New fic! BSG remix
A bit late but I have a BSG remix fic to post! And sort of my first real time writing Laura Roslin, after all these years in fandom. *worried gesture*
But first, obsessive_a101 remixed my own Dee/Gaeta friendship ficlet with Rippling Light (a Springs Eternal remix) and it was just wonderful!
My own 'remixee' was newnumbertwo with The Gifts of the Dying Leader, a fic where Roslin & Baltar speak one last time before the end of Daybreak. One of the things that struck me in that fic was the implication of Roslin and Caprica-Six's relationship and I wanted to explore that as well as write from her POV - which is as atypical for me as writing from Baltar's was for newnumbertwo. :)
Cross-posted at bsg-remix here, I'm still making my way through a bunch of other fic there!
Title: Common Ground (Time Washes Clean Remix)
Characters: Laura Roslin, Caprica-Six, Gaius Baltar, Bill Adama
Pairing: Adama/Roslin, Caprica/Baltar
Rating: PG
Warnings: canon death
Summary: Laura finds an unlikely connection during her last days in sickbay.
Word Count: @6,000
Author's Notes: Huge thanks to my beta, astreamofstars!
She was surrounded by water, cool and blue, naturally clear way she hadn't seen in what felt like eternity. She'd dreamed of this before. Was she dreaming now? She was on the open water with Emily, not yet on the shore. When she woke in a bed in sickbay, head bare and IV in her arm, she was told by the attending medic -- Ishay, she knew all their names by now -- that she'd fainted in her quarters (the Admiral's quarters). "Scared the marines half to death," Cottle grumbled. "You should give some warning when you feel like passing out."
"Hera," was the first thing she said, and the doctors exchanged a look she could read in an instant, a silent warning not to upset her.
"You should rest," Ishay said with slightly too much forced enthusiasm. Laura's throat felt very dry, she cringed at the discomfort and part of her did want to be elsewhere again.
"Tell Admiral Adama," she began, and then wasn't sure what it was she wanted to tell him. "That I'm awake now. Not to worry." She didn't doubt he'd already been checking in and calling. She imagined him a rock in CIC, but just as vividly saw him drinking himself into oblivion, and needed to steel herself against that. She added, meaning to think of the fleet, "Tell Lee also."
"Of course." The things she wanted to ask next were for one of her scarves back, for one of her cigarettes, and when they expected her to be able to leave. It was when she could not sit up without her hands shaking violently that it seemed to her the conversation would be this is the end. That she would stay as comfortable as she could in this room and not leave it again, and she did not want that conversation, was not ready for it yet. Her feet were planted, still not on the shore.
======
When it wasn't the water, it was the opera house she saw in her dreams, rows upon rows of ornate sculpture and tributes to the gods of Kobol, flying past her as she ran, a child's laugh impossibly loud over the sound of instruments. She woke hearing a moan that wasn't her own, that she expected somehow to be Sharon's. Instead it was the other one, Caprica-Six curled on her side, not quite in a fetal position on the bed nearby.
The last time they spoke she'd been glowing and anxious, and she'd told her -- what? That she hadn't had any of their dreams, not the whole time I've been pregnant. Two minutes awake, she said absently to Cottle, "She lost the baby, didn't she?"
The suddenness of the subject confused him at first. "Hera?" No, they'd all lost her. She was always running too fast. Laura shook her head faintly, she managed a purposeful look in the Six's direction and back at him.
"Oh," he cleared his throat, hesitated saying something else. "That she did. Eight days ago." Laura nodded and closed her eyes. Her head was still swimming, and a blurred memory returned to her, that she'd known this already. Colonel Tigh was sick with grief, it wasn't like her to forget that. She couldn't imagine what to say to either of them. What Cottle said, craning his neck toward the Cylon and raising his voice just enough to be heard, was "I'm kicking her out of that bed soon."
(She had a wild, unfocused thought that it could've been Lt. Gaeta's bed. She'd just remembered now how he sang in this room. She'd almost forgotten, twisted to rage by the sound of it over the wireless, what an astonishing voice he had.)
She'd now been conscious long enough to know this feeling, the numb, barely coherent flood of information she was struggling to piece together. "You know I don't want drugs," she said with gritted teeth. She needed to be clear, she had to-
"You were asking for them last night," he told her, in his bluntly empathetic way. "It was just for the pain. Don't try to be stubborn about this, you already lost." She believed that was true, but it silenced her in a way she hated. He was still angry at her for stopping her treatments. He didn't like to lose people, even for a cynic.
She looked back at Caprica-Six, who met her eyes with a terribly hollow expression and forced her to look away first. "She's been here eight days?" she said, trying to keep her voice quiet.
"Ellen's been to see her a few times."
"Can I get up to talk to her? Or can she come over here?"
He offered an arm to her, pushed the IV tray for her himself; it was a struggle to stand, but Laura felt relief in how manageable it was after all.
======
The Six rolled to her other side when she approached her, arms curved defensively in a way that seemed somehow deliberate, like she was conscious of her body at all times. She'd often laid exactly that way in her cell, Laura able to think nothing but Gods, they made her beautiful. Cottle stepped away, shut the curtain around them. "Hi," Laura said softly.
"You want to talk about the dreams," Caprica said in a distant voice, barely even a question.
"I don't..." she paused carefully, feeling she should have rehearsed something on the slow trip over. "I do. I always do. I want to know what they mean. But I think you know exactly as much as I do, and we don't have to."
Caprica said nothing.
"I'm not going to ask how you are. I know I can't imagine it. If there's anything I can..."
Somehow, barely moving, someting appared to soften in her. "Thank you, Madam President," she said politely.
It might never stop unsettling her to hear one of them call her that. (It was struggle enough to call the Cylon by her own name, the name of Laura's own planet turned to ash in a matter of hours, not five years ago.) A lot of them were saying that to her now, unironically. The first she remembered doing that was Leoben, only minutes before she had ejected him into space. Only for another -- the same man, a man at all? -- to give her a short, reverent smile in Galactica's hallways. They were citizens of the fleet now, her successor had promised it, and she could only let it pass.
She did think for a much more worrying moment, like Baltar, she might call her Laura. But she was too wary to be that familiar -- instinctively wary, her face was still but one of someone expecting a spider's bite any moment. It was certainly not the first time anyone looked at Laura that way. Elosha, for whatever she was, a dream or a spirit from the grave, had all but told her she'd forgotten how to love. Laura was trying, this moment, to love Caprica. Not to think of her name's origins, but how frail and sad she looked now. How she carried the resignation of someone who's not capable of losing anything else, and it was not the first time Laura had seen that look either.
======
Caprica sat cross-legged on the far end of Laura's bed, staring down at the joint in her hand like she already deeply regretted this decision. This Laura didn't mind, for the pain. One rapidly-contained coughing fit later (Caprica's this time, not hers) , the Cylon exhaled the rest of her breath and relaxed, returning it to her and pressing a hand against her own cheek. "I've never tried that," she said. Laura still had the presence of mind not to say, You can now.
