The History Books Forgot About Us

by miabicicletta

Eleven lives Bill and Laura don't remember living, and one life they think is all they have.

Fic: The History Books Forgot About Us
Title: The History Books Forgot About Us
Author: sunshine_queen and miabicicletta
Summary: Eleven lives Bill and Laura don't remember living, and one life they think is all they have.
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: ~6,500
Disclaimer: All borrowed characters are property of RDM, NBC Universal, and their respective owners.
Notes: This collaboration can be seen as a prequel to miabicicletta's fic Arms Full of Miracles (Every Blue Shade of Green) and a companion to sunshine_queen's (genius) story (that started it all) and the dish ran away with the spoon. Each of us wrote six of the vignettes, and we swear we don't hate Bill.

Title comes from Samson by Regina Spektor

Individual vignette titles come from Leonard Cohen/Frederico Garcia Lorca (you can listen to the song here)

1. in some hallway where love's never been
Sagittaron

They are fleeing Kobol when Pyramus catches Alena's eye.

He is nineteen, a blacksmith and a orphan; she is fifteen, a student and fair as the sunrise. Though he is quite desperate with love, he knows better than to start something in the belly of the Galleon, where their future is uncertain and her father scowls constantly.

It is Alena who approaches him, a blush on her cheek as she sits down. Her dress is long and white and Pyramus can hardly breathe for her beauty. "My father doesn't want me married yet," she starts, "But I think I can convince him." This is their second conversation; their first were stammered introductions.

"You barely know me," he says, but he doesn't want to protest too much. The idea of marrying Alena fills him with the kind of glee that makes men dance and ring bells and raise sacrifices to the Lords of Kobol.

"You're from the Sagittarius tribe, and you make things with metal." Here she smiles, and Pyramus knows he is lost. "And you make my heart beat faster, which means something, I think."

"Yes," he agrees, all but wordless, and Alena seems to glow from within. She knows nothing of love, or of binding souls together. Not yet.

"We might be happy together," she says, so heartfelt and earnest that Pyramus can't help but grasp her hand tightly.

They marry, and settle on Sagittaron, their lives hardly different from what it had been on Kobol, but much richer with one another. Alena feels that her husband hung the moon, and his devotion is unchallenged. When an illness claims his life at thirty-eight, Alena pines herself into an early grave.

2. dragging its tail in the sea
Libran

Charis is accidentally elbowed off the dock when she is seven years old, so slight she hardly makes a splash when she hits the water. It is a day of good omens, and the excitement of the return of the Agleia keeps everyone from noticing except for the sailor Matthew, who dives off the side of the ship and rescues the girl. She is easy to spot underwater, her hair bright as fire, and Matthew's heroic dive has caught people's attention.

Charis is revived, inelegantly spitting up water and crying for her mother. Matthew, figuring he has done his duty, turns to go back to his ship when Charis's father demands he at least come for dinner. The little girl is nine years younger than him, so he spends the evening talking awkwardly with her parents, who fawn over him like he's royalty. He has been on the water since he was a boy and he tells them stories that cause Charis to watch him with wide, pale eyes.

He takes to meeting the family every time he comes aground in Tula, Charis becoming a surrogate sister, and he teaches her how to tie knots and the importance of sea breezes, to read the sky for the weather and the cardinal constellations.

"I wish you weren't away so often," Charis says fervently when she is fourteen, rope in her lap.

Matthew shrugs. "The sea is my home," and he means it. She upsets her tea when she storms off, and won't say goodbye before he leaves.

When she is sixteen he comes back and she treats him coolly. She is trying to act sophisticated - she talks about the books she's studied and the few dances she's attended, and he does not know what to make of her. He has a ribbon the color of her eyes, which he hands to her.

"Do you love me?" she asks softly, earlier coldness forgotten, and he is so stunned that he is quiet. Mortified, she leaps up and runs inside, the ribbon left on her seat.

He goes away for two years, traveling from port to port, and he realizes on no uncertain terms that he does. He buys her trinkets - hair combs from Sept, a shawl from Justo, bracelets from Loi - and composes long speeches that he will greet her with that explain his love fully. When he docks in Tula, the Agleia no longer brings crowds. He goes to the house he has visited so often, his arms laden with presents, and when Charis opens the door all he can say is "Yes."

He will die on the docks some years later, and she in childbirth.

