Bad Days
She has good days and bad days.
Good days are not what others would classify as good. Good days are being able to smile without the skin pulling taut and painful. Smiling without feeling like she is about to be torn asunder. Good days are laughing without feeling the constant pressure on her ribs. Breathing without feeling the ball of pain, burning so hard and hot that she is constantly amazed that she and this cancer can continue to co-exist, side by side.
Good days are few and far between, and the bad days feel all the worse for them. Someone out there is laughing at the joke - whichever God is in charge of irony, she thinks: probably Ares or Zeus, undoubtedly a man at any rate - laughing at the sick realization that the good days are blessings and curses. The good makes the bad feel so much worse, so much bigger than it really is. The good is a small sliver of light, casting the bad in shadow and twisting it until it becomes a monster looming over her, intent on harm.
She should have learned the first time. But all she did the first time was nothing. Don’t talk about the cancer. Don’t think about the cancer. Take your pills. Don’t acknowledge the death hanging around you, within you. Don’t think, don’t look, don’t touch - don’t let anyone touch - don’t think, don’t blink, don’t dream anything other than visions, coloring her world in acid brights and shadowed darks, the entire spectrum between filled with secret messages. Don’t.
So all she learned the first time was avoidance. How to completely ignore your cancer until you died or it went away. Or, in her case, both.
Avoidance was easy. Avoidance was familiar and comforting. Avoidance was a luxury this time, one that her heart, her soul and Bill Adama would not allow her.
Today is a bad day. A day when even keeping her eyes open hurts. She hates today, she thinks. Hates these sheets and this skin, hates its smoothness and the cold that seems to pervade every deck of this frakking ship. She hates Galactica herself today. Hates the ship because it is her tomb, encased in steel and floating aimlessly through space, circling a tiny planet tirelessly in the hopes that on the next rotation, the impossible will have been achieved and something will change. She hates it. Hates it.
Hates the planet below them and the Gods that sent them there. Hates the Cylons, hates the humans - she hates being here. Lying in his bed trying to find the will to get up and move past this moment. Her breasts ache, her spine feels stiff and her head is pounding.
On bad days, she can feel it inside of her. Insidiously creeping through her skin, cell by cell - bony fingers clutching at her until the skin rots from the inside out, blackens and hangs there as a useless grotesque monument of victory. Cancer is winning - it’s winning, it’s within reach of victory and all she can do is lie here and hate it.
She bites her lip to stifle the sob that is lodged somewhere in the back of her throat. It chokes her, causes her to cough even as hot tears leak out and trail past her eyes into where her hairline should be. There is no hair there. Victory. Just hot tears clinging to too-smooth skin, bonding it to the thin pillow below. She decides she hates the pillow too. She even hates the scent of it right now - because it is a smell she associates with the good days and oh how she hates the good days today.
At least the cabin is quiet. Only her muffled sobs, punctuated with high pitched keening moans as she lies still and cannot move save to cry and to hate.
Good days and bad days, she thinks.
They were better than no days at all, right?
The pain hitches - pauses for a moment before flaring, bony fingers clutching tighter as if in response to her question. Wrong. She can feel herself begin to shake, and she closes her eyes tight against the sight of her own limbs spread out before her, quaking and out of her control. Her breathing increases and she fights it - muscles tensing painfully, rigid against the movement as she tries to regulate her breathing. It isn’t working, the tears coming fast and furious now as she begins to feel dizzy from the irregulated oxygen. Her heart is beating, pounding too fast for her body - slamming uselessly against her ribs, against her flesh, railing against the cancer itself. An attempt to loosen the painful grip of those cold, sharp fingers - digging into her deeper and deeper, reaching for her heart.
There is no cure for this - no cure for this feeling, this invisible presence waking with her and sleeping with her, placing itself between her and him. She cannot see it. She cannot touch it to shove it away, pummel her fists into it until it bleeds black all over the floor, oozing and gasping in its own death. She cannot kill it. She can only hate it until the hate is too much for just one object to bear and it breaks and bleeds onto everything around her.
She hates Galactica. She hates the Cylons. She hates the Quorum. She hates her people. She hates Earth. She hates Lee. She hates Tory. She hates Zarek. She hates Bill. She hates herself for allowing all of this hate in. She hates the cancer for bringing it here.