"I still see him in my head," Caprica said after a few minutes. "He's there, playing with a toy car or... we had this wooden one, Saul found it from someone and-" she shook her head, her eyes watered. Laura could see her running the wheels over her stomach. "It's so real when I see it. Liam." She said the name in a whisper.
"Like a projection? Are you doing that?"
"Maybe," she still stared in kind of daze, a wonderment. "No. I feel like there's another world where he just... It was so close."
"There's another world where I'm doing cartwheels out of this room," Laura said, and Caprica broke her gaze but didn't quite smile back. "We have to... I think we have to take this one."
Caprica brushed a tear aside and shook it off. "You never had children," she said. "Did you, ever? Did you want one?"
"No. It's not that I-" she wasn't sure how to finish. "There were other things. Considering all that's happened since, it seems that was for the best." It was impossible to even imagine a different path of her life now, a pair of children dead on the Colonies, if she was even to survive (meant to survive) herself. "I'm sure of that now," she said, softer but steady.
"It's strange you didn't."
She almost laughed, felt the need to defend her choices reflexively. "It's not at all. It can't be a priority for everyone."
"But they are for you. You like them. You'd devote your life to them."
"Sometimes that's easier without your own." Caprica took this in. "I took after my mother, she was a teacher," she went on. (Her thoughts were with her so much lately, always coming to the edge of something terrible and then retreated to a happier memory instead.) "Maybe I just admired her so much. I wanted to fight for people like her, not just the kids." Something painful crossed Caprica's face, just for an instant. "What?"
"I don't know," Caprica said. "Parents." Whatever she was thinking seemed enormous and alien to Laura. She remembered the Cylons were children of no one, or humanity, or maybe, crazily, Ellen Tigh, and didn't envy any of those shadows. What she said next was another subject entirely though, as if switching on another light. "Gaius's father was sick."
"Was he?" Laura asked, not that interested in the answer.
"Back on Caprica." Remembering herself, she added, "He told me."
"He didn't tell you," Laura said, simply. "You saw him. You knew him then."
She said nothing, not a confirmation or denial. What did it matter now? Her loyalty to him always seemed to verge on martyrdom. And Laura felt strangely comforted to know she was equally wary of being played, of the conversation moving from trap to trap. The Six only went on, "He was a farmer."
"Was he really?" she said evenly. "I read that once."
"Gaius was very private about it," Caprica continued, with a knowing look to her meaning. "Before that... manifesto or whatever he named it. He was ashamed."
Poor thing, Laura thought, could not fit any math or logic into human relationships. "So, some of us don't take after our parents at all."
"No. He thought he wasn't anything like him, but he was. Julius was only arrogant about different things. And probably some of the same." Her smile faded from mischievous to something more sincere, wistful. "He was proud of what he did, Julius. He was upset to lose it. He hurt that Gaius left, even if he still took care of him. He'd taught him everything. Gaius only told me when he was drunk, but he'd memorized it all. Sometimes I thought if we did find Earth..." she caught herself mid-sentence, like she was afraid of raising a bad memory, or embarrassed by her own flights of innocence. She deflected the idea just as quickly. "I imagined a lot of things." Laura noticed a glint of pride, affection in her eyes when she talked about him, a moment before she'd be pulled back to reality. She still loved him.
"You still care about him," is what she said.
Caprica smiled again, if not with her eyes. "That was never what we were missing."
Laura felt lightheaded. So little else mattered at the end, she wanted to tell her. "His father was sick," she repeated instead. "What was wrong with him?"
Caprica stared at the ceiling. "A lot of things. His back, his kidneys were failing. He'd forget things. He'd forget where he was. He was old, he was a very old person. I'd never known someone experiencing that. It made them both so angry." She looked back at her in serious thought. "I think that's why you look afraid of children sometimes; I thought it was just Hera, in the dream."
She'd gone so fast from one thought to the other, personal to philosophical and back, that Laura felt her heart twist. She thought she was done with anger, done being frightened, but sometimes it bubbled up again, the reality of her death, she felt horribly exposed and manipulated but couldn't stop herself. "I couldn't live with them going through this," she said in a painfully wavering voice. "A family. Being like my mother..." the tears came even sooner than they had the last time she talked about her, just the word brought a sting to her eyes that had been building for the last few minutes. It was never the responsibility, she wouldn't be where she was if she feared that, wouldn't have the fates of tens of thousands of people in her hands. Maybe it had always just reminded her of death, loving or being loved. She would die and they'd be all that was left, a different kind of responsibility. The buzz was probably all that kept her from breaking down harder.
She knew the Cylon was watching her, empathetic but curiously, like she wasn't sure how to give warmth in a natural way, at least not to her. "I'm sorry," she said in a foreign-sounding way. "I know," though it would be hard for her to. She reached to touch her hand, and Laura found herself grabbing it forcefully, what she was feeling a moment ago replaced with a rush of steel in her veins.
"I saw you once on Caprica. You looked in my eyes. Do you remember that?"
Whatever she was hoping for -- a glimmer of recognition, surprise, guilt -- she was disappointed. (She'd gotten at least that from Gaius once, even if it did very little.) She searched her eyes and only saw confusion, and something sadder, that she didn't want to believe was pity. "I don't," Caprica said.
"You were there." She would not let this go, maybe she would never. "You were with Baltar, you were holding each other. You looked back at me, like you saw I was watching you."
Caprica's mouth twisted uncertainly. "What do you want from me?" There was a helplessness in it. (Her face like all of them, 49,998 people, who'd already lost whatever they could lose. Her face like someone who'd do conceivably anything to make them both feel better about this.)
"I want to know what you were thinking. Right then, when I saw you."
She paused. "I was probably happy."
Laura felt a wave of relief, almost, to hear her say it. The smallness of it.
"We used to walk by the fountains outside the ministry. He'd kiss me in public. I don't remember you," she said again. "But I liked when people watched us. I shouldn't have. It would've been safer to be invisible. I wasn't there to attract attention from anyone but him. But... I was proud. I was happy. I wanted people to envy how happy we were." She might keep talking, until told it was enough. Laura relaxed her hand, though Caprica didn't move away. "It was a sin wanting that."
"Not your worst," Laura said. It sounded human, but she didn't say this.
Caprica took a long breath. "I hate it when people watch me now," she said.
Laura didn't know if this was meant to make her feel better, or if she simply needed to relieve herself further, the way she used to murmur to no one in her cell. "You can go home to the baseship," she said, not unkindly.
She shook her head. "It's worse there. It's always been worse from them." Another dark, almost-smile. "At least I intimidate some of you. When I look back, you stop staring."
It hadn't occurred to Laura before that she'd do anything but disappear there. And that of course she could not. "What do they think you are?"
"A hero," she almost choked on the word. "A hero or a failure, now."
An image flashed through Laura's mind, the faces of the men on the Astral Queen looking to her to bless their souls. The applause when she returned from Kobol, the dead left behind but Earth shining nearer than ever. She forgot how to meet a stranger without seeing at least a flash of adoration or vitriol in their eyes. She remembered the questions on so many faces when she stepped off the shuttle from Earth, a moment seared in her mind like a scar. They were deathly quiet when the door opened, before the clamoring for answers began, they were only looking at her and she had nothing, nothing. All that hope...
