Title: The Other President
Rating: K
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairings/Warnings: Laura Roslin, Tom Zarek, mentions of Adama/Roslin
Genre: Drama
Setting: Set during Blood on the Scales
Premise:While Gaeta has his last conversation with Baltar, Tom Zarek is confronted by the only person who wants to speak with him before he dies, Laura Roslin.

The Other President

The hallway to the brig is quiet. Every step Laura's heels make on the floor resonate clearly to Zarek's cell. He knows she is coming but he doesn't know why. He knows she is tired from all he put her through. She's fed up with his attempts to be heard; she's fed up with politics, with life here in general. It makes her dangerous, the crushing defeat of an Earth that wasn't humanity's salvation and the cancer that eats away at her body has made her desperate. Laura Roslin was desperate for peace, a peace with the Cylons. She had asked us to run, to turn away from our homes and now with no place to run she had given up and asked us all to take a chance with the people who destroyed our world.

To Zarek, she had given up and maybe she couldn't fight anymore. Maybe the tragedy of finding a devastated Earth was the final straw but Tom Zarek couldn't give up. For Tom, it was the moment he took a chance and perhaps be remembered for something more then a 5 minute president.

The footsteps stopped. There was some chatter outside, Tom assumed it was between Roslin and one of the guards. The two guards that were watching him within the brig were signalled to join the others in the hallway. It was then that he saw Laura Roslin make the step inside the hatch to where his guards had been. He watched her carefully, she walked as if each step had been thought out but there was a slight tremor to her step. He had seen this before. The last time she had cancer and they had left the fleet in search of Kobol, he had seen her movement unsteady as she climbed the hills on Kobol, in search of the tomb of Athena. The memory of that time and now was just unbelievable to Tom and he tried to stop thinking about it because the absurdity of then and now made him want to laugh in a way he didn't think Laura would appreciate.

Laura's eyes never left his but her usual steely gaze wasn't so penetrating this time. She was sick and while she maintained her usual sense of professionalism she wanted him to know want pain looked like. She dragged a lone chair that scratched it's way from the other end of the room. He didn't know whether she couldn't lift the chair or if she wanted to put him at unease. When the chair rested less then a metre away from the bars Laura sat down. She kept her arms rested on her lap and just stared at Tom.

"Talk", she said.
"Excuse me?"
"In one hour you are going to be put to death by firing squad, you have one hour to talk to someone and apparently I am the only volunteer; so talk"
"Ok, why aren't I going the way of the airlock? I thought that was your preferred method of execution"
Laura smirked despite herself.
"You interfered with the military first. They get to choose the execution method".
"Right, I suppose it doesn't make much difference, military, government - it's all the same at the end of the day".
Laura didn't take the bait she just found a place above Zarek's head to find interesting all of a sudden. There was something she needed to know but she had to choose the moment wisely.
"Laura?"
"What?"
"Don't you want to say anything? I thought we were supposed to be having a conversation. You've never been one to shy away from speaking your mind before".
"There are something's that can be said without words Mr Zarek"
"How are you feeling Laura?"
"Ill, next question"
Zarek laughed.
"You aren't seriously going to keep this up, are you?"
There was a small hint of weakness to Laura's demeanour. She pursed her bottom lip as if she was trying to hold back, this was something he had seen her do before, though her eyes were still wet from what he guessed was a moment of stress during the mutiny. It felt strange to him being around her while she tried so vainly to remain strong when she was so obviously exhausted. Tom couldn't tell if she was using her own weakness against him but the tension in the air was thick and he expected at any minute she was going to unleash her temper against him. He remembered her threats against him just a short time ago: bullets, bombs, eye teeth - she would rip him to shreds if her strength allowed her. He loosened his tie to gain some relief from her icy glazed stare.
"The cylons; were they really a cause for revolution or just an excuse?" she finally asked.
This time he couldn't help but smirk.
"A little from column A and a little from column B"
She swallowed as if something was caught in her throat. She didn't know why the truth bothered her so much when she already knew how he was going to answer the question. For a time, she had convinced herself that maybe this terrorist turned politician could use his understanding of the fleet from his time on New Caprica to the benefit of the fleet as it stood now. But after a time she realised just as she had known before New Caprica, that his ego had a bigger role in his causes then the causes themselves.
"Laura, do you honestly think that if Admiral Adama didn't fancy you the way he does that you too wouldn't be behind these bars?"
Laura didn't expect this, she didn't expect her 'relationship' with the Admiral was common knowledge and of all things Zarek could bring up she was the least comfortable with this. But despite her surprise at his question she also knew Zarek, he was baiting her again and as he only had one hour left to live and she had a lot of venting to do she decided to play her own card.
"Jealous?"
Zarek had assumed she would be offended or perhaps brush it off but she jumped in and played the cards dealt to her. He should have expected this, Laura had become less careful about her reputation as long as she reached her goals. Zarek moved closer to the bars so he was within a few inches from her. She didn't move back at all, she was ready for anything he sent her way and he knew it.

