I decided I would publish this today. This is the longest chapter so far, and it did not feel right to cut it halfway. So you get the whole thing.

M warning for Baltar's torture in sickbay (not much more than what was shown in the episode, however the topic is sensitive) and some of Laura's flashbacks elicited by her experience witnessing Baltar's torture.

Thanks to the persons who have commented.

Chapter 30

Helena and Takashi ate in silence with the others. Sharon was quiet. When they finished their meals, Takashi called the group together. They sat around the campfire, talking.

"Alright, Sharon. It is just our team now. Where do you want to take us?"

"We stay here. The camp is perfectly situated. Those caves up there are leading to the villages, all of them underground. We can visit them one at a time. I suspect you will find there a lot of the information that you are seeking. There are thirteen villages, which are separated with each other. Our people have found refuge there a long time ago. Those caves have been inhabited for millennia."

"Where they hiding from something?" Evelyne asked. Sharon looked at her sharply.

"It seems so," Liang interjected, "living inside caves and leaving no trace outside, no constructions, no buildings, and using the natural geology to make a perfect hiding place. Invisible from above! Other civilizations built temples, erected massive monuments to their God or Gods, the bigger the better. But here, these people wanted to disappear. And they did."

John looked at Sharon. He looked then at Dr. Inoue as if to silently ask his permission. Takashi nodded.

"What were they afraid of, Sharon? Could it be something or someone coming from the sky?" John asked gently. They could feel the tension rising. Sharon seemed worried and for the first time, they could tell she was unsure. Helena thought she was even scared.

"Yes, we were afraid!" A strong low voice said behind the group. Everyone turned suddenly to look behind. A tall woman was standing in the clearing. Nobody had seen her approaching and in a second everyone was standing up. She seemed very old, and was holding a long carved wooden stick she used as a cane. Yet, she did not appear fragile. Her long straight hair was completely white, held back in a braid, and her skin was dark. She was wearing a long simple gray-blue dress with long wide sleeves and a belt made out of linen cord and sandals. She walked slowly to the group. Everyone looked at her in shock. She was very dignified, tall and straight, and exuded authority.

Her face looked at lot like Sharon's with unmistakable Asian features and her eyes were a stunning bright blue. John brought in one of the camp chairs for her to sit and the old woman moved into their circle nodding at all of them solemnly.

"Takashi" whispered Helena and she looked at her left arm. A silver bracelet, an open bangle with two spheres, was high up her wrist. "Laura's bracelet!"

The old woman said quietly, smiling, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." Then, she sat down among them.

"Baltar tried to commit suicide in his prison cell, discovered and saved by Lieutenant Gaeta who entered his cell at that precise moment. And I rushed to Galactica from Colonial One in the middle of the night. When Lieutenant Gaeta told us that he wanted to interrogate him, I knew immediately he was lying. Gaeta like all of us had suffered the horrors of the occupation. He had been on the inside; once suspected a collaborator, he had been indeed the informant that was passing critical and key papers to the resistance (for instance the frequencies of the wireless communications), without which we would never have been able to escape. Gaeta suffered a different kind of torture, an emotional one, forced to participate and work with the cylons to gain access to key information. I had no doubt he wanted to kill Baltar and that he came to his cell for this purpose only. I wasn't the only one not sleeping. I sipped my coffee slowly while listening to Bill, Tigh and Cottle, fighting tiredness. Baltar was sleep deprived also, and on a hunger strike. He needed to eat. I gave the order to Dr. Cottle to force feed him. We needed him alive so that we could interrogate him.

'I want him cogent' I said to him and I could read his displeasure in his eyes. I wanted to deny the hint of disappointment I saw in his look. We needed Baltar to talk, and in order to do so, he had to be stable. Baltar was with the cylons when we were looking for the Eye of Jupiter. We needed the information he had and we needed to find out if the cylons were on their way to Earth. I wanted more. I wanted to destroy him.

Tigh decided to install security cameras in the cell. When all of them departed, Bill and I remained in his quarters.

'How are you?' Bill asked, concerned, reading my mind like an opened book.