3. and I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
Leonis

Ilsa is a tightrope walker, Jason is the lion tamer. They travel around Leonis with Lev's Wondrous Circus, and they attract quite a crowd.

Jason has been in love with Ilsa since he first joined the circus five years ago. When he walked into the big top, she was up on the rope doing tricks, black hair to her hips and eyes like a doe. She was with Gunnar, the fire eater, who could wrap both hands around her waist and had eyes and hair as dark as smoke with a personality to match.

He had arrived with his lion in tow, walking behind him like a rather large house cat. Some of the female acrobats cried out at the sight, but Jason put out a hand and the cat laid down, head on his paws.

"Impressive," Ilsa had said from above, and she descended on a rope so gracefully it was as if it took no effort at all. Everyone was in love with Ilsa.

The lion was named Priam, and he walked by his master's side without a leash, docile as a kitten. When they went to the next town, Ilsa had hung back to walk with the new stranger. "How did you get your own lion?"

"He followed me home," which is what Jason always replied, and Ilsa laughed, high and sweet. She was alone in the world, her mother dead when she was young of something she claimed was dramatic and exaggerated, and she had grown up on the tight rope. Gunnar found her at Jason's side, clearly displeased, and Ilsa gave Jason a small smile as she walked away with him.

Ilsa kissed him a year later, just before he put his head in Priam's mouth, two acts before she tried a complicated new trick on the rope. "For luck," she said, but the kiss was more than friendly. Gunnar could easily snap Jason's neck if he found out, but it was worth the risk.

She took to doing that, kissing him for luck before her act, her face guileless and sweet. "I never fall anymore," she whispers, though she never did before, and Jason replies, "I'd never let you," which is the sort of things young lovers say.

Gunnar found out and lifted Jason up by the throat. Ilsa attacked him with a holy fury as Jason's face turned purple, her fists bouncing off Gunnar's back like raindrops, until she stepped back and said, in a low and terrible voice, "I'll die if you kill him!"

She had an imperial quality about her, and no one had ever doubted her word. Stricken, Gunnar had released Jason, who slowly returned to his regular shade. Gunnar was gone by the end of the night, and the troupe found a new fire-eater in Feris.

Three and a half years later, after they had wed and are billed as the top married attractions ever to perform in a circus, Gunnar returns. Jason is watching Ilsa, Priam at his side, when Gunnar neatly slides the garotte around his throat. Ilsa, high in the air, had never looked more beautiful.

4. and I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
Virgon

Agata is the loveliest maiden in Nicosia, in all of Virgon, some of the matrons say. Potrero agrees with them, and tells her often. Her laughter is like bells, and each time he hears it, he marvels at the kindness of the gods who willed that his best friend soon become his wife.

He is the youngest of the merchant's sons, she the only daughter of a widowed printmaker. From the time they are small, they have been a pair. Potrero weaves her stories as they grow up side by side, strolling among the bougainvillea or below their favorite redbud tree, high on the hill above the ocean.

One day Agata asks, "Why do you dream up these fantastic tales?"

He shrugs, remembering her shining eyes the day they met. "Because it pleases you to hear them."

He grows tall and bold as she grows lovelier with each year, and as time goes on his stories become their own. At sixteen she steals a knife from her father's workbench before bed, climbing down the trellis to carve their initials into the redbud's bark. When Potrero sees it the next day, she grins like a tigress, presenting him with his first printed story - set by her own nimble fingers - and he knows he is hers forever. Lying under their tree on the hill, tangled in each others arms, they imagine the adventures they will have together.

One unhappy day the king visits on a journey through his many provinces, and in the marketplace Agata falls under his wandering eye. She is soon to be married and rejects his amorous advantages as well as the many baubles and trinkets he flashes before her eyes. She is no fool, despite her beauty, and is wise to the wants of other men.

The king is unmoved by her loyalty. "Bring her to me," he growls to his men, and has her shuttered up in the manor home of the prefect where his court breaks from their travel. Rather than submit to him, Agata fights tooth and nail, calling for her lover until she is hoarse. The angry king eventually tires of her antics. Venomous, he orders her public lashing to assuage his wounded ego and as warning to those who would not heed his authority.

Potrero learns of her abduction and rallies his brothers, who are sympathetic. "I will be at your side no matter what," the oldest, Marco, swears, "but my brother, they are the very might of Virgon...What can we do?"

