Title: Arms Full of Miracles (Every Blue Shade of Green)
Author: miabicicletta
Summary: On an unremarkable morning some time since they'd arrived on the second Earth, Bill Adama woke up to discover that he had died.
Rating: PG
Notes: This fic is, in all honestly, my favorite piece of writing in a very long time. It grew out of my grief after having watched the BSG finale, oh, back in December (2009) I think it was, and has remained near and dear to my heart in the months since. So much, in fact, that I have left it alone for long spells of time, unsatisfied with the idea of "forcing" it to a conclusion. Nothing quite worked. I didn't know, not really, where it was going, despite working on it with a casual adoration intermittently for the last seven months. The other day while munching some carrot sticks and reading some material to inspire a very different sort of project, a phrase popped into my head that suddenly just...lead the way. It was quite extraordinary. I surely will be eating carrot sticks more often. The title comes from my favorite song in all of the universe: Go Places by The New Pornographers. I suggest you listen to it before you read, perhaps while you read, and definitely after you have read. A thousand thanks to leiascully, whatever_lj, and korenap for their collective beta-ing efforts, all of which served to improve this more and more at every pass. You guys are the rocking-est stars of of all the rockstars.
Battlestar Galactica, Bill Adama and Laura Roslin...here is my love letter to you.
On an unremarkable morning some time since they'd arrived on the second Earth, Bill Adama woke up to discover that he had died.
His first thought was that Laura had been right.
His second thought was that she was truly one frakkin' aggravation of a woman to be dead and buried and still proving him wrong.
He woke to the sound of water. Wherever he was, it was not the low hills of Earth where he'd chosen to build their cabin.
Bill opened his eyes, and found himself at the base of a trickling waterfall amid a circular grove of olive trees. The world he stepped into was somewhere at altitude; on the opposite side of the tumbling water the land dropped away, revealing broad, green plains that climbed to a range of high mountains capped with snow. Farther off, he could make out the edge of a wide body of water that stretched sweetly into a hazy horizon.
Sunlight shone through the green and fragrant leaves. It was gentle and warm, so unlike the oppressive heat in the equatorial valley. A cool breeze stirred the branches, dappling light across his face, and around him were all manner of sounds of life - birds, wind, water.
So much life.
Small animals, birds, insects, all alighting on trees and rippling through the growth. In a tree above his head, a spider spun out its web; a songbird trilled; near his feet, a hare dashed through the sorrel.
Wonders all.
He breathed deep. He felt good. Light. At long last, the pains that life and labor, especially these last months, had put in heart and mind and body were absent, replaced by a strength and self-possession that made Bill feel twenty again.
He wanted to run for the pleasure of running, to feel earth beneath his feet and air in his lungs. It was incredible. It was miraculous. At that, his heart sank a little, thinking on all those he longed to share this feeling with.
A clear stream sprung from the falling water, trickling through the grove. He followed its path and was taken aback when his eye fell on the sight of a temple in the near distance.
Bill eyed it warily, astonished and unsure. Still, he followed the stream, finding its presence here, whatever 'here' was, improbable and yet strangely of comfort.
He was afforded a better look at the temple as he approached it. Fashioned from a smooth, white stone, the structure itself was a simple, old design and even before he'd gotten close enough to set foot inside, Bill could sense a gravity to it, a quality. Like a ruin that lived, it seemed an ancient place, but one that had never fallen out of time or use. Bill thought he'd seen one like it before, though he could not say when. Could not say where.
He stepped closer.
Two stories high, the temple was composed of four walls of sculpted marble and porphyry, lazuli and serpentine; inside a portico surrounded a cool green courtyard. Along the outer walls were curving troughs of water. Flower petals dotted the surface, floating beside tiny oil lamps, whose small flames burned a heady incense.
Bill was reminded darkly of chamalla.
Around him, the stone was engraved with symbols Bill recognized from the once-great Forum on Caprica, whose thousand-year-old monuments had been constructed using relics from the time of the Exodus.
At the courtyard's center, flanked by pomegranate and almond trees that reached up to a roofless expanse of sky, a few short, wide steps wrapped around a small and lovely fountain of pale pink stone. Everything shone in the light from the water, reflected up and around, and the courtyard walls shimmered with ethereal shifts of sunlight.
