Disclaimer: Bill and Laura do not belong to me. They just grab me by the neck sometimes and tell me: "Write us."
This fic is for Ana, my neighbor and friend. For being adamant that I had to watch BSG and insisting for years until I did so.
Euphoria.
Screams, cries, and cheers echo in the CIC walls and spread through the corridors, faster than light. Faster than any of the jumps into the void they have performed in this constant run the last four years have been. Joy overflows the ends of the ship, breaks through the cracks of their souls full force, bounces against the ceiling, the panels, the tables, and the screens and pours over them again like a blissful, too long awaited rain.
They are a family. A few hundreds of people. A few thousands, because the scene they are living in the CIC right now is most likely being replicated across the fleet in a collective catharsis, a much needed liberation, an emotional contagion suggesting that happiness, unlike sound, can be transmitted in space.
The waves have carried his father's words to the very last corner of the very last ship, to all the ears, and all the hearts. Leaning against the central table of the CIC, Lee has silently listened to the Admiral's message. He has felt expectant, restrained, his heart on his sleeve. Even knowing in advance what the Admiral would say he wanted to hear it no less. He needed to hear it as much as everyone else. He needed to feel the heavenly music of those words said aloud, spilling out of his father's lips, pressing into his eardrums. That sentence is the catalyst of the hope that thirty thousand souls have tried not to lose when they had lost everything else already. It is the secret formula that gathers all the worries, all the pain, and all the sacrifices of the last years. This sentence bottles it all up, shakes it and uncorks, at last, the dream they barely dared to dream. It is the magic wand that turns a pipe- dream into something specific. Suddenly, their dream is no longer a mirage: it is a tangible reality. It has a round shape, it is half- hidden behind a soft halo of clouds and any of them can see it just looking through a window.
Lee jumps on the table, raises his arms in praise, clenches his fists, and yells his relief and his ecstasy emptying all the air from his lungs. He adds his own electric vibration, running through him from head to toes, to the trembling that shakes them all together as if they all shared the same body.
Then, Lee jumps down to the floor again and hugs his father. Or maybe his father has hugged him first. He cannot be sure. It does not matter anyway. During the last years, those hugs have become the only effective communication line between them. At last we found a way, he thinks. This one is as good as any other. It is certainly much better than having none at all. It has been a long time since Lee finally assumed his father would never express his affection for him in words. He has accepted it. He accepted it in about the same moment he learned how to read it in his eyes and his gestures. It was also then that he finally quit torturing himself for being so similar to him, in this, too. On some many ways he was so much like him that he would never be even mildly comfortable in his own skin without forgiving his dad first.
There is something else Lee needs to accept now. However, after all they have been through, his own relationship with his father re-established on a ground that makes both of them tacitly comfortable, Lee knows this new acceptance will be easier. Much easier.
But above all, he knows there is nothing he can do but coming to terms with it.
There is nothing else he can do because this is just not going to change. Plain and simple. This reality is much stronger, much bigger than this planet holding all their hopes for a future. Lee knows his father has a reason to live. He had it already before they found Earth and he would still have it if they had not found any promised land on those coordinates. Lee knows, too, that his father will not have eyes and heart for any Earth at all when she leaves. He knows that, when the moment comes, the Admiral will be like a ship purposelessly floating across the space. He will only want to fall asleep and wake no more.
Lee has spent a long time in his life believing his father did not love him. Now he knows better. He knows he does. But here is the paradox: the moment Lee has learnt to decipher the telltale signs of his father's heart it has become crystal clear whom this heart belongs to. And it is not to him.
It is not to him, his son, his only son alive. It is not to Kara, the foster daughter he loves with the strength you can only find in chosen love, when it is not a love born from circumstance or genetic chance but from choice and a communion of souls. It is not to Zak despite the layer of eternity that death imposes on our feelings for those we have lost. It is not to Lee's mother: that is for sure. It was never her: Lee is certain about that, it is clear as the light of those days in Caprica that will live forever in his memory.
Lee knows it because he has never, ever seen his father look at his mother the way he is now looking at Laura Roslin.