"Anything," Potrero breathes.

When Agata is dragged into the street the next day, the brothers and their men go at the guards with anything they can find: hammers, irons, clubs - every plank, every tool a worthy weapon to save her. But they are greatly outnumbered, and the guardsmen know no mercy.

Just as Potrero has fought his way to Agata's side and is reaching for her prone and broken body, the king's best man runs him through with his honed and vicious blade. Both lovers watch the bright blossom that his blood makes as it spills across his chest. He falls to the stones at her side, the light gone from his eyes, their stories dead on his tongue. Agata dies with his ring on her finger, heartbroken with grief.

The redbud tree on the hill never blooms again.

5. they've been sentenced to death by the blues
Aerilon

"When I met your father," Bridget will tell her children, "he had a fiddle in his arms and a song in his heart. I married him because I wanted my life to be even half as beautiful as the music he made."

Michael lives the next farm over, though they do not meet him until she is seventeen and he twenty-one. He walks her home from the county fair one Sunday after they have danced for hours, and asks if he can hold her hand. Bridget gives him her easy, sideways smile, and he boldly tucks a lock of chestnut hair behind her ear. He is smitten, he tells her over their next picnic lunch, singing her songs of joy and merriment for all that she makes him feel.

Her husband comes into the world making music, she learns, and Bridget is happy to help him keep time.

He shows her the rhythm to every day, humming a song for their morning coffee, composing a tune for tea, strumming his guitar while she cooks them dinner. He even makes love like a dance, Bridget thinks, which is probably how they end up with six children. That, and the wild, melodic love between them.

"Ditty for your thoughts, my girl?" Michael always asks, pulling her against him while the children laugh and holler.

"You'll get none, boyo, for mine demand a symphony," Bridget scolds with her crooked smile.

The year of sorrows comes when their oldest is ten and the youngest is two. Spring comes early, and the crops that sprouted too soon are destroyed by a late frost. What isn't ruined in spring is ended by the desperately hot summer. The sickness begins in the fall, and one by one the children catch it: Susan and Althea, John and Gregory, Jacob and Daisy.

The only one to survive is their youngest.

The songs stop and the drinking starts. The house is quiet and cold all that winter, with Daisy always pressed to her mother's side, frightened of being left alone.

"Michael, please," Bridget begs, tears in her eyes. "Play her song, sing a lullaby. Anything!"

But Michael can only turn away, his throat choked by grief, and if her voice grows sharp, there is no one to blame. He recovers, mostly, but the music is gone from their lives. Though there is still love, it is older now, worn and frayed. The guitar quiet as the grave.

He gets lost in a blizzard the year he turns sixty-four, and dies a slow, peaceful death in a snowdrift, following the voices of his lost little ones. Bridget buries him beside their five children, humming a tune he taught her when they were young and happy, still ignorant of all that life would bring them.

6. I'll be wearing a river's disguise
Gemenon

They meet in the middle of the river, Pelagia from the South and Alin from the North, their clothes left on respective banks. Their meeting is, at best, punishable by expulsion from their orders, at worst, execution.

Pelagia supposes that if she could only do one thing for the rest of her life, she'd be content with kissing Alin. He is dedicated to his task, wholly invested in kissing her, his hands smoothing the length of her back. The water is cool but they've long since become used to it.

She first saw Alin at a ceremony. He was speaking, his voice round and rich and heavy with piety. She interprets prophecies and signs, dressed in gauzy white and flavored with chamalla. His voice made her soul vibrate in her chest and she knew then, as she knows now, that Alin is her destiny.

"This is madness," he says every time they meet, and while he's not entirely wrong, he's not right either. She's tried explaining it to him, what it's like having the Gift, and found that her words fall short. It was impossible to explain how easy it was for her to see things - fires and storms and visitors - and how easy it is to accept. Their meeting is inevitable; it has already been foreseen.

"I almost died twice when I was little," she says, as she floats on her back. The water laps at her side, and his fingers are just on her spine. "So my parents offered me to the Gods for saving me. Now I take chamalla and read tea leaves."

And have illicit affairs, Alin thinks, that will get them both killed. But the silk of her skin is worth any death.

For all her foresight, Pelagia cannot see who betrays them; she only knows that the head priestess speaks to her quite seriously, and there is talk of losing her place. She is kept in her quarters for days, not knowing that Alin's fate was to be expelled from his order and whipped publicly, before being abandoned by their river.