She doesn’t want it - any of it, really. Because hating all of those people, all of those things - it hurts. It hurts to do it - to look at the man she loves and hate him for sitting there, breathing freely, filled with healthy flesh, healthy bone - a pain-free heart. Hating him hurts her. Every heartbeat is a bit sharper - a tighter squeeze as the blood needs to be compressed that much harder. It hurts, but she cannot stop it. Cannot stop her irrational anger, her irrational emotions, because they all stem from her very rational fear.
She does not hate him. She hates his lack of cancer. She hates his attempt to understand. She hates her circumstance and the place in which she wakes up most mornings. She hates these endless circles around a dead planet as they all wait - for a sign, for an order, for something to change so they can move on. On bad days, she knows they are circling, waiting for her death. If she dies, they will move on. An endless countdown of her remaining days. One more cycle closer.
She does not hate him.
She just hates, because it is all she can do.
The good days aren’t worth it, she thinks.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
He wonders if it’s all worth it, most days.
She cries when she thinks she’s alone - dry sobs that shake through her thin frame when she thinks he cannot hear her. When she thinks he is preoccupied. When he is, in reality, hiding in another room, back pressed against cold metal as his own breath comes in gasps - and if it hurts him, what in the hell must it be doing to her?
He feels guilty.
Ashamed that he hides and waits it out - but when she cries, she is all sharp angles, jutting bones and razored edges, and any attempt to comfort her would end with both of them bleeding out across the floor.
He tried once - they didn’t speak for days afterward.
Those days - when the sound of her voice, something that usually flows through him like liquid happiness, ends up catching somewhere in his chest and ripping him open, millimetre by millimetre - those days, he wonders how this ended up being their life. How exactly was that fair? To give him this incredible feeling - a love so strong that he was seriously beginning to wonder - if she died - if she… how much longer could he possibly last without her?
Logic dictated that he would survive, but he knew better.
He couldn’t live without her.
Wouldn’t.
Didn’t want to.
He could say it a thousand different ways - express it with every touch, every painful gasp for air - tell her a thousand times, but she refused to believe. Lee had ignored it when he had said it out loud once - brushed it aside as hyperbole, an embellishment of an ordinary love.
Bill knows better. There is nothing ordinary about Laura Roslin. Not in life, not in the face of death, and never, ever in love.
Some days he sees her look at him and he knows, knows that some secret small part of her heart hates him. And an even larger part hates herself for even thinking it. Those days, he just takes her hand in his and lets her squeeze until the anger can become pain - for her, for him, for both of them - he just presses his palm to hers, holds fast until the moment has passed and the anger can subside.
It always does: pain and sorrow replaced slowly by comfort and joy.
And when she laughs - soft lyrical sound that is different every time he hears it - when she laughs, he knows. Knows that he could listen to her laugh a hundred thousand times before they reach their end and never hear every single laugh she possesses. Knows that he could look at her for years, decades, centuries and never truly see every inch of her beauty. Knows that should she leave before him, he would follow her blindly into the dark - never letting go.
It is selfish of him, and he knows that too. She wants his reassurance that he will go on - but he can never bring himself to look into her eyes (a thousand different colors and he doesn’t have enough time to catalogue them all) and repeat the lie to her. I will go on. He cannot. Cannot breathe, or live, or function, without her. And maybe that makes him weak - a wuss. Perhaps it makes her stronger - but he’s never argued that blatant truth, and he will not argue this one either.
Without her -
Nothing else matters. Even the things that should.
He has never been a man to have faith - to place his trust in something out of his control - but in the face of this, in the face of this painful fear, it’s all he has.
Faith that the only solution is for her to live.
Faith that she is the strongest person he knows. Stronger than fear, stronger than religion, stronger than terror. Stronger than death.
His hand tightens around hers, and hers squeezes back - one of those rare days when her laugh is a symphony of unheard notes, and her smile is genuine, her hand in his symbolizes only that she needs him near her always.
He wonders if it’s all worth it - and his answer changes day to day.
It’s worth it, but it hurts.
It’s worth it, but he cannot survive this alone.
It’s worth it, but the pain is too much today.
It’s worth it, but -
Nothing else matters.
