FIC: With Full Honors (1/3)
Summary: Laura throws herself a pity party.
Word Count: 2,400
Rating: M
Genre: Angst, Drama, Romance, Humor
Setting: Post-The Passage
Series: Love in a Time of War: 10
Chapter One:
Laura lay on her back on her bed, holding the first chocolate over her head, admiring this rare treasure. She would eat just one today, gain some energy; she’d been so lethargic lately, even before the food rationing. She brought it close enough to inhale the wonderful scent, the almost forgotten smell of milk and cocoa and sugar and vanilla...she licked the corner.
She’d offered to share the precious box of six candies with Tory, reminding the younger woman that they had to keep their strength up while on severely limited rations, but Tory had only wrinkled her nose.
“No thank you. I have a bag of pretzels that I found under one of the passenger seat cushions.”
Laura nibbled a flake off the truffle’s corner. Offered chocolate--some of the last known chocolate in the universe--and she wanted a stale pretzel. The girl was probably concerned about her frakkin’ weight. If they didn’t get to the algae planet safely, Tory wouldn’t have to worry about her dress size at all.
She carefully bit off another flake. The flower that Bill had brought with the chocolates had finally withered. She’d carefully pressed the still bright petals in pages of the second book that he’d given to her, and they’d stained the paper red, like lipstick on the edge of a white cup.
The fragment of chocolate melted on her tongue, spreading across her taste buds in a smooth cream. Laura had had plans for these candies. She would have melted one...she bit another tiny piece off, revealing the center. She smiled. Caramel. She loved caramels...and she would have carefully poured it over Bill’s erection...she could see him now, nervous, a bit scared even, but wanting it too, watching her lick him clean through half-closed lids...
Then she would have asked Bill to spread melted chocolate and caramel over her folds, even into her, and then she would watch as he cleaned her with his tongue...
Letting out a long, shattering breath while pressing her legs together, Laura decided that eating the candy sans hot flesh wasn’t measuring up to her fantasies. Life was truly a bitch sometimes.
Balancing the truffle on her collarbone, she grabbed both sides of the bed. Funny, it had seemed so narrow all these years and now it felt empty without Bill there. All the times she’d fought for an inch of space in his rack, deciding between the worse of two options, either crammed against the bulkhead, setting off her claustrophobia, or clinging to the edge on the outside, Bill’s strong arm being the only thing holding her in place.
His forearms, so dense and thickly muscled under her exploring fingertips, yet so warm and silky...she wouldn’t be feeling those again any time. She loved his embrace, those steel bands pressing her against his chest...
She rolled on the bed in frustration, almost losing the chocolate. She grabbed it in time, and it softened in her hot hand. Carefully, she placed it back in the box and licked her palm clean.
She’d made the excuse that she wouldn’t spend the whole night with him because it was so uncomfortable--the man put off heat like a pot-bellied stove--but the truth was, she hadn’t seen morning with a man in at least...eight years? Probably much longer, but she decided to only go back as far as the beginning of her affair with Richard.
He’d invited her out to his weekend home for a working retreat, but when she arrived, she was the only cabinet member there. She wasn’t shocked or offended; they’d been skirting a sexual attraction for years. She’d had two full nights, three days, just like the dirty weekend cruises she used to take with girlfriends in her younger days. And they hadn’t been restful nights, with awakenings from his insistent erection pressing against her back.
Bill’s belly fit perfectly into the curve of her back, his groin snuggling up into her ass, that strong arm around her waist, his lips behind her ear. He was a nice fit, Bill Adama.
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Frak. She wasn’t going to cry. She was going to remain cool and presidential; this was just another negotiation that fell through, but with no great effect on the big picture, saving the human race-wise.
She pulled the candy back out of the box and bit it in half. The caramel and chocolate stuck in her teeth, and the sugar zapped straight to her light head.
Just to wallow a bit--after all, she had chocolate at hand--she wondered how much detail Bill knew about her affair with Richard. She’d been so shocked to hear that he knew that she hadn’t really reflected on what that meant. Now, from the other side of the presidential seal, she could see how much friction there had been between Adar and the security forces--if one member had been willing to share their affair with a mid-level military commander, how deep had been their contempt?
Had there been photos? She bit the half of candy in half again; it tasted bitter. Visualizing giving Richard a blow-job in his office was like viewing some anonymous pornography, it was so distant and foreign to her now. But had Bill looked at such an image? Chuckled over it with his friend? Had they critiqued her technique?
She almost gagged, but forced the candy down. She wasn’t going to waste a bite of food on her own stupidity. The caramel oozed down the back of her throat, and she avoided thinking about the connotations.