When she does see him - delirious and bleeding and drowning in the current as he tries to reach her side - she beats on her door to be released to no avail.

His body washes up on the southern shore the next day. Pelagia never speaks again.

7. there's an attic where children are playing
Tauron

Sera has been in the tower for three months when she is given a fellow inmate to occupy the next cell over.

From the ink on his arms, she can see he is Ha'la'tha, and turns her nose up in disgust. Their families have been rivals in Hypatia for time out of memory, each with long histories of the one crossing the other. But when the uprising swelled against the Virgon tyrants, both clans agreed to set aside their local animosities for the duration of the war. Still, no love is lost between them.

"What's your name?" Sera breaks her silence to ask one day, tired of her own weary mind and wanting words of comfort.

"Titho," he replied, after a long while, apparently sharing her outlook. "My mother named me for Tithonus."

"Your mother is a strange lady," she says without thinking. But instead of the angry retort she expects after the words have escaped her mouth, he surprises her with a laugh - a most unexpected sound after months of solitude.

"She certainly is," Titho replies.

They sit a little closer after that, each on their side of the bars.

"I was with my father and uncle," Titho explains, "we were north of the city, in the forest. A group of those cake-eaters surprised us." He is quiet for a moment. "They killed my uncle. I'm not sure about my father."

Sera reaches through the bar and holds his hand, knowing his grief. Her sister and cousins tried to escape the raids the night she was captured. Atalanta, she knows, did not survive.

Dogs that they are, their enemies have some honor. Because of their youth, they are kept locked away in the tower instead of more unsavory places. Still, sometimes Sera can hear the cries of captured rebels echo through the long, cavernous hallways of their keep, and both she and Titho pretend not to wonder which of their many friends and family members the voices may belong to.

One day no one comes to bring them water or scraps of bread. Or the day after that. They have not been well cared for, no, but neither have they been gravely mistreated so far. This development means something, they decide. Sera manages to catch some rainwater in a small dish on the fourth day, holding her arm out as long as she can so she can offer some to Titho. By the eighth day, as they are growing delusional with thirst and hunger, a series of great explosions rock the building, echoing through the city. The door to their room is kicked open, and a group of men rush in. Sera can barely lift her head, but she does manage to catch a glimpse of a familiar face before collapsing again.

"Cousin..." she croaks out, unable to stand.

Beside her, Titho has curled on his side, their fingers still twined from when they last said their prayers together. His fluttering lashes are the last thing she sees before she loses consciousness...and his clear eyes the first thing when she wakes sometime later. In the wake of independence, their families have found more to respect than revile about each other. It is a new world, the elders say, and slowly, they begin to make amends for their long and mutual hatred. Short years later, Titho and Sera seal the peace with their union and a pair of twins called Perseus and Penelope.

"My life began in that prison cell," Titho says with affection, to which Sera always responds by kissing his neck, right over his marriage tattoo. All is well until the day an assassin's bullet finds his heart, catching his chest in the space above her name.

8. there's a shoulder where death comes to cry
Scorpia

At the funeral of the slain Hyperion Astraeus, the pity is directed only at his very important family - his wailing sisters, his fainting mother, his blustering father who makes vague and threatening proclamations against whoever would dare destroy the almighty Astraeus family. His wife, sitting quietly in black, is mostly ignored, which is more to her liking anyway.

Cassandra had met Hyperion when she was twenty-one and the whispers of spinsterhood were really gaining momentum. She was a scholarship student at the Scorpian University, one of the very few women enrolled, and attending an art history class when Hyperion sat beside her. He looked like he should be in a myth starring as one of Aphrodite's lovers, so classically handsome was his face, and the cut of his clothes and the timbre of his accent spoke of unimaginable wealth. She'd seen him on the cover of magazines while checking out of grocery stores, heard the gossip of his many conquests, and she is disgusted to find herself feeling a bit weak in the knees as she looks at him.

"You're probably smarter than me," he stated at the end of the period, stunned by her wit and candor.

"Probably," she agreed, steeling herself against his winsome smile. "I know for a fact I try a lot harder." And she did. He had the Astraeus empire behind him; she had a sick father and six younger siblings.