"Cottle is nice to me," Caprica was saying. "And then he leaves me alone."
Her mind reeled back, it was strange she never had children. The hope on those faces after Earth. The idea of being the one to tell them the worst truths of the world.
(She thinks sometimes, Billy could've been her child. She knows logically she did not fail him.)
"That's not what I am," Laura must have murmured out loud, the smallest misfire of her brain and speech, out of the disease or paranoia, she didn't know. She knew that Caprica looked alarmed and guilty (now, guilty, whatever that was worth) to have heard her.
"I didn't mean you at all," Caprica blurted. And Laura knew very likely she hadn'’t, that it was her own subconscious talking to her again, that conceivably they could both be heroes and failures, in the way she and Baltar were just frauds of different degrees, but this was not a common ground she could approach just now.
"I'm sorry," Laura said, closing her eyes. "I'm- tired." She was not, but it had been a convenient excuse lately. "I'll leave you alone." She'd been the one to come to Laura's end of sickbay this time, but it was kinder than any variation of Go.
Caprica stood uncertainly, started to leave. "You're not a failure. You aren't either of those things to me," she added, hoping to be comforting in her honesty, and Laura hated to admit it was. "You're only sick, L- Madam President."
It wasn't the dying, she wanted to explain, but the meaninglessness of it. Bill was right once, it felt better when it meant something, that she'd lead them to Earth - with that gone, she'd been nothing but a raiser of empty hopes. Still, she knew logically it wasn't her fault, as she knew she probably didn't need to say what she was about to.
"I think you're a lot of things, Caprica." It didn't mean to sound as harsh as it might have. She was more things, multitudes of things, she couldn't understand. "But Liam, that wasn't you."
Caprica looked at her hands. "I know," she said. "It doesn't lessen it, does it?"
"No," she agreed. The odds were against their hopes, she thought, like all mothers.
======
It was against so much of her better judgment that she told Bill on his next visit, before he left, "There's something else."
"What is it?" he said in the unspoken tone of I'll do whatever it is. He was in a sober, focused mood that reassured her.
"Caprica-Six. You should find a room for her. You barely slept in your quarters when I was there. Or- somewhere else. Cottle says he could put her to work here but I think he was joking, and I think it makes people nervous-"
He looked bemused already. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"I do. I do, Bill. She just- I don't think she has anywhere to go. Those men on the hangar deck attacked her, and... I, I don't think she's comfortable going back to the Cylons, and she can't be around Tigh, or Baltar, gods forbid." She grimaced and swallowed, trailing off.
"Where did this come from?"
"We talked," she said. "Bill, I've been thinking about what you said to me once. After Kara came back. That I didn't want to die alone, and it felt better when it meant something. That I'd lead us to Earth in my final years, and I couldn't face it being," she gestured vaguely, "I don't know, some meaningless godless garbage like everyone else's death."
"Did I say that?" his voice crackled lightly. "I think you're making me sound like a piece of work."
She laughed. "Maybe I'm just remembering the gist of it. It wasn't my best day either." He gave her a pained smile, the kind she would hate if not for the counter-feeling of wanting to be near him as long as possible. She felt lighter, younger, sillier for it. "And now we're just..." her thought broke into a cough that she soldiered through and continued. "We're just out here, for who knows how many generations, falling apart." She took a breath. "I'm going to leave. If not right now, soon, and I'm going to leave you and I know that-"
"Shhh," he said, trying not to cry in front of her, but she spoke over him.
"Do not shh me for yourself, Bill, I'm not gonna make you hear it many more times." Only she could take a lecturing tone from her deathbed, even with her hand in his. "If none of it matters I just want to do what I can, for people I care about, for people I love. For people I can barely stand. I don't want to leave them alone."
He kissed her hand. "Okay."
"Okay," she closed her eyes, and then opened them a moment later in a narrowed, half-playful way. "Don't frak her."
His smile was unforced now. "That wasn't gonna happen."
She clicked her teeth. "I don't know. She's very pretty."
"Too tall," he said. "And I don't like blondes."
They would never come to this arrangement either way. The ship itself was dying. In days he did not have an extra bed to speak of, and shortly after that she'd join him on the hangar deck. There may have been hope in the world after all, because she did see the outside of her room in sickbay again, she saw Hera again in the arms of her mother. She saw Caprica and Baltar, when the gunshots died away, holding hands like there was no one watching.
======
Her sight was the first thing to go even as her visions proved true, if askew. Under a tarp, blankets keeping her warm, she took in as much of the planet as she could as Cottle's drug cocktail's effects wore off, the adrenaline and euphoria that had kept her moving for the past few hours. She could not imagine standing now, but all she wanted was to run across the fields, to swim in the ocean. She could almost feel it, not feel anything else, only to remember she was still miles away on the shore.
It was Bill clearing his throat that made her stir slightly and know he'd come back, with Dr. Baltar in tow, who sat down on a blanket next to her like he was worried -- maybe just a fraction worried, but still factoring in the possibility, that it was full of knives. "I'll be right over here, Laura," Bill said to her, gesturing somewhere, and she whispered, "Okay."
Baltar seemed to be buzzing with nerves somehow, though it might've just been her eyes creating blurred edges to his face, a static around him as he ran a hand through his hair. She realized it wasn't the kind of fear she was used to from him. After all her attempts to avoid this scene, she was seeing it from the other side after all, what she'd gone through with her mother. She'd held his own existence in her hands once, more than once. And he looked like he didn't know how someone so strong, so large in his life, was such a frail scrap of bones and ragged breaths now. Still she summoned her voice to speak to him. "Don't look so afraid, doctor... You have a job to do."
"A- a job?" He would look frightened at the prospect. Willing but frightened, to do anything. That was fair.
"Yes," she swallowed with difficulty. She did everything with difficulty now. Every word pressed out slowly; she felt she was choosing them more carefully now "These people... they need you."
"I believe Mr. Lampkin will be acting as President," he said slowly, as if even he was trying to calculate the chance in hell that's what she was talking about.
"Not... what I meant." She did not have the time for thoughts on that. It wasn't her choice, she still hoped (knew) Lee and his stubborn sense of justice would not be far from whatever sort of government they made; balancing his naivete against Lampkin's opportunism, it wasn't the worst idea. But none of this was in her hands anymore. It shouldn't be now. They'd figure these things out as they were going to. Instead she shook her head and said, "You can help them."
"I’m pretty sure the only time I helped anyone was when I saved you." At any time, literally any other, she would cringe away from him holding this over her again. It always seemed a petty demand for credit, a grudge to hold against her, and now -- now, for once, she understood what it was, maybe what it had always been. The self-deprecating confession of it, the one thing he could feel he did right, no matter his other mistakes. For her, for the human race, for the people who loved her.