'Tired' I answered, honestly. I could not elaborate further to Bill. He knew it too. He looked at me right in my eyes, knowingly. I lowered my head. I needed to keep control of my emotions, or at least pretend to be. We had decided that I would go back to Colonial One, sleep for a few hours, shower and change. The interrogation would take place in the morning, after Baltar was rested and fed."

"Back on Colonial One, laying on my small bed, for what I knew would be only a few hours, I faced again my detention flashbacks. I had hoped Baltar had been killed on New Caprica and that I never would have to face him again. Unabated anger had prevented me to sleep since I found out he was alive. I realized in a moment of awareness that I was not healed from the pain of these cylon occupation months. They had left a much stronger mark on me that I was willing to admit. With Baltar's reappearance, my scars reopened. I had been in denial all these weeks. I was reliving each night the horrors of New Caprica, waking up screaming, crying, or shaking in sweat-drenched sheets. I felt on the edge of a precipice, held back only by the calm presidential mask I was putting on during the day, hiding behind the smile. I could not be impartial on this; I was too involved. Baltar had surrendered to the cylons; he had let them establish prisons, torture; he had signed a death list, bearing my name and so many others. I knew he had collaborated with the cylons before the attacks and probably let them in to the defense mainframe, allowing them to destroy our defenses. I remembered the harrowing hours spent cataloguing victims of torture on New Caprica with Dr. Cottle, and the horrors we saw. I knew there was worse fate than dying. I had witnessed it on New Caprica. My personal detentions were nothing compared to what others endured. I wanted to make him pay. The only hope holding me back from a complete breakdown was the certainty I would be able to extract valuable information from Baltar about the whereabouts of the cylons and their way to Earth, and his involvement in the original attacks. I slept a little, waking up often. And when I undressed to shower, I turned slightly to look at my lower back in the mirror. Some scars were still there, visible, healed, most white pearly marks on my skin, a few still pink, and others were just faint lines disappearing. They did not hurt anymore, but felt smooth under the touch, like raised lines that I could read with the tip of my fingers, telling a horrifying story. The invisible scars in my mind had not healed as easily. I let the spray of the water calm me and collected my strength for the day ahead, determined."

"Tigh, Adama and I, for once, all agreed that we needed to break him and find information about where the cylons were going, and what he knew, since he had lived with them since the rescue from New Caprica. People had elected him and he betrayed them. We know what happens to traitors."

"Once Baltar was back from sick bay to his cell, I decided to pay him a visit. Bill and I argued about this. He wanted to interrogate him. For me this was personal. I experienced New Caprica. I wanted to break him. What a pitiful creature he was, in his cell, trying to keep his dignity. It took an incredible amount of will power not to spit at him such his person repulsed me. I maintained an appearance of calm, a smile on my face, when I was swelling from anger and disgust inside. And yet, there was something in his face that was terribly human. I was willing to give him back his dignity and some comfort for his admission of guilt. I gave him his glasses back, just like he gave me mine back in the cylon detention cell, and lit a cigar for him. When he came in my detention cell on New Caprica and gave me back my glasses, he had given back my power and my existence as an individual. My strategy did not work. He denied any involvement in the attacks or any betrayal. The detention center was not his, he said, but the cylons'. It infuriated me that he could compartmentalize his involvement, that he could separate himself so easily from the consequences of his actions in another attempt at self-preservation. When I told him he needed to eat for his own good and I did not wish him to suffer, it was a lie. I would not have cared less about his pain, I wanted information and mostly I wanted his apology. He denied knowing the whereabouts of the cylons or their strategy to find Earth. I thought naively, I may add, that showing him pictures of the brutalities inflicted on New Caprica would break him. He was the president when these horrors happened; horrors happened to HIS people under HIS presidency. He was so hell-bent on claiming his innocence that he would not even assume any responsibilities for what happened, for the prisons on New Caprica nor the destructions of the colonies. None... He continued to state that he was innocent. There was no intent, he said, he did not betray anyone. He said it clearly: 'I did not collude in the genocide of my own people.' he did not bring down the defense mainframe and hereby allow the destruction of our world. I knew what I saw. I knew it was the truth. If he were having an affair with the blond cylon Six, then he would have been involved. I thought about all of those who died in the attacks, a mere fraction of the pictures put in the memorial hallway on Galactica. Throwing the pictures we collected on New Caprica at him, I felt my rage exploding. We had planned to have him face the pictures of New Caprica's horrors and the death of the colonies and threaten him with death, but I did not expect that I would lose control of my temper in such a radical way, violent, unrestrained. And I screamed. If there were not guards present, I could have killed him with my own hands. My heart was pounding in my chest when the guards dragged him, carried him, in the memorial hallway to the airlock, under the eye of colonel Tigh. He stopped us to show us the picture of some family he knew and try to convince us that he would not have wanted to kill those. He screamed that he was not a murderer. He claimed his innocence, called for a fair trial, which he deserved under Caprican Law, and called me out on my anger. He knew it was personal to me. He screamed that he had saved me several times. But he did not give us anything and eventually colonel Tigh brought him back to his cell, when Baltar called him on his bluff."

