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.
Regrets
By chimรจre
There is a sheet of paper, almost four years old, that lay for a long time in a desk drawer of the President of the Twelve Colonies. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary to-do list, so it seems strange that it should have been kept under lock and key, or carefully and secretively tucked in a pocket - again - since the President and her belongings moved to the Galactica.
It is a lesson Laura Roslin learned from her predecessor. The words on the sheet, written at different times with different pens, are lessons that life after the end of the world has taught her. It is not a complete list, but she thinks that would take several volumes.
It reads,
Olympic Carrier
Elosha
Baltar as (Vice) President (the brackets around Vice added with a different pen and swift and bitter strokes)
Banning abortion
The suicide bombers
Maya and Isis (and Isis crossed out with a different pen)
Hera. Captain Agathon. Athena
Asking Lee to help with Baltar's trial
Faith. Earth
Zarek. Gaeta. The Quorum
Hera (the name traced many times, leaving small grooves in the paper)
And on the other side, because on this creased and stained sheet of paper Laura has no one to hide from, and its whole purpose is not to hide from herself, it reads,
Breaking my word to Bill
Being Presidential too much of the time
Not building the cabin
Making Bill believe in Earth
Breaking Bill's heart
The second list has been written with the same pen, all at once, the letters slightly unsteady as though the hand tracing them had been shaking. This list is a dying woman, President in name only, sitting behind a desk that doesn't really belong to her any more, bullet holes in the walls around her and photos of the Quorum scattered before her, eyes painfully dry and sobs caught in her throat. This list the realization that her and Bill's refuge in love will soon be gone just as Earth and faith and the Quorum, and that again, even though indirectly, it will be her fault. This list is at once a moment of weakness and a moment of truth. It is everything that she cannot, will not show or say or admit to, because that would mend nothing and only cause more pain.
There is a sheet of paper that burns strangely slowly in Laura Roslin's hand that is steady with the help of the last medication she will ever take. One corner of it, the tiniest bit, floats to the floor of the cabin that is the only place where she has ever felt at home.
It doesn't matter, she thinks, lightheaded from the drugs and her stubborn will and love and regrets and a feeling of everything coalescing, flowing over, ending. Perhaps some of the regrets could finally have been crossed off that paper now, at the very end. But it doesn't matter. Her regrets are etched into her skin, her flesh, her bones. Once marked by them, she can never erase them, especially those on the second list.
Laura would want to erase her regrets if it meant that Elosha would be alive and Hera would be safe and Bill could live without her. But for herself, she almost welcomes their burning touch on her soul as memory dredges them up. Her regrets remind her of too important things for her to want to live without them.
Still, almost all her regrets fade when living without them is no longer an issue, and she wonders how she has deserved dying without them. They are gone, and she feels lighter than she has since before she can remember. They are gone - all her regrets but one.
