[bsg] know well the gathering of stars
Title: Know Well The Gathering Of Stars
Summary: Laura Roslin, supporting cast.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None definitive.
A/N: Thanks to sloanesomething, bantha_fodder and alliesings.
*
Know Well The Gathering Of Stars
*
Release from this weary task of mine
has been my plea to the gods
throughout this long year's watch,
in which, lying upon the palace roof of the Atreidae,
upon my bent arm, like a dog,
I have learned to know well the gathering of the night's stars,
those radiant potentates conspicuous in the firmament,
bringers of winter and summer to mankind -
the constellations, when they rise and set.
- Watchman, Agamemnon.
*
When Laura was a teacher, she liked to have her exams marked within a week and her lessons planned days in advance. Every subject had a different folder and everything was neat, ordered, labelled. Her writing on the board was an anomaly that irritated her, but she decided that her chaotic side needed an outlet, and left it at that.
She misses, more than she’d tell anyone - even Billy - the days in the classroom, where she spent hours analysing the twelve great poets of the Colonies.
Then, the answers to questions weren’t life or death for what the Cylons have left of humanity.
*
She spends about an hour choosing what to wear to her first official press conference, which is ridiculous because she’s never had less to choose from. Her hands won’t stop sweating.
Lee meets her at the door to escort her to the shuttle waiting to take her to Cloud 9. On the way, he says something complimentary about the colour of her suit, and she wonders whether it was his mother or his father that trained him to be so polite, or whether it’s just Lee.
She manages the conference quite well; she’s got excellent voice projection and presence and she only fumbles on two of the trickier questions. Billy coached her well.
“Well done, Madam President,” Lee tells her afterwards. “You couldn’t have done better.”
Not quite true, she thinks ruefully, thinking about how she’d answered the question about the Presidency succession by chasing her own tail in circles, and how she’d had no real idea of how important tylium was to the fleet in general bar ‘we need it for fuel’.
“Stop evaluating yourself,” she can almost hear her father say. “You did fine.”
“Not bad for a first time,” she replies carefully. When she gets back to her quarters, she gets Billy to find her a book on Colonial resources. She reads about tylium every night until she's memorized it all.
When the reporter snidely asks her about tylium again, Laura tears her to shreds.
*
Soon, she's busier than she’s ever been. She visits every ship, meets every captain, smiles until her cheeks ache. Years spent at school mean she's more at home in heels than in flat shoes, something she's extremely grateful for.
She almost forgets she’s dying.
*
Billy always tries to have some good news stories for her at the end of his briefings; identical twins born on a civilian ship, an engagement on the Galactica - a couple get married on Cloud 9 and Laura sends them a bottle of champagne.
She needs them the most in the mornings, when she wakes up having dreamt about a little girl with soft brown eyes and a face full of accusation, always holding a doll with bright yellow hair.
*
She notices half way through the meeting that Billy’s looking at his watch every five minutes. Then it’s every minute, then every thirty seconds. She beckons him closer.
“The shuttle leaves in ten,” she says in a half whisper. “If you run, you’ll make it.”
“How did you - “
“Go. I can handle this without you.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s hot water rosters, Billy. I think I’ll manage.”
He grins. “Yes, Madam President.”
“Say hello to Dee for me.”
”I will.”
She smiles as he leaves the room in a rush of papers and green paisley.
*
Sometimes Laura finds herself wishing she could give anyone who bothered her detention at lunchtime.
*
Numbers, numbers everywhere, overwhelming in their magnitude - people alive, people dead, people to feed, addition and subtraction, black on a whiteboard. Forty-two people ahead of her in line for Presidency. Forty-two people who would have been better equipped to do what is now her job.
Sometimes it feels like a million.
Laura wonders exactly what the odds were, but she was never good at math.
*
“No,” she tells him. “Tell them that is ridiculous.”
“In that exact phrasing?” Billy asks, with a ghost of a grin.
“Why not?” Laura snaps back. “It is. Not one member of this fleet is any more entitled to a commodity than another.”
She paces, notices Lee giving her a strange look as Billy moves out of the room to send her message to the Leonis delegate. “What?”
“I was wondering if you meant that.” Lee is smiling, but she knows him well enough to know that he’s not entirely joking. “I think your coffee, Madame President, is better than anywhere else on the fleet.”
”I have a lot of policies to sign,” she says lightly. “I need something to keep me awake.”
“Of course.”
She notices the clipboard in his hand has a bent corner and the plastic is pulling away from the edges, and she looks around the room. There is a pile of creamy paper stacked on her desk and there are soft throw rugs carelessly draped over the chairs.