Good days are not what others would classify as good. Good days are being able to smile without the skin pulling taut and painful. Smiling without feeling like she is about to be torn asunder. Good days are laughing without feeling the constant pressure on her ribs. Breathing without feeling the ball of pain, burning so hard and hot that she is constantly amazed that she and this cancer can continue to co-exist, side by side.
Good days are few and far between, and the bad days feel all the worse for them. Someone out there is laughing at the joke - whichever God is in charge of irony, she thinks: probably Ares or Zeus, undoubtedly a man at any rate - laughing at the sick realization that the good days are blessings and curses. The good makes the bad feel so much worse, so much bigger than it really is. The good is a small sliver of light, casting the bad in shadow and twisting it until it becomes a monster looming over her, intent on harm.
She should have learned the first time. But all she did the first time was nothing. Don’t talk about the cancer. Don’t think about the cancer. Take your pills. Don’t acknowledge the death hanging around you, within you. Don’t think, don’t look, don’t touch - don’t let anyone touch - don’t think, don’t blink, don’t dream anything other than visions, coloring her world in acid brights and shadowed darks, the entire spectrum between filled with secret messages. Don’t.
So all she learned the first time was avoidance. How to completely ignore your cancer until you died or it went away. Or, in her case, both.
Avoidance was easy. Avoidance was familiar and comforting. Avoidance was a luxury this time, one that her heart, her soul and Bill Adama would not allow her.
Today is a bad day. A day when even keeping her eyes open hurts. She hates today, she thinks. Hates these sheets and this skin, hates its smoothness and the cold that seems to pervade every deck of this frakking ship. She hates Galactica herself today. Hates the ship because it is her tomb, encased in steel and floating aimlessly through space, circling a tiny planet tirelessly in the hopes that on the next rotation, the impossible will have been achieved and something will change. She hates it. Hates it.
Hates the planet below them and the Gods that sent them there. Hates the Cylons, hates the humans - she hates being here. Lying in his bed trying to find the will to get up and move past this moment. Her breasts ache, her spine feels stiff and her head is pounding.
On bad days, she can feel it inside of her. Insidiously creeping through her skin, cell by cell - bony fingers clutching at her until the skin rots from the inside out, blackens and hangs there as a useless grotesque monument of victory. Cancer is winning - it’s winning, it’s within reach of victory and all she can do is lie here and hate it.
She bites her lip to stifle the sob that is lodged somewhere in the back of her throat. It chokes her, causes her to cough even as hot tears leak out and trail past her eyes into where her hairline should be. There is no hair there. Victory. Just hot tears clinging to too-smooth skin, bonding it to the thin pillow below. She decides she hates the pillow too. She even hates the scent of it right now - because it is a smell she associates with the good days and oh how she hates the good days today.
At least the cabin is quiet. Only her muffled sobs, punctuated with high pitched keening moans as she lies still and cannot move save to cry and to hate.
Good days and bad days, she thinks.
They were better than no days at all, right?
The pain hitches - pauses for a moment before flaring, bony fingers clutching tighter as if in response to her question. Wrong. She can feel herself begin to shake, and she closes her eyes tight against the sight of her own limbs spread out before her, quaking and out of her control. Her breathing increases and she fights it - muscles tensing painfully, rigid against the movement as she tries to regulate her breathing. It isn’t working, the tears coming fast and furious now as she begins to feel dizzy from the irregulated oxygen. Her heart is beating, pounding too fast for her body - slamming uselessly against her ribs, against her flesh, railing against the cancer itself. An attempt to loosen the painful grip of those cold, sharp fingers - digging into her deeper and deeper, reaching for her heart.
There is no cure for this - no cure for this feeling, this invisible presence waking with her and sleeping with her, placing itself between her and him. She cannot see it. She cannot touch it to shove it away, pummel her fists into it until it bleeds black all over the floor, oozing and gasping in its own death. She cannot kill it. She can only hate it until the hate is too much for just one object to bear and it breaks and bleeds onto everything around her.
She hates Galactica. She hates the Cylons. She hates the Quorum. She hates her people. She hates Earth. She hates Lee. She hates Tory. She hates Zarek. She hates Bill. She hates herself for allowing all of this hate in. She hates the cancer for bringing it here.
