She was starting to make confessions. In the middle of the night when he couldn't see her face in bed she would tell him this or that, voice her regrets over things done, or not done. It was as if she were getting it out in the dark knowing that one day soon she wouldn't rise with the light and it would be too late.
"Bill?"
"Hm?"
His ship was dying. She was dying. And though she knew that he could hardly stand to admit it during the day, in the veil of night he let her speak freely.
"I'm sorry that I'm not on better terms with your children."
She was going to die without making amends with those he cared for most. The closest semblance she had to a family.
"Lee and Kara made their choices," he replied after letting out a long thoughtful breath that warmed the back of her bare neck.
"Still…If I had time...If things were different...I'd try. For you."
She felt him smile behind her and without seeing him she knew it was a smile laden with sadness.
"I appreciate knowing that, Laura, but I wouldn't expect you to."
She swallowed unsure if she was thankful or not that he was letting her off the hook. Perhaps on some level she'd hoped that he wanted her to be part of his family. Part of his inner circle of trusted loved ones, instead of how they existed and had always existed; devoted but separate and hidden away from all else. Then again it had always been about them, hadn't it?
Bill regarded his entire ship and crew as an extended family and no matter how at home Laura had come to feel on Galactica she felt as though she didn't quite belong amidst all the symbolic kinship.
"Things with Lee...I just can't…" she began to explain but faltered.
She could still remember the moment Apollo's once trustworthy eyes had turned ice cold as she faced him in the courtroom. He'd looked nervous and unsure and then suddenly his ego and indignation had taken over. She would never see him the same way again.
"Don't worry about Lee," Bill half groaned.
But the truth was that Laura really didn't worry much about Lee. Kara either for that matter. At least not directly. Probably not as she should. As sad as it was she sometimes even had to remind herself that Zak had ever existed.
She'd spent the last few years following her begrudged destiny. She'd spent them fleeing from an enemy and an illness, fighting tooth and nail to live even though before it all she'd secretly wanted to die. She'd spent them running from love and then giving herself over to it. After all of that, after giving into her fate, her prognosis, her heart and so much more Laura couldn't help that she felt sort of numb when it came to Bill's kids. It was as if she couldn't fit them inside herself. There was no room after everything else. Anything more than the basic compassion or concern she felt for them was mostly in how their well being effected Bill. She wanted them to be okay for him.
She would never truly understand the weight that he endured as a parent. She would never comprehend how he'd never be free of his worries or fears over his children, how his heart was never absent of the grief of having already lost one, or his torturous belief that he would never see his son again. Even after dedicating her last years to protecting the lives of an entire people, even after losing so many, even with the past loss of her family, Laura would never know that kind of unseverable connection. She didn't envy it, but she did appreciate it. She recognized it was there and she respected it, even admired it.
Laura wondered if things would have been different had their relationship began in an ordinary way. If she'd met Bill on Caprica and had an ordinary life and if death wasn't one foot inside her doorway. Would she have possessed the energy and sympathy needed to care for Lee and Kara as she should? Or would she still feel such numbness toward them? She didn't know and the very numbness in question stopped her from feeling the guilt that her uncertainty should have ushered in. She'd meant it when she told Bill that she would have tried, but she couldn't imagine what it would actually feel like to want to.
"Lee and I...There was a time where I felt we had a friendship and I-"
"He's jealous," Bill said with half a bemused grunt.
"Huh?"
"He's jealous," He repeated, letting out a low chuckle.
"Wait, Bill, do you mean he's jealous of me or he's jealous of you?"
Her phrasing made him laugh a bit harder before sighing at her side.
"Maybe both, but I doubt he even recognizes it."
"Bill, be serious."
"I am. In a way," he shrugged and tightened his arm around her shoulder. "Lee doesn't know what he wants. He gets angry when he sees people close to him who do. Even angrier once they get it and it satisfies them. I can only hope that he lives to find and attain something...that he truly wants...but he's always looking for something else."
Laura supposed that Bill was right in some sense. She'd assessed as much about the young man not long after she'd met him. His eye was quickly caught, his head easily turned. He always wanted something more, something other than what he already had. He always wanted to do something other than what he was already doing, something better. If Laura was brutally honest with herself she'd used it to her advantage in her early days within the fleet. Making Apollo her military liaison, fluffing his feathers with a new title and a coy smile. On more than just a few occasions she'd flirted with him, not overtly but enough. She'd quickly learned that inflating his ego kept his attention on what she needed him to do. Perhaps looking back Lee had recognized what she'd been doing. Perhaps outing her during Baltar's trial had been her reckoning.
"Kara…"
"Kara is deeply damaged, Laura...but that happened long before you."
She suddenly felt her throat close with emotion. Why, she didn't know. She'd put even less thought toward Starbuck than she had Apollo. Perhaps it was the wild sadness that perpetually existed within the girl's eyes.
"It's not that I don't care…"
"I know, Laura," He assured her. "My own relationship with them is strained as it is. How could I expect more from you?"
Bill was trying to make it seem as though her relationship with his children, or lack thereof, didn't bother him in the slightest, but how could that be true?
Laura tried to think back to a time when she'd primarily thought of them as brave young soldiers, before she'd thought of them as Bill Adama's kids; a time when she'd trusted and relied on them for the heaviest of tasks, convincing them to rebel against the man they respected most. She sometimes wondered how Bill could look back and see it as anything but a time when she'd turned his children against him. How could he not be troubled over how they'd both gone from choosing her side over his in an all out mutiny to each bitterly rejecting her?
Laura wondered if those early oppositions were very well the reason for the way their relationships had ended up. She could tell herself that it was because Lee had become lost in obsessive self righteous indignation and that Kara had become irreparably disturbed by the life she'd lead. She could make a thousand other excuses, but she would still suspect that they resented her deeply. In their eyes she'd made them turn on their father. She'd momentarily become the outlet by which they'd each expressed their anger and frustrations toward him and his leadership. They'd abandoned him in her name and then, in turn she'd eventually abandoned them in his. She suddenly had him; had his ear, his eye, his heart and she didn't need them anymore.
Bill had long ago given himself to Laura, chosen her just as his children once had and they understood she no longer had use for them with their father at her heels. How could Lee see her as anything more than a user? How could Kara see her as anything more than the proverbial stepmother who her daddy believed over her? The young woman had pulled a gun on her in desperate rage over it and Laura had been able to shoot at her in defence when given the chance. Cylon or not, crazy or not, she'd taken a literal shot at Bill's daughter.
Laura's true intentions and justifications meant little when looking at her actions from the perspective of Bill's children and the shame of that, at least, was strong enough to burn through the some of the numbness.
She hoped that he knew that they'd been more than pawns to her. She hoped that he understood that she'd asked them for help because of their strengths and bravery and all that he'd instilled within them. She prayed that he knew that she didn't blame them, that she'd seen how the incredibly strenuous circumstances of the last few years had hindered their growth and their stability and that it pained her to know that they would likely be thriving had the worlds not ended.
For a moment she allowed herself to picture them all as a family back on Caprica. A dinner at an authentic Turon homestyle restaurant. Bill ordering for the table as they laughed and joked around. The two of them smiling and shaking their heads at Lee and Kara's bet over who could eat the spiciest noodles without breaking a sweat. Sharing their lives, sharing his children.
"I'm sorry, Bill," She said again.
"I know," He acknowledged once more.
Laura closed her eyes against the dark and nodded.
"I love…" She began in a whisper. "I love how you love them."