BSG Story: The Body is a Myth (1/?)
So I got really, really bored yesterday and today and wrote 7 pages of BSG 'fic which is...unusual for me (and probably not to be encouraged since I should have been writing something else). I wasn't going to post it because it's unbeta'd and unfinished, but then I thought blah, why not? If I wait until it's actually finished, BSG will probably be over and perhaps it'll entertain someone for a few minutes. SO, with all errors entirely my own, and in the hope I complete it at some point:
Title: The Body is a Myth
Rating: Um, PG?
Spoilers: Through 4.09 The Hub
Disclaimer: I don't own them! I make no money!
Summary: What happens to Laura Roslin after she dies? What happens to Kara Thrace after D'anna reveals the name of the final cylon?
Laura Roslin died; so much morpha she was barely aware of Bill or the book. Of his son, or of Kara Thrace.
Laura Roslin died, a cold metal ring on her finger, two grieving men, and the harbinger of death at her side.
Laura Roslin woke up in a vat of white goo. She was a little disappointed. She was tired; she'd been ready, she'd felt done. But this was impossible. The hub was gone. This was a morpha-dream. She'd wake up, barely, to Bill and the book and his son and Kara Thrace and they'd start again, this waiting for death.
Thrace was terribly inefficient. She'd mention that, when she woke up, in her broken voice. She'd mention it if she could remember.
That room - the room where she had died (no, she reminded herself, the room where she was dying right now) - that room was a place where her thoughts never made it as far as her lips. Her brain was misfiring on morpha; her thoughts were eating themselves the way her body was eating itself, and this was the first time in days she had entertained an idea that complex.
She wondered if she'd forget it, when she woke up. If she'd forget this dream: the goo was warmer than it had looked in the Hybrid's bath. The vat was so much more comfortable than a hospital bed.
Laura Roslin turned her head to the left and saw Natalie, the Six, kneeling. Natalie pressed her long, elegant fingers against Laura's mouth, just for a second, and said, “I'm so sorry, Madam President.”
“What for?” Laura asked. Her voice was high and clear: it was like discovering she could have been a concert soprano. She had forgotten what it was like to speak without effort.
“It's not a dream,” Natalie said. “I'm so sorry.”
* * *
It was a state funeral. Kara watched the Old Man put a flag on her coffin and then stand, resolute, as they opened the airlock and committed her body to the heavens.
Kara thought of Leoben.
When she got back to her rack, he was sitting on it. Shirt like someone had puked over it, sleeveless red vest held together with thick plastic buckles. He was smiling, wide and easy. Of course he was smiling: he was pleased to see her.
“What is the first article of faith?” he asked.
Because there was no one else in the room, Kara answered.
“This is not all that we are,” she replied.
“This is not all that we are.”
Kara closed her eyes. “What if it is?”
Kara opened her eyes, and he was gone.
* * *
Natalie had found a bathrobe for Laura. It was white and fluffy. She was sitting in it, with her real hair and a body that didn't seem to be dying, on an antique chaise with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“You seem very calm,” Natalie said.
“I'm dreaming,” Laura replied.
“You're not dreaming. You weren't routed through the hub. This basestar is...unique.”
“So you've told me.”
Laura sipped her coffee. It was so nice to be able to taste again.
“You'll see,” Natalie sighed. She sat down next to Laura at the other end of the chaise. “When you don't wake up on Galactica you'll believe me.”
“A magical basestar no one knew existed, with its own independent resurrection facility just happened to be near enough to pick you up after you were shot, and just happened to be near enough to pick me up, and yet, by either choice or coincidence, has failed to pick up a single other cylon passenger, despite the fact that you are now, as a species, and by your design, Natalie, facing permanent mortality? Does that about cover it?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. Unrepentant.
“Was it worth it?” Laura asked. “Did it give your life meaning?”
Natalie didn't turn to look at her. She sat, straightbacked, shoulder-blades tense above the cut of her tank top, honey-brown hair only half-hooked behind her ears. Eyes somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
“I saw...” Natalie said. “I saw a forest.”