"We were back colonel Tigh, Admiral Adama and me in Adama's quarters discussing what to do next. I knew Tigh was as determined as I was to make him talk. After all, he had experienced worse torture than I on New Caprica. I was angry and defeated. This is when Bill mentioned a classified program to use hallucinogens to create such an anxiety level than the prisoner would talk and hold on to the interrogator as the only lifeline to reality. I was astonished that he would even mention it. I did not know such a program existed and I certainly did not know Adama participated in it and had the drugs on board. Bill was coldly determined to use this form of emotional torture to get him to talk. He was calm, calculating and following to the end the cruel logic of our interrogation. With the loyalty and resolve of an officer obeying the order of his commander in chief –me-, he set up the process. A few weeks ago, right after the liberation of New Caprica, I saw Bill fighting Zarek, on his order to carry out trials without representation of those accused to have collaborated with the cylons. Bill claimed then they deserved due process and fair trials. He stood up and clapped when I declared the armistice. Yet, here, he had no problem breaking his ethics to interrogate Baltar. Was it because we knew implicitly that he was guilty, because his commander in chief ordered it, or because Laura had been tortured in the cylons jails?"

"I had never participated to anything like this. And it hit very close to home. Baltar was begging us not to do this, and when he said I was doing this for my own satisfaction, looking at me in the eyes, I knew he was right. 'That's the truth, isn't it?' he said. I gave the order to give the injection. And I witnessed his descent to hell, as Bill interrogated him with the skills of someone who was no stranger to this process. I shivered at his cold cruelty. I had ordered it. I looked at Baltar, his head and body strapped on the hospital bed, with a heart monitor on, as he slipped into unconsciousness. The low and calm voice of Bill, the Admiral, dragging him in the depth of his darkness, the flashlight illuminating his face and the sound of terror in Baltar's voice reminded me of my own torture. I had not remembered until this moment. It was like a flash of consciousness. I had been drugged; I had been interrogated by Cavil with the same tone of voice, low, cruel, emotionless, his face close to mine, just like Bill's face was close to Baltar's. I had felt the terror compressing my chest, preventing me to breathe, becoming tighter and tighter. Always the same questions. Again and again. Until I screamed and repeated the same answers. They wanted the resistance plans. I did not know them and kept on saying so. They kept on asking. I felt terror. Then I heard Baltar talk about Caprica Six, the cylon who saved his life and who loved him. It was enough to bring me out of my own recollection. I asked:

'Doctor, did you conspire with her to subvert our defense system?'

'Conspiracy requires intent! I never intended.' He replied. He seemed to look inside for an answer and started to scream 'It wasn't my fault'.

I knew that he probably could not lie under such drugs. He believed this. He believed it wasn't his fault, whether that was indeed the truth or not.

Baltar screamed, his skin covered with sweat and shivering. 'I am not responsible'. And Ishay in a panic stepped back and hit a tray that fell down and startled him.

I looked at his face. I knew what he was going through. Flashes of light and despair. Sinking into darkness. My Gods, what were we doing? What was I doing?