Cassandra is different from every other girl Hyperion has ever met. The only thing about him that impresses her is his family's ability to make everything they touched lucrative, and only then because she was intrigued by their keen business sense. The multiple buildings bearing his family name on campus, the fact that his father has lunch with the president, the committees his mother works on - everything is met with polite interest or the shrug of a delicate shoulder. Hyperion has to use his considerable charm and intellect to convince Cassandra to that he is more than a playboy coasting on his family's name, and the more she challenges him, the more he enjoys it.

"I think I'm in love with you," he says, seven months after they met, six months after she agreed to start seeing him socially, and five minutes after she successfully navigated her first Astraeus family function with grace.

"I know you are," she replies wearily, "and I'm trying not to hold it against you."

Being in love with Hyperion means getting wrapped up with the duties and responsibilities of the Astraeuses, involving herself with social expectations and obligations, things that Cassandra has never experienced and never desired - but she does love him, deeply and foolishly. He is cultured and so different from the drudgery that she's known, and would have known for the rest of her life. Her life is turned bright with colors and spontaneity as the long road of toil she had once foreseen vanishes. Her siblings and father are well taken care of for the first time, and Cassandra can indulge her passion for art - painting for fun, going to museums and galleries and owning masterpieces that make her heart sing.

Hyperion works for his father, overseeing dozens of business ventures and properties. He is good at what he does, managing his family's affairs with a keen business sense, but one so talented cannot help but make enemies. The morning he is gunned down, he kisses Cassandra goodbye as she sips her tea, her eyes alight with new ideas. "You'll show me tonight," Hyperion assures her, but before she can put her brush to the canvas she sees a news bulletin that the heir to the Astraeus dynasty was shot in front of the head offices, and moments later her mother-in-law is on the phone in hysterics.

As the body is being entombed in the family mausoleum - a space beside his begrudgingly kept for her - Cassandra remembers the arched eyebrows and murmured whispers of her future in-laws. How could someone so common ever be worthy of him? "It's the opposite," Hyperion had said, nuzzling her neck, "How was I ever deemed worthy of you?"

9. in the mist of some sweet afternoon
Aquaria

In the final year of his dissertation, his advisor abruptly decides that Peter's CV lacks the necessary fieldwork to ensure tenure track on one of the richer colonies, and kindly arranges for a sabbatical at the polar thermophysics outpost so his best student can get some more experience while finishing his degree. Peter arrives with his warmest coat, a box of journals, and his mother's sugar cookies.

Indira is a geochemist who says two words to him in the entire first month he is there: "Good morning." She works as though she cannot tire, rising before him every day and retiring later every night. Indira has outer-space eyes, greener than any chromium oxide or beryl mineral Peter has ever seen. The handful of other research associates shrug when he asks about the quiet girl with the double doctorate.

"She's in her own world," a physicist from Caprica says. "Doesn't talk much, but, Gods, you should see the data she compiles."

When Peter tries to make small talk one day, about her home, about her family, she says without emotion, "I was raised in an orphanage. What about you?"

Peter tells her about his mother, who made games with snow and could cook a feast from the barest scraps in the dead of winter, and his father who managed the second-largest spaceport on Aquaria, down in the Khumbu. He tells her about meeting all the explorers and scholars that passed through as a child, watching them with their curious instruments and packs full of gear as they headed off to the labs and outposts and university stations that dotted the icy northern hemisphere.

"I romanticized it as a child," Peter says with chagrin. "If only I knew how boring the work actually was."

Indira looks at him with her magnificent eyes. "How could you ever be bored?"

She shows him bioluminescent clouds in the frozen oceans and drags him to the tops of mountains in the name of isotopes and carbon density. She shows him glacial floes and lateral moraines, meteor showers and the exact location of magnetic north. Even she has to grin a little at their wobbly brass compass, whirling around all clueless and confused. Peter is no biologist, but he thinks his heart might be doing the same.

One day, he looks over the lonely mess table to find her staring at him.

"You have phthalocyanine eyes," she says. It takes Peter half a beat to realize what she means, to remember that phthalocyanine is a blue pigment, and that to Indira, science is the language of love.

"Yours are like verdegris," he replies, "flecked with carotene. It's my favorite color." Indira kisses him as though experimenting but Peter does not mind at all. She seems to like her initial findings, dedicating advanced research methodologies to the matter that night and every one after. She is nothing if not thorough. When she smiles in her sleep, Peter thinks it may be the greatest accolade he could ever earn.