It was ancient and beautiful, and Bill barely gave any of it a second glance because the loveliest thing he had yet seen was perched upon the fountain's edge, shoes in hand, glasses glinting in the sun. She was white-armed and radiant, dressed in a familiar pencil skirt and white blouse looking altogether remarkably unremarkable but for the simple fact that it was impossible.
Laura was by the fountain. A silver bracelet on her wrist and flowers by her feet.
Under the sun and his own incredulous gaze, she smirked, all feline and felicitous. She was all that he remembered, and some things he never knew, and when she saw him her smile blossomed in benediction.
"About time," she said.
"Laura."
But it wasn't Laura, not quite. Bill recognized this pose. However mirthful her eyes seemed to be, this was the President, who was just as lovely and twice as dangerous.
"It's good to see you, Admiral. I've been waiting. Come. Walk with me."
"This isn't real…"
She tucked her arm in his, as if this were just another passageway on Galactica, just another stroll between meetings and not lifetimes.
"Well, I beg to differ, but I'll allow that it certainly depends on one's definition of 'reality'." She smirked. "And, loosely speaking, you're right; that doesn't quite apply here."
"Which is where, exactly?"
"You tell me.
It looked, in some ways, like Caprica, the wide grasslands and groves beyond the city, the mountains near Delphi.
"This can't be Caprica." He waited for Laura to explain. She always had more to say than he did.
"No," she agreed, leading him out of the courtyard.
This path took them across a small bridge above the tumbling stream, into a wide, cool garden. The sun seemed higher here, and roses bloomed among orchids and lilies. It was verdant and wild, cultivated, but without the demarcations of borders and rows. Flowers and herbs grew in all there spaces there were for a thing to grow. Color and life in riotous splendor wherever he glanced.
As they strolled, a host of sparrows lit in the branches of a lemon tree beside the path, and Laura paused to consider a bird at eye level.
"This is...a kind of Kobol. Where men and women first began to dream."
Bill gave a sigh at the lovely and poetic lack of an answer.
"I can't quite accept that. I'm worn out with dreams." Yours, he thought, remembering her visions of lost children and ancient halls. Mine. Streams and cabins; places where neither duty nor sickness could come to call.
She glanced back at him, clearly amused. "Don't be morose, Bill, it never suited you."
The sparrow moved off, and his eyes followed it in flight as it was joined by many of its brethren. When he looked back, her glasses were gone, her hair down, suit replaced by a flowing light green dress.
He considered her in the supple, shifting light. He wondered if afternoon could exist when time, it seemed, did not.
Laura went on weaving threads of an explanation. "I know how you feel...really, I do. For all I did believe, I could never have fully understood. We had that in common, at least."
And then, as she turned back to appraise him, under the fullness of her gaze a strange thing happened. He felt his vision...expand seemed the only word for it. In a single moment she was
a young girl, fearless and bright
an alluring young woman who made his heart contract to behold
expectant with child, as she had never once been in all her life
was lined and venerable, marked by time, by everything life had asked of her
He saw all she had given to her years, all she'd given up for her people, crowned for her troubles with lengths of silver hair that he longed to have been given, just once, the chance to touch. She was every moment she had ever been or could be, and ageless just the same. Childlike with wonder even as she held the grace of a hundred years.
Bill could only stare, could only ache to see her in all her humanness, all that life had offered to her, and all that life had denied both by the choices she had made and those made by something more.
Finally she was herself. As he knew her best, had always known her in this life and every other – Laura.
"Daylight's burning, soldier."
She took his hand, and lead him further down the path.
He watched her at his side. She seemed happy, but unfocused and far away.
"Is this where...you came, too?"
"Yes, after a time. Sometimes it seems like it's only been a few moments. Other times I feel like it's been an age on Aerilon."
"There's no one else?"
She faced west, eyes falling on a long-off horizon.
"Starbuck, sometimes. For reasons I've never understood, the planes of existence seem to bend on occasion for Kara Thrace. "
"How do you know?"
"Billy told me."
"Billy?"
"I don't know if he..." She struggled for a word. "...commands the same kind of power Starbuck does. Maybe the Universe just granted me that one small kindness. He met me by the Riverwalk fountain on Caprica City and told me I was dead. It was a strange conversation."