I remembered now the beatings. They took me back in my cell. I was naked, humiliated and his belt whipped me. And I was just pain. Pain. Like knives on my back, slashing my skin. I felt nothing else but pain, and then I felt nothing. And then water. Cold, soothing the pain. So cold, numbing. Then I remember seeing the number Six cylon, her stopping my torture, screaming at Cavil and Doral. I remember how she brought me warm food and gave me clothes and some medication. She saved me for the second time. My eyes filled with tears. How could I do this to someone else? Me? I respected the rule of the Law. I had been tortured and now I was the torturer. Bill continued to interrogate him when he came back to his senses. He talked about Caprica Six, how she chose him and seduced him

'Is she an angel, is she a demon?' He called in terror, fearing that he would sink in the waters of his hallucinations. Did I scream too? I remembered the terror. Was my vengeance necessary? Was I feeling better seeing him suffer? I thought I would. I wasn't. I wanted him to pay. I made him pay. I felt worse.

And then Bill was increasing the level of the torture, cruelly shutting down the light that was keeping Baltar sane, letting him in the total darkness with his fear. And he screamed a long scream. He kept on crying and screaming. I had trouble keeping myself together.

He told us what the cylons were looking for in the Temple of Five. Not Earth. They were looking to identify the Final Five, the last five cylons. And Baltar wanted to know if he was one of them. He wanted to be a cylon. I had trouble understanding why anyone would want to be. And he answered, 'all my sins forgiven'. He knew now that he wasn't a cylon and said so. That is when he sank and the monitor beeped a sudden drop of blood pressure. We were losing him. I remember losing grip on my life during interrogation. I could not stop my tears. Dr. Cottle stopped Bill.

'That's enough! I am putting an end to this freak show' he yelled and I nodded my agreement, wiping my tears."

"Bill came back to his senses. He also had been lost in his hatred. He had taken the role of the executioner and was ready to take his task to its end. He stopped, coming out of his trance, and stepped back. I could not look at Dr. Cottle in the eye. I felt the shame of what we were doing burning me. He was busy taking care of Baltar and administering medications to stabilize him. We exited sickbay and went back to Bill's quarters in complete silence, unable to speak or even look at each other. When he closed the hatch, I sat on the leather sofa and looked down. Silent, he went to fill two glasses with alcohol and handed me one. He sat next to me. I hated seeing this darker side of him. He was military. I knew that he could carry such orders. He did it. He got caught in it. He lost grip on his emotions. Was he subconsciously trying to show to me that he was far from having gotten too soft? We were intimate enough with each other that we could show our characters' naked flaws: the parts in ourselves that we were not proud of, the parts that we were hiding from everyone else. We knew what the other was thinking. We sat in silence caught in our own thoughts. I welcomed the alcohol in my body, warming and numbing, tears still in my eyes.

'Talk, Laura.' He said low and gently. 'Say what you want to say.'

I shook my head. 'I can't' I was looking on the floor as a new wave of tears threatened to overflow. He had the decency not to press further. I was not ready to share the reminiscent memory, faint, yet powerful, of my own torture. I was not ready to share the guilt that was overpowering me, or the hate I was feeling towards my own actions and myself. We were not better than the cylons. We were frauds. We claimed our high principles and we wanted to show that we were following our grand ideas of ethics and law, but in fact we were no different than those who torture and manipulate.

He refilled my glass. I was letting my tears flow freely, comfortable with him such that I could cry and not feel ashamed of it. I was ashamed of my actions, not my tears. He did not look at me nor did he try to comfort me. He knew I needed my privacy and gave it to me without leaving the room. He knew it was not out of weakness. And I drew some comfort of having him nearby. Then after a few minutes, he said: 'Colonel Tigh will come soon for a debriefing. Why don't you go in the head and wash up.'

I was glad he gave me the opportunity to recompose myself before that meeting. I nodded and went there, leaving the door open. I washed my face and he was soon behind me handing me a clean towel.

'Thank you.'

He gave me a light and brief hug and left. I looked at my face in the mirror and felt shame invading me. Pushing it away, I turned around and went back in the room for the briefing."

