Written for: celievamp, femme_fic 2009 on livejournal; prompt: "Before and after the reveal of the 'Five' Laura had always thought that there was more to Ellen Tigh than the goodtime girl image she presented to the world. Fine with explorations of Ellen's relationships with Sol and Cavell." Title from "Brainwashed" by George Harrison.
When the world was new and the bitterness of defeat lingered on her tongue, Laura still rose at first light and joined Tory for breakfast every morning. The food tasted like ashes and she kept seeing Billy's face across the table instead, briefing her on the work the settlers were doing and the latest gossip that swirled into the camp from Colonial One. She bit down on her lip and clenched her hands in her lap until the urge to reach out to stroke his face and whisper her apologies passed.
Mornings were spent moving around the camp talking to parents and children, making promises about curricula and a normal life at long last. As she walked among the new colonists, these last remnants of the old, she kept her attention on the sky and beyond it to the Galactica. After so long among the stars, the solid ground was strange under her feet. The fragile feeling of artificial gravity had always made her feel as though one wrong step would send her spiralling into a bulkhead. The adjustment to living on a planet again made her bones ache long after she'd fallen into her cot at night.
In the dark, it was harder to tell herself it was the transition to a planet-bound existence that wearied her and not the loss of her position or the Bill Adama-shaped hole in her daily rounds.
In the afternoons, she left Tory to her lists and plans and walked out into the woods that surrounded New Caprica on both sides of the river bed. Her breath came more easily with every trip and she wandered farther and farther afield. Three months after the sod-turning when they sat under the stars and she planned her idyllic mountain cabin, she sat down in a clearing that overlooked the ragged encampment and rolled some of her dried leaf in the last of the papers she'd brought from the ship. She lay back in the tall grass and watched the clouds drifting overhead.
Befuddled by the smoke and the pressure in her chest that grew more every day, she didn't realize she'd started to cry until a tear rolled back into her ear.
---
Her first day as a teacher again was a disaster. It had been so long since she had the charge of anyone so young that she feared she'd lost the touch. By the time she dismissed the children back into the care of their parents, she was a wreck. She left Maya in the tent that served as their school and slogged through the mud back to her own. She huddled on her cot, wrapped in a blanket that did little to block out the chill, and poured herself into her journal. She remembered the first time she'd done this, how she'd gone out for drinks with friends after school and laughed at her own inadequacies.
On this miserable little planet that she never wanted in the first place, she felt her isolation growing like the cancer that nearly stole her life. It stole its way into all the cracks inside her and strangled the little sparks of hope, resisting all her efforts to halt its progress. As she sat in the dark and listened to the people moving around outside, she wondered how she long she could keep going.
Keeping up with the children exhausted her but she found that their appetite for learning quickly rekindled her own desire to teach. She spent less time in her tent every day and made the superhuman effort to seem friendly and open. Even if she wasn't the president any longer, there were still people who came to her first with their problems, both petty and grand. As the weather turned colder, she abandoned her walks. Maya found someone to watch the baby at the back of the class and they added another session in the afternoon as more ships came down out of the skies and the population swelled.
At night, she dreamed of the thirteenth tribe and the texture of the admiral's uniform under her cheek.
---
There were rumors that the fleet would soon abandon all pretense at keeping watch for the Cylons. She smiled at the growing numbers of familiar faces as they pushed through the crowds, looking naked in civilian clothes. Chief Tyrol - just Tyrol now - came to see her at the school almost as soon as he had landed. He looked around at the school tent while they talked and came back three days later with a half-dozen workers and supplies to build desks and chairs.
He wouldn't meet her eyes when she asked where he'd gotten them.
---
Tory pushed a notebook across the table one morning as they ate.
"I've been keeping track of who goes in and out of Baltar's ship," she said.
The pages were filled with her neat handwriting, divided into days and shifts and indexed with small colored marks.
"I don't understand," Laura told her. "What do you expect to do with this?"
Tory smiled but her eyes stayed cold and hard. "Nothing, really. It's hard to let go of old habits."
Laura used to know how that was but the farther they got from the battlestar, the less she remembered. "You keep it," she said, and slid it back across the table. "Old habits die hard for a reason."
---
When they announced the occupation, she stood with Maya and the Tyrols and balled up her hands so tight she drew blood in the crease of her palms. She wanted to fly up out of the crowd and scratch Baltar's eyes right out of his smirking face but settled for putting a hand on Cally's arm as she cradled her swollen belly.
There was no room for empty platitudes so she kept her silence.
The next few days passed in a blur. She was furious with herself for everything: for letting President Adar talk her into traveling to the Galactica, for acquiescing to Adama in the election, for not being ruthless enough to cut out Baltar's rot when she first saw it.
For not dying in a sickbay bed.
The children were oddly untouched by the occupation for the first few weeks, until the Cylons walked in during class one day and every day after. While she stood at the board and led them through irregular verb tenses, the reporter and the blonde would stand in the back and stare. They never spoke, never interrupted, just stared at the children with shining eyes. The little ones shifted in their seats while the older children stiffened like boards, their faces like stone.