She wraps her arms around herself.
“Look after yourself,” Lee tells her, getting to his feet. “Make sure you do sleep. We can’t afford to lose the President.”
Billy comes back into the room just as Lee finishes his sentence, and the words hang in the air. Lee doesn’t say anything else, goes back the Galactica, to his tiny cramped office and that night, when she’s bought the first course of her meal, she picks up her fragile wine glass and runs her finger under it. Sure enough, the emblem of the Canceron glassblowers is a tiny bump between her fingers, and she puts the glass down, stares down at her meal.
“Where did these glasses come from?”
Billy looks up. “I don’t know, Madame President. Would you like me to -“
”Don’t bother.”
She’s not hungry anymore.
*
Laura stands under the hot water of her shower and sighs. She only has ten minutes, the same as every person in the fleet - water is recycled, but it takes fuel and power that the Fleet needs to conserve.
She traces the almost imperceptible lump on the right side of one breast with her fingernails.
When the water cuts out, she hasn’t yet reached for the soap.
*
One day, Lee quotes poetry in her presence, and she laughs.
“Almost right.” She grins at his crestfallen look. “And make sure you hold back the emphasis. Like this,” she tells him, repeats the phrase back at him, and she’s a teacher again, standing in front of a classroom and trying to breathe life into the words of a poet who died long before the apocalypse. She’s another verse in before she suddenly realises that she’s let herself get carried away. Lee grins at her as she comes to a halt.
“I bet you were a tough grader.”
“You would have passed,” she tells him, looking over the crisp uniform and the bright blue eyes, and wonders what she’s meaning.
*
She wonders where Billy gets his shirts from.
*
She’s returning from a meeting about the pilot shortage with Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, Lieutenant Thrace and Lee, and Billy is in step beside her. She's lost in her thoughts about the possible training procedure outlined by Lieutenant Thrace when he says something.
“Do you think the rumours are true?”
“What?” she asks, absentmindedly.
“That Captain Apollo is in love with Lieutenant Thrace?”
"Yes," she says before she thinks, and hears her footsteps echo on the concrete floor, one two one two.
“Isn't that against regulations?”
She thinks about the balance of power, the lump in her breast, and forty-two people ahead of her in line.
“I don’t think it’s something we need to talk about,” she says instead. Billy takes the hint.
*
“You can not do this.” A vein is throbbing in his temple. He’s livid. She’s never seen him like this.
“Are you doubting my judgement as President, Captain?”
“As your military advisor, Madam President, my role is to give you my honest opinion. And that isn’t fair.”
“Life isn’t, Captain,” she cracks back, and her voice is almost shaking. “You of all people should know that by now.”
He flinches, and she thinks that somewhere she should feel guilty for using his past against him but she’ s so angry that her nails are biting into the palms of her hands. Billy is very deliberately not looking at either of them, and Laura knows he’s about to offer some excuse and disappear from the room. Gone are the days when he thought she needed moral support.
When Lee speaks again, his voice is softer and carefully controlled and Laura knows that’s worse than before.
“Then your job, Madam President, is to make what people have left as fair as possible.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Impossible? So, you are saying that democracy is impossible?”
“Be careful, Captain,” she warns, and Lee takes a deep breath.
“If you’ll excuse me, Madam President, I have rosters to write. And if you have no further need of me -.”
“Captain Apollo,” she says, suddenly tired.
“Madam President?”
“Thank you for your input. I will consider it.”
“I’m sure you will,” he says, and closes the hatch behind him on the way out. He is always the gentleman.
*
The Great Tragedies were a third-year staple; bookstores made a mint off the footnoted versions, because they made for better papers.
She made them read Agamemnon first, because it was the one with the sex, the corruption, the holy wrath.
“Now that’s out of the way,” she would say at the start of the second week, looking over her glasses for emphasis, “I don’t like hyperbole, not in my histories and not in my papers.”
She always got hyperbole anyway.
“Madam President? We need an answer now.”
The voice is accompanied by a crackle of static, and she looks around the room, willing Billy or Lee to appear, but Billy is on one of his few days off and Lee is flying CAP with Starbuck and there’s nobody.
“You know it was him?” she repeats.
“He raped three little girls,” the man tells her, sounding desperate and angry. “We caught him.”
“Surely there is some procedure. This has to go through some kind of trial - ”
“He was shot trying to escape. We could save him, but..."
The ‘but’ hangs in the air. Laura thinks of Kami.
“Let him die.”
A week later she remembers it's a line from Agamemnon, stops too short of the podium, has to swallow the feeling of falling before she can give her speech.
Then Billy needs her on Galactica, and Lee has a question about martial law, and she forgets.
