Curtain Call
Chapter 2
Bill entered their quarters their book in hand. "Laura?"
He spotted her on the leather couch half reclined waiting for him.
"I went to sickbay. You said you would go see Cottle after your talk with Lee."
She smiled at him. It was a guilty smile. "I did go see him, Bill."
She hadn't been in sickbay nearly long enough. A look to her wrist – still unmarred confirmed it before her words.
"It was just to talk, Bill." She patted a spot on the couch beside her, offering him the space at her feet. "We should talk, Bill. You and I."
She was his undoing.
He wasn't a fool. He knew that. He was so far past the possibility of being able to do anything to change it – not that he would even if he could - but he knew it.
Her wig was off. Bill despised the wig that was so unlike her real hair. They both did, but she wore it as a part of her Presidential facade. The cut of it was so harsh, it made her look so harsh, but it also hid many of the signs of her illness from the passing glances of those who didn't really have a need to know.
In place of the wig, she wore her scarf. Without the wig and her own hair her face looked so much softer. He could see so much more of it.
When she smiled, he could follow the way it changed not just her lips, but her whole face. How it created lines around her eyes and made the muscles in her cheeks move. She had a dimple in her cheek when she smiled. He had never noticed it before. It was so far back on her cheek – closer to her ear than her lips - that her hair had always covered it. He couldn't remember ever even having seen her ears before she lost her hair. They were small and one stuck out a bit more than the other, but they were perfect for her face. When her hair had been her own, there had just been so much of it. It had hidden so much.
She was waiting, staring up at him expectantly with that soft look. Her hand still caressed the space beside her.
He pulled the chair from the desk and set it across from her.
He didn't want to sit next to her. He had already learned that for him soft Laura was oh so much more perilous than harsh Madam President. He had a feeling that he would need all of his wits about him for this conversation.
Her tone was even – almost clinical as she started.
"I spoke to Cottle, Bill. If I stop the doloxan and all but the treatments that target the pain, he thinksI could have two, maybe even three good months before things get to be bad. And when they do, it will be like the last time – a few weeks of some good days and some bad days and then finally just a few very bad days before it's over.
"Bill, with the treatments we're talking a year, but not too much longer than that. For every two good days, there will be three or four bad ones and one or two very bad ones. And that's just at the start – that's what we've been doing. It is going to get worse. It is going to get a lot worse. You didn't have to see the last time. Instead of my Bill, I had my Billy. Towards the very end, he took to keeping my pills at his desk because sometimes I would forget and he was afraid I would take too many by accident or not forget and still take too many. But that's nothing, Bill, that is nothing compared to what I had to see with my mother."
Rehearsed – he realized would be a better word.
"I went the doloxan free route the first time and it may have been swift, Bill, but it was merciful. With the doloxan, Bill, by the end there will be nothing left of me. At the end of a doloxan year there will be just pain and a carcass."
Finally he was hearing real emotion in her voice, but he had long since stopped listening to the words.
"I'm tired of getting my good days in dribs and drabs, Bill. I want to have them in a deluge and then board the ship. I'll wait for you there on the shore, Bill. For as long as it takes, I will wait for you."
She reached to cup his face, but he pulled away.
This was what he had been dreading ever since she had told him of her dream, her vision of crossing over. She was using it as an excuse to stop fighting. She couldn't do that. He had to make her see that. She had once asked him to live for today because maybe tomorrow really isn't coming. Maybe today is all they had left. But he needed her to fight for tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, and the tomorrow after that one because what if tomorrows were all that they had left? What if there was no hereafter?
She had her faith in her gods and a vision of a shore to cling to. He didn't have any gods. All his faith was in the woman before him. She was all he had to cling to.
He knew she was waiting now. Waiting for a response from him. She looked tensed for a fight which was good because he had every intention of giving her one.
"What if you're wrong? What if there really is no shore? No Fields of Elysium? What if this is all that there is? Today and as many tomorrows as we can get hold of?"
Her eyes shined as she endeavored to give him a reassuring smile. "There has to be, Bill. There has to be! This can't really be all that there is! Life can't be that cruel. The gods can't be that cruel! We can't really have waited all of our lives to find one another only to lose each other like this!"
He shook his head at her naivety. Was she really that blind? Didn't she see? "If your gods really did exist how else could you describe them? Haven't you learned anything from these past few years? Your gods are nothing but cruel!"
"Bill-"
He didn't want to be attacking her and her beliefs, but she had to be made to see. Two months versus a year? How was there even a question in there?
"Something will come along. It always does. A lot can happen in a year's time, Laura. I'll talk to the Agathons –"
Squeezing her eyes shut, she didn't let him finish. "Bill, you know that Hera's blood wouldn't work now. It was the undifferentiated whatever of the fetal blood."
"Then I'll talk to them about having another baby!"
She just stared at him.
He had to make her see reason. "There are so many cylons in the fleet now, Laura. Other cylon/human couples are bound to happen. There will be more hybrid babies – you just have to give it time."