One night they sit under the skylight and she turns to him as the aurora shifts above.

"You make me feel like that," she says, looking at him. Yes, Peter thinks. Like nitrogen atoms, just minding their own business until a silent solar wind comes along and sweeps them through mighty magnetic fields, tossing them up and down and up again, getting all spun into their most excited state until there is nothing for the lost little atoms to do but dance along the ionosphere and sing across the sky.

They co-publish four groundbreaking studies and have three children before his still-spinning heart gives out at eighty.

10. in a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Canceron

By the time Jaya feels the thief's fingers in her pocket, he has already ducked past her. It is probably too late, but she gives chase anyway. Jaya can run like the wind when provoked, and even though he is quick, the sheer force of her will fuels her to keep his pace. She finds the thief leaning against an alley wall in the favela, staring into the contents of her meager wallet. She is about to snatch it back when he tosses it to her, everything in place, even the ten cubits which are plain enough to see.

The thief smiles. "I just wanted to know your name."

He is Paolo, and like her he has grown up in the slums of Mangala. He has a mother and nine older siblings; she lives with her two sisters and their five children and it is not long before she becomes his partner. Paolo has the voice of an angel, resonant and almost familiar, that distracts from his lightning bolt hands. They are honorable thieves, picking rich tourists pockets for trinkets and cash, saving each cubit for a place of their own.

"I want to see the stars," she tells him, as they lie side by side on the roof of his building, staring up at the haze of smog that obscurs the lights of the heavens, betraying only shuttles and transports that fly away to other cities on better colonies.

"Someday," Paolo says softly, "We'll get out of here." He paints a picture of their life together: owning a little restaurant where he can cook her dinner every evening. She'll keep the records, smiling for their customers who, of course, are all regulars and friends. Or maybe she could go to nursing school, get a good job. Maybe become a teacher. Their dreams are simple, but honest. A home to call their own, far away from the slum; far away from Mangala. They just need a little money first.

"No drugs," Jaya makes him swear, determined not to fall prey to the men who took her father's life in an instant life and then her mother's, day by day, fix by fix. He promises, his word as true as the blue of his eyes.

Like most good thieves, Paolo is a sweet-talker, and his posturing wins the attentions of Pekola, a cold-eyed girl whose brother runs the Saura-mora gang on the west side of the slum. Jaya's girlfriends try to warn her: "That girl is no good. Don't cross her, mun." Even her older sister Sagel is grave, pleading with Jaya to keep her profile low. "Just wait for her attentions to move on."

But Mangala is a treacherous town where temperatures run hot to boiling, the tempers even more so, and Jaya is not immune. She loses her cool in a flash of rage when she sees Pekola kiss Paolo, pressing her lean, hungry body against his, clawing her lacquered nails through his dark hair.

"You come near us again, I'll kill you," Jaya spits, holding a switchblade against her rival's throat.

Pekola laughs in her face, her pretty, expensive earrings tinkling like little knives. "See if you can, little girl," and whistles a high, sharp sound like a shriek. A fancy car pulls up on the corner where a man in an expensive suit and a gun on his hip whispers to her, then turns to stare them down before they drive away.

Paolo and Jaya share a long look, feeling trapped by crime and poverty and all the cruelty that grew from such bitter earth. Life was no game anymore, where a gold watch and a hundred cubits put them ahead at the end of the day. Two weeks later, they celebrate when Jaya lands a secretary's job, working for a gruff doctor in a neighborhood nearby, beyond the favelas. He grew up in the slums like them and is impressed by her fierce and serious demeanor.

The fire starts sometime in the night, after they have fallen asleep in Paolo's small bed. By the time the smoke and screams awaken them, it has spread to the stairs, blocking all the exits. The smoke is bad, in their lungs and in their eyes; between the heat and the poor ventilation, it is impossible to see. With his last breaths, Paolo manages to break a window, throwing Jaya to open arms in the street below.

She breaks only a wrist in the fall, while Paolo collapses before he can jump. For that all his quick feet and deft touch can do, he is unable to steal another moment from the gods.

Jaya leaves the favelas for good six months later, marrying the doctor's son on a cool morning before Holi. For the rest of her life, every time she sees the stars, she thinks of Paolo and says his name so softly, only she can hear.

