Work Text:
Goodbye, Captain Apollo
Her tears dripped onto the rancid mass of vomit in the bowl as she fumbled for the lever. Laura Roslin watched it swirl away, replaced by clean, sparkling water. More tears came as she collapsed back onto the floor, leaning her head against the door. She didn’t have the strength to get up yet.
Feeling hollowed out, she wrapped her arms about herself and sat and cried.
Eventually, the foul taste in her mouth drove her to her feet and over to the sink. The bathroom mirror mocked the President of All Humanity as she caught a glimpse of her reflection. There was vomit in her hair. Her tears came harder.
Resolutely, she washed her face and rinsed her mouth out, and then she brushed her teeth. With trembling fingers, she unbuttoned her shirt, grateful that she hadn’t messed it up except for that small spot on the right hand cuff; when her stomach had given its first traitorous heave, she almost hadn’t made it to the bathroom.
Applying a little liquid soap to the spot, she washed it out under the running water and hung it up.
Her reflection was a pale, fragile wraith in a thin chemise, staring at her--begging her to make it not real. Not again, her eyes begged. Not again. She pulled on the dark blue courtesy robe that had been hanging on the peg on the back of the door.
She leaned over the basin to wash the bits of vomit out of the ends of her long auburn hair. What she longed for was a hot bath, pomegranate shampoo and conditioner from the Aphrodite Spas, and to change from the skin out into the most luxurious, decadent silks in all of Caprica. What she had to settle for was a chrome sink, ubiquitous liquid soap and the same clothes because she’d only worn them once this week. And she hadn’t brought another outfit to Galactica.
Note to frakking self; leave at least one change of clothes on this frakking ship .
The problem was that her wardrobe was so limited, she could hardly afford to part with any of it, and she rarely stayed on board Galactica long enough to necessitate changing her clothing.
But with her diloxin chemotherapy, her bloody drug-induced, Cylon-haunted visions, Baltar’s unbelievable “not guilty” verdict courtesy of Bill Adama--and not to mention his son, Lee--the return of Kara Thrace from the dead, or at least some ... THING ... that looked like her, just in time for a fleet-wide blackout, and the Cylons making another grand entrance, it had been one long frakking day that just didn’t seem to want to end.
And it wasn’t even fifteen hundred hours yet. FRAK!
Rinsing and wringing her wet ends out, she finger-combed through her hair and smiled sardonically at her reflection. “You look like hell,” she muttered.
At least the Cylons had been affected by the same power drain the fleet had experienced and in the end, Bill had managed hold them off long enough for the civilian ships to get their drives back up. They were now hiding inside an electromagnetic storm--which Gaeta had found deep inside the Ionian Nebula--with an almost identical radiation signature to the one that hid the Ragnar Anchorage weapons’ depot back in the Twelve Colonies trinary system.
A radiation signature that had proven inimical to Cylon silica-based neural technology and a storm that took up almost the same volume as an average solar system gave them a hell of a lot of space to hide in.
They couldn’t remain indefinitely, but it would at least give them a place to rest and repair their damaged ships, while they tried to figure out what the next clue to Earth was and where in the Nebula it might be hidden.
That was provided the Cylons didn’t find them, or the next signpost, first.
The quiet knock on the bathroom door startled her and she gave a little cry as she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Madam President?”
"Frak! Just the person I want to see right now," she muttered sarcastically to herself.
“Madam President?” Lee Adama called again, concern shading his voice.
Laura sighed and belted the robe tightly before opening the door. “What can I do for you, Mr. Adama?”
He didn’t quite wince physically at her mode of addressing him, but she saw wince in his eyes none-the-less. She noticed he was wearing his uniform again.
“Are you all right, Laura?”
Ignoring his question, she walked over to the VIP quarters’ only armchair and sat down. “Is there something you wanted, Mr. Adama?”
“Yes, gods-damn it!” he exploded. “I want to know if you’re all right!”