"You can't save me this time." She was taking his one good deed away from him. It was only fair to make sure it wasn't his last.
"I'm sorry about that," he continued earnestly. "I do feel I owe you. I mean, for not murdering me.” He was nothing if not grateful for that. And she could still make it count, for something other than her conscience.
“I’m not sorry," she rasped with a smile, and realized how much she meant it. "I’m... ready. But you do owe me. Use your... talents, to help these people." She looked him in the eyes, hoping he would catch her meaning. That Caprica was right, in their talk that seemed so long ago, that he'd never forgotten. She added, "Our people."
"My talents?" He shook his head slightly, not understanding for a moment, and just as quickly she saw it dawn on him, in the stretch of golden fields before them. "Whatever I know," he said. He was nodding firmly now, assuringly. "Whatever I can do. I’ll use it for them. Madam President."
The title was gentle, respectful. She tried to remember the last time he used her title in a way that didn't sound the least bit forced or patronizing. He favored her first name so long, even when she didn't want him to, and now when she nearly wouldn't have minded it... She realized then that he had been clasping her hand in both of his ever since he started talking about his talents. She gave it a limp squeeze and only said, "Good." And released him to go.
He moved to leave -- or some aura of him, in her eyes, seemed to be standing already, and then was suddenly back next to her, never rising from his seat at all. "Madam President, you, uh..." he stammered over his words a bit. "You never told anyone about what I did."
She couldn't see clearly but suspected there was something perpetually wounded in his face, not unlike Caprica. What do you want from me? she asked her, and she honestly hadn't known. He'd kept that secret so long before he unburdened himself in a cloud of morpha to her. Who had he expected her to tell? Hadn't she known for ages when she saw them together, and couldn't offer any proof of it? But she knew this was different, that since then it had been her secret too.
And the truth was, everything had moved so fast after the baseship, after Earth, after Tom Zarek's little uprising, for a time it almost hadn't seemed to matter anymore. He was so small to her then -- this person who'd loomed so large in her life, as helplessly mortal as she was now and asking not to die. She'd been so sure in those moments he needed to die, that for the sake of humanity's future, the sake of justice, that she had to, and then suddenly she wasn't, and the very lack of sureness was enough to spare him -- it seemed that decision was over. She didn't want Bill to kill him any more than she'd wanted him to bleed out on that table, and he would've. She wanted it less if she could feel blissfully unresponsible for it and delegrate that crime onto someone else. Nearly anyone would've killed him, had she asked. For once that power truly frightened her.
If he were truly remorseful -- and if he hadn't seemed to be before, talking delusionally about floods and God's will, he did a little more now -- he'd have to deal with that on his own. Tell it or not tell, leave himself to judgment or live with the guilt his own head, it wasn't in her hands. That was the only absolution she could give him. "Not... my story," she said simply. He'd be the only one with the secret again, and he could do with that again what he wanted.
"I should get to it," he said awkwardly. In the past she'd despair for a world with Gaius Baltar as their hope, but she couldn't find that bitterness in her now; it was a beautiful world, and she knew that he would try. He did owe that to her. With one last step back inside, he added, "Laura, I, uh... Caprica sends her regards." It was only then she amended her thought, that he wasn't the only one holding his secret now; there was Caprica, too. For good or ill, they had each other to carry the weight with. She'd wanted this, to leave no one alone, and again she felt the ache of Bill without her.
"She-" Baltar went on. "I think she grew to admire you greatly." It was more than that, she wanted to say, more and multitudes she couldn't understand, but didn't have the breath to explain, and that seemed to be Caprica's story now. "And thank you for being there for her when I..." he trailed off. When I wasn't, was all she could think, and he seemed to want to spend a long time rectifying that now. She remembered Caprica saying that her love for him wasn't what they were lacking, and she understood that his love wasn't, either.
"This place, it's..." it didn't have a name. "It's another chance." He'd preached about wanting that. It wasn't only her choice to give it to him. "Use it."
Bill was hovering at the entrance of the tarp, not intruding or listening (she wasn't sure even now if he could stomach that), but she knew when his shadow returned, to see whether they were finished. He didn't want to leave her, wanted to soak up any last precious moments before she was gone, and when she smiled it was the lighter, sillier her who only wanted that too. Baltar looked like he might want to bend and kiss her hand, or her forehead, in some misplaced sort of chivalry, but he looked between them and knew not to overstay his welcome. All he did, the trembling gray figure in a lush green world, was touch his hand to his heart and then leave, covering his face.
"You all right?" Bill's voice croaked, cleared his throat to cover it.
"I'm- still here." She knew that she was shaking with the effort of fighting against her own body, shutting down, just for a while longer. She had hung on through the battle and she would hang on through this. "My last... words... weren't gonna be... to Gaius Balt-" the end of his name strangled somewhat in her throat, coughing and gasping, and she knew in an odd, out-of-body way -- she was already feeling outside of her body -- that Bill was supporting her by the shoulders before she was finished.
"I know," Bill was saying as casually as he could manage. "We couldn't let that happen." Her body relaxed again, she did not care about saying the rest of his name, not from intolerance (though for once the bile she tasted in it was literal) but because he was already gone to his next life. Everyone always discussed dying with regrets, but it amazed her how much the very feeling of regret had faded away from her, leaving only the feeling of being present and loved. Each piece of her life was a door closing. Like long-forgotten boxes saved in one's home for years, only to be lost in a fire, a storm, a series of nuclear bombs, and for the owner to realize with a surprising sense of peace how little she ever needed them. She could not tell if this was a selfish thought or a selfless one. She thought of Billy, somewhere forever wise beyond his age, telling her it was human.
She inhaled again and though to form the words they'll be all right but this too seemed unnecessary. As if reading her mind, Bill said "I spoke to Caprica. She said... something about, you could've been friends. 'Under other circumstances.'"
Laura smiled. She did not say, only thought, that under no circumstances but the ones they were in now, could they have possibly come as close to being friends. "They'll all be..." she breathed. "fine."
"I brought you something," he said. It was a pair of binoculars, from the survey they were taking of the land. She'd been desperate to see the grazing animals in more detail, and didn't have the heart to tell him it made no difference now.
"It's... a very beautiful world," she said. He told her then about naming it Earth, and she allowed him that bit of humor, of resolution. Maybe it was. Maybe it was that simple, all this time, to make hopes real themselves. That sat in silence, until it seemed right to warn him, her voice smaller and shallower than before. "I'm having trouble breathing."
"Come on," he told her, and she was so unsure how any of this was meant to feel that it took her a moment to realize he was lifting her in the air, carrying her. It took her longer, until she felt discomfort from the hard seat of the raptor, and saw him embracing Lee and Kara outside it -- Lee and Kara figures, her eyes rendered them sharply and beautiful against the sky above them, waving goodbye -- that she was certain this was happening, not a dream, something she must not drift away from yet. They were flying for what felt like a very long time, until all she could see were colors and shapes, but vibrant ones, birds and fish and mammals she hadn't dreamed of in years, others she never thought she'd seen. "So much life," staring down into the water, she wanted to reach in and touch it but was still on the shore, and then she wasn't.