She shook her head. "Bill, you don't even know that it would work a second time. It didn't even work a first time. Not really. The cancer wasn't cured. It came back!"
"It bought us two extra years. So we repeat it every two years." Bill shrugged. It was hardly ideal, but he didn't really see a problem with that. "I'll take my cures two years at a time!"
He watched her put her head down into her hands.
He knew the volume of his voice had been going up each time he spoke. He tried to rein it in. "Maybe there is something that can be done with Saul's baby. I know it's not a hybrid, but if I asked Saul –"
That brought her head up - her expression one of horror. "- Saul would do anything for you, Bill. You wouldn't even have to ask, just suggest it and Saul would do anything for you, but there are risks and it isn't just Saul's baby."
Rather than argue the particulars of it with her, he went back to the abstract. "Laura, in a year's time something will come along. You need to keep fighting and wait for it."
She was growing angry with him. "Bill, I am dying. I am in pain and I am dying. I love you, you know that I do, but I need you to understand that. The treatment, it's prolonging the cancer, it isn't curing it. I cannot keep doing this.
"There are so many pills, Bill. So many. I can't even remember all the names anymore. Every morning as soon as I wake up I take eight little white round tablets, six green capsules, and five of these red capsules that are so enormous I don't even think they were originally intended for people. Those all need to be taken on an empty stomach. Then as soon as I manage to keep down something that isn't a pill I have to take four of the half green and half white capsules and then four more of the purple and white capsules. There are so many pills, Bill. Some mornings I can't manage to swallow them all. And that's just the round in the morning."
That was just her obstinacy. "They don't have to be pill form, Laura. Cottle can put a portacath in for injections instead."
Cottle had been gently trying to suggest surgically inserting a portal with a septum and a catheter connected to a vein for a while now. Mentioning how much quicker and easier it would be on her if they didn't have to find a vein each time she went in for a treatment or blood draws.
She shook her head adamantly. "That's the start of the end, Bill. I remember that with my mother. That's the beginning of being permanently attached to all of the machines that will do the work that my body can't do anymore and I don't want that, Bill. I have never wanted that. That was why I refused the doloxan the first time around.
"I don't want to end up like my mother- just this pitiful creature lying in a bed with no dignity. Too weak to stand, to dress, to feed herself. Needing someone to change my diapers! I don't want that, Bill, and we're going to be getting there! I want to have two months with you, not a year as a burden to you."
"Laura, I would relish every extra moment we might have together. How could you even think that I would consider taking care of you as a burden? That I would –" He searched for the words " – resent you for it?"
"I would resent it!"
He wouldn't hear it. "It doesn't matter, Laura. We're not there yet."
"Look at me, Bill." Shrilly, she insisted when he wouldn't. "Look at me! We are getting there, Bill. We are getting there and sooner than you think."
"It's hard, Laura. I know it's been very hard on you, but we can get through this."
Moving from the couch, she kneeled before him resting her hands on his knees. "No Bill, we can't! I can't. There is no getting through it this time! I'm tired of smelling of sickness and death! I can't do this!"
Standing, he pulled himself out of her grasp. He couldn't hear her – couldn't listen to what she was asking him to do – to allow to happen. "I can't do what you're asking me to do."
"Don't do this to me, Bill." She was pleading with him.
"Do you think that I sat in that raptor for show? I can't live without you, Laura."
Her arms were now resting on the seat he had abandoned. With a slight shake of the head, she turned from him.
Taking advantage of her silence, he persisted. "Laura, we've been down this road before. We can do it again. The past few days have taken a toll on all of us – especially you."
"Bill this isn't just about the past few days. For the past four years I've been dying. I'm tired." She didn't say it but he could hear the final two words 'of waiting'.
He could hold back his anger no longer. "That's it? You're just giving up. You're going to surrender?"
"Surrender?" The word came out in a huff that couldn't quite be called amused. "This isn't a battle you or I can win, Bill. This war, it's over! This body, my body, its broken!"
But it wasn't her body that was irretrievably broken – not yet. It was her spirit. Finding that Earth, the thing that everyone - but her most of all - had pinned their hopes and dreams on for the last four years, was nothing but a charred wreck had broken her.
Her struggles the last four years had been with a clear end goal in mind – finding Earth. Now that that had been taken from her in the cruelest way imaginable she was rudderless.
The one good thing that had come out of the mutiny was the reigniting of her fire. When he had heard her voice, her words coming over the com right before reentering the CIC, he had known everything was going to be all right - not because he was retaking his ship but because she had regained her spark. However it seemed that its return had been short lived.
When she had thought him taken from her, she had been willing to fight Zarek and Gaeta to the bitter end. She just needed to put that same spark into this fight against her cancer. If he could get her to do that, they could get through this. He knew they would.
"Something will come along!"
Moving to stand in front of him, she put a hand on his chest and spoke of the hope that neither had dared to speak of when it had still been alive. "Earth was supposed to be that something, Bill. We both know that."