For a moment, Laura saw it too. The sun caught behind such bright green leaves. Like nothing she had ever found on New Caprica.
“It was beautiful,” Natalie said, and grabbed Laura's hand.
* * *
“Who's the fifth?” Kara asked.
“You are. Didn't you know?”
“Who's the fifth?” Kara leaned over the metal table, and for a second, she saw Leoben, not D'anna, lazing back in the folding chair.
“Laura Roslin.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“Admiral Adama.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“You ever going to get bored?”
“Nope. Figure I can just ask you about thirty-thousand more times and work it out through elimination. Who's the fifth?”
“Why should I tell you? I lost four of my five life-lines when your damn Colonel decided to out himself.”
“Who's the fifth?”
Leoben leaned forward and whispered, “Daniel Thrace.”
“What?” Kara asked. Her chest was ice. “What did you just say?”
D'anna lifted one side of her mouth and an eyebrow and stared at her like maybe she thought Kara had gone crazy, or maybe she was about to laugh. “I said, 'you, sweetheart, haven't we been over this?' But apparently I was mistaken.”
“You said Daniel Thrace.”
The expression on D'anna's face, this time, was unmistakable. Open-mouthed. Afraid, even. Kara thought of Leoben and his God; his quest to find something so much larger than him it would drive him mad. D'anna had been inside the Temple of the Five and looked at her hidden siblings and found they were neither spectacular nor mighty. D'anna was the master of mysteries, the one with secret knowledge: the Oracle. D'anna had never looked at anything and realised she was small, until, perhaps, now.
It was like rebutting a parlour trick with a miracle.
“How can you know...” D'anna managed. “You couldn't know that.”
Kara felt it, true and bitter as a puncture in her EVA suit. But she couldn't say the words. To admit it would be a sin. To admit it would kill the music: the endless piano, rolling and alternating, three-steps from repetition. Those deep, certain chords that dropped like anchors into her soul.
“Daniel Thrace,” she shrieked. “Never survived the attacks on the Colonies. You killed him. You killed Daniel Thrace, just like you killed everyone else!”
Kara stumbled from her chair. She banged against the door and yelled for the marines to let her out.
Kara Thrace realised, shaking in the corner of an empty compartment, that it would be easier to accept that she was a cylon, than to accept that Hera Agathon was never the first hybrid.
* * *
After three days, Laura began to suspect she had fallen into a coma. She was sitting with Natalie, watching the Hybrid. When she wandered off on her own, she got lost, and there didn't seem to be anyone else on board.
“Autonomic vent functions are unaligned. Re-adjust point three per cent. The somnambulist accepts solipsism before her god. What is a deity?”
“There!” Laura pointed. “The somnambulist. That's me.”
“The coolant veins are losing pressure. Worship. All actions performed in service to a single goal. In service to the coolant veins. The coolant veins are losing pressure.”
Natalie leaned forward, her hand half an inch above the milky liquid. She wanted to touch everything, Laura had noticed. Like a child, exploring. It made her think of the Caprica Six in Galactica's brig and her naïve, trusting curiosity mixed with such bitter violence. She shivered.
“If you're the somnambulist,” Natalie said. “She seems to be judging your easy acceptance that this is just a coma.”
“I've always been more practical than religious,” Laura growled.
“Saggitaron!” the Hybrid gasped. “A constellation that forms the most reliable navigational point should form the basis of a star chart. Course correction one quarter astern. Fuel redistribution.”
“Are we going to Saggitaron?” Laura asked.
Natalie shook her head. “I don't think so.”
“Jump!”
* * *
Helo was putting Hera to bed and Sharon was out flying a CAP when Kara started pounding on the door to his quarters. She flew in, saw Hera in the crib she had outgrown at least six months ago, and froze.
“Starbuck,” Helo said. “You okay?”
She blinked, worked her mouth a few times before she turned to look at him. “Not really,” she said. “I need you to put me in the brig. And take my sidearm,” she unclipped it from her holster.
