Title: Houses of Tomorrow
Author: miabicicletta
Pairsings/Characters: Laura Roslin. Billy Keikeya.
Rating: PG
Summary: She likes this, moments when they could pretend they were normal people.
And a woman who held a babe in her arms said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Many years of teaching had made Laura Roslin a highly astute woman. The skills she'd learned at the head of a classroom stayed with her long after the chalk dust had settled, and continued to served her faithfully when she entered into politics. Patience and perception, she found, were among the best tools in managing the labyrinthine corridors of bureaucracy. She'd been savvy, she'd been shrewd, and over time had come to fill all the blank spaces of her map with Gorgon's lairs and the many monsters she had battled.
She liked to think that she was capable of seeing what fell before her with a keen and lucid eye. Which was why it struck her rather deeply when late one evening, Laura Roslin realized that she barely knew anything at all about the closest person left to her in the whole of the universe.
"Billy, where are you from?"
He looks at her as though he does not understand the question, paused over a field of notes and files he'd been wrapping up before the morning's Quorum meeting. It was a priceless expression, the rare occurrence of which never failed to inspire a moment of sudden affection for her young aide.
"Ma'am?"
She smiles and motions back to the chair.
"We barely had time to get to know one another, you and I, and then the attacks, the Cylons, and the endless crises...and yet you spend all day, every day with me. It seems cold, don't you think? We need some time to be human as well as leaders. Come sit, those can wait to be filed till morning."
He opens his mouth, but gave no response. Instead he settles in his chair again, reluctantly setting his stack of files aside.
"Good. So…?"
"Um. I'm from Ithaca, by the lakes in the north of Qualai? My parents grew up there, though my father's family was from Picon."
He shifts uncomfortably. Billy was young, so young. She tended to forget that, even with the plain clarity of youth in his features. He was painfully bright, but grim, weighed down with the trappings of severity that so often accompanied grave, promised individuals and had nothing to do with the end of the world. Still, his innocence was disarming at times.
"And you were at the University of Caprica, yes?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Me too!"
"I—I didn't know that, ma'am. I thought you had been at the CSE?"
"For my PhD, yes. But I did my undergraduate degree at Artemis College, Caprica. Which college were you at?"
"Prometheus, ma'am."
"Oh, I should have guessed. You know the first time we met, you struck me as such a noble young scholar, Billy."
She likes this, these moments when they could pretend they were normal people. Just a boss and her faithful deputy, their rapport more like professor and advisee, closer to the people they had been before the bombs fell; unburdened by the void made in the loss of everyone else around them. Here they could pretend, if only briefly, to be as they were on Caprica, before they became refugees and the last best hope of democracy in all of humankind.
"Whatever made you get into politics?"
He blushes.
"Well…to be honest, Madame President, it was...unintentional. I was supposed to start law school in the fall. I'd gotten a junior clerkship for Justice Lang; just case review and filing, really. But a few weeks before it was supposed to begin, they told me it had been filled – I think it went to the daughter of some prefect from Leonis. The woman at Government HR reassigned me to you. I... couldn't really say no at that point."
And there it was. She hadn't wanted to be President. He hadn't planned to be fetching tea for a third-tier cabinet member.
She hums, and an incredulous little giggle escapes her.
"It would seem that Fate had other things in mind for you and I."
"I suppose it would seem that way, Ma'am."
"Tell me about your family, Billy," She leans forward, giving him her undivided attention. "What were your sisters like?"
His expression softens even more than usual in his guileless baby face. She can see the retreat in his eyes as he goes off somewhere good and safe that even at the height of their destruction the Cylons cannot touch.
"I had two, older. Sora was the oldest. Acted like it, too." His shoulders lost a little of their tension and he leaned a little further forward, relaxing ever so slightly.
"I remember when we were younger I was always getting so mad at her. Everything around them, especially Sora, was chaos. She had this way of sneaking up on me and she'd swoop in from somewhere, swinging me up in the air. I always thought she was going to let me go and I'd go flying, but she never did…"
She wasn't sure when Billy had begun speaking so much with silence. It might have been something he'd done all along. She couldn't say.
"Jill was at a year younger but it never mattered with them. They're…"
A shadow passes in his features; he catches his mistake.
"…werebest friends. They did a number on my parents in prep school. Always seemed like they had twelve boyfriends each, tons of friends. My mom complained constantly that our house was never quiet, and there were always people dropping by, calling, messaging on the vid screen, but secretly I think she loved it. They were so…I don't know, bubbly I guess. I don't think they ever went a day without someone falling in love with them. Pretty much the opposite of me."
He shakes his head in self-reproach, humor falling flat. Oh, Billy, she thinks. How tempted she is to kiss that mop of luckless hair on his head and murmur lovely lies to him like a proper mother would.
Instead she gives him a small truth, her most precious.
"I had two sisters, too."