When Adama has ceded to her the honor of giving the order for the final jump, his eyes have reflected such tenderness that Lee has averted his own, suddenly embarrassed and overwhelmed as if he was an intruder in a space he did not belong to, witness to a scene he was not supposed to see, a truth more absolute than anything he was allowed to watch. It was not just tenderness, he reflects. It was gratitude, admiration, warmth, and understanding. It was something impossible to describe, something whose mere existence made everything else pale in comparison.
She has delivered the order with her eyes locked with his, her fingers on her lips to contain the emotion, her whole body trembling, pure fragility. A version of Laura Roslin Lee is not used to seeing but one that seems so much more real to him: the image of what his father sees in her suddenly becomes complete in Lee's mind. And the son sees how that woman's eyes correspond to each and every feeling of his father. There is a powerful, magnetic, and tangible connection between them that becomes apparent once again in that instant. His mother never looked at his father the way Laura is looking at him now, either.
The moment Adama has finished his speech, he has released the intercom over the console, he has taken her hand, he has pulled her to him and it has been her, Laura Roslin, who he has embraced first.
It has been them. It has always been them, and not even the promising profile of the planet that can be seen behind the windows reflects these years' voyage, the deep meaning of their journey, better than the picture of his father holding that woman in his arms, close to his heart. His support, his friend, his refuge, his partner. The love of his life.
Watching that scene, that silent but loud intercourse between his father and the president, Lee experiences an uncomfortable mixture of gratitude and envy. Gratitude, because life has finally allowed his father to find love. Even if it has been just at the end, at the twilight of his life, in the last corner of the universe, in the last step of a nightmarish journey. Maybe it is because she has found a way to be his partner inch by inch along that rosary of sacrifices, lending him her very own shoulders to make his burden lighter. And envy because it is such love. A kind of love he has never known; he might never, ever find. His mother never caught even the smallest glimpse, never saw a blink of something like this. His father has opened for Laura Roslin a door that nobody who had known him before ever suspected that existed.
The first time Lee noticed that strong emotional charge in their eyes meeting each other's it was by sheer chance. However, ever since that moment he has chased them inadvertently; he has paid full attention every time he has found himself in the same room, discussing any issue with them, every time that circumstances have granted him new chances to observe them. Lee has even pressed his father to talk a few times, searching and hoping for honest answers, forcing him into uneasy questions, pushing him against the wall. He did not intend that exactly: he just wanted to know thus he could not avoid collateral damage. Now he can remember himself interrogating Adama about the reasons why the president had moved into his quarters, already a few months before. He remembers himself going off-topic in their conversations, taking unexpected, challenging detours, trying to bring his father to confess something Lee did not really want to hear. Something that maybe Adama was not ready to admit back then, not even to himself, let alone to others. Lee now understands that his father had needed time, too, to accept what was happening, what had already happened a long time ago in his and Laura Roslin's hearts. He had needed to create a space inside him where he could accept it, he had needed time to make up his mind to act accordingly. Granted that convincing her to follow him down that path must have been at least as hard. The president was not second to him in stubbornness, devotion, pride, and commitment to her duties.
It had required her tragic illness and ulterior vanishing to trigger his father's admission. The ultimate reason for his shocking decision to stay behind in a raptor, alone, leaving an orphan mankind whose destiny he was supposed to guide and protect (leaving Lee an orphan in the process, too): he could not live without her. He said it plainly, without drama. It was what it was. It was his truth. Lee wondered if, perhaps, that had also been the first time Bill had openly confessed his feelings to himself.
Lee had been afraid his father would be out of his mind. Now he understood that he had found his heart again. He had gotten his soul back.
"Bill, what is it that you don't know?"
Just an hour earlier, Laura Roslin's sweet voice had echoed in the room interrupting Lee's discussion with his father. She had carefully walked behind Adama, soft as breeze, caressing his back in passing. She had taken a seat beside him, she had put her hand on his arm and she had squeezed it affectionately. His back first, then his arm, finally their glances: the contact was a constant between them. It was a silent celebration, the deep joy of being with each other again.