Helo frowned. Kara shook the sidearm at him by the muzzle. “Dammit, Helo, you have to arrest me!”
“All right,” he said, taking the gun slowly, and deliberately. “All right, but let's talk about this first. What's got you so wound up?”
Kara dropped onto his bed. Helo sat down next to her. Hera, confused, stood in her crib and asked, “Dada?”
“Kara's a little upset right now, Hera,” Karl told her. “But she's going to be just fine once we have a chat about it, aren't you, Kara?”
“Gods, Karl, I'm not three years old.”
He pushed her shoulder, playfully. “Could have fooled me, Starbuck.”
She turned and stared straight at him. She said, “The final cylon is Daniel Thrace.”
Helo felt his eyes go wide and his nose wrinkle. “Daniel Thrace as in...”
“As in Daniel Thrace, Helo. As in the only damn Daniel Thrace that would make me come here and ask you to arrest me. My father.”
Helo nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Kara, it's not your fault. It doesn't make you bad. We're going to go to the Admiral and talk to him about this, and we're going to make it all right. You're not a cylon, Kara. You're like Hera, or Nicky Tyrol. There is nothing wrong with you.”
Kara shook her head. “I don't trust myself.”
“I trust you.”
* * *
Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera watch her right back, and wondering how long it would be before the Admiral showed up and sent her to the brig, when the alarm siren sounded, and she heard Gaeta calling action stations over the tannoy.
She'd been wondering how to explain why she had never looked for her father after the attacks. The idea of going to Dee and getting her to check the Fleet's passenger lists had occurred to her, just once, a few days after the Olympic Carrier. But he'd left when she was a kid, and she'd never heard from him again, and who knew if he was even calling himself Daniel Thrace any more. Everything was gone, and the thought of one more disappointment, one last abandonment, had seemed too much.
In retrospect, that was a terribly convenient decision.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera and wondering if there could be programming in their brains.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, trying very hard not to think of the other half of the equation. In this tiny scrap of civilisation, Kara Thrace was famous. And Daniel Thrace had never come looking for her. He'd never killed himself to resurrect where his daughter was and save her. He'd never even taken a shuttle.
“Action stations, action stations. Set condition one throughout the ship.”
Kara picked up Hera and started running toward the hangar deck.
* * *
Laura and Natalie ran into the cylon CIC, though to Laura, the name seemed odd. A CIC was full of blunt technology designed to withstand nuclear explosions and immoveable military personnel designed to do the same, not elegant water features and nouveau architecture.
Natalie plunged her hand into a waterbed and gasped. It took Laura a moment to realise what she was doing.
“Where are we?” she demanded.
“Back with your Fleet,” Natalie replied.
Laura wondered if this was a symbolic journey. If her body was about to die, or if she was returning to consciousness.
“They're launching vipers,” Natalie said, turning to her with a panicked expression. “We don't have any raiders. We're defenseless.”
Death then, Laura decided.
“We have to hail them, Laura.”
“How?”
Natalie reached across, grabbed Laura's hand and forced it into the water.
Laura thought her mind was on fire. The ship sang through her body. The dislocation was as bad as the worst moments of her illness, when the pain was so intense, she couldn't function. Time stopped. She hung, suspended in white noise. She saw the Galactica, she felt fear; a dozen vipers were coming to pierce her skin - small nubs of heat in a bone cold stretch. Natalie had been trying to tell her something. The ship had crawled inside her chest and was begging her to do something.
Oh what was it?
Talk to them.
Comm frequencies.
They bloomed in her mind. A web of thin lines daggering between the vipers and the Fleet.
“That one!” she heard herself gasp. She understood: somehow she needed to pick a strand of radiowave, and tell the ship to copy it, but she had no idea how. “That one,” she repeated.
Natalie, a presence so small in the shipworld of the waterbed that at first, Laura could barely perceive her, knew what she was doing. Natalie began to make changes, communicating with the ship at an unimaginable speed. It was like standing beside a waterfall and knowing every spit of spray was a syllable.
A line stretched between Laura's downturned palm and the Galactica.