More than just a place to settle the fleet, Earth had been the something they had been hoping would come along for use in combating her cancer. With the discovery of the vestiges of Earth's civilization, gone was the hope that the lost thirteenth colony might hold the knowledge of a cure for her cancer.
"Bill, it didn't work out. There isn't going to be a something this time. You have got to face that."
He refused to accept it. If Earth wasn't going to be their something, he would make something else their something. "Everyone has to have something to fight for. You're my something. Why can't I be your something?"
"Oh Bill, you are my something!"
He said it every bit as bitterly as he felt it. "But it's not enough. I'm not enough."
"Bill, I watched my mother die for two years. The pain, the body aches, the nausea, the chills, the tremors... Two years of doloxan and radiation and every other treatment the doctors could come up with. I want to be with you, Bill. Really with you. I would rather have two months of us than two years of that."
She had both hands on his chest. "Bill, think about it. Two months of having the strength and the energy to make love to you the way I've always longed to. Two months of really being together. Two months of actually being able to enjoy a meal with you - not just trying to choke some small bit of sustenance down without the nausea bringing it right back up. Two months of curling up together on the sofa with a book during your off duty hours – not you switching shifts with Saul so you can sit on the floor of the head with me after one of my treatments because you're afraid of what you'll find when you get back if you leave me alone.
"I want two months of falling asleep in your arms and waking up there. Not a year of living in a hospital bed with my immune system so weak I have to be confined to a section of sickbay.
"I'm not completely abdicating my position as President – just giving up all the scut work to Lee. And I know you'll still have your responsibilities, but we could use those two months to really spend time together in a way we've never been able to before because of all of our obligations. It's time we could use to learn all those things about each other that there's never been time for before. I want that with you so much, Bill. Having those two months with you.
He shook his head. "I don't want two months." Two months wasn't nearly long enough. "I want a lifetime." He wouldn't settle for anything less.
She persisted. Taking his hands, she pressed them to her face and smiled. "Bill, I've always wanted to feel your hands in my hair. Two months of growth wouldn't be much, but there would be some." She reached a hand to finger his hair and smiled at him wistfully. "It might even get to be as long as yours."
He wouldn't admit it to her, not until she was healthy again and her hair long and full, but he too had always wanted to feel his hands in her gorgeous locks of hair.
She was vain - not overly, but more than a little bit. Though she had tried to hide it, he knew that of all the changes and challenges brought on by the return of her cancer and the aggressive treatment to combat it the one that she had grieved the most was the loss of that exquisite hair. He never mentioned it, and he didn't know where, but he knew that she had kept all the strands that had fallen out unwilling, unable to actually dispose of them. If the day ever came that he did have to lose her, even if he could survive the immediate loss, he knew that coming across that wherever she hid it would kill him.
The want, the need in her eyes – he wanted to give in to it, but he knew he couldn't.
He went back to his battle cry. "Something will come along. It always does."
She put her head down, resting her forehead on his chin.
"Do this for me, Laura."
"Bill, don't ask this of me."
"I'm asking."
"Bill –"
He put his hands on either side of her face lifting her eyes to meet his gaze, keeping her from leaning into him. "I'm asking."
"Bill –" He couldn't give in to the pleading in her eyes. He just couldn't. Not with what was at stake.
She tried to pull away, but he wouldn't let go. He didn't let go until closing her eyes, she gave a slight nod.
He kissed her on the temple before moving towards the handset. "I'll call Cottle. Tell him we're coming right now."
She shook her head. "Not right now. I'll call him. I'll make the appointment, but not right now."
He had the advantage now, but he knew it might only be momentarily. He needed to press it. "We can go now. Saul is already covering my shift in CIC."
"We have a meeting tomorrow with Lee and Romo Lampkin to get things started for installing Lee as vice president and putting together the plans for a new Quorum. I need to be coherent for that. I'll talk to Cottle this afternoon. I'll schedule a treatment for after the meeting."
He knew he was badgering her. "You can call him right now."
"He was getting ready to operate on Anders as I was leaving."
Sam Anders. For better or worse, Kara's husband. Bill sighed wearily. Why did all of their lives have to be filled with such loss?
Unrelenting, Bill insisted. "But you will call him later? You'll make the appointment?"
She gave a slight nod. "Right now I want you to lay with me, Bill." She gestured to the book still in his hand. "We're almost to the end. I want to finish our book together."
Pulling her close again, he spoke of his feelings for her as he often did – through books. "It's my favorite. I don't want it to end."
A hand again in his hair, she gently chided him. "Bill, there are only a few chapters left."
Kissing him on the cheek, she took him by the hand, trying to coax him to his rack. "Come. I want to lie in your arms, close my eyes and just take in the sound of your voice."
He met her halfway.
Veering to the bookcase, he put Searider Falcon on its side on the shelf and reached for another book – any other book.
tbc
A/N As always reviews are greatly appreciated.