His father had stopped his train of thought and had turned towards her. Lee knew that the whole room (with him in it) had gone dark around the Admiral in that instant. Bill perceived one source of light and only one: Laura's face.
"It's good to see you" was all he had said.
His father's emotion was quiet, restrained but his glance surrounded Laura with such warmth that Lee had felt compelled to look somewhere else. However, he had managed to stay present. He wanted to see this. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see what happened. Thanks to that he had been a witness. Watching Laura look at Bill, watching her soothe him, build his confidence, pass him her energy, her faith, with that rare combination of courage and calm so very hers… That had been an invaluable lesson on how to restore his father when he was falling apart. Laura had read the man's emotions as soon as she had arrived, with just a glimpse, and she achieved in three lines what Lee, his son, had not after half an hour of solid reasoning.
"I wanna see you grab that first fistful of Earth".
So this was how it had to be done. This was what he had never figured out how to do. It was emotion, and not reason, what Laura Roslin had put into play to make the Admiral move forward. That rational, smart, logical woman knew all of his father's inner levers and had activated them in the precise order, with the proper pressure, as a master playing a delicate melody.
Lee had felt like clapping.
The fact that Laura Roslin had been able to do that revealed a much more emotional nature than Lee had supposed her to have. Now, and now only, Lee remembers again that woman at the beginning, just arrived, hardly an expert president but strongly determined, fresh and courageous; that warm, welcoming woman who was not afraid of displaying emotion, of putting it on the table, even using it like one more piece in the political game she had been forced into. Occupation, trials, abuse, detention, loneliness, lack of understanding, cancer… and that woman still existed.
Maybe this was what his father had done for her. This was the part of Laura that Bill had helped her keep alive.
While Bill had gone away to get dressed and fight his own inner battle, leaving them alone, Laura had looked at him, at Lee, and she had still found the strength to forgive him. She first had made a silent alliance with him to convince his father and now she was showing Lee how deeply she trusted him. With just a few, precise, and exact words she had not just expressed what she expected from him: she had made him feel capable and wish with all his heart to do so. Lee had felt a wave of gratitude and pride spreading in his gut and right then he had captured a fragment of what that woman made his father feel like in a sudden, lightning flash.
She is good for him.
She is what he needs. They are what each other needs.
Even if they have now found Earth, Roslin and Adama need nothing else. Everything else is a gift for Lee. For humanity. Everything else is what they were determined to accomplish for their people. And they, who expected absolutely nothing, found their own treasure along the way.
Lee wakes up from his daydream just in time to see Laura Roslin doubled over herself above the main table of the CIC, her head buried in her hands, all of her invaded by an emotion that refuses to leave her. He sees his father walk towards her and put an arm across her shoulders. She gets upright when she feels his touch. She turns towards him. Lee cannot see her face because she is giving him her back but he sees his father raising his hands to her cheeks and brushing away a strand of her hair. For a split second, Lee is certain he is going to kiss her. He thinks his father is about to start his own celebration with the woman he loves and who loves him back, right there, in front of everybody, in the middle of the general party.
He does not.
Adama's arm wraps Roslin's shoulders, she slips her own across his waist. While everybody else is dancing, jumping, cheering, and crying, they, the parents of humanity, those two lonely beings who have found each other when they did not expect anything else, sneak towards the corridor. They walk slowly, as if there was no need to rush, not anymore. As if they no longer cared who may see them. As if they were more worried about the quality than the quantity of the time they still have left.
Arriving at Earth means being free, to them more than to anyone else.
It is a curse, too.
Suddenly, Lee wishes the prophecy were not true. He wishes that the Scriptures were wrong, that the Gods could be cheated and this planet were not their home; that the journey did not end just yet, so that his dad could keep his love by his side a little longer.
Then he sees it. They have each other: this is their Earth.
All the hubbub and the uproar of the joyful celebration become silent in his mind as Lee can see one thing only: his dad's and Laura Roslin's backs, their shapes interlocked as if they were one, as one as their souls are, disappearing in the darkness of the corridor.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it :)