He knew what she meant.
"You asked where we were." She faced him now and took his hands in her own. In the endless green depths of her eyes he found no trace of mirth, no mischief. There was only that quiet, true serenity which Bill had known in their lives together for all-too-brief a time.
"This, Bill...This is the place where the Gods were made."
She kissed him, stealing all his questions.
"You died."
"Yes, Bill, I did. I was there, remember?" Her mouth turned up but her eyes were soft and sad. Their arms linked, he threaded his fingers through hers, feeling the fine bones of hands. "But then, so did you."
"So this is…the afterlife?"
"It is. And it isn't. You and I have been through that, Bill. That is not our fate."
"So we're…" He couldn't finish.
"Yes...and no. Like the line by Kataris: So much of life that I have learned / in time and time but since / My days marked by greater players / between the pawn and prince," she replied enigmatically. Still playing the politician, even now. Or maybe the philosopher.
"The priestess, for one."
She nodded her head once, pleased. "And the knight, if you stick with the metaphor," she mused. "Still, I like to think we amounted to more than pieces on some mortal board game."
A question nagged at his mind.
"Will I...does Lee…?"
She paused, dipping her head to the side slightly, considering her words.
"I think, maybe." She nodded a little and said more confidently, "Soon."
He frowned, saddened by the prediction, puzzled by her unsure augury. Laura was empathetic.
"What you have to understand, Bill," she explained, "is that time does not exist as it once did for us. It is neither fixed nor constant. In the space of this sentence, cities will have risen only to fall; a child will have drawn a single breath and, yes, not long from now, Lee will have lived the full extent of his life and joined us here. The last of our children called home."
"How do you know?"
She gestured to the sky, where the clouds were slowly gathering to the east.
"The sun is beginning to set." She said this as thought it were self-evident.
"You weren't Lee's mother."
She rolled her eyes.
"No more than you were Kara's father. The same could be said of Billy," she continued. "In this life, I was everyone's mother, Bill. And no one's."
Seeing he was not satisfied with her answer, she went on with no small amount of reproach.
"William Adama, I have carried and borne our children through many lifetimes. You'll forgive me if I went this one without a pregnancy, and yet still managed to become guardian of humanity."
I mean, really, Bill, she silently added.
They walked slowly, and he marveled at her realness. She was a little flushed, her skin a shade closer to tan than he had ever seen her. Even on New Caprica, with fresh air and sunshine to accent her loveliness, she'd never looked so serene, so free of her burdens.
He supposed she never had been.
She spoke.
"This isn't Elysium, Bill. The afterlife isn't for us, because there is no after."
"Saul?"
She shook her head, stroking his arm empathetically.
"I don't know. That's part of the risk we took: not all can follow us here. And the part of us which remains human will never be satisfied by that. It fuels us to return. To live more. Love more."
"You still call me Bill. Why?"
"We've had many names," she shrugged. Her dress had changed now to a deep violet. "It seems...simplest to use these until we choose our next, don't you think?"
"You'll…be Laura?"
"Oh, Bill, I always was. President, yes, and prophet besides. But to you, even from our first bout-"
Bill smiled at that, recalling the first verbal spars in the dance that became their life together.
"-I was only ever Laura."
"Saint Laura the pragmatic, revered amongst men, patron of scholars and airlocks?"
She laughed, and slapped the arm she held playfully. "I should think you'd be the first to know I was no saint, in this life or any other."
"You remember?" Our other lives, he does not say, could not bring himself to say.
"Some. Many, but not all. Not yet." She smiled up at him. "You will, we will, in time. There's a certain period of...readjustment, let us call it. Kara thinks its funny, says it's the universe trying to keep us humble."
He shook his head in disbelief. "What did Starbuck ever know about humility?"
She lead him to the place where the brook tumbled into a clear blue lake. Although he could not see it, he knew, somehow, that the lake fed a river, and the river lead to a sea beyond which lay a great ocean.
Or, perhaps, that was the only way his still-so-human consciousness was able to comprehend the vastness of time and space and the forces that filled the places in between. Gravity pulled at the universe, yes, but then so did love. The matter of the heart - human, cylon, hybrid - was only more discerning.
