"Am I supposed to be scared now?"
Bill looks anything but as he stares down the irate redhead standingin front of him. She narrows her eyes at him, a furious half-strangled sputter escaping her compressed lips before she spins around and stalks back to her desk, sitting down abruptly.
Stifling an almost over-whelming urge to laugh, he follows her across the room and takes the visitor's chair opposite her. She's shuffling papers, concentrating intently, as if her life depends upon her getting them into the proper order.
He's seen this before. She's hoping that if she ignores him pointedly enough, eventually he'll get up and leave, giving them both some time to cool off before they can rationally discuss whatever comprises the disagreement of the hour.
Usually, it works.
Not this time.
This time, for all her ranting, he's still not sure why she's even angry with him. The best he can gather is she's had a very bad day and has decided that he will bear the brunt of it.
And that's okay with him. If irrationally yelling in his direction for a while will make any of this even a little bit easier for her, well, he's pretty sure he can take it.
"Laura," he says now.
She stops sorting her papers and looks at him without raising her head, eyes rolling upwards to glare at him over the top of her glasses. He hears her thoughts as easily as if she had spoken them. Are you still here?
"You are absolutely, one hundred percent, completely right."
Tilting her head slightly, she watches him for a second. Then she sets her papers down on the desk and swipes her hands across them, flattening them into a messy pile. "Am I?" she asks dangerously, clearly anticipating some sort of trick. "What am I right about, Bill?" She pulls off her glasses and tosses them on the desk in front of her like a gauntlet.
He leans back in his chair, crosses his arms and looks her straight in the eye, his best carved-from-granite Adama glare firmly in place. Quietly, but resolutely, he replies, pausing after every word, as if each comprises its own sentence. "I. Don't. Know."
They stare at each other in a silent standoff, until finally he sees what he's been watching for, an almost imperceptible quirk of her upper lip. And then another. And soon after, a very un-presidential snort of laughter.
Cracks begin to appear in his own stoic façade, first around his eyes, and then his own lips start to twitch upwards. Soon, he's grinning outright, and Laura is actually giggling, her cheeks flushed and the fingers of one hand pressed tightly to her mouth.
"Bill, I'm sorry," she says after a few moments. "You didn't deserve that."
He returns her smile, then looks down to his lap, still grinning at first, but by the time he looks back up at her, all traces of humour are gone. "None of us deserve any of this," he says.
Laura's smile drifts away. "No," she agrees quietly, eyes dropping back to the pile of paperwork in front of her. Her fingers slides along the edges of the top sheet and he glances away when a thin, red line appears on her thumb.
When he looks back, she's sliding her glasses on. "So," she begins, "about the rationing…"