But first, obsessive_a101 remixed my own Dee/Gaeta friendship ficlet with Rippling Light (a Springs Eternal remix) and it was just wonderful!
My own 'remixee' was newnumbertwo with The Gifts of the Dying Leader, a fic where Roslin & Baltar speak one last time before the end of Daybreak. One of the things that struck me in that fic was the implication of Roslin and Caprica-Six's relationship and I wanted to explore that as well as write from her POV - which is as atypical for me as writing from Baltar's was for newnumbertwo. :)
Cross-posted at bsg-remix here, I'm still making my way through a bunch of other fic there!
Title: Common Ground (Time Washes Clean Remix)
Characters: Laura Roslin, Caprica-Six, Gaius Baltar, Bill Adama
Pairing: Adama/Roslin, Caprica/Baltar
Rating: PG
Warnings: canon death
Summary: Laura finds an unlikely connection during her last days in sickbay.
Word Count: @6,000
Author's Notes: Huge thanks to my beta, astreamofstars!
She was surrounded by water, cool and blue, naturally clear way she hadn't seen in what felt like eternity. She'd dreamed of this before. Was she dreaming now? She was on the open water with Emily, not yet on the shore. When she woke in a bed in sickbay, head bare and IV in her arm, she was told by the attending medic -- Ishay, she knew all their names by now -- that she'd fainted in her quarters (the Admiral's quarters). "Scared the marines half to death," Cottle grumbled. "You should give some warning when you feel like passing out."
"Hera," was the first thing she said, and the doctors exchanged a look she could read in an instant, a silent warning not to upset her.
"You should rest," Ishay said with slightly too much forced enthusiasm. Laura's throat felt very dry, she cringed at the discomfort and part of her did want to be elsewhere again.
"Tell Admiral Adama," she began, and then wasn't sure what it was she wanted to tell him. "That I'm awake now. Not to worry." She didn't doubt he'd already been checking in and calling. She imagined him a rock in CIC, but just as vividly saw him drinking himself into oblivion, and needed to steel herself against that. She added, meaning to think of the fleet, "Tell Lee also."
"Of course." The things she wanted to ask next were for one of her scarves back, for one of her cigarettes, and when they expected her to be able to leave. It was when she could not sit up without her hands shaking violently that it seemed to her the conversation would be this is the end. That she would stay as comfortable as she could in this room and not leave it again, and she did not want that conversation, was not ready for it yet. Her feet were planted, still not on the shore.
======
When it wasn't the water, it was the opera house she saw in her dreams, rows upon rows of ornate sculpture and tributes to the gods of Kobol, flying past her as she ran, a child's laugh impossibly loud over the sound of instruments. She woke hearing a moan that wasn't her own, that she expected somehow to be Sharon's. Instead it was the other one, Caprica-Six curled on her side, not quite in a fetal position on the bed nearby.
The last time they spoke she'd been glowing and anxious, and she'd told her -- what? That she hadn't had any of their dreams, not the whole time I've been pregnant. Two minutes awake, she said absently to Cottle, "She lost the baby, didn't she?"
The suddenness of the subject confused him at first. "Hera?" No, they'd all lost her. She was always running too fast. Laura shook her head faintly, she managed a purposeful look in the Six's direction and back at him.
"Oh," he cleared his throat, hesitated saying something else. "That she did. Eight days ago." Laura nodded and closed her eyes. Her head was still swimming, and a blurred memory returned to her, that she'd known this already. Colonel Tigh was sick with grief, it wasn't like her to forget that. She couldn't imagine what to say to either of them. What Cottle said, craning his neck toward the Cylon and raising his voice just enough to be heard, was "I'm kicking her out of that bed soon."
(She had a wild, unfocused thought that it could've been Lt. Gaeta's bed. She'd just remembered now how he sang in this room. She'd almost forgotten, twisted to rage by the sound of it over the wireless, what an astonishing voice he had.)
She'd now been conscious long enough to know this feeling, the numb, barely coherent flood of information she was struggling to piece together. "You know I don't want drugs," she said with gritted teeth. She needed to be clear, she had to-
"You were asking for them last night," he told her, in his bluntly empathetic way. "It was just for the pain. Don't try to be stubborn about this, you already lost." She believed that was true, but it silenced her in a way she hated. He was still angry at her for stopping her treatments. He didn't like to lose people, even for a cynic.
She looked back at Caprica-Six, who met her eyes with a terribly hollow expression and forced her to look away first. "She's been here eight days?" she said, trying to keep her voice quiet.
"Ellen's been to see her a few times."
"Can I get up to talk to her? Or can she come over here?"
He offered an arm to her, pushed the IV tray for her himself; it was a struggle to stand, but Laura felt relief in how manageable it was after all.
======
The Six rolled to her other side when she approached her, arms curved defensively in a way that seemed somehow deliberate, like she was conscious of her body at all times. She'd often laid exactly that way in her cell, Laura able to think nothing but Gods, they made her beautiful. Cottle stepped away, shut the curtain around them. "Hi," Laura said softly.
"You want to talk about the dreams," Caprica said in a distant voice, barely even a question.
"I don't..." she paused carefully, feeling she should have rehearsed something on the slow trip over. "I do. I always do. I want to know what they mean. But I think you know exactly as much as I do, and we don't have to."
Caprica said nothing.
"I'm not going to ask how you are. I know I can't imagine it. If there's anything I can..."
Somehow, barely moving, someting appared to soften in her. "Thank you, Madam President," she said politely.
It might never stop unsettling her to hear one of them call her that. (It was struggle enough to call the Cylon by her own name, the name of Laura's own planet turned to ash in a matter of hours, not five years ago.) A lot of them were saying that to her now, unironically. The first she remembered doing that was Leoben, only minutes before she had ejected him into space. Only for another -- the same man, a man at all? -- to give her a short, reverent smile in Galactica's hallways. They were citizens of the fleet now, her successor had promised it, and she could only let it pass.
She did think for a much more worrying moment, like Baltar, she might call her Laura. But she was too wary to be that familiar -- instinctively wary, her face was still but one of someone expecting a spider's bite any moment. It was certainly not the first time anyone looked at Laura that way. Elosha, for whatever she was, a dream or a spirit from the grave, had all but told her she'd forgotten how to love. Laura was trying, this moment, to love Caprica. Not to think of her name's origins, but how frail and sad she looked now. How she carried the resignation of someone who's not capable of losing anything else, and it was not the first time Laura had seen that look either.
======
Caprica sat cross-legged on the far end of Laura's bed, staring down at the joint in her hand like she already deeply regretted this decision. This Laura didn't mind, for the pain. One rapidly-contained coughing fit later (Caprica's this time, not hers) , the Cylon exhaled the rest of her breath and relaxed, returning it to her and pressing a hand against her own cheek. "I've never tried that," she said. Laura still had the presence of mind not to say, You can now.