A pair of simple cups perched on a small wooden bench by the water's edge. One was empty, the other half full.
"I couldn't finish," she explained. "Not without you. I'm glad I waited."
Laura took the cups in hand, setting him down on the bench and bent to dip the empty cup into the stream, precisely at the point where it ran into the lake.
She studied her own half-empty cup, mused, "How much there is to remembering. And forgetting."
Whatever she was, Bill thought, death, it seemed, did little to temper the mercurial mystery that was Laura Roslin.
"Drink." She held out a cup for him, her own in the other hand.
He took it without question and, closing his eyes, drank deeply.
The Cycle of Time: oddly simple for encompassing the whole history of the universe.
It is elements and particles, prayers and hopes.
It is life and death: of suns, of power, of humans and not-humans.
It is love and loss, time and time and time again.
Through it all, before the first of firsts, he sensed her, that without which he was not, both something more and yet a part of him despite being all her own. Together a matched pair, gratefully, mercifully, trapped in one another's endless orbit.
He is changed by the knowledge of it all, or maybe restored. It is a useless to parse words for the indescribable, he thinks.
When he finally opens his eyes again he hears,
"Good to see you, Old Man. Been waiting for ages."
Starbuck grinned, embracing him with the full measure of her devotion. Slung upon her back was a bow and tethered to it a golden arrow.
Kara and Zak and Billy. His children, taken before their time.
Zak, smiling bright and cocky, the very image of youth.
"Been a long time, Admiral." Fleet-footed Billy, as sure and true as daybreak. He looked stronger, more confident than he ever had in life. Bill smiled, and reached out to grip the boy's shoulder. Laura embraced him fully, embraced them all.
There were others waiting, too. At every turn was a familiar face, another chance.
Dee, head back, shoulders proud, wise with all her ages and all her griefs. How many times throughout the lives of the universe she'd suffered such mortal ills. How often, overwhelmed by her compassion and her empathy, ending her life for it. Sam was perched beside her strumming a guitar. Catching Bill's eye, he paused to throw a lazy salute and winked. Somehow Sam's cocky smile looked closer to wisdom on this side of existence, and Bill saluted back as Sam once again filled the gardens with music.
Perhaps most strangely of all, the sight of Baltar lazing in a patch of shade with a drink in hand, could not so much as faze him. How much there was to remembering. As so often in life, his arm lay slung around a tall blonde Six in scant, diaphanous clothing. The first Six, maybe. She smiled brightly and waved.
They were all here, he mused, eyes catching sight of a dozen and more familiar faces, and each glance over his shoulder only brought more good memories, more good friends. Even Tom Zarek, appearing half in shadows despite the long golden rays of sunlight.
"I'd like to say 'I told you so'," she said, eyes dancing between the loved ones around them, "but I think this surpasses even my expectations."
Laura, at last, once more. For the ages.
"You know," he begins, much later.
It is after the sun is gone, and amid laughter and tears and joy, Lee is welcomed home. There are others, but he is one of the last.
After he has taken Laura's hand and led them away to another place that belongs to them alone which they have cultivated together. Their library is a circular room with tomes from a thousand ages, in ten thousand tongues, and Laura giggles when Bill picks out Searider Falcon, both remembering a passionate reunion that took place atop a discarded copy in a Raptor aboard a basestar not so very long ago.
They had marveled at how forever could feel new and old at once, finding skin and lips and the perfect fit of their bodies. Finding here, as always, they are made for each other.
They have always been made for each other.
But now it is later, and she hums a querulous sound in her throat as her slender, naked arm coils tighter around him.
"You know, I might have prayed to the Lords of Kobol had I known there was a chance they'd actually listen."
She props herself up on her other arm, chin in hand, raises a brow. "Ah, but didn't you?"
"I was an atheist, Laura," he says by way of retort. Which, in retrospect, must have been what Starbuck meant by the universe striving to keep them humble.
She runs a pale hand across his chest, free from scars, free from the pain a heart feels in living.
"None of that matters. Faith was always there." She smiles, touching her forehead to his as the stars wheel above; he remembers how truly they had always guided them. "We just had it in each other."
He could hardly argue: he had only ever believed in her.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
- "The Wandering of Old Aengus", William Butler Yeats