He looks up, surprised and curious. She smiles with empathy, but her expression feels tight, tendons like strings on a box of sorrow she fought very long to close. It will hold; it always does.
"Younger, both. I'm sure I'm no different from Sora. We oldest have a reputation to uphold, you know, and younger siblings to keep in line."
The corners of his mouth turn up in honesty, but he is still far away. The course of this conversation has taken them both out of this room, and the words they speak are only half meant for one another. The rest are caught somewhere between exposition and absolution.
"Were they on Caprica…?"
She can tell he is a little insecure with his empathy, in this new bond between them. His voice comes out smaller, and she almost wants to tell him yes, yes we went through the same thing, darling boy.
But she doesn't. She can't give him that comfort; can't, because she remembers the first time the world ended as a warm, sunny day, without clouds of fire and rains that fell like smoke. Her grief is an old scar that she has learned to live with, and Billy's wounds are still fresh, raw and weeping, that have not yet begun to heal. They are comrades, yes, but not in loss. She'd accepted her heartache long ago, and it is unequal to his own.
"No." She looks up, smiling her smile that is not. "No, they died several years ago. There was an accident. At the time they were barely older than you are now."
She removes her glasses, folds them in her hands.
It amazes her, a little, the ways he has completely taken her by surprise with his earnest affection, his disarming means of seeing past her walls. She alternates between musing how terrible a politician he would be; either that, or a leader capable of changing the worlds. She never can quite decide.
She rose with deliberation, felt the strong, sturdy quality of the ornate and unlikely artifact of her office under her fingertips as moved around the desk to his side. Resting against it, her hands fell to her sides, and she idly tapped her thumbnails against the smooth lacquer. Eyes flicking up to the ceiling, she chose her words carefully.
"Billy, I want to tell you something."
"Yes, ma'am?' He sat straight up, dutifully coming to full attention.
"I never found the time for myself in the way that most people do by my age. I suppose that it's true enough to say that the right opportunity never arose - marry, have a family - but just as true that I never really went out of my way to look for those opportunities." She glanced down at him, "I'm not sure if you had noticed, but I do tend towards single-mindedness."
They shared a private grin.
"So, when my family died so suddenly, I continued to do as I had always done and all my grief went into my work. That sublimation afforded me political success and personal satisfaction by serving the students and teachers of the Twelve Colonies, but it also left me...less than I might have been. Hollow, if not alone."
She paused, cocked her head to appreciate him.
"Billy, if I had ever had a son, I would hope he'd have been exactly as you are. You do your family, and their memory, a great service. I hope you know how proud I am of you."
For just a moment, all the stiffness and unsure emotion in him fell away and he smiled. Gods, so young.
"Madame President…oh, I don't even know what to say."
"Just promise to keep being you, every day. Because I don't know what I would do without you, Billy."
He surprises her with a fierce hug. He is so tall. She barely comes up to his shoulder. She closes her eyes, her heart swelling for this kind and smart and true and just good, good boy she depends on so much. It is more true endearment than she has felt in all her recent memory; more than she has felt since the attacks; and, if she is honest with herself as she is not always willing to be, probably since long before that. She'd made an art of keeping people at arms length for so very long. And here this idealistic, terribly dressed young atheist had shuffled bashfully into her office. She could hardly believe that that reserved young man, the one who had opened her doors and filed reports, could be the same BIlly who'd come every day to read aloud to her as she'd traipsed the edges of this life not so long ago. Somewhere in between he had become her family.
How strange the kindness of the Gods.
She steps back and placed a small kiss on his brow. He really needs a haircut.
"I should be going, Madam President."
"Don't let me keep you. Give my best to Petty Officer Dualla."
He blushes, but didn't duck his head so awkwardly this time.
"Good night, ma'am.
"Goodnight. I'll see you in the morning?"
"Always, ma'am."
Two weeks later, Billy Keikeya dies on the Cloud 9 and all she can focus on is that he was twenty-five years old.
Younger than either of her sisters.
Younger than either of his.
Laura Roslin had reacted to the holocaust against the Twelve Colonies of Kobol with silent shock and a shaking voice. But on the night of Billy's funeral, the guilt for all her unshed tears at the death of billions poured out from reckless ache within her as though there could be no end. Her sobs echoed in the empty office aboard Colonial One, barer now with the loss of a son born of circumstance, if not blood.
The Scriptures spoke of the darkest hours, which came just before the light of dawn. But for all the hope in her heart, for every dream of a promised land she'd helped perpetuate, Laura could not say for certain there would ever be a dawn again, and morning was not quite the same. An hour would come, of course, when she would rise to smooth her hair, straighten her suit and begin to comb through the dossiers of her miniscule staff members in search of a suitable replacement. An hour when she would resume the work she was committed, if perhaps no longer Fated, to do.
But morning was a long way off yet, without even a sun to rise in greeting.
She wept, a small gold ring clutched close to her heart, and no one left to comfort her.
The title and opening lines come from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, "On Children"