Title: For Gift Or Grace
Author: Trialia
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Rating: T
Word Count: 490
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Bill Adama/Laura Roslin
Spoilers: Daybreak II-III
Beta: flamingo55
A/N: No summary, because it would be spoilerful. Post-finale. If you can tell me where I got my title, you get a cookie... and no Googling!
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It breaks his heart a little more the day he realises he can no longer remember the exact shade of her eyes. He thought he could not break any more than he already has; he knows now how wrong that was.
Her voice, he is grateful, is not yet gone from his thoughts.
He wants to remember her as she was when he first fell in love with her; when he saw her shining brighter than any sun in the daylight of New Caprica; her face as he made love to her for the first time, desperate and joyful and unwilling to give up any scrap of the time she had left. Of the life she had left.
It hurts to remember her last words, and he's beginning to wonder how he ever thought he could go on without her, even for her sake. The pain of the first few weeks has not gone away. Instead, dulled by time and use, it remains an ache in his chest, a hard lump in his throat. He doesn't think he'd cried as much in his life as he did in the days after the numbness wore off, even when Zak died; after all, then he'd had a second son, even if he could never be a replacement. No one can replace Laura in his heart.
Even Earth's beautiful sunsets can only remind him of the woman who should be at his side and is not. Sometimes he prays, to no deity in particular, for a day when he will be able to remember her without pain. He's unsure it will come at all.
He throws himself into physical work, more than his old body should take on, until his once-torn chest burns fire, and he is so tired he can't think. He falls to sleep, worn out, with her smile on his mind, and does not dream. A small mercy, he thinks: to forget Laura would be to betray her, but to end the pain in any other way, even more so. No matter how much he sometimes wants to frak it all and take action in a more definite way than killing himself with overwork.
He continues to exist without her because it's what she would have wanted.
Sometimes, he wonders if she knew how cruel she was being, and decides not. Even though they'd fought to begin with, she'd never have done that to him on purpose. She didn't say it, but he knew how hard she fought to keep them all alive, how much she wanted them to reach Earth. He can't betray that. At least, not directly.
He speaks his agony, his regret, his adoration and guilt aloud to the night. "I miss you," he whispers, face buried in his hands as he sits by her grave, back against the branch that marks her loss for the world.
She's the only one who will hear him now.