Disclaimer: everything in Battlestar Galactica (re-imagined series) belongs to Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and the Sci Fi Channel, I'm just borrowing some of it. Not making any money. Don't sue.
Services for the Dead
By chimère
Heavy.
He feels heavy, body and heart and mind, weighed down with an unbearable burden he can neither shake off nor break under. She would not allow him to break; her memory issues the same order and denies him that luxury.
It is almost too hard to stand upright, to move, to breathe. It is definitely too hard to think and feel, and yet he cannot seem to stop.
He is too familiar with death, and he knows that at first it is very difficult to feel grief. The first reactions are always mute denial, suffocating anger, and this heaviness. There is a piercing beauty and release to be found in tears, but he knows he cannot seek his absolution there yet. Perhaps not for a long time. Perhaps not ever.
There is no release, and no comfort, either.
He is an atheist. He doesn't believe in the gods or the afterlife. Sometimes he wishes he could - oh, how he wishes that right now -, but he cannot comfort himself with faith.
I will never see Laura again. She lives only in my memory now, nothing more than an image, albeit a cherished one, and when I am gone, she will be, too. There is nothing more, no reunions on the fields of Elysium. There was just a body that held a spirit I loved, and now the body has failed and the spirit is gone. Just - gone. There is nothing after death.
But she believed.
And there is nothing more right or hard or bitter than to speak words he doesn't himself believe in, at a ceremony he finds intolerable, because she would have wanted him to. To honour her memory, even though he would rather do it any other way.
Ceremonies, services, funerals are meant to make death easier to bear. He doesn't know whether that holds true for anyone else. For him, they have always made it harder. He is here now for Laura, not for himself, although he sees the absurdity of that - he knows that Laura is past caring, so why should he abide by the way of grieving she held to be right, and not by his own? And yet, the services are always for the dead and not for the living.
The Galactica's starboard hangar bay is packed, and yet almost silent. Thousands of grieving faces, and a few worried ones. He feels a flash of irritation, but acknowledges his son with a look. He averts his eyes from Saul; he is too worn out right now to even feel proper anger about that.
He doesn't know how they all see him at this moment, as he walks to the podium - the Old Man finally truly grown old, something in him irrevocably broken.
What right do you have to grieve, any of you? he wants to rage. She gave her life to you - literally -, and you didn't believe in her, placed all the blame and so little of the credit on her shoulders, didn't even vote for her.
He calms himself with a deep, painful breath. This is about her. Not me.
Each word of the prayer adding to the heaviness inside him, he begins to speak. "You were every one of us, Laura. You were the breath in our lungs, the blood in our veins, the light in our eyes. Now that breath, that blood and the light are gone, and we are left..."
He sees Tom Zarek at the front of the crowd, and the rage boils up again, black and churning. As soon as he has finished the prayer, the new President will murmur "so say we all" and relish the words.
His hands grip the sides of the podium.
He will not finish the prayer.
He doesn't believe it, and it feels like a violation, even though Laura did have faith.
And he cannot bring himself to utter the words "so say we all" and thus agree with her death.
The silence grows restless, people shuffle their feet, look at him uncertainly. He can feel Lee's worried gaze.
Because I can't live without her, he said. Isn't it true, then? How can he be standing here, composing an elegy for Laura, when his grief should strike him down?
It should, but it doesn't. And the heaviness does not ease.
Even if he wanted to continue the prayer, he can no longer remember the words. We are left with what? Her work, her legacy, her goals, her dreams... He should say all that, he knows, at least that, if not the words of the prayer. She would expect him to. But he can't.
Nothing.
We are left with nothing.
I am left with nothing.
He can almost hear her gently admonishing "Bill". He still has Lee, the Galactica, the remnants of humanity. And he knows he'll remember that again. But not right now.
He stares at the coffin covered with a Colonial flag and surrounded by the honour guard, and for a moment the pain is so great it forces him to hunch over the podium. He cannot speak. Not only does he have no words, he probably has no voice any longer.
In a rush, he hears her voice, feels her hands, sees her smile - and as precious as they are to him, he pushes the phantom sensations roughly away, lest he collapse before his crew and the people of the Fleet. Tears, which he thought could not break through this heaviness, suddenly burn the corners of his eyes.
Silently, Admiral Adama leaves the podium, stands before the coffin and salutes President Roslin. The silence, carrying the prayer interrupted and the truths too painful to speak, gives Bill the strength to hold his tears for Laura for a little while longer.