"While the men wanted to pursue the interrogation with stronger means, especially Tigh, who operated with the same yearning for vengeance as I, I knew I did not want to go that route again. I wanted to use persuasion instead, with an offer to keep him alive. I was counting on Baltar's self-preservation instinct. We decided that Gaeta, who had a relationship with Baltar, would be best to persuade him to collaborate. Set up in the cell, which had a camera, we planned up for this interrogation to take place the next day, after Bill would have time to brief Gaeta on the goals we wanted to accomplish. Meanwhile, I continued to study the scriptures to find out what Baltar was talking about when he mentioned the Five. As I mentioned to Bill and Tigh earlier, it had to be a reference to the Five cylons, which were missing. We knew seven of the eight cylons. We knew there were twelve models. The prospect of having five unidentified cylons probably operating as sleeping agents in the fleet made me very nervous. Did they even know who they were?"

"I looked at both men. We needed more information. I added: 'I want to go see the number Six cylon, which came back with Hera and Sharon.'

'Why?'

'When I was dying with the cancer, I remembered that I had seen both of them in Caprica city the day of the attacks, by the market. I think she loves him and maybe to save his life, she will collaborate with us.' I was indeed hoping that she would reveal some information to us. I also had a hidden agenda. I wanted to know if this Six model was the one who saved me from being raped and stopped the torture later on. She saved me. Something had bound us in that moment. I felt vulnerable emotionally. Bill looked at me. I could see in his eyes an unasked question. I left accompanied by guards to visit Six in her cell.

She looked at me with contempt; still my gentle demeanor was genuine. I felt truly indebted to her. I knew intuitively that it was the same model who saved me. She called herself, Caprica Six. I validated her love for Baltar, trying to make her understand that her collaboration could save him. I promised her we would allow her to testify on Baltar's trial, if she gave us information, and that she would not be airlocked. She confronted me on this. She knew I lied to Leoben, the very first cylon we encountered, when I promised him life and did airlock him once I got the information he had. I felt absolutely no guilt at airlocking a being that could simply download and resurrect. She also instinctively knew my rage against Baltar and how much I wanted him to pay for what he did to us, both destroying the human race by betraying his people and on New Caprica by allowing tortures to happen. Her cold judgment affected me. She was putting a virtual mirror in front of me. I have to admit she was right. I did this. I felt it. Governing is not easy. We have to make choices, some of which are unethical, others against my own belief system. We have to make the choices that will allow us to survive. I am not proud of them. Yet, knowing what I knew at the time, I would act just the same. Today my rage for Baltar was justified and I knew I had to put this behind me also. I knew it would not be easy. We had to get the information he had without resorting to the violence we subjected him to by torturing him. He was human; he had proven this under the tight grip of hallucinogenic drugs, which left little possibilities of him lying. We had to give him his trial, as a citizen of the colonies. Caprica Six turned around on her cot facing away from me. She did not give me any information. I walked away and at the last minute, before the cell door closed, I whispered: 'Thank you for saving me'. If she heard me, she didn't move. I went back directly to Colonial One, avoiding Bill and the inevitable questions he would ask. I rested on Colonial One that night unable to find sleep. The interrogation of Baltar unleashed streams of fresh memories of my own torture. I had wanted to have these memories back and now that I had, I had to deal with the pain they created inside me. I needed to find closure with my own wish of vengeance and the pain I experienced. I hoped that the interrogation of Baltar would help me, but deeply inside, I knew that there was a very certain chance that it would not."

"The next day we sat in the observation room, looking at the screen, while Gaeta interrogated Baltar. At first it went well. And then Baltar noticed the camera and immediately knew it was a set up. That is when he started to talk to Gaeta and called him a traitor for working with the cylons back New Caprica and passing documents to the resistance. Baltar emphasized that he signed the execution documents, because he had a gun pointed to his head and he suggested that Gaeta was indeed a far worse traitor than him. This is when Gaeta lost it and stabbed Baltar in the neck with his pen. I knew from the beginning that Gaeta wanted to kill him the first time he came unannounced in his cell. I knew I was playing with fire when I put Gaeta back in the interrogation room with Baltar. And I did not know that his rage would be so strong he'd try to kill him again, in the open. I had no difficulties validating Gaeta's feelings. I felt the same way. We secured Gaeta, and Baltar, injured but alive, was transported to sickbay. I was shaking, partly from the lack of sleep and mostly from the sudden violence, which had shocked us.