She doesn’t want it - any of it, really. Because hating all of those people, all of those things - it hurts. It hurts to do it - to look at the man she loves and hate him for sitting there, breathing freely, filled with healthy flesh, healthy bone - a pain-free heart. Hating him hurts her. Every heartbeat is a bit sharper - a tighter squeeze as the blood needs to be compressed that much harder. It hurts, but she cannot stop it. Cannot stop her irrational anger, her irrational emotions, because they all stem from her very rational fear.
She does not hate him. She hates his lack of cancer. She hates his attempt to understand. She hates her circumstance and the place in which she wakes up most mornings. She hates these endless circles around a dead planet as they all wait - for a sign, for an order, for something to change so they can move on. On bad days, she knows they are circling, waiting for her death. If she dies, they will move on. An endless countdown of her remaining days. One more cycle closer.
She does not hate him.
She just hates, because it is all she can do.
The good days aren’t worth it, she thinks.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
He wonders if it’s all worth it, most days.
She cries when she thinks she’s alone - dry sobs that shake through her thin frame when she thinks he cannot hear her. When she thinks he is preoccupied. When he is, in reality, hiding in another room, back pressed against cold metal as his own breath comes in gasps - and if it hurts him, what in the hell must it be doing to her?
He feels guilty.
Ashamed that he hides and waits it out - but when she cries, she is all sharp angles, jutting bones and razored edges, and any attempt to comfort her would end with both of them bleeding out across the floor.
He tried once - they didn’t speak for days afterward.
Those days - when the sound of her voice, something that usually flows through him like liquid happiness, ends up catching somewhere in his chest and ripping him open, millimetre by millimetre - those days, he wonders how this ended up being their life. How exactly was that fair? To give him this incredible feeling - a love so strong that he was seriously beginning to wonder - if she died - if she… how much longer could he possibly last without her?
Logic dictated that he would survive, but he knew better.
He couldn’t live without her.
Wouldn’t.
Didn’t want to.
He could say it a thousand different ways - express it with every touch, every painful gasp for air - tell her a thousand times, but she refused to believe. Lee had ignored it when he had said it out loud once - brushed it aside as hyperbole, an embellishment of an ordinary love.
Bill knows better. There is nothing ordinary about Laura Roslin. Not in life, not in the face of death, and never, ever in love.
Some days he sees her look at him and he knows, knows that some secret small part of her heart hates him. And an even larger part hates herself for even thinking it. Those days, he just takes her hand in his and lets her squeeze until the anger can become pain - for her, for him, for both of them - he just presses his palm to hers, holds fast until the moment has passed and the anger can subside.
It always does: pain and sorrow replaced slowly by comfort and joy.
And when she laughs - soft lyrical sound that is different every time he hears it - when she laughs, he knows. Knows that he could listen to her laugh a hundred thousand times before they reach their end and never hear every single laugh she possesses. Knows that he could look at her for years, decades, centuries and never truly see every inch of her beauty. Knows that should she leave before him, he would follow her blindly into the dark - never letting go.
It is selfish of him, and he knows that too. She wants his reassurance that he will go on - but he can never bring himself to look into her eyes (a thousand different colors and he doesn’t have enough time to catalogue them all) and repeat the lie to her. I will go on. He cannot. Cannot breathe, or live, or function, without her. And maybe that makes him weak - a wuss. Perhaps it makes her stronger - but he’s never argued that blatant truth, and he will not argue this one either.
Without her -
Nothing else matters. Even the things that should.
He has never been a man to have faith - to place his trust in something out of his control - but in the face of this, in the face of this painful fear, it’s all he has.
Faith that the only solution is for her to live.
Faith that she is the strongest person he knows. Stronger than fear, stronger than religion, stronger than terror. Stronger than death.
His hand tightens around hers, and hers squeezes back - one of those rare days when her laugh is a symphony of unheard notes, and her smile is genuine, her hand in his symbolizes only that she needs him near her always.
He wonders if it’s all worth it - and his answer changes day to day.
It’s worth it, but it hurts.
It’s worth it, but he cannot survive this alone.
It’s worth it, but the pain is too much today.
It’s worth it, but -
Nothing else matters.