His hands were like ice. If William Adama, through some trick of fate, managed to live to be a thousand years old, the only thing he'd recall of old Doc Cottle was the overwhelming aroma of cigarettes and his ice cold hands.
"Cough."
It was a rough, short order given by a man who didn't seem to notice that his patient was also his commanding officer. Cottle didn't really seem all that impressed by the chain of command, and his attitude towards Adama reflected none of the pervasive love and relief that crewmembers seemed to be overflowing with since his near-death experience.
To the best of his knowledge, William Adama couldn't remember hiring Doctor Cottle, or authorizing his transfer to Galactica. Cottle was like Galactica herself, old and neurotic and ripped from the pleasures of a well-earned retirement by some crackpot Cylon genocide nobody could have predicted.
Still, Galactica had survived the attack on the Colonies by sheer virtue of its age and idiosyncrasies, and Cottle was no different. While everyone on the ship stood in awe of Adama's seemingly miraculous recovery, to Cottle he was just another patient.
For some reason, it felt good to Adama, felt right to him that Cottle was neither overly impressed or overly sympathetic with him after his close call. He wasn't comfortable with the adulation, although he was grateful to be back where he belonged, if only on restricted duty. "Any clue on when I can go back to full time?" Adama asked as Cottle scribbled something in his chart.
"Did I say it was time for questions?" the white-haired physician mumbled, then took out a tiny flashlight. "Straight ahead," he ordered, and flashed the penlight in Adama's eyes with a slow "uh…huh…" He shook his head, and wrote something else in the chart. "You're lucky to be alive, Commander. You're lucky I'm letting you out at all."
"Estimate, Doctor?"
"If I had any backbone at all, I'd put you in bed for three weeks," he raised his hand to stop Adama's protests before they started. "But this isn't a perfect world, and I don't have much of any kind of spine any more, so restricted duty until I give you the go ahead. No complaints, or I'll relieve you of duty." He returned Adama's glare without a hint of fear and added, "You used up quite a bit of our store of supplies on this last little jaunt of yours, Commander. It would be nice if you could find some place for us to acquire medical supplies--no, don't bother. I know that's a fool's wish. Just try to keep from puncturing or lacerating any more major body parts in the near future, if you would, sir."
Adama nodded, easing out of the examination chair, standing slowly. He had to grab Cottle's shoulder for balance, and the whiff of lingering smoke on the doctor's coat had him coughing slightly.
He'd quit smoking years ago. Cold turkey, two days after Caroline told him she was pregnant with Lee. They'd spent the first trimester fighting their own demons--Caroline with morning sickness, and Bill with the nastiness that came with overcoming an addiction.
"You mentioned supplies," he said as he caught his breath from the sudden wave of discomfort. "What can we do about manufacturing medicines within the fleet?" He hoped the question would distract Cottle from the swift withdrawal of blood from his cheeks as he tried to regain his equilibrium.
"Wouldn't be too hard to manufacture the drugs we need; we have machinery we can jury-rig to do that. But getting the raw ingredients--well, I heard there was a floating botanical garden in the fleet at one point." He cast a rather cold eye on Adama. "Pity it didn't have FTL technology, or we'd be sitting pretty."
Adama didn't take the bait. The time for recriminations was far past, and he wasn't going to let Cottle get to him. "Yeah, too bad about that."
"If you could get us to a planet with the necessary plant life, we could gather some samples, maybe some seeds to use for future crops…"
A planet with the necessary plant life.
Kobol.
It was too hard, right now, to think of Kobol. Crawling with Cylons, crawling with legend, Kobol had already taken too much from William Adama.
She used chamalla extract to fight the pain. It occurred to him that she had been in pain since the first day he met her. That she had been dying, every moment they struggled to keep the fleet alive.
And Cottle had known, probably since the first week.
Adama stared at the old man, wondering how many other secrets he was keeping. The face seemed so old to him, even though he knew Cottle couldn't be more than ten or fifteen years his elder.
Some jobs age men more quickly than others.
"We'll find something. In the meantime…."
"In the meantime, we do what we can."
It's what they all did. Lee, Laura, Cottle. They were doing what they could do, and his anger with them was pointless.
How the hell did it come to this? How the hell did he lose so much control in such a short time?
It was as if Sharon had shot through all of them, everyone in the fleet, in those short, painful moments.
Twenty-four ships had followed Roslin and Lee, almost half the fleet.
They couldn't survive apart, yet how could he justify following her? Risking the remainder of the fleet?
And what would he do if he found her, by some chance of the gods, still alive on Kobol?
She used chamalla to control the pain. All those long conversations, the hard decisions, the random smiles when one or both of them would just get too tired to be serious anymore.
The phone against his ear, her voice soft and steady.
He missed her, and it didn't matter. He had made his bed, and she had forced him to lie in it.
Earth didn't exist, and chamalla had led her down a dangerous and foolhardy path. Half the fleet was following her into a trap, including his only surviving son.
Did it matter if her voice was like a warm summer rain? Did it matter that he'd never seen her complain, not even once, of the pain that must be almost unbearable? Did it matter how she felt in his arms?
He had a fleet to run. Half a fleet surviving was better than all of them dying, and he knew what he had to do.
"Let them go," he whispered to himself as he straightened, no longer relying on the doctor for balance.
Cottle frowned and turned away, the examination over and done with. "You already did," he said so softly that Adama almost didn't hear it.