*
Summary: Laura Roslin, supporting cast.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None definitive.
A/N: Thanks to sloanesomething, bantha_fodder and alliesings.
*
Know Well The Gathering Of Stars
*
Release from this weary task of mine
has been my plea to the gods
throughout this long year's watch,
in which, lying upon the palace roof of the Atreidae,
upon my bent arm, like a dog,
I have learned to know well the gathering of the night's stars,
those radiant potentates conspicuous in the firmament,
bringers of winter and summer to mankind -
the constellations, when they rise and set.
- Watchman, Agamemnon.
*
When Laura was a teacher, she liked to have her exams marked within a week and her lessons planned days in advance. Every subject had a different folder and everything was neat, ordered, labelled. Her writing on the board was an anomaly that irritated her, but she decided that her chaotic side needed an outlet, and left it at that.
She misses, more than she’d tell anyone - even Billy - the days in the classroom, where she spent hours analysing the twelve great poets of the Colonies.
Then, the answers to questions weren’t life or death for what the Cylons have left of humanity.
*
She spends about an hour choosing what to wear to her first official press conference, which is ridiculous because she’s never had less to choose from. Her hands won’t stop sweating.
Lee meets her at the door to escort her to the shuttle waiting to take her to Cloud 9. On the way, he says something complimentary about the colour of her suit, and she wonders whether it was his mother or his father that trained him to be so polite, or whether it’s just Lee.
She manages the conference quite well; she’s got excellent voice projection and presence and she only fumbles on two of the trickier questions. Billy coached her well.
“Well done, Madam President,” Lee tells her afterwards. “You couldn’t have done better.”
Not quite true, she thinks ruefully, thinking about how she’d answered the question about the Presidency succession by chasing her own tail in circles, and how she’d had no real idea of how important tylium was to the fleet in general bar ‘we need it for fuel’.
“Stop evaluating yourself,” she can almost hear her father say. “You did fine.”
“Not bad for a first time,” she replies carefully. When she gets back to her quarters, she gets Billy to find her a book on Colonial resources. She reads about tylium every night until she's memorized it all.
When the reporter snidely asks her about tylium again, Laura tears her to shreds.
*
Soon, she's busier than she’s ever been. She visits every ship, meets every captain, smiles until her cheeks ache. Years spent at school mean she's more at home in heels than in flat shoes, something she's extremely grateful for.
She almost forgets she’s dying.
*
Billy always tries to have some good news stories for her at the end of his briefings; identical twins born on a civilian ship, an engagement on the Galactica - a couple get married on Cloud 9 and Laura sends them a bottle of champagne.
She needs them the most in the mornings, when she wakes up having dreamt about a little girl with soft brown eyes and a face full of accusation, always holding a doll with bright yellow hair.
*
She notices half way through the meeting that Billy’s looking at his watch every five minutes. Then it’s every minute, then every thirty seconds. She beckons him closer.
“The shuttle leaves in ten,” she says in a half whisper. “If you run, you’ll make it.”
“How did you - “
“Go. I can handle this without you.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s hot water rosters, Billy. I think I’ll manage.”
He grins. “Yes, Madam President.”
“Say hello to Dee for me.”
”I will.”
She smiles as he leaves the room in a rush of papers and green paisley.
*
Sometimes Laura finds herself wishing she could give anyone who bothered her detention at lunchtime.
*
Numbers, numbers everywhere, overwhelming in their magnitude - people alive, people dead, people to feed, addition and subtraction, black on a whiteboard. Forty-two people ahead of her in line for Presidency. Forty-two people who would have been better equipped to do what is now her job.
Sometimes it feels like a million.
Laura wonders exactly what the odds were, but she was never good at math.
*
“No,” she tells him. “Tell them that is ridiculous.”
“In that exact phrasing?” Billy asks, with a ghost of a grin.
“Why not?” Laura snaps back. “It is. Not one member of this fleet is any more entitled to a commodity than another.”
She paces, notices Lee giving her a strange look as Billy moves out of the room to send her message to the Leonis delegate. “What?”
“I was wondering if you meant that.” Lee is smiling, but she knows him well enough to know that he’s not entirely joking. “I think your coffee, Madame President, is better than anywhere else on the fleet.”
”I have a lot of policies to sign,” she says lightly. “I need something to keep me awake.”
“Of course.”
She notices the clipboard in his hand has a bent corner and the plastic is pulling away from the edges, and she looks around the room. There is a pile of creamy paper stacked on her desk and there are soft throw rugs carelessly draped over the chairs.
She wraps her arms around herself.