“The state of my health is none of your concern,” she said coldly; anger rose like bile in her throat. “Now, if there’s nothing else, please leave. It’s been a long day and I’d like to get some rest.”
Lee looked down at her for a long moment. Finally, taking a deep breath, he tried again. “Look, I didn’t come here to argue with you,” he said quietly. “I wanted to apologise. I know I hurt you during the trial with my cross-examination and I’m sorry; it wasn’t my intention. I didn’t realise that the cancer was back--I thought you were cured, and I’m sorry it was exposed like that. But it wasn’t personal, Laura. I hope you understand that all I wanted was to make sure that Baltar got a fair trial. Now, you may not agree, but whatever else he has done, he was entitled to that.”
Laura stared at him, stunned; a cruel hand tightened about her heart and squeezed until it exploded and she could no longer breathe ... until suddenly she could.
“You self-righteous, little shit!” she said in a low, hard voice; his eyes widened in shock and he stumbled back a step although she hadn't moved from her chair. “It wasn’t personal? You stood in front of that court and told everyone that I was nothing but a frakking hopped-up drug-addict, with a sick, twisted need for revenge, and I’m supposed to swallow that whole and smile and say, “Fine, Captain Apollo ... don’t worry, I understand why you did it ... we’re still friends ... no harm done ... you’re forgiven?” Is that it?”
“I’m sorry,” Lee ground out. “I never meant to hurt you. It wasn’t my intention for it to come off sounding like that.”
She laughed, harsh and grating. “You didn’t intend for it to come off sounding like that?” she whispered incredulously; she couldn’t stop the tears coursing down her face. “Pray tell, what exactly did you mean for it to sound like? You found out I was taking Chamalla and it never occurred to you to ask me why? It never occurred to you to think, “Hmm, well Lee Old Boy, she’s taking Chamalla again ... now, what possible reason could she have for taking that drug? Let’s think about it, shall we?”
Lee blanched as she continued, voice dripping sarcasm, “Now, what reason did she have to start taking it in the first place? Well, let’s see ... she had cancer--could that possibly be the reason? Could it be that the cancer is back? Nah! The president is just a frakking drug-addict, playing at being a prophet so she can get high on Chamalla!”
He stared at her in abject horror at the ugly picture she painted with her words, and somewhere inside her, a little voice shouted at Laura to stop--but she couldn’t.
“That’s really how you see me, isn’t it, Lee?” she goaded.
“No!” he cried out; there were tears in his eyes. He braced one hand against the bulk head as if he needed it to stay upright. “Gods no, Laura!”
“No?” she repeated hoarsely, determined to see this to the end. “Then please explain it to me, Lee. My taking Chamalla during my first bout with cancer would have had no relevance to Baltar’s defence of his actions on New Caprica. And you said that as far as you knew, the cancer had been “cured” two years ago--that you didn’t know it had returned. So let’s look at this logically,” she said in her most level schoolmarm voice. “Now correct me if I’m wrong, but as I see it, the only way it could have been was relevant to Baltar’s defence was if I was a drug-addict, whose addled perceptions could not be trusted because I still taking Chamalla while on New Caprica, and in fact, had not stopped when the cancer went away.”
Laura watched him lean against the wall, head bowed. “Wasn’t that the inference the tribunal judges, everyone in that courtroom--and indeed--everyone in the entire fleet, was supposed to draw? It doesn’t take a genius to see the headlines; “President Laura Roslin, drug-addict, power-mad schoolteacher and so-called prophet, takes vicious revenge on the innocent Dr. Gaius Baltar, Great Saviour of Humanity and Hero of the People.” Isn’t that what you were really saying in that courtroom?