"I remember another Laura Roslin, a Laura Roslin I don't think even Bill Adama knew. This Laura Roslin started a small school in New Caprica even before she had a book to work with, she would gather young children around her and tell them stories of the great 12 colonies. She was an idealist who viewed her former life and the lives of her fellow humans on the colonies as an ideal paradise. That Laura Roslin created an ideal version of the past for the next generation in an effort for them to encourage change in the future. Then the cylons came and she reminded her students that one day they would rise up from the cylon oppression and they would find justice in a day of reckoning. On the day of reckoning, the Galactica and Pegasus would return to rescue them and they would finally be free from all the pain the cylons had caused them and their families. This Laura Roslin instilled a sense of hope into her children and when she regained power she instilled it in her people as well. How do you think this Laura Roslin would feel knowing that the present Laura Roslin had placed her hope in cylons because of misplaced alliances concocted by the all powerful Adama family in her absence? Is this really the card you wanted to play Laura?".
"Life was different then, we were all different then; you included"
"Is it really that different though? We are still being oppressed but this time instead of it being Baltar and the cylons it's the Adama family - which now seems to include you - and the cylons. Your democratic government is as much as a sham as Baltar's was"

Roslin got off her chair a little quicker then Zarek expected. She clung to the bars and looked directly at the man in front of her. His remark had cut at her a little harder then she thought was possible. She was reminded of them, those people she left behind in the Quorum to put up with Zarek's tirade against her while she struggled to deal with her failures and mortality.
"Anya Lebien, Damien Frestya, Frank Roveno; do you even remember their names? You killed them Zarek and with them you killed any legitimacy you had as a leader. So don't bother attempting to declare yourself as the voice of democracy. You killed any remaining democracy in this fleet when you killed them".
Zarek put his face to the bars so he was within inches of Laura Roslin.
"I didn't need to kill democracy by killing them. It was already dead the instant you brought a former military officer and an Adama into a Quorum seat. Any legitimate independence the government had from the military went straight out the window when the Young Prince Adama took his place next to Queen Roslin. You might do the fleet a favour now by being honest with them regarding the real ruling party of the fleet. I have to wonder though, when did you give up and realise the pointlessness of maintaining a democracy under Adama's military regime, was it before or after you slept with him?"

Laura's breath quickened, perhaps to quickly. She wanted to slap him, she wished Kara Thrace was here to kick Zarek right where it hurt. But then maybe he would see Kara as part of the Adama military regime as well. Instead of getting to slap him she felt herself getting weak again and she clung onto the bars in front of her trying to regain her stance, desperate not to show weakness.
It didn't matter, Zarek had already noticed her clinging to the bars, he reached out and held her small upper arms as she attempted to get her breath back. Laura had her eyes to the floor for the first time since she entered the room. She felt weak and slightly pathetic having this man hold her up while she regained her strength.
"Do you want me to call the guards?" he asked.
"No, I'm ok, I just think I need to sit down again".
Zarek loosened his grip on her arms and she slowly lowered herself back to her seat.
She was angry, angry at Zarek and angry at her body for being so weak that she couldn't even slap the bastard. She couldn't look at him. She needed to look any where but at him, simply to regain her strength. She looked at the floor and she concentrated on her breathing and she ignored his petty attempts to care how she felt. She didn't want pity, she had come here for closure, just something, anything to help her negotiate in her own mind what had transpired today. But instead of closure she felt the sting of her own failures as a leader. There was no victory in taking back Galactica from Gaeta and Zarek, just the cold hard sense of great unrest within the fleet, an unrest she had feared since Earth. Of all the things she had faced, losing the one hope that was Earth was one failure she could not justify to herself or the fleet. Hiding away was something cowardly and she knew that but she had been in a state of shock and dismay that was as dense as any fog and it was only now when she had to fight back for power that she felt a release from her flaws. She wondered if this was what Baltar had been referring to while on the baseship. A sense of relief from the burden of sin and failure. Comparing herself with Baltar was a road she didn't like to go down, but as time went on she began to realise that all leaders must balance the weight of failure with their need for self preservation.
"Tom, you said once that I was an idealist. I know that the leadership in the fleet isn't perfect and I have struggled to balance my disappointment with Earth and my role as president, but in case you still care I have decided to create a new quorum. Lee came to me with the idea, that we base the membership on the various ships in the fleet, instead of what you would call an idealist version of colonies. You once said that we were being held hostage by the way things used to be, that we were carrying on as if the colonies were never destroyed. At the time you had a point, but I would never admit to it. I'm not going to pretend the cylons didn't destroy our home world, I'm not going to forget the lives lost on New Caprica or the fact that Earth was nothing but a disappointment. But I don't have the luxury any more to wallow in my failures or the cylon's. Right now we have a chance to change things, a chance not to be hostage to the past. Our allies have proven themselves loyal, I have to let go and so do you. "

Laura stood up as if she had never felt the moment of weakness she had just a short while ago. She didn't like the man in front of her, part of her was still angry but that part was under control by the part of her that felt something entirely different.
"Goodbye Tom"
He tried to think of something, anything to say before she left but nothing came to mind that would sound significant enough.
"Goodbye Laura"