Prompt: "Give me one good reason why I should wear a dress."

Set: between Someone to Watch Over Me and Islanded in a Stream of Stars


She talks, sometimes, in what he would like to think of as her sleep, what he knows is the fog of pain and morpha and chamalla, the confusion of a strange bed, unfamiliar sounds.

Sickbay is still new, to both of them.

Sometimes she mumbles about Hera, about Earth, about the Opera House. Sometimes it's silly things, memories, maybe, fragments : you forgot your cat, why are you so purple, give me one good reason why I should wear a dress.

Bill does not think of himself as a sentimental man, and he has never been a romantic.

But he would have liked to see Laura in that red dress, just one more time.

Bill does not allow himself to indulge in what-ifs. They met how they met, they did what they had to do, they had what they had. But sometimes, when he's here but Laura isn't, not really, when her eyes slip shut and her mind wanders, when he's left alone—

They meet at a government function, in a bookstore, in a bar. (Never mind that Bill can't think of a single other event that would require the Secretary of Education and a battlestar commander, that he would never have struck up a conversation with a stranger, that he and Laura would never have frequented the same bar.) They are married within a year: a small wedding, private, no fuss. He wears his dress grays; she talks about just pulling a suit out of her closet, and he doesn't argue…but when he sees her in her dress, the ivory warm against the flush of her skin, he can't help but be happy she made a little fuss, after all.

They both complain about all the events required by her job: the fundraisers, the rallies, the numbingly tedious parties. But when she leans closer to whisper in his ear during a formal dinner, when she catches his eye across a crowd, when he watches her getting ready to go out, when she holds up her mass of red hair for him to zip up her dress—

No. It's better not to think about it.

"Bill?"

Laura's eyes flutter open, come to focus on him. She gestures wryly at their book, still open on his lap. "Did I miss anything?" she murmurs.

He lifts her hand to his lips. "I did," he whispers.