“Look after yourself,” Lee tells her, getting to his feet. “Make sure you do sleep. We can’t afford to lose the President.”
Billy comes back into the room just as Lee finishes his sentence, and the words hang in the air. Lee doesn’t say anything else, goes back the Galactica, to his tiny cramped office and that night, when she’s bought the first course of her meal, she picks up her fragile wine glass and runs her finger under it. Sure enough, the emblem of the Canceron glassblowers is a tiny bump between her fingers, and she puts the glass down, stares down at her meal.
“Where did these glasses come from?”
Billy looks up. “I don’t know, Madame President. Would you like me to -“
”Don’t bother.”
She’s not hungry anymore.
*
Laura stands under the hot water of her shower and sighs. She only has ten minutes, the same as every person in the fleet - water is recycled, but it takes fuel and power that the Fleet needs to conserve.
She traces the almost imperceptible lump on the right side of one breast with her fingernails.
When the water cuts out, she hasn’t yet reached for the soap.
*
One day, Lee quotes poetry in her presence, and she laughs.
“Almost right.” She grins at his crestfallen look. “And make sure you hold back the emphasis. Like this,” she tells him, repeats the phrase back at him, and she’s a teacher again, standing in front of a classroom and trying to breathe life into the words of a poet who died long before the apocalypse. She’s another verse in before she suddenly realises that she’s let herself get carried away. Lee grins at her as she comes to a halt.
“I bet you were a tough grader.”
“You would have passed,” she tells him, looking over the crisp uniform and the bright blue eyes, and wonders what she’s meaning.
*
She wonders where Billy gets his shirts from.
*
She’s returning from a meeting about the pilot shortage with Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, Lieutenant Thrace and Lee, and Billy is in step beside her. She's lost in her thoughts about the possible training procedure outlined by Lieutenant Thrace when he says something.
“Do you think the rumours are true?”
“What?” she asks, absentmindedly.
“That Captain Apollo is in love with Lieutenant Thrace?”
"Yes," she says before she thinks, and hears her footsteps echo on the concrete floor, one two one two.
“Isn't that against regulations?”
She thinks about the balance of power, the lump in her breast, and forty-two people ahead of her in line.
“I don’t think it’s something we need to talk about,” she says instead. Billy takes the hint.
*
“You can not do this.” A vein is throbbing in his temple. He’s livid. She’s never seen him like this.
“Are you doubting my judgement as President, Captain?”
“As your military advisor, Madam President, my role is to give you my honest opinion. And that isn’t fair.”
“Life isn’t, Captain,” she cracks back, and her voice is almost shaking. “You of all people should know that by now.”
He flinches, and she thinks that somewhere she should feel guilty for using his past against him but she’ s so angry that her nails are biting into the palms of her hands. Billy is very deliberately not looking at either of them, and Laura knows he’s about to offer some excuse and disappear from the room. Gone are the days when he thought she needed moral support.
When Lee speaks again, his voice is softer and carefully controlled and Laura knows that’s worse than before.
“Then your job, Madam President, is to make what people have left as fair as possible.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Impossible? So, you are saying that democracy is impossible?”
“Be careful, Captain,” she warns, and Lee takes a deep breath.
“If you’ll excuse me, Madam President, I have rosters to write. And if you have no further need of me -.”
“Captain Apollo,” she says, suddenly tired.
“Madam President?”
“Thank you for your input. I will consider it.”
“I’m sure you will,” he says, and closes the hatch behind him on the way out. He is always the gentleman.
*
The Great Tragedies were a third-year staple; bookstores made a mint off the footnoted versions, because they made for better papers.
She made them read Agamemnon first, because it was the one with the sex, the corruption, the holy wrath.
“Now that’s out of the way,” she would say at the start of the second week, looking over her glasses for emphasis, “I don’t like hyperbole, not in my histories and not in my papers.”
She always got hyperbole anyway.
“Madam President? We need an answer now.”
The voice is accompanied by a crackle of static, and she looks around the room, willing Billy or Lee to appear, but Billy is on one of his few days off and Lee is flying CAP with Starbuck and there’s nobody.
“You know it was him?” she repeats.
“He raped three little girls,” the man tells her, sounding desperate and angry. “We caught him.”
“Surely there is some procedure. This has to go through some kind of trial - ”
“He was shot trying to escape. We could save him, but..."
The ‘but’ hangs in the air. Laura thinks of Kami.
“Let him die.”
A week later she remembers it's a line from Agamemnon, stops too short of the podium, has to swallow the feeling of falling before she can give her speech.
Then Billy needs her on Galactica, and Lee has a question about martial law, and she forgets.
*