"I still see him in my head," Caprica said after a few minutes. "He's there, playing with a toy car or... we had this wooden one, Saul found it from someone and-" she shook her head, her eyes watered. Laura could see her running the wheels over her stomach. "It's so real when I see it. Liam." She said the name in a whisper.
"Like a projection? Are you doing that?"
"Maybe," she still stared in kind of daze, a wonderment. "No. I feel like there's another world where he just... It was so close."
"There's another world where I'm doing cartwheels out of this room," Laura said, and Caprica broke her gaze but didn't quite smile back. "We have to... I think we have to take this one."
Caprica brushed a tear aside and shook it off. "You never had children," she said. "Did you, ever? Did you want one?"
"No. It's not that I-" she wasn't sure how to finish. "There were other things. Considering all that's happened since, it seems that was for the best." It was impossible to even imagine a different path of her life now, a pair of children dead on the Colonies, if she was even to survive (meant to survive) herself. "I'm sure of that now," she said, softer but steady.
"It's strange you didn't."
She almost laughed, felt the need to defend her choices reflexively. "It's not at all. It can't be a priority for everyone."
"But they are for you. You like them. You'd devote your life to them."
"Sometimes that's easier without your own." Caprica took this in. "I took after my mother, she was a teacher," she went on. (Her thoughts were with her so much lately, always coming to the edge of something terrible and then retreated to a happier memory instead.) "Maybe I just admired her so much. I wanted to fight for people like her, not just the kids." Something painful crossed Caprica's face, just for an instant. "What?"
"I don't know," Caprica said. "Parents." Whatever she was thinking seemed enormous and alien to Laura. She remembered the Cylons were children of no one, or humanity, or maybe, crazily, Ellen Tigh, and didn't envy any of those shadows. What she said next was another subject entirely though, as if switching on another light. "Gaius's father was sick."
"Was he?" Laura asked, not that interested in the answer.
"Back on Caprica." Remembering herself, she added, "He told me."
"He didn't tell you," Laura said, simply. "You saw him. You knew him then."
She said nothing, not a confirmation or denial. What did it matter now? Her loyalty to him always seemed to verge on martyrdom. And Laura felt strangely comforted to know she was equally wary of being played, of the conversation moving from trap to trap. The Six only went on, "He was a farmer."
"Was he really?" she said evenly. "I read that once."
"Gaius was very private about it," Caprica continued, with a knowing look to her meaning. "Before that... manifesto or whatever he named it. He was ashamed."
Poor thing, Laura thought, could not fit any math or logic into human relationships. "So, some of us don't take after our parents at all."
"No. He thought he wasn't anything like him, but he was. Julius was only arrogant about different things. And probably some of the same." Her smile faded from mischievous to something more sincere, wistful. "He was proud of what he did, Julius. He was upset to lose it. He hurt that Gaius left, even if he still took care of him. He'd taught him everything. Gaius only told me when he was drunk, but he'd memorized it all. Sometimes I thought if we did find Earth..." she caught herself mid-sentence, like she was afraid of raising a bad memory, or embarrassed by her own flights of innocence. She deflected the idea just as quickly. "I imagined a lot of things." Laura noticed a glint of pride, affection in her eyes when she talked about him, a moment before she'd be pulled back to reality. She still loved him.
"You still care about him," is what she said.
Caprica smiled again, if not with her eyes. "That was never what we were missing."
Laura felt lightheaded. So little else mattered at the end, she wanted to tell her. "His father was sick," she repeated instead. "What was wrong with him?"
Caprica stared at the ceiling. "A lot of things. His back, his kidneys were failing. He'd forget things. He'd forget where he was. He was old, he was a very old person. I'd never known someone experiencing that. It made them both so angry." She looked back at her in serious thought. "I think that's why you look afraid of children sometimes; I thought it was just Hera, in the dream."
She'd gone so fast from one thought to the other, personal to philosophical and back, that Laura felt her heart twist. She thought she was done with anger, done being frightened, but sometimes it bubbled up again, the reality of her death, she felt horribly exposed and manipulated but couldn't stop herself. "I couldn't live with them going through this," she said in a painfully wavering voice. "A family. Being like my mother..." the tears came even sooner than they had the last time she talked about her, just the word brought a sting to her eyes that had been building for the last few minutes. It was never the responsibility, she wouldn't be where she was if she feared that, wouldn't have the fates of tens of thousands of people in her hands. Maybe it had always just reminded her of death, loving or being loved. She would die and they'd be all that was left, a different kind of responsibility. The buzz was probably all that kept her from breaking down harder.
She knew the Cylon was watching her, empathetic but curiously, like she wasn't sure how to give warmth in a natural way, at least not to her. "I'm sorry," she said in a foreign-sounding way. "I know," though it would be hard for her to. She reached to touch her hand, and Laura found herself grabbing it forcefully, what she was feeling a moment ago replaced with a rush of steel in her veins.
"I saw you once on Caprica. You looked in my eyes. Do you remember that?"
Whatever she was hoping for -- a glimmer of recognition, surprise, guilt -- she was disappointed. (She'd gotten at least that from Gaius once, even if it did very little.) She searched her eyes and only saw confusion, and something sadder, that she didn't want to believe was pity. "I don't," Caprica said.
"You were there." She would not let this go, maybe she would never. "You were with Baltar, you were holding each other. You looked back at me, like you saw I was watching you."
Caprica's mouth twisted uncertainly. "What do you want from me?" There was a helplessness in it. (Her face like all of them, 49,998 people, who'd already lost whatever they could lose. Her face like someone who'd do conceivably anything to make them both feel better about this.)
"I want to know what you were thinking. Right then, when I saw you."
She paused. "I was probably happy."
Laura felt a wave of relief, almost, to hear her say it. The smallness of it.
"We used to walk by the fountains outside the ministry. He'd kiss me in public. I don't remember you," she said again. "But I liked when people watched us. I shouldn't have. It would've been safer to be invisible. I wasn't there to attract attention from anyone but him. But... I was proud. I was happy. I wanted people to envy how happy we were." She might keep talking, until told it was enough. Laura relaxed her hand, though Caprica didn't move away. "It was a sin wanting that."
"Not your worst," Laura said. It sounded human, but she didn't say this.
Caprica took a long breath. "I hate it when people watch me now," she said.
Laura didn't know if this was meant to make her feel better, or if she simply needed to relieve herself further, the way she used to murmur to no one in her cell. "You can go home to the baseship," she said, not unkindly.
She shook her head. "It's worse there. It's always been worse from them." Another dark, almost-smile. "At least I intimidate some of you. When I look back, you stop staring."
It hadn't occurred to Laura before that she'd do anything but disappear there. And that of course she could not. "What do they think you are?"
"A hero," she almost choked on the word. "A hero or a failure, now."
An image flashed through Laura's mind, the faces of the men on the Astral Queen looking to her to bless their souls. The applause when she returned from Kobol, the dead left behind but Earth shining nearer than ever. She forgot how to meet a stranger without seeing at least a flash of adoration or vitriol in their eyes. She remembered the questions on so many faces when she stepped off the shuttle from Earth, a moment seared in her mind like a scar. They were deathly quiet when the door opened, before the clamoring for answers began, they were only looking at her and she had nothing, nothing. All that hope...