“Now,” Natalie said. “Save us. Talk to them.”
“Admiral Adama,” Laura began, voice shaky. She was still in a world that was half-computer, half-deep space. She focused on her own feet against the deck of the basestar. On Natalie's hand pressed over her own. “Bill,” she said. “Please don't fire. We don't have any raiders. We don't have any missiles. We're not hostile. It's me, Bill. It's Laura.”
There were seconds and seconds of silence. Laura felt herself smile: she knew the exact look that would be on his face. Personal betrayal that the universe dare throw this trick at him. At him.
“If it makes you feel any better, Bill,” she said, surer now, in more familiar terrain. “I'm reasonably sure that I'm still in a coma in your sick bay, but on the offchance the universe is really this frakked up, on New Caprica, right after you grew that godsawful moustache, the day of the groundbreaking ceremony - do you remember that? You lied to me. You told me you were going to build me that cabin in the woods.”
After a pause, the words came. Slow, suspicious. Brief. “I told you I'd like to.”
“It was still a lie.”
The longest silence yet. And then, “I'm sorry Laura. But this can't be you. You aren't the final cylon.”
Of course, Laura agreed with him, but she found herself unaccountably frustrated by his obstinacy. Here she was, returning from the dead in a cylon basestar, and even in her dreams, his response was to put his foot down and expect the universe to fall in line.
“Bill,” she sighed. “If you're really there and I'm really here, then I'm afraid we're both going to have to face some uncomfortable -”
“No,” he cut her off. “You can't be the final cylon because we know who the final cylon is. And it's not you. So since you're dead, and since you can't be a cylon, you must be some sort of cylon trick.”
Well. She hadn't been expecting that.
“Perhaps I just really wanted to upstage Captain Thrace,” she said. “Does a basestar trump a viper?”
She thought she heard him snort.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“So far,” Bill said. “You haven't launched any raiders. And you're not setting off our radiological alarms. So I'm going to detail a squad of raptors to head over and secure your ship. If we lose contact with our people, for any reason, I'll authorise the release of nuclear weapons, and I'll blow your ship to hell.”
“That sounds entirely fair, Admiral. Believe me, I have as many questions as you do.”
* * *
So, yeah, there's that. :)
Title: The Body is a Myth
Rating: Um, PG?
Spoilers: Through 4.09 The Hub
Disclaimer: I don't own them! I make no money!
Summary: What happens to Laura Roslin after she dies? What happens to Kara Thrace after D'anna reveals the name of the final cylon?
Laura Roslin died; so much morpha she was barely aware of Bill or the book. Of his son, or of Kara Thrace.
Laura Roslin died, a cold metal ring on her finger, two grieving men, and the harbinger of death at her side.
Laura Roslin woke up in a vat of white goo. She was a little disappointed. She was tired; she'd been ready, she'd felt done. But this was impossible. The hub was gone. This was a morpha-dream. She'd wake up, barely, to Bill and the book and his son and Kara Thrace and they'd start again, this waiting for death.
Thrace was terribly inefficient. She'd mention that, when she woke up, in her broken voice. She'd mention it if she could remember.
That room - the room where she had died (no, she reminded herself, the room where she was dying right now) - that room was a place where her thoughts never made it as far as her lips. Her brain was misfiring on morpha; her thoughts were eating themselves the way her body was eating itself, and this was the first time in days she had entertained an idea that complex.
She wondered if she'd forget it, when she woke up. If she'd forget this dream: the goo was warmer than it had looked in the Hybrid's bath. The vat was so much more comfortable than a hospital bed.
Laura Roslin turned her head to the left and saw Natalie, the Six, kneeling. Natalie pressed her long, elegant fingers against Laura's mouth, just for a second, and said, “I'm so sorry, Madam President.”
“What for?” Laura asked. Her voice was high and clear: it was like discovering she could have been a concert soprano. She had forgotten what it was like to speak without effort.
“It's not a dream,” Natalie said. “I'm so sorry.”