11. And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
Picon

Stephen first sees Violet in the library, the month before the entrance exam to medical school. Her focus is unwavering, pale green eyes flicking across study guides and textbooks until one day he sits across the table from her.

"I don't need any distractions," she says without looking up, her voice rich and firm, and Stephen nods, dazzled by her beauty.

After their exam, Stephen emerged from the classroom to find her leaning against the wall, her long legs crossed and her hair over her shoulder. "I'm going to be a great surgeon," she announces to him. "No one's going to stop me."

"I won't stop you," he breathes, his eyes the heartbreaking blue of the clear twilight they walk into.

They both get into the best medical school in the colonies, and while Stephen doesn't hold Violet back, he certainly makes her work for her marks by keeping up with her. They graduate first and second in their class, and marry in a small ceremony before starting their internships at the prestigious Austrinus hospital. Violet specializes in neurosurgery, Stephen in pediatric cardiology, and the Doctors Crecio become well-known within the medical community.

When they learn Violet cannot have children, no one is as surprised by her grief as she is. With all her ambition, when would there have been time? Still, Stephen's kisses cannot stop her tears once they begin. There are other ways, he tells her.

"You don't understand. It's not that I can't have children of my own," she sniffs. "It's that now I'll never have yours."

When he is forty-five, Stephen is in the process of exploring a new way of operating on newborns. He plans to meet Violet for dinner at a cafe across the street from the hospital. She doesn't see him get hit by a car as he steps into the street without looking, lost in his breakthrough, just as she doesn't think that Stephen will mind her running out on dinner when she receives an emergency page.

Stephen dies in the emergency room, taking his brilliant theories to the grave. Violet lives for her work for the next twenty years.

12. with its "I'll never forget you, you know!"
Caprica

Bill and Laura meet at the end of the worlds. They meet before that, really, though neither one really notices at the time, squabbling only as much as their incongruous positions demand. Both are caught up in their equally unhappy lives - his family, her cancer - and would not would have given the other a second thought ever again if the Cylons had not attacked.

As it is, the Commander meets the President and it is plain for all to see that theirs will not be an easy partnership. She finds him grave and stubborn; he thinks her a naive fool. They argue and debate, baring their teeth at each other over everything from pilots to prophecy.

It is not an easy partnership. Until, one day, it is.

After arrows and bullets and the Home of the Gods, things begin to change. She pins him with an an Admiral's wings and he witnesses a miracle of science. Her almost-son dies and his remaining son lives, and after a year in the stars, Bill finally sees Laura, who giggles in fits and forgets her shoes.

"It was always between us, anyway," is what he said about her once.

Things go wrong (things are always going wrong) but for a while they have it good, sitting under the stars while sharing herbal cigarettes that make their heads both spin. Laura makes him feel like youth, Bill thinks, and their dreams are those of rest: clear water and a little cabin on a planet somewhere called Earth.

For all the emptiness of space, they find it full of signs and wonders. Being around Laura is like déjà vu all over again: she loses her office, only to earn it back; is cured of her cancer, only to have it return. They still argue, still debate, but now when she growls "Admiral," be it in his quarters aboard Galactica or over the comm from her ship, she says it like an endearment.

The Admiral and the President, he thinks, watching her sleep. Once upon a time they shook hands, agreed to be partners, once they smiled, prepared to be friends. And one time they had kissed, wanting that much more. Still partners and friends, there are more kisses now, even as she grows sicker in searching for their new home. The old gods say she must die to save them, and though Bill is charged with the safety of the Fleet, with all that is left of humanity, he questions what he would do to keep her by his side.

For the meantime, there is still work to be done. For so few survivors, everyone seems to want something - justice or mercy, revenge or control. Each day is a war, with fighting on every front, and despite the fire in Laura's eyes when they are able to find a moment for themselves, he is beginning to understand that she is a battle he will ultimately lose. He tries to savor the moments, though. Laura still giggles, and Bill reads her their favorite books, finding words for what they cannot always say.

In the end though, their love cannot spare Laura's life, for all the ways it has saved them. With her last shaking breath, she whispers small words of wonder at the richness of the world around them. Bill is grateful for this planet, for the end it will bring to their wandering and sorrows, but none of it means as much when she is gone; his time here, he can feel, will not be long.

When the last President of the Colonies dies on the Earth they've longed for, it is the first time he must lose her, and the last time that they are parted.