The helplessness came creeping back in, worming its way into the tender spots that had only just started to heal. She welcomed it, nurtured it. She wanted it to balloon inside her, knock down all the defenses she'd built up and stoke the ember of hate that she'd neglected. She drew the presidential smile onto her lips and went to Gaeta to beg an audience. Keeping Maya safe wasn't her only priority but she was more terrified of would happen if they discovered the child than she was of anything else on this gods-forsaken planet.
Gaeta took a note into her - into Baltar's office and came out with such a look of pity that she wanted to scream.
"He said he'll try, ma'am."
"Oh, I'll just bet he did." She didn't wait for him to try to placate her; she'd been in the game long enough to know what would come next.
But the Cylons didn't come to the school again. She didn't care enough to find out why.
---
Ellen Tigh was waiting for her when she came back from dinner one night. She pushed herself up off the cot, dropping a stack of papers onto the floor. Laura brushed past her and gathered them up before they were ruined by the damp.
"Mrs. Tigh. What are you doing here?"
"Really, Laura, when are you going to call me Ellen? I'd hoped we could be friends, now that we're on somewhat equal footing." Ellen pushed back her hair and smiled, a quick, careful twist of her lips that didn't betray the slightest crease in her face.
It was an expression Laura knew well; she had practiced it in mirrors and darkened windows for longer than she could actually remember. She crossed her arms over her chest, a flimsy attempt to keep the other woman at bay. "I'm sorry about the colonel but you know that I have no influence here."
"That's funny - neither do I. What I do have is a bottle of the camp's finest. I thought you might like to join me for a drink."
She waved the bottle in the air and Laura could smell the liquor on her breath. Her sense of smell had all but disappeared as her cancer spread but since the remission it had come back in fits and starts, good only for nauseating her in the crowded camp until the sanitation systems had gone online. Now, as she breathed in, all she could smell was the wet, musty air and the sharp antiseptic scent of the moonshine. Underneath it was a hint of perfume that she couldn't - and didn't want to - place.
She wanted to throw Ellen out of the tent but found herself reaching for the bottle instead.
"Oh what the frak," she said and lifted it to her lips.
---
The mud was everywhere, in her shoes and up her legs and crawling into her brain. They stumbled out of the camp, heading for the trees and the clearing where Laura kept her New Caprican leaf plants hidden out of sight. Ellen clung to her as they crashed through the straggly underbrush, giggling and hiccuping.
They were still a good ten minute walk from their goal when Laura tripped over a root and they both went tumbling to the ground. She tipped her head back, watching the sky wheel lazily overhead and laughed. The slight pressure of the other woman's body against her side was a welcome weight after so many months alone and some barely sober part of her brain wondered what in the Gods' names she was doing out here.
Ellen's hiccups smoothed out and in their place she was making a soft keening noise. She rolled away and curled in on herself, the keening shifting into rapid, ragged sobs. Laura pushed herself up to her knees, awkwardly shuffling over to her. She smoothed back the woman's hair and murmured nonsense as she cried like a child, in great shuddering breaths that shook her whole body.
"I don't know how to get him out," she whispered finally.
"You'll think of something," Laura said. "Nothing seems to keep you down for long."
---
The joint burned down to a tiny scrap of paper, burning her fingers as she stared down at the camp. It was a cold, clear night but dry. This far up into the hills, she could almost pretend that their refuge was still just that.
"I should never have gotten into that Raptor with Bill."
Laura hummed, noncommittal, the consummate politician's response in intent if not in words. She'd gone a thousand rounds with Adama on the same subject, starting with that disaster of a dinner party the night he'd returned with Saul's wife in tow. By now she knew all of their weak points, Saul's and Ellen's and Bill's. Where to twist the dagger and when to slide it home. She didn't, though. Mostly.
Instead, she rolled another joint and passed it to Ellen. "I wanted to build a cabin here," she said. "I don't even know what I'd do with a cabin."
---
When the bottle was drained and the dried leaf gone and Ellen's mouth on hers, Laura felt like it was the first time, the only time, she'd ever done this. Like there had never been any nights in college or between lovers, like she'd never entertained the thought of another woman moving against her. Never used the image or the possibility to titillate some man. Her hands shook and left damp, nervous trails along Ellen's skin like she was trying to wipe everything away.
There was no comfort in this body. Maybe there never had been. There was nothing soft or welcoming, only the hard edges and sharp curves that Ellen had learned to use to her advantage.
In retrospect, Laura couldn't imagine how anything Ellen did could possibly have taken her by surprise. For all her scheming and intrigues, the woman was an open book to anyone who took the time to look past the painted lips and swinging hips. Back her into a corner and she would lash out at the nearest target, taking down any and everything in her path.
But she was the most dangerous when she thought she had nothing left to lose.