Staring out the porthole, her view was Galactica’s bulkhead instead of the starscape. Bill had insisted on Colonial One riding through the star cluster inside his ship for protection. She was in the belly of the beast; Zeus had swallowed his wife whole.
She slipped the last bit of caramel between her lips; it was too small to save anyway. She and Bill had not had their little talk yet. Somehow, an opportunity just never seemed to come up. It was simple enough to fill every waking hour with work; someone always wanted something more from either her or him. Her hand slid over to the box again, and she bit the corner of another candy. Brandy-flavored jelly oozed out over her lower lip and she lapped it up quickly.
Perhaps he could infer that she’d been avoiding him. Screaming down the phone line to him and Cottle about the food contamination, she was reminded why she’d first started going to meet him on the Galactica, concerns about seeming too cozy with the military branch of government be damned. Then, over the months, it had become something else. The truth was that she’d been drawn to be in his company and his comfortable home.
Cleaning the last of the brandy from the center of the chocolate with her tongue, she thought about how she would miss reading in his quarters. It had the right lighting, warm and settled in pools around the rooms. Not this flat green florescent glow.
When she’d discovered his library, she’d had an inkling that this may be a man with whom she could share more than a professional relationship. At first she’d assumed the books would be tomes of military history and the like, but when she’d drawn closer and seen the eclectic titles, she’d wanted to know Adama better because of those books.
He was like one of his books, where she’s first seen the faded spine with it indecipherable title, then looked at the brighter cover, flipped open to the title page, table of contents, then the thrill of the first lines and that delving into the story.
And he’d surprised her even more with his love of poetry. They were on the couch, he seated, her curled along the cushions, lying on her side with her head on his lap, trying to make some notes for a lesson plan--she’d have to be back on the surface in eleven hours, and in front of the class in eighteen--but he was reading poetry aloud and that kept stilling her pen.
“Am I disturbing you?” he said, peering down at her over the tops of his glasses. “I prefer to read poetry aloud; it seems I can understand it better.”
“Yes, poetry is meant to be heard, not read,” she said drowsily.
“I dunno--you’re half-asleep,” he said, pushing the hair away from her ear and cupping her jaw to stroke it with his thumb.
“It’s your voice,” she said. “It does something to me, more than the words.”
“I make you fall asleep?” he said, his voice even more gravelly with amusement.
She squeezed his kneecap. “Don’t fish for compliments; you know that’s not what I mean.”
He flipped the page. “Perhaps you’d prefer another poet? Milo doesn’t do it for you?”
“You want the truth?” she said.
“Always,” he said, folding the slender volume around his finger.
“I’ve never been much of a reader of poetry,” she confessed.
“And you a teacher.”
“I know.” She rolled onto her back to look up at him. “But...it’s just that I prefer a story--I want to go somewhere. To find an ending. Poetry just seems to give me more questions.”
“I think that’s what’s supposed to happen,” he said.
“Yes, I think so too.”
“How about I get The Streets Know My Name,” he said. “That story goes somewhere, in a hail of bullets and pushing aside no-good dames.”
She grinned up at him. “You’ll read aloud to me?”
He had tugged her up so that he could rise. “Yes, if it makes you happy.”
Laura bit into the next truffle. Raspberry cream. Her second favorite flavor, after caramel. Her sailor bard, hidden deep in the bowels of his ship, was probably reading poetry a lot these days, asking all of his questions to an empty room. Those had been their honeymoon days, their responsibilities less consuming, their privacy easy to maintain. They’d tried to recreate the easy-going intimacy since the exodus, but to no avail, apparently.
According to him. Apparently. Apparently she’d been dumped; there was no way around that. She chewed hard on the last bite of the raspberry cream. Or were they taking a break, as she used to suggest to those couple of over-pressing boyfriends when she was trying to get through graduate school and help her grieving father pick up the pieces of his life. We need a break, things are getting too intense. It’s not you, it’s me.
What a frakking load of shit that she’d been handing out--she grimaced; marshmallow center, of course. She hated the marshmallow one and always tried to pawn it off, but couldn’t waste it now. Better just swallow it whole and get it over with.
He had frustrations, huh? Wasn’t that what she had been there for? Or was he suggesting that she was one of them? Well, frak him. She had to wipe her eyes again. Never cried over men and she wasn’t going to start now. She’d just been staring at the ceiling for too long, her eyes were too tired, her head seemed to throb all the time these days.
