos from his quarters. There isn’t much, but it’s a start.
He digs Laura’s grave, weeping all the while. Her body still lies in the Raptor, and only now does he take her out and carry her to her final resting spot.
Bill marks the place with a pile of stones and a sapling of a laurel tree he finds not too far away. After a few moments, he crosses over to the other side of the hill, taking a seat on the stone.
“I laid out the cabin today,” he says, speaking as if Laura was still there, sitting next to him. “It’s going to have an easterly view. You should see the light that we get here when the sun comes up from behind those mountains. It’s almost heavenly.”
He pauses for a moment. “Reminds me of you.”
When he closes his eyes and feels the wind at his cheek, Bill imagines that a certain red-haired angel has kissed him.
~~
Bill catches up with her at the rocks. At one pile there is a massive tree growing at the head, like a living tombstone. “Isn’t that a laurel tree?” he asks her.
Laura shrugs. “I’m a teacher, not a botanist.”
“Good point.” Bill moves forward nonetheless, carefully stepping on the stones as if afraid that one step too heavy will wake a body buried underneath. He presses his palm to the trunk. “I still feel like I’m treading familiar ground,” he murmurs. “It’s like I’ve been here before.”
“Well, I haven’t.” Laura looks at the second stone pile. “See?” she suddenly cries, “I told you these two are graves! There’s a headstone on that one and everything!”
“Well, then, let’s see who died,” Bill replies, turning away from the tree.
The gravestone is a simple tablet, with a few words carved into it. “All I can read is what I think is the name. There’s no date,” Laura admits as she peers at the tablet. “Can you read it?”
“Did I decode the Rosetta Stone?”
“Touché, Bill.” Laura sighs. “Who do you think ‘William Adama’ is?”
“All I know is that ‘William Adama’ has a name creepily similar to mine. By the way, did you see what was carved onto the trunk of the laurel tree?”
“No, I didn’t,” Laura replies. “What was it?”
“Someone named ‘Laura Roslin-Adama’,” replies Bill.
That gets Laura’s attention. “This is not funny,” she snaps.
“It was carved onto the tree!” Bill raises his hands in a gesture of peace. “I tell it like it is!”
~~
Building a cabin from scratch is back-breaking labor, but to Bill it is a labor of love.
Every day he carries stone and drags lumber up the hill. Every day the walls get a little thicker, a little higher.
When the cabin is done, Bill admires it and wishes Laura was there to admire it, too.
“The cabin’s done, Laura. There’s a stream running by at the base of this hill. The water’s clear, but not as clear as glass. Nothing’s perfect, because you’re not here.”
Tears roll down his cheeks. “You’re not here,” he repeats, his voice like a whisper. “But now that there’s no one around except your memory and me, I love to play pretend.” Saying that, he wipes his tears with the sleeve of his jacket. “I set the table for two all the time. I read aloud. I curl up to a pillow at night. I go about pretending that you’re still here, but you’re not.”
After a moment, Bill walks over to Laura’s grave. The laurel sapling is growing rapidly, branches shooting upwards towards the sky and leaves and flowers blooming from them. “I’m going to write a book, Laura,” he says. “It’s going to be about you, me, and our story.”
~~
“Laura Roslin-Adama,” Laura reads. “Once again, the rest is undecipherable. Is it code?”
“Maybe just an older form of English,” Bill answers. “Why don’t we head back into the cabin?”
The couple does so, heading back into the musty warmth of the little stone cabin. Once there, Laura promptly removes a thick layer of dust off of the bed so she can sit.
“That’s disrespectful to the dead,” Bill remarks as she holds up a faded old blanket.
“It’s not like the ghosts of William Adama and Laura Roslin are going to pop in any moment and punish me for disturbing their stuff,” Laura retorts. “I bet this blanket was hers.”
“And the strange suit is his,” Bill adds, gesturing towards a faded, almost white suit. “It looks like a space suit, now that I come to think of it.”
“And the helmet’s right there!” adds Laura, pointing to the top of the bookshelf. She gets up and dusts off the spines of the books on the fourth shelf. “Wow, there’s a lot of reading material here,” she murmurs appreciatively.
“Did you also notice how there’s no corners on anything?” Bill adds, looking around him. “Look at the bookshelf and the chairs and the bed!”
“And even the photographs!” Laura adds, pointing to the de-cornered picture frames. “Wait, photographs?”
Bill moves to stand next to her and dusts off the photo, revealing a picture of a man and a woman. “They’re older than I expected,” he remarks.
Laura nods, looking at the photograph. The man is dressed in what obviously is some sort of uniform, and the woman wears a suit. Her hand is resting on his chest. Even though the photo has faded over time, there is no mistaking the smiles on their faces. “They were married,” she whispers. “Laura Roslin and William Adama.”