* * *
It was a state funeral. Kara watched the Old Man put a flag on her coffin and then stand, resolute, as they opened the airlock and committed her body to the heavens.
Kara thought of Leoben.
When she got back to her rack, he was sitting on it. Shirt like someone had puked over it, sleeveless red vest held together with thick plastic buckles. He was smiling, wide and easy. Of course he was smiling: he was pleased to see her.
“What is the first article of faith?” he asked.
Because there was no one else in the room, Kara answered.
“This is not all that we are,” she replied.
“This is not all that we are.”
Kara closed her eyes. “What if it is?”
Kara opened her eyes, and he was gone.
* * *
Natalie had found a bathrobe for Laura. It was white and fluffy. She was sitting in it, with her real hair and a body that didn't seem to be dying, on an antique chaise with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“You seem very calm,” Natalie said.
“I'm dreaming,” Laura replied.
“You're not dreaming. You weren't routed through the hub. This basestar is...unique.”
“So you've told me.”
Laura sipped her coffee. It was so nice to be able to taste again.
“You'll see,” Natalie sighed. She sat down next to Laura at the other end of the chaise. “When you don't wake up on Galactica you'll believe me.”
“A magical basestar no one knew existed, with its own independent resurrection facility just happened to be near enough to pick you up after you were shot, and just happened to be near enough to pick me up, and yet, by either choice or coincidence, has failed to pick up a single other cylon passenger, despite the fact that you are now, as a species, and by your design, Natalie, facing permanent mortality? Does that about cover it?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. Unrepentant.
“Was it worth it?” Laura asked. “Did it give your life meaning?”
Natalie didn't turn to look at her. She sat, straightbacked, shoulder-blades tense above the cut of her tank top, honey-brown hair only half-hooked behind her ears. Eyes somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
“I saw...” Natalie said. “I saw a forest.”
For a moment, Laura saw it too. The sun caught behind such bright green leaves. Like nothing she had ever found on New Caprica.
“It was beautiful,” Natalie said, and grabbed Laura's hand.
* * *
“Who's the fifth?” Kara asked.
“You are. Didn't you know?”
“Who's the fifth?” Kara leaned over the metal table, and for a second, she saw Leoben, not D'anna, lazing back in the folding chair.
“Laura Roslin.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“Admiral Adama.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“You ever going to get bored?”
“Nope. Figure I can just ask you about thirty-thousand more times and work it out through elimination. Who's the fifth?”
“Why should I tell you? I lost four of my five life-lines when your damn Colonel decided to out himself.”
“Who's the fifth?”
Leoben leaned forward and whispered, “Daniel Thrace.”
“What?” Kara asked. Her chest was ice. “What did you just say?”
D'anna lifted one side of her mouth and an eyebrow and stared at her like maybe she thought Kara had gone crazy, or maybe she was about to laugh. “I said, 'you, sweetheart, haven't we been over this?' But apparently I was mistaken.”
“You said Daniel Thrace.”
The expression on D'anna's face, this time, was unmistakable. Open-mouthed. Afraid, even. Kara thought of Leoben and his God; his quest to find something so much larger than him it would drive him mad. D'anna had been inside the Temple of the Five and looked at her hidden siblings and found they were neither spectacular nor mighty. D'anna was the master of mysteries, the one with secret knowledge: the Oracle. D'anna had never looked at anything and realised she was small, until, perhaps, now.
It was like rebutting a parlour trick with a miracle.
“How can you know...” D'anna managed. “You couldn't know that.”
Kara felt it, true and bitter as a puncture in her EVA suit. But she couldn't say the words. To admit it would be a sin. To admit it would kill the music: the endless piano, rolling and alternating, three-steps from repetition. Those deep, certain chords that dropped like anchors into her soul.
“Daniel Thrace,” she shrieked. “Never survived the attacks on the Colonies. You killed him. You killed Daniel Thrace, just like you killed everyone else!”
Kara stumbled from her chair. She banged against the door and yelled for the marines to let her out.