The next candy was nut nougat. She loved the rich, heavy taste of almonds and cashews. Guilty, she looked at the lone chocolate left in the box among the empty papers.
Guilty; he had decided to assume the blame for every failure so far. Guilty because that hour he spent with her should have been used to try and get them another click closer to Earth? Guilty because he was enjoying himself while thousands of citizens ate the equivalent of dog kibble and now they didn’t even have that?
The nougat stuck in her teeth, so she chewed harder, like he’d gnawed on his mouthpiece during his bout. Silly old man. Could’ve been killed; didn’t he see that? The fight had been one of those horrible slow-motion instances and she’d been paralyzed by fear--she should have thrown in the towel from his corner and dared him to say it all to her face, instead of over the top of her head.
The last truffle had a center of dark chocolate cream, dense and so rich as to glue her mouth shut.
When she talked to him, she was going to tell him that one thing she’d learned from frakking the previous president of the Twelve Colonies herself was, no guilt. They were different from the mere citizens; the rules didn’t count for them. Wasn’t that what Richard has said the few times that she’d dared to vocalize any guilt? It isn’t that simple, Laura. Morality can’t quantify our relationship.
But Bill Adama saw things simply and with great clarity; it was his most endearing quality, as well as his most frustrating. He saw her with clarity--it made her nervous most times. Richard would make love to her as though he was watching himself in a mirror, performing--maybe there had been cameras, and he knew it. That had made sex easy. She could take care of her own needs, drift away to other places and times.
Bill looked at her. He wanted the lights on, in more ways than one. He wanted to hear I love you, he wanted family dinners with all the kids, he wanted...he was like an avalanche, growing in size and speed, picking up debris as he rolled down at her.
“Madam President?” Tory was there.
Laura hummed her reply, her mouth glued shut by sugar and milk residue. Her shoes were still on, her clothes rumpled, her lips sticky, her mascara smudged, her eyes damp.
Pathetic, the young woman’s stoic stare said. Just utterly, completely, pathetic.
“Do you feel more rested, Ma’am?” Laura gave a small nod, so encouraged, Tory pushed on: “We’ve arrived at the algae planet. The Admiral requests your presence on the CIC.”
Laura pushed herself up, smoothing her hair back, the strands sticking to her hands. “Yes, I feel much better,” she said. “Just let me go wash up.”
End (1/3) Chapter Two>>>
Word Count: 2,400
Rating: M
Genre: Angst, Drama, Romance, Humor
Setting: Post-The Passage
Series: Love in a Time of War: 10
Chapter One:
Laura lay on her back on her bed, holding the first chocolate over her head, admiring this rare treasure. She would eat just one today, gain some energy; she’d been so lethargic lately, even before the food rationing. She brought it close enough to inhale the wonderful scent, the almost forgotten smell of milk and cocoa and sugar and vanilla...she licked the corner.
She’d offered to share the precious box of six candies with Tory, reminding the younger woman that they had to keep their strength up while on severely limited rations, but Tory had only wrinkled her nose.
“No thank you. I have a bag of pretzels that I found under one of the passenger seat cushions.”
Laura nibbled a flake off the truffle’s corner. Offered chocolate--some of the last known chocolate in the universe--and she wanted a stale pretzel. The girl was probably concerned about her frakkin’ weight. If they didn’t get to the algae planet safely, Tory wouldn’t have to worry about her dress size at all.
She carefully bit off another flake. The flower that Bill had brought with the chocolates had finally withered. She’d carefully pressed the still bright petals in pages of the second book that he’d given to her, and they’d stained the paper red, like lipstick on the edge of a white cup.
The fragment of chocolate melted on her tongue, spreading across her taste buds in a smooth cream. Laura had had plans for these candies. She would have melted one...she bit another tiny piece off, revealing the center. She smiled. Caramel. She loved caramels...and she would have carefully poured it over Bill’s erection...she could see him now, nervous, a bit scared even, but wanting it too, watching her lick him clean through half-closed lids...
Then she would have asked Bill to spread melted chocolate and caramel over her folds, even into her, and then she would watch as he cleaned her with his tongue...
Letting out a long, shattering breath while pressing her legs together, Laura decided that eating the candy sans hot flesh wasn’t measuring up to her fantasies. Life was truly a bitch sometimes.
Balancing the truffle on her collarbone, she grabbed both sides of the bed. Funny, it had seemed so narrow all these years and now it felt empty without Bill there. All the times she’d fought for an inch of space in his rack, deciding between the worse of two options, either crammed against the bulkhead, setting off her claustrophobia, or clinging to the edge on the outside, Bill’s strong arm being the only thing holding her in place.