'Why don't you come back to my quarters for a little while?' Without even waiting for my answer, Bill led me back to his quarters. The large room was dark and he lit only a couple of lights, by the sleeping area and by the sofa. I sat down quietly on the sofa, drained. Baltar was infuriating; his sharp intelligence added to his narcissist personality made him a perfect manipulator, as he again proved today. Bill sat next to me. I was looking down at my hands.

'I did not sleep last night' I said.

'Why?'

'I started to remember what happened to me in cylon detention' I answered calmly.

'I see'. He went to the cart and poured himself a glass of alcohol. He handed me a glass as well and I took a little sip of the amber liquid that was burning my throat. I continued looking down, my voice barely a whisper.

'I couldn't remember, Bill. I recalled the beginning of the detention, the humiliation, and the fear, hands touching my naked body, the guards watching me as I was exposed, a sexual assault that was interrupted. And then, I had large gaps missing. I knew I had been beaten up pretty badly. I just couldn't remember. And yesterday, when I saw Baltar, it all came back to me. I felt the pain again. When I was looking at him, it was like looking at myself, Bill. We did this. We went that low.' I took another sip of the drink. I was tired and emotionally raw, but strangely relieved to have shared this with him. Maybe it was the influence of the alcohol, my body was just giving out. I had been so tired lately, from lack of sleep and emotional turmoil. He laced my hand with his, tears in his eyes.

'Why don't you lie down and sleep?'

'I can't spend the night here, Bill, you know that.'

He sighed and pulled me up to lead me to his rack. After turning of the light by the sofa, he quickly arranged some pillows and I lay down on the bed. He sat next to me, looking at me gently.

'I told him I did not have any satisfaction in seeing his pain, but the truth is I was willing to seeing him endure a great deal of suffering in order to get what I wanted. It wasn't some intelligence, some truth. I wanted a genuine admission of guilt.' I saw Bill looking away, knowing he probably felt the same way.

'That's something that you're not going to get from someone like Baltar. He doesn't see himself that way. It's not who he is. In his eyes, he is the victim, not the criminal.' Then avoiding me, he looked away, and said: 'It's not to late for him… to just disappear'. Bill, loyal until the end, would not hesitate to kill for me. I touched his arm gently. Again, I remembered a very similar conversation, when I suggested he eliminated Admiral Cain, as I knew she would try to kill him first. Nobody knew Baltar was back among us; it would have been easy. I thought about his proposition for a few seconds. Memories of New Caprica flashed back in front of my eyes: humans killed, tortured and all the work Dr. Cottle and I did to identify the missing and catalogue the injured. Then I remember his look when we interrogated Baltar yesterday. Cottle had become my conscience. On New Caprica, he had treated humans and cylons alike, without discrimination. As a doctor, he had sworn an oath. I did too. My oath was to protect my people and to uphold the laws of the colonies. As much as I hated him, Baltar was human. He was also part of my people. I remembered how I declared the armistice for those who collaborated on New Caprica. I had to move forward.

'We can't do that', I replied, 'for all his crimes, he's one of us'.

'So what happens next?' He asked.

'We give him his trial.' He sighed at my answer and looked back at me. We stayed silent for a minute, reflecting on the compromises we had to make in order to rule, and yes, reflecting on our guilt as well. Both of us, we were not immune to mistakes, misjudgments and hate. We were at war and compassion had no place in war. Or did it? I closed my eyes for a second, overwhelmed by fatigue, and then, I saw Bill stretch to turn off the light over the head of the bed. Then he bent and brushed his lips on mine in a fleeting kiss. 'Sleep. I'll wake you up in a couple of hours.' He rose and retreated to his desk, turned on the desk lamp, pulled his journal out of the drawer and started writing. I closed my eyes and, exhausted, I fell asleep."

Thank you all for reading. I hope you enjoyed this long chapter. As I have to return to my regular adult life with a week that already looks very busy, I doubt I will be able post anything until next week. My students come first.

Please leave me some comments, they feed my motivation. Thanks :)