Kara Thrace realised, shaking in the corner of an empty compartment, that it would be easier to accept that she was a cylon, than to accept that Hera Agathon was never the first hybrid.
* * *
After three days, Laura began to suspect she had fallen into a coma. She was sitting with Natalie, watching the Hybrid. When she wandered off on her own, she got lost, and there didn't seem to be anyone else on board.
“Autonomic vent functions are unaligned. Re-adjust point three per cent. The somnambulist accepts solipsism before her god. What is a deity?”
“There!” Laura pointed. “The somnambulist. That's me.”
“The coolant veins are losing pressure. Worship. All actions performed in service to a single goal. In service to the coolant veins. The coolant veins are losing pressure.”
Natalie leaned forward, her hand half an inch above the milky liquid. She wanted to touch everything, Laura had noticed. Like a child, exploring. It made her think of the Caprica Six in Galactica's brig and her naïve, trusting curiosity mixed with such bitter violence. She shivered.
“If you're the somnambulist,” Natalie said. “She seems to be judging your easy acceptance that this is just a coma.”
“I've always been more practical than religious,” Laura growled.
“Saggitaron!” the Hybrid gasped. “A constellation that forms the most reliable navigational point should form the basis of a star chart. Course correction one quarter astern. Fuel redistribution.”
“Are we going to Saggitaron?” Laura asked.
Natalie shook her head. “I don't think so.”
“Jump!”
* * *
Helo was putting Hera to bed and Sharon was out flying a CAP when Kara started pounding on the door to his quarters. She flew in, saw Hera in the crib she had outgrown at least six months ago, and froze.
“Starbuck,” Helo said. “You okay?”
She blinked, worked her mouth a few times before she turned to look at him. “Not really,” she said. “I need you to put me in the brig. And take my sidearm,” she unclipped it from her holster.
Helo frowned. Kara shook the sidearm at him by the muzzle. “Dammit, Helo, you have to arrest me!”
“All right,” he said, taking the gun slowly, and deliberately. “All right, but let's talk about this first. What's got you so wound up?”
Kara dropped onto his bed. Helo sat down next to her. Hera, confused, stood in her crib and asked, “Dada?”
“Kara's a little upset right now, Hera,” Karl told her. “But she's going to be just fine once we have a chat about it, aren't you, Kara?”
“Gods, Karl, I'm not three years old.”
He pushed her shoulder, playfully. “Could have fooled me, Starbuck.”
She turned and stared straight at him. She said, “The final cylon is Daniel Thrace.”
Helo felt his eyes go wide and his nose wrinkle. “Daniel Thrace as in...”
“As in Daniel Thrace, Helo. As in the only damn Daniel Thrace that would make me come here and ask you to arrest me. My father.”
Helo nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Kara, it's not your fault. It doesn't make you bad. We're going to go to the Admiral and talk to him about this, and we're going to make it all right. You're not a cylon, Kara. You're like Hera, or Nicky Tyrol. There is nothing wrong with you.”
Kara shook her head. “I don't trust myself.”
“I trust you.”
* * *
Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera watch her right back, and wondering how long it would be before the Admiral showed up and sent her to the brig, when the alarm siren sounded, and she heard Gaeta calling action stations over the tannoy.
She'd been wondering how to explain why she had never looked for her father after the attacks. The idea of going to Dee and getting her to check the Fleet's passenger lists had occurred to her, just once, a few days after the Olympic Carrier. But he'd left when she was a kid, and she'd never heard from him again, and who knew if he was even calling himself Daniel Thrace any more. Everything was gone, and the thought of one more disappointment, one last abandonment, had seemed too much.
In retrospect, that was a terribly convenient decision.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera and wondering if there could be programming in their brains.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, trying very hard not to think of the other half of the equation. In this tiny scrap of civilisation, Kara Thrace was famous. And Daniel Thrace had never come looking for her. He'd never killed himself to resurrect where his daughter was and save her. He'd never even taken a shuttle.
“Action stations, action stations. Set condition one throughout the ship.”
Kara picked up Hera and started running toward the hangar deck.