His forearms, so dense and thickly muscled under her exploring fingertips, yet so warm and silky...she wouldn’t be feeling those again any time. She loved his embrace, those steel bands pressing her against his chest...
She rolled on the bed in frustration, almost losing the chocolate. She grabbed it in time, and it softened in her hot hand. Carefully, she placed it back in the box and licked her palm clean.
She’d made the excuse that she wouldn’t spend the whole night with him because it was so uncomfortable--the man put off heat like a pot-bellied stove--but the truth was, she hadn’t seen morning with a man in at least...eight years? Probably much longer, but she decided to only go back as far as the beginning of her affair with Richard.
He’d invited her out to his weekend home for a working retreat, but when she arrived, she was the only cabinet member there. She wasn’t shocked or offended; they’d been skirting a sexual attraction for years. She’d had two full nights, three days, just like the dirty weekend cruises she used to take with girlfriends in her younger days. And they hadn’t been restful nights, with awakenings from his insistent erection pressing against her back.
Bill’s belly fit perfectly into the curve of her back, his groin snuggling up into her ass, that strong arm around her waist, his lips behind her ear. He was a nice fit, Bill Adama.
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Frak. She wasn’t going to cry. She was going to remain cool and presidential; this was just another negotiation that fell through, but with no great effect on the big picture, saving the human race-wise.
She pulled the candy back out of the box and bit it in half. The caramel and chocolate stuck in her teeth, and the sugar zapped straight to her light head.
Just to wallow a bit--after all, she had chocolate at hand--she wondered how much detail Bill knew about her affair with Richard. She’d been so shocked to hear that he knew that she hadn’t really reflected on what that meant. Now, from the other side of the presidential seal, she could see how much friction there had been between Adar and the security forces--if one member had been willing to share their affair with a mid-level military commander, how deep had been their contempt?
Had there been photos? She bit the half of candy in half again; it tasted bitter. Visualizing giving Richard a blow-job in his office was like viewing some anonymous pornography, it was so distant and foreign to her now. But had Bill looked at such an image? Chuckled over it with his friend? Had they critiqued her technique?
She almost gagged, but forced the candy down. She wasn’t going to waste a bite of food on her own stupidity. The caramel oozed down the back of her throat, and she avoided thinking about the connotations.
Staring out the porthole, her view was Galactica’s bulkhead instead of the starscape. Bill had insisted on Colonial One riding through the star cluster inside his ship for protection. She was in the belly of the beast; Zeus had swallowed his wife whole.
She slipped the last bit of caramel between her lips; it was too small to save anyway. She and Bill had not had their little talk yet. Somehow, an opportunity just never seemed to come up. It was simple enough to fill every waking hour with work; someone always wanted something more from either her or him. Her hand slid over to the box again, and she bit the corner of another candy. Brandy-flavored jelly oozed out over her lower lip and she lapped it up quickly.
Perhaps he could infer that she’d been avoiding him. Screaming down the phone line to him and Cottle about the food contamination, she was reminded why she’d first started going to meet him on the Galactica, concerns about seeming too cozy with the military branch of government be damned. Then, over the months, it had become something else. The truth was that she’d been drawn to be in his company and his comfortable home.
Cleaning the last of the brandy from the center of the chocolate with her tongue, she thought about how she would miss reading in his quarters. It had the right lighting, warm and settled in pools around the rooms. Not this flat green florescent glow.
When she’d discovered his library, she’d had an inkling that this may be a man with whom she could share more than a professional relationship. At first she’d assumed the books would be tomes of military history and the like, but when she’d drawn closer and seen the eclectic titles, she’d wanted to know Adama better because of those books.
He was like one of his books, where she’s first seen the faded spine with it indecipherable title, then looked at the brighter cover, flipped open to the title page, table of contents, then the thrill of the first lines and that delving into the story.
And he’d surprised her even more with his love of poetry. They were on the couch, he seated, her curled along the cushions, lying on her side with her head on his lap, trying to make some notes for a lesson plan--she’d have to be back on the surface in eleven hours, and in front of the class in eighteen--but he was reading poetry aloud and that kept stilling her pen.
“Am I disturbing you?” he said, peering down at her over the tops of his glasses. “I prefer to read poetry aloud; it seems I can understand it better.”
“Yes, poetry is meant to be heard, not read,” she said drowsily.
“I dunno--you’re half-asleep,” he said, pushing the hair away from her ear and cupping her jaw to stroke it with his thumb.
“It’s your voice,” she said. “It does something to me, more than the words.”