"Weren't you saying that my memories of standing in front of that Centurion firing squad, staring down the barrels of their gun-hands--that all my flashbacks and bloody nightmares since New Caprica are nothing more than the frakkinghallucinations of a drugged-soaked addict! And that everything that happened--the whole nightmare of that gods-forsaken planet ... all those lives lost--had nothing to do with Gaius Baltar, his frakking policies and the fact that he was working for the Cylons ... that he has been all along.”
“It was my duty to see that he got a fair trial!” Lee replied meeting her gaze with angry defiance. “I won’t apologize for that! You were the one who lost perspective and made it about revenge! You were the one who forgot that everyone deserves a fair trial--and he was certainly not going to get it from that farce of a Show of Justice you and my father cooked up!
“My Gods, my father didn’t even think Baltar deserved that much. If it hadn’t been for three of those commanders refusing to be railroaded by him, I’m sorry, but you would have had my father put a bullet in Baltar's brain not an hour after the verdict was read, just like you tried to have him do with Admiral Cain.”
“Lords of Kobol, you really do think that I’m a monster,” she said feeling suddenly sad and exhausted. She forestalled his intended protest with a flick of her hand. “I guess I deserve that. Boy, when someone falls from that pedestal you put them on, they really fall hard. There’s no middle-ground between sky and gutter for you, is there, Captain Apollo?”
"Don't!" he shouted. His face contorted in disgust. "Don't you dare shrug it off as if it was just that one incident--don't you dare try to manipulate this ... manipulate me! Gods, that's how you solve everything now, isn't it? If something gets in your way, get rid of it--kill it if you have to. It doesn't matter that you're kidnapping babies, it doesn't matter that you're stealing elections and making a mockery of democracy, it doesn't matter that you're committing murder--it doesn't matter that you're committing genocide! Just get rid of the frakking problem."
"Yes, if it threatens the survival of the human race--yes you get rid of the frakkingproblem any way you can!"
"Well sometimes it's not enough just to survive if we lose everything that makes us human. Our people are better than that--humanity is better than that!" Laura bit back a groan and wondered if he realised he was quoting his father almost verbatim.
"And when there's no one left because we clung so blindly to our ideals?" she whispered. "Do I really need to remind you that the Cylons are out there and our people are nothing but cosmic dust, not even a footnote in history if we don't put survival first."
He gazed at her with pity now. "Tell me, Laura, since the Olympic Carrier, how many slips of paper do you have now in that desk drawer of yours?"
"Too many," she replied, staring directly into his eyes. She gave a hoarse, bitter laugh and shook her head. “You're right. I am a monster--and right now, this monster has neither the strength nor the inclination to continue this discussion. I need to get some rest before I have to go do monstrous things to Kara Thrace ... figure out if she's a problem I need to get rid of."
He stared at her, eyes again wide with horror as she threw Kara's predicament in his face.
“But I will say this one last thing; you do your father a great disservice, Lee. Regardless of his personal feelings towards Baltar, William Adama would not have allowed them to cloud his judgement or besmirch the honourable discharge of his duty to that Court ... not even for me. You of all people should know by now that whatever else he is, he is Honour personified.”
She rose, picked up the folder lying on the low coffee table and held it out to him. “Please, deliver this to your Master-at-Arms, Sargeant Hadrian. She is the Court’s records-keeper.”
Lee nodded as he accepted the folder, but there was a confused expression on his face as he stepped out of the cabin.
“And on the way,” Laura continued quietly, “you might want to take a look at the majority opinion for acquittal. It was written by Admiral William Adama.”
She shut the hatch in his stunned face and locked it. Her legs gave away and she sank to the floor, her body shaking with the force of her sobs as she laid her head against the cool steel surface of the door.
“No, Lee,” she whispered. “Not for me; for you, definitely, but never for me.”
Laura closed her eyes, remembering Lee’s unadulterated admiration for her in those first terrifying days after the Holocaust and their subsequent flight from the Twelve Colonies. And as the weight of the last three years came crashing down on her, she’d never felt more alone.
“Goodbye, Captain Apollo,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Goodbye.”