“She must have been very beautiful,” agrees Bill, looking pointedly at the Laura next to him. “Why don’t we look at the other photos?”
“Who’s disrespecting the dead now?” Laura asks, raising an eyebrow as he dusts off another photo. “Oh my, that’s a beautiful dress,” she whispers, looking at the Laura in the photograph. “Look at the smile on her face…”
~~
There are numerous photographs of Laura in the cabin. Though there are photos of the Agathons, of Kara and Lee, and of Saul and Ellen, Laura makes the most appearances.
Bill is now working on his book. He sits at the desk, occasionally gazing out the window, occasionally gazing at a photograph of Laura on his desk.
“I’m breathing in and breathing out,” he mutters as he writes. “I’m wide awake but I can’t hear a sound.”
“When I’m breathing in, I just think about,” another voice says. “Another you, another me, another now.”
Bill turns around to see Laura gazing at him.
~~
It is already in the afternoon when Bill and Laura decide to eat lunch in the cabin. By then, they had rid the entire cabin of dust, uncovering memories as they went.
They sit and eat at the crude wooden table with only two chairs. The table is set for two, just like everything else in the cabin except for the bed. Laura gazes out the window as she nibbles at her sandwich. “There’s a story here somewhere,” she suddenly says. “Remember the wardrobe?” she guestures vaguely to the wardrobe behind her. “Only his clothes are in there. All of her outfits are in the trunk.”
“And the bed! There’s only room for one,” adds Bill. “This whole place feels as if only one person actually lived there, but he constantly pretended he had a companion.”
“But the companion wasn’t really made up,” added Laura. “She appears in many photographs and she has a grave.”
Bill nods. “He outlived her,” he agrees.
~~
“I’ve gone mad,” Bill whispers.
Laura smiles at him. “To anyone else, you have. But there is no one around, so why bother?” She leans forward as if to kiss him. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” Bill replies, his voice thick with emotion.
Laura smiles. “I love our cabin. It’s very nice of you to set a place at the table for me, too.” She pauses, her eyes falling upon the book. “You’re writing a book?”
“I’m nowhere close to ending,” Bill admits. “It’s about you and me.”
Her green eyes are filled with so much happiness that some of the joy spills over, and for the first time in ages, Bill Adama feels a smile creeping onto his face.
~~
There is a desk in front of the windows. Earlier that day Laura had dusted it off, revealing another photograph of Laura Roslin. She had also revealed a book.
Old with age, the de-cornered pages are covered with someone’s firm, flowing script. Next to it is a what seems to be a pen and three pins.
“The pins are strangely shaped,” Bill murmurs as he takes one of them. “Two of them look like a diamond on top of a hexagon, and the last one looks like…”
“Pilot wings,” finishes Laura. She takes the book and gazes at it. “If only we can read this! I think it’s a diary or at least a book detailing their tale.”
“Well, we can’t read it, at any rate.” Bill looks at the darkening sky outside. “Come on, let’s head back to the campground and leave William Adama and Laura Roslin to rest in peace.”
Laura agrees, setting the book back down. They gather their things and exit the cabin, raising the wooden door back up behind them.
“I stil wonder what happened to them,” Bill admits as they hike downhill. “Maybe they were transcendentalists who shied away from society.”
“Maybe William Adama was a pilot taking his wife out for a ride and she died,” Laura says thoughtfully. “Distraught, William lands here and starts a new life.”
“But then why and how did Laura Roslin die in the first place?” Bill asks as he pauses to kiss her.
“That,” Laura replies as they break apart, “We’ll never know.”
~~
“Come with me,” Laura whispers into Bill’s ear. “Come with me to Elysium.”
Bill looks at his finished book. “One last thing,” he says quietly, flipping to the front. He picks his pen up and writes a note on the inside front cover, then sets the pen down, removes his pilot’s wings and Admiral pins, and places his hand in hers. “I won’t lose you this time,” he says. “I love you.”
When Lee enters his father’s cabin, he discovers his father sitting at his desk, dead. There is a book on the desk, and he opens it.
“To whomever it may concern,” he reads, “Please bury my body next to Laura’s and leave this cabin and its memories alone.” Tears roll down Lee’s cheeks as he closes the book. “I won’t fail you in your last wishes, dad,” he murmurs, taking the body of the Old Man and dragging him out to the gravesite.
When Lee is finished with the burial, he takes a stone and carves away at it until he has “Here lies Admiral William Adama: a great leader, a better father, and the best lover” engraved on it. He then goes to the laurel tree and carves out “Here lies Laura Roslin-Adama, whose frail hands imprinted many hearts” on its trunk.
He finishes by fashioning a plank for a door and using it to seal the cabin off from the outside world, and leaves with one final goodbye.
“Rest in peace, mom, dad.”