At the End of the Day
"You wear strength so well, I forget that you have to take it off at the end of the day; still feeling the marks that it leaves on your soul."
- T.B. LaBerge / Unwritten Letters to You
She takes her shoes off, and it unnerves him.
She does it so casually the first time, just kicking off her heels, placing them neatly beside the table, tucking her legs up under herself on the couch.
She doesn't put her shoes on again until the next day. He keeps being surprised that she's smaller than he expects.
She takes a shower in the morning, steps out of the head with wet hair, wrapped in her fluffy white robe, her face bare of makeup, and he's startled.
It's not the intimacy of it; he's seen her in her robe before, and even if he hadn't, he and Laura have been through far too much together to bother with that kind of prudishness. That's not it.
Nor is it that her looks suffer for the lack of polish; on the contrary, he thinks he might come to prefer this, Laura just as she is, without any adornments or embellishments.
He can't help but be honored that she's privileging him to see it, even as he knows that necessity, rather than desire, may be driving her.
After her second doloxan treatment, he comes home to find his quarters dark, Laura curled up on the couch, asleep, a washcloth over her eyes, and he is frightened.
He'd heard her give a press conference over the wireless barely an hour before; she'd sounded cool, and calm, and utterly in control.
He'd been relieved.
Now she's lying alone in the dark, her shoes and jacket off, her hands tucked under her head like a little girl.
Even when she'd lost Billy, even when she'd forfeited the election, even when she'd been on her deathbed…she'd looked more like the President than she does in this moment.
He thought he knew Laura Roslin.
It turns out that there is another woman there, too, and he's only just meeting her now.
He'd met Secretary Roslin, and then he'd met President Roslin.
The woman curled up on his couch is neither.
It is only now dawning on him much work this must take her, how much energy it must require.
He'd thought that it came naturally to her, because he never saw a crack. He'd thought it was effortless, because she never let anyone see that it was an effort.
He is terrified.
He draws closer, grabs a blanket out of a cabinet, spreads it out lightly over her shoulders.
She mumbles something incoherent in response.
"It's okay," he tells her. "You're safe."
When she nestles further under the blanket and goes back to sleep, he knows that she knows it, too.
The next morning, while she's in the shower, he calls and asks Cottle when her next doloxan treatment is. He doesn't say that he's planning to clear his schedule to go with her, but from his unusual agreeableness, he thinks Cottle might have guessed it, anyway.
He doesn't mention it to Laura; he knows that she will tell him not to bother, that she's fine, that she can do this on her own.
All of those things are true. He has no doubt that she could get through this without him.
That doesn't mean she has to.
When he walks into sickbay a few hours later, and finds her stretched out on a bed, pale and queasy, her hand pressed to her mouth, he pretends he isn't afraid. He sits down in the chair beside her, cracks open a book, and begins to read.
He reads until he can see the tension in her neck, in her shoulders, begin to relax, and she falls asleep again.
He watches over her until she wakes up, and brushes her hair off her face, and turns back into the President.
He doesn't mind.
It can be their secret.