Laura was not a sound sleeper.
He did not know if she ever had been.
Did not know if it was the terrors of New Caprica or some older malfeasance that came to revisit her at night. All he knew was that the nights she stayed in his quarters she would start with a small cry in the dark and gasp into the void before moving past his bunk like a silent wisp and run the water in his sink to mask her quiet sobs.
The night he had been brave enough to open his eyes and watch her through the dark he had glimpsed her clutching her chest and trying to calm her heaving breaths with quiet shushing sounds. He did not want to encroach on her nightmares, even as close as they had become, the wall between them demanded her privacy. But her sobs were so clearly distinguishable beneath the sounds of the running faucet, the rasping gasps as she tried to catch her breath… the low hum of anguish in her throat.
She had not spoken of New Caprica. The occupation. Her detention. Her almost execution. He did not ask about it, couldn't bring himself to force her to relive something she so obviously wanted to forget.
But the vision that had followed him through the Occupation. Of her head kicked back by the force of a bullet, her red hair flying as she collapsed behind her desk on the Colonial One. Behind the tables of her schoolhouse. Over the cot in her tent… it hadn't left him. Maybe her visions hadn't left her either.
Maybe it was time to exorcise their demons.
She was on the floor, her head against the bulkhead, her knees drawn up to her chest quivering with the effort to control her breathing. Clutching at her breast with tears streaming down her face.
"Laura?" he asked softly, unwilling to disturb her privacy.
Shaking, she removed her hand from under her slip to cover her face.
"I'm sorry." She gasped, hiding her face behind her fingers, "I'm fine, really."
"No," and he pulled the blanket from his bunk, "No you're not."
"Please Bill…" she pleaded from behind her fingers, "please just go back to bed."
"Can't do that." And he turned off the faucet and slid down the wall beside her, tucking the blanket over her bare knees.
"Thank you." She whispered and drew it closer to her chest as if to shield herself from him. Laura wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her silver bracelet glinting in the half light, her breath shuddering as she fought to control herself.
"You know… I think about New Caprica a lot." He started. Speaking to the opposite wall, "The music… people dancing. The warmth of actual sunshine on my shoulders…"
He twirled his wedding band absently.
"A woman in a red dress, selling me a dream of cabins and streams…" he smiled, "murmuring warm comforts in my ear under the night sky with solid ground under my back."
He tempted a sidelong glance, hoping to catch the whisper of a smile, but only saw new tears fall from glassy eyes and sobered, his voice dropping lower still; weighed down by his guilt.
"I think about when I jumped away… when I left you all… when I left you to be tormented, and tortured… murdered."
"This isn't how I imagined having this conversation." Laura interjected with a grim, watery laugh; her chin balanced in the palm of her hand.
"How did you imagine it?" Bill asked but Laura just sighed and fixed her gaze on him. Her cheeks still damp but her mouth pulled up at the corners with a familiar, coy mischief. Deepening the lines by her eyes.
A chuckle rumbled deep in his chest and he reached over without reservation and took her hand in his own. She did not pull away, but she did not reciprocate either.
"I still dream about it." He confessed, "The same dream. Over and over."
She studied him curiously in the dark.
"Even though I know you're safe. Even when you're asleep in the next room…" He tightened his grip on her hand and felt some of the tightness in his chest loosen when she leant against him, albeit gingerly. Her hair tickling his bare shoulders.
"You dream about me?" she teased gently, knocking her knees against his.
"Trust me, I can think of more pleasant images of you to have running around my head."
Her small giggle ended abruptly in a long hum. And he closed his eyes to the warmth of that gentle sound.
"New Caprica…" she considered grimly, "You know… when Caprica was being blown apart beneath us and the last stragglers of humanity were being rounded up by that girl who shot you in the chest… The whole world was ending, and I couldn't focus on anything other than the fact that I had cancer and I was going to die…"
"But you didn't."
"And yet I still wake up at night… I wake up and try not to scream. Not because I'm trapped in that Gods-damned, stinking prison of Gaius-frakking-Baltar. Not because I was loaded into the back of a truck like a cow for slaughter… I wake up… because every night that lump is back, Bill… and there is nothing anyone can do about it."
He shifted slightly and extricated his arm to wrap securely around her. He had not forgotten but he had grown so accustomed to her healthy vibrance that her cancer had drifted a way back in his mind in his way that it had so obviously not done in hers. She had been so steely, hard even, during those months that he had not really considered how her illness, or sudden resurrection, had truly affected her.
"It's just a nightmare, Laura." He murmured into her hair, but she was quaking beneath him again.
"No. Bill… it's not." She gasped breathlessly.