“I make you fall asleep?” he said, his voice even more gravelly with amusement.
She squeezed his kneecap. “Don’t fish for compliments; you know that’s not what I mean.”
He flipped the page. “Perhaps you’d prefer another poet? Milo doesn’t do it for you?”
“You want the truth?” she said.
“Always,” he said, folding the slender volume around his finger.
“I’ve never been much of a reader of poetry,” she confessed.
“And you a teacher.”
“I know.” She rolled onto her back to look up at him. “But...it’s just that I prefer a story--I want to go somewhere. To find an ending. Poetry just seems to give me more questions.”
“I think that’s what’s supposed to happen,” he said.
“Yes, I think so too.”
“How about I get The Streets Know My Name,” he said. “That story goes somewhere, in a hail of bullets and pushing aside no-good dames.”
She grinned up at him. “You’ll read aloud to me?”
He had tugged her up so that he could rise. “Yes, if it makes you happy.”
Laura bit into the next truffle. Raspberry cream. Her second favorite flavor, after caramel. Her sailor bard, hidden deep in the bowels of his ship, was probably reading poetry a lot these days, asking all of his questions to an empty room. Those had been their honeymoon days, their responsibilities less consuming, their privacy easy to maintain. They’d tried to recreate the easy-going intimacy since the exodus, but to no avail, apparently.
According to him. Apparently. Apparently she’d been dumped; there was no way around that. She chewed hard on the last bite of the raspberry cream. Or were they taking a break, as she used to suggest to those couple of over-pressing boyfriends when she was trying to get through graduate school and help her grieving father pick up the pieces of his life. We need a break, things are getting too intense. It’s not you, it’s me.
What a frakking load of shit that she’d been handing out--she grimaced; marshmallow center, of course. She hated the marshmallow one and always tried to pawn it off, but couldn’t waste it now. Better just swallow it whole and get it over with.
He had frustrations, huh? Wasn’t that what she had been there for? Or was he suggesting that she was one of them? Well, frak him. She had to wipe her eyes again. Never cried over men and she wasn’t going to start now. She’d just been staring at the ceiling for too long, her eyes were too tired, her head seemed to throb all the time these days.
The next candy was nut nougat. She loved the rich, heavy taste of almonds and cashews. Guilty, she looked at the lone chocolate left in the box among the empty papers.
Guilty; he had decided to assume the blame for every failure so far. Guilty because that hour he spent with her should have been used to try and get them another click closer to Earth? Guilty because he was enjoying himself while thousands of citizens ate the equivalent of dog kibble and now they didn’t even have that?
The nougat stuck in her teeth, so she chewed harder, like he’d gnawed on his mouthpiece during his bout. Silly old man. Could’ve been killed; didn’t he see that? The fight had been one of those horrible slow-motion instances and she’d been paralyzed by fear--she should have thrown in the towel from his corner and dared him to say it all to her face, instead of over the top of her head.
The last truffle had a center of dark chocolate cream, dense and so rich as to glue her mouth shut.
When she talked to him, she was going to tell him that one thing she’d learned from frakking the previous president of the Twelve Colonies herself was, no guilt. They were different from the mere citizens; the rules didn’t count for them. Wasn’t that what Richard has said the few times that she’d dared to vocalize any guilt? It isn’t that simple, Laura. Morality can’t quantify our relationship.
But Bill Adama saw things simply and with great clarity; it was his most endearing quality, as well as his most frustrating. He saw her with clarity--it made her nervous most times. Richard would make love to her as though he was watching himself in a mirror, performing--maybe there had been cameras, and he knew it. That had made sex easy. She could take care of her own needs, drift away to other places and times.
Bill looked at her. He wanted the lights on, in more ways than one. He wanted to hear I love you, he wanted family dinners with all the kids, he wanted...he was like an avalanche, growing in size and speed, picking up debris as he rolled down at her.
“Madam President?” Tory was there.
Laura hummed her reply, her mouth glued shut by sugar and milk residue. Her shoes were still on, her clothes rumpled, her lips sticky, her mascara smudged, her eyes damp.
Pathetic, the young woman’s stoic stare said. Just utterly, completely, pathetic.
“Do you feel more rested, Ma’am?” Laura gave a small nod, so encouraged, Tory pushed on: “We’ve arrived at the algae planet. The Admiral requests your presence on the CIC.”
Laura pushed herself up, smoothing her hair back, the strands sticking to her hands. “Yes, I feel much better,” she said. “Just let me go wash up.”
End (1/3) Chapter Two>>>