"Cottle is nice to me," Caprica was saying. "And then he leaves me alone."
Her mind reeled back, it was strange she never had children. The hope on those faces after Earth. The idea of being the one to tell them the worst truths of the world.
(She thinks sometimes, Billy could've been her child. She knows logically she did not fail him.)
"That's not what I am," Laura must have murmured out loud, the smallest misfire of her brain and speech, out of the disease or paranoia, she didn't know. She knew that Caprica looked alarmed and guilty (now, guilty, whatever that was worth) to have heard her.
"I didn't mean you at all," Caprica blurted. And Laura knew very likely she hadn'’t, that it was her own subconscious talking to her again, that conceivably they could both be heroes and failures, in the way she and Baltar were just frauds of different degrees, but this was not a common ground she could approach just now.
"I'm sorry," Laura said, closing her eyes. "I'm- tired." She was not, but it had been a convenient excuse lately. "I'll leave you alone." She'd been the one to come to Laura's end of sickbay this time, but it was kinder than any variation of Go.
Caprica stood uncertainly, started to leave. "You're not a failure. You aren't either of those things to me," she added, hoping to be comforting in her honesty, and Laura hated to admit it was. "You're only sick, L- Madam President."
It wasn't the dying, she wanted to explain, but the meaninglessness of it. Bill was right once, it felt better when it meant something, that she'd lead them to Earth - with that gone, she'd been nothing but a raiser of empty hopes. Still, she knew logically it wasn't her fault, as she knew she probably didn't need to say what she was about to.
"I think you're a lot of things, Caprica." It didn't mean to sound as harsh as it might have. She was more things, multitudes of things, she couldn't understand. "But Liam, that wasn't you."
Caprica looked at her hands. "I know," she said. "It doesn't lessen it, does it?"
"No," she agreed. The odds were against their hopes, she thought, like all mothers.
======
It was against so much of her better judgment that she told Bill on his next visit, before he left, "There's something else."
"What is it?" he said in the unspoken tone of I'll do whatever it is. He was in a sober, focused mood that reassured her.
"Caprica-Six. You should find a room for her. You barely slept in your quarters when I was there. Or- somewhere else. Cottle says he could put her to work here but I think he was joking, and I think it makes people nervous-"
He looked bemused already. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"I do. I do, Bill. She just- I don't think she has anywhere to go. Those men on the hangar deck attacked her, and... I, I don't think she's comfortable going back to the Cylons, and she can't be around Tigh, or Baltar, gods forbid." She grimaced and swallowed, trailing off.
"Where did this come from?"
"We talked," she said. "Bill, I've been thinking about what you said to me once. After Kara came back. That I didn't want to die alone, and it felt better when it meant something. That I'd lead us to Earth in my final years, and I couldn't face it being," she gestured vaguely, "I don't know, some meaningless godless garbage like everyone else's death."
"Did I say that?" his voice crackled lightly. "I think you're making me sound like a piece of work."
She laughed. "Maybe I'm just remembering the gist of it. It wasn't my best day either." He gave her a pained smile, the kind she would hate if not for the counter-feeling of wanting to be near him as long as possible. She felt lighter, younger, sillier for it. "And now we're just..." her thought broke into a cough that she soldiered through and continued. "We're just out here, for who knows how many generations, falling apart." She took a breath. "I'm going to leave. If not right now, soon, and I'm going to leave you and I know that-"
"Shhh," he said, trying not to cry in front of her, but she spoke over him.
"Do not shh me for yourself, Bill, I'm not gonna make you hear it many more times." Only she could take a lecturing tone from her deathbed, even with her hand in his. "If none of it matters I just want to do what I can, for people I care about, for people I love. For people I can barely stand. I don't want to leave them alone."
He kissed her hand. "Okay."
"Okay," she closed her eyes, and then opened them a moment later in a narrowed, half-playful way. "Don't frak her."
His smile was unforced now. "That wasn't gonna happen."
She clicked her teeth. "I don't know. She's very pretty."
"Too tall," he said. "And I don't like blondes."
They would never come to this arrangement either way. The ship itself was dying. In days he did not have an extra bed to speak of, and shortly after that she'd join him on the hangar deck. There may have been hope in the world after all, because she did see the outside of her room in sickbay again, she saw Hera again in the arms of her mother. She saw Caprica and Baltar, when the gunshots died away, holding hands like there was no one watching.
======
Her sight was the first thing to go even as her visions proved true, if askew. Under a tarp, blankets keeping her warm, she took in as much of the planet as she could as Cottle's drug cocktail's effects wore off, the adrenaline and euphoria that had kept her moving for the past few hours. She could not imagine standing now, but all she wanted was to run across the fields, to swim in the ocean. She could almost feel it, not feel anything else, only to remember she was still miles away on the shore.
It was Bill clearing his throat that made her stir slightly and know he'd come back, with Dr. Baltar in tow, who sat down on a blanket next to her like he was worried -- maybe just a fraction worried, but still factoring in the possibility, that it was full of knives. "I'll be right over here, Laura," Bill said to her, gesturing somewhere, and she whispered, "Okay."
Baltar seemed to be buzzing with nerves somehow, though it might've just been her eyes creating blurred edges to his face, a static around him as he ran a hand through his hair. She realized it wasn't the kind of fear she was used to from him. After all her attempts to avoid this scene, she was seeing it from the other side after all, what she'd gone through with her mother. She'd held his own existence in her hands once, more than once. And he looked like he didn't know how someone so strong, so large in his life, was such a frail scrap of bones and ragged breaths now. Still she summoned her voice to speak to him. "Don't look so afraid, doctor... You have a job to do."
"A- a job?" He would look frightened at the prospect. Willing but frightened, to do anything. That was fair.
"Yes," she swallowed with difficulty. She did everything with difficulty now. Every word pressed out slowly; she felt she was choosing them more carefully now "These people... they need you."
"I believe Mr. Lampkin will be acting as President," he said slowly, as if even he was trying to calculate the chance in hell that's what she was talking about.
"Not... what I meant." She did not have the time for thoughts on that. It wasn't her choice, she still hoped (knew) Lee and his stubborn sense of justice would not be far from whatever sort of government they made; balancing his naivete against Lampkin's opportunism, it wasn't the worst idea. But none of this was in her hands anymore. It shouldn't be now. They'd figure these things out as they were going to. Instead she shook her head and said, "You can help them."
"I’m pretty sure the only time I helped anyone was when I saved you." At any time, literally any other, she would cringe away from him holding this over her again. It always seemed a petty demand for credit, a grudge to hold against her, and now -- now, for once, she understood what it was, maybe what it had always been. The self-deprecating confession of it, the one thing he could feel he did right, no matter his other mistakes. For her, for the human race, for the people who loved her.
"You can't save me this time." She was taking his one good deed away from him. It was only fair to make sure it wasn't his last.