* * *
Laura and Natalie ran into the cylon CIC, though to Laura, the name seemed odd. A CIC was full of blunt technology designed to withstand nuclear explosions and immoveable military personnel designed to do the same, not elegant water features and nouveau architecture.
Natalie plunged her hand into a waterbed and gasped. It took Laura a moment to realise what she was doing.
“Where are we?” she demanded.
“Back with your Fleet,” Natalie replied.
Laura wondered if this was a symbolic journey. If her body was about to die, or if she was returning to consciousness.
“They're launching vipers,” Natalie said, turning to her with a panicked expression. “We don't have any raiders. We're defenseless.”
Death then, Laura decided.
“We have to hail them, Laura.”
“How?”
Natalie reached across, grabbed Laura's hand and forced it into the water.
Laura thought her mind was on fire. The ship sang through her body. The dislocation was as bad as the worst moments of her illness, when the pain was so intense, she couldn't function. Time stopped. She hung, suspended in white noise. She saw the Galactica, she felt fear; a dozen vipers were coming to pierce her skin - small nubs of heat in a bone cold stretch. Natalie had been trying to tell her something. The ship had crawled inside her chest and was begging her to do something.
Oh what was it?
Talk to them.
Comm frequencies.
They bloomed in her mind. A web of thin lines daggering between the vipers and the Fleet.
“That one!” she heard herself gasp. She understood: somehow she needed to pick a strand of radiowave, and tell the ship to copy it, but she had no idea how. “That one,” she repeated.
Natalie, a presence so small in the shipworld of the waterbed that at first, Laura could barely perceive her, knew what she was doing. Natalie began to make changes, communicating with the ship at an unimaginable speed. It was like standing beside a waterfall and knowing every spit of spray was a syllable.
A line stretched between Laura's downturned palm and the Galactica.
“Now,” Natalie said. “Save us. Talk to them.”
“Admiral Adama,” Laura began, voice shaky. She was still in a world that was half-computer, half-deep space. She focused on her own feet against the deck of the basestar. On Natalie's hand pressed over her own. “Bill,” she said. “Please don't fire. We don't have any raiders. We don't have any missiles. We're not hostile. It's me, Bill. It's Laura.”
There were seconds and seconds of silence. Laura felt herself smile: she knew the exact look that would be on his face. Personal betrayal that the universe dare throw this trick at him. At him.
“If it makes you feel any better, Bill,” she said, surer now, in more familiar terrain. “I'm reasonably sure that I'm still in a coma in your sick bay, but on the offchance the universe is really this frakked up, on New Caprica, right after you grew that godsawful moustache, the day of the groundbreaking ceremony - do you remember that? You lied to me. You told me you were going to build me that cabin in the woods.”
After a pause, the words came. Slow, suspicious. Brief. “I told you I'd like to.”
“It was still a lie.”
The longest silence yet. And then, “I'm sorry Laura. But this can't be you. You aren't the final cylon.”
Of course, Laura agreed with him, but she found herself unaccountably frustrated by his obstinacy. Here she was, returning from the dead in a cylon basestar, and even in her dreams, his response was to put his foot down and expect the universe to fall in line.
“Bill,” she sighed. “If you're really there and I'm really here, then I'm afraid we're both going to have to face some uncomfortable -”
“No,” he cut her off. “You can't be the final cylon because we know who the final cylon is. And it's not you. So since you're dead, and since you can't be a cylon, you must be some sort of cylon trick.”
Well. She hadn't been expecting that.
“Perhaps I just really wanted to upstage Captain Thrace,” she said. “Does a basestar trump a viper?”
She thought she heard him snort.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“So far,” Bill said. “You haven't launched any raiders. And you're not setting off our radiological alarms. So I'm going to detail a squad of raptors to head over and secure your ship. If we lose contact with our people, for any reason, I'll authorise the release of nuclear weapons, and I'll blow your ship to hell.”
“That sounds entirely fair, Admiral. Believe me, I have as many questions as you do.”
* * *
So, yeah, there's that. :)