"I'm sorry about that," he continued earnestly. "I do feel I owe you. I mean, for not murdering me.” He was nothing if not grateful for that. And she could still make it count, for something other than her conscience.
“I’m not sorry," she rasped with a smile, and realized how much she meant it. "I’m... ready. But you do owe me. Use your... talents, to help these people." She looked him in the eyes, hoping he would catch her meaning. That Caprica was right, in their talk that seemed so long ago, that he'd never forgotten. She added, "Our people."
"My talents?" He shook his head slightly, not understanding for a moment, and just as quickly she saw it dawn on him, in the stretch of golden fields before them. "Whatever I know," he said. He was nodding firmly now, assuringly. "Whatever I can do. I’ll use it for them. Madam President."
The title was gentle, respectful. She tried to remember the last time he used her title in a way that didn't sound the least bit forced or patronizing. He favored her first name so long, even when she didn't want him to, and now when she nearly wouldn't have minded it... She realized then that he had been clasping her hand in both of his ever since he started talking about his talents. She gave it a limp squeeze and only said, "Good." And released him to go.
He moved to leave -- or some aura of him, in her eyes, seemed to be standing already, and then was suddenly back next to her, never rising from his seat at all. "Madam President, you, uh..." he stammered over his words a bit. "You never told anyone about what I did."
She couldn't see clearly but suspected there was something perpetually wounded in his face, not unlike Caprica. What do you want from me? she asked her, and she honestly hadn't known. He'd kept that secret so long before he unburdened himself in a cloud of morpha to her. Who had he expected her to tell? Hadn't she known for ages when she saw them together, and couldn't offer any proof of it? But she knew this was different, that since then it had been her secret too.
And the truth was, everything had moved so fast after the baseship, after Earth, after Tom Zarek's little uprising, for a time it almost hadn't seemed to matter anymore. He was so small to her then -- this person who'd loomed so large in her life, as helplessly mortal as she was now and asking not to die. She'd been so sure in those moments he needed to die, that for the sake of humanity's future, the sake of justice, that she had to, and then suddenly she wasn't, and the very lack of sureness was enough to spare him -- it seemed that decision was over. She didn't want Bill to kill him any more than she'd wanted him to bleed out on that table, and he would've. She wanted it less if she could feel blissfully unresponsible for it and delegrate that crime onto someone else. Nearly anyone would've killed him, had she asked. For once that power truly frightened her.
If he were truly remorseful -- and if he hadn't seemed to be before, talking delusionally about floods and God's will, he did a little more now -- he'd have to deal with that on his own. Tell it or not tell, leave himself to judgment or live with the guilt his own head, it wasn't in her hands. That was the only absolution she could give him. "Not... my story," she said simply. He'd be the only one with the secret again, and he could do with that again what he wanted.
"I should get to it," he said awkwardly. In the past she'd despair for a world with Gaius Baltar as their hope, but she couldn't find that bitterness in her now; it was a beautiful world, and she knew that he would try. He did owe that to her. With one last step back inside, he added, "Laura, I, uh... Caprica sends her regards." It was only then she amended her thought, that he wasn't the only one holding his secret now; there was Caprica, too. For good or ill, they had each other to carry the weight with. She'd wanted this, to leave no one alone, and again she felt the ache of Bill without her.
"She-" Baltar went on. "I think she grew to admire you greatly." It was more than that, she wanted to say, more and multitudes she couldn't understand, but didn't have the breath to explain, and that seemed to be Caprica's story now. "And thank you for being there for her when I..." he trailed off. When I wasn't, was all she could think, and he seemed to want to spend a long time rectifying that now. She remembered Caprica saying that her love for him wasn't what they were lacking, and she understood that his love wasn't, either.
"This place, it's..." it didn't have a name. "It's another chance." He'd preached about wanting that. It wasn't only her choice to give it to him. "Use it."
Bill was hovering at the entrance of the tarp, not intruding or listening (she wasn't sure even now if he could stomach that), but she knew when his shadow returned, to see whether they were finished. He didn't want to leave her, wanted to soak up any last precious moments before she was gone, and when she smiled it was the lighter, sillier her who only wanted that too. Baltar looked like he might want to bend and kiss her hand, or her forehead, in some misplaced sort of chivalry, but he looked between them and knew not to overstay his welcome. All he did, the trembling gray figure in a lush green world, was touch his hand to his heart and then leave, covering his face.
"You all right?" Bill's voice croaked, cleared his throat to cover it.
"I'm- still here." She knew that she was shaking with the effort of fighting against her own body, shutting down, just for a while longer. She had hung on through the battle and she would hang on through this. "My last... words... weren't gonna be... to Gaius Balt-" the end of his name strangled somewhat in her throat, coughing and gasping, and she knew in an odd, out-of-body way -- she was already feeling outside of her body -- that Bill was supporting her by the shoulders before she was finished.
"I know," Bill was saying as casually as he could manage. "We couldn't let that happen." Her body relaxed again, she did not care about saying the rest of his name, not from intolerance (though for once the bile she tasted in it was literal) but because he was already gone to his next life. Everyone always discussed dying with regrets, but it amazed her how much the very feeling of regret had faded away from her, leaving only the feeling of being present and loved. Each piece of her life was a door closing. Like long-forgotten boxes saved in one's home for years, only to be lost in a fire, a storm, a series of nuclear bombs, and for the owner to realize with a surprising sense of peace how little she ever needed them. She could not tell if this was a selfish thought or a selfless one. She thought of Billy, somewhere forever wise beyond his age, telling her it was human.
She inhaled again and though to form the words they'll be all right but this too seemed unnecessary. As if reading her mind, Bill said "I spoke to Caprica. She said... something about, you could've been friends. 'Under other circumstances.'"
Laura smiled. She did not say, only thought, that under no circumstances but the ones they were in now, could they have possibly come as close to being friends. "They'll all be..." she breathed. "fine."
"I brought you something," he said. It was a pair of binoculars, from the survey they were taking of the land. She'd been desperate to see the grazing animals in more detail, and didn't have the heart to tell him it made no difference now.
"It's... a very beautiful world," she said. He told her then about naming it Earth, and she allowed him that bit of humor, of resolution. Maybe it was. Maybe it was that simple, all this time, to make hopes real themselves. That sat in silence, until it seemed right to warn him, her voice smaller and shallower than before. "I'm having trouble breathing."
"Come on," he told her, and she was so unsure how any of this was meant to feel that it took her a moment to realize he was lifting her in the air, carrying her. It took her longer, until she felt discomfort from the hard seat of the raptor, and saw him embracing Lee and Kara outside it -- Lee and Kara figures, her eyes rendered them sharply and beautiful against the sky above them, waving goodbye -- that she was certain this was happening, not a dream, something she must not drift away from yet. They were flying for what felt like a very long time, until all she could see were colors and shapes, but vibrant ones, birds and fish and mammals she hadn't dreamed of in years, others she never thought she'd seen. "So much life," staring down into the water, she wanted to reach in and touch it but was still on the shore, and then she wasn't.