Here we are. Finally. Just so you know, chapter 32 is pretty much finished except for the compulsive changing I like to do, and the Epilogue is just waiting for a final paragraph or two.
Thank you to everyone who's been kind enough to review - it really is appreciated. For some reason BSG readers seem more likely to drop by and say 'hi' than any other I've expereinced, and I love it! Thanks for the comments, the suggestions and the conversations. It's made this story one of the most enjoyable ones to write I've ever written! Also a hello to a couple places I like to lurk: GateWorld's A/R thread (the absolute best spot during the season for all things A/R related) and Sci-Fi's like-minded shipper thread. It's places like those that make the hiatus bearable!
Too
High a Cost
By:
Mariel
Chapter 31
Honesty
Bill hung up the phone with a violent bang and an angry exclamation.
"Bastard," he muttered.
Laura, who was casually leaning against the edge of his desk, looked at him with a half-smile on her face. She'd listened with interest to his one-sided discussion with Cottle and couldn't quite tell who had outdone the other in quarrelsome testiness. She was, however, intrigued by how agitated the conversation had made Bill, and would have given much to know what Cottle had said to create the reaction he had. Knowing by the scowl on his face this was not the time to ask, she commented, "He was surprisingly nice when he spoke to me."
His eyebrows rose. "And that didn't trigger anything on your DRADIS?"
She gave a surprised chuckle, then admitted dryly, "It was a little unusual."
"He only started out civil to get the information he wanted," Bill rasped. "As soon as he got that from you, he started complaining and giving me orders! He knows damned well I'm okay." Repeating the explanation he'd given Cottle, he said, "I felt disorientated when my memories returned, that's all. It was a completely understandable reaction, and he knows it. I'm fine now." He glared at the communications receiver he'd just slammed back into place and moved towards the sofa. "And I'll go back to Life Station when I'm good and ready," he told her over his shoulder. "Verbally abusing me over the comm at the top of his lungs got him nowhere."
Folding her arms in front of her, Laura moved easily to follow him. Readily welcoming the diversion from their earlier conversation, she was unable to suppress a grin as she remarked, "I bet yelling made him feel better, though. Maybe almost as good as it made you feel to hang up on him."
Bill stopped and turned. His scowl relaxed and his lips quirked upward slightly. "You may be right," he conceded.
They shared a familiar, knowing glance, then shifted their eyes uncomfortably.
Nearing the sofa, Bill automatically began to undo the buttons of his uniform as he mulled over his conversation with the doctor. As anticipated, Cottle had ranted and raved at him for a while over the expected medical stuff and about his not returning to Life Station and about who, exactly, was in charge of decisions regarding his health. Once he'd gotten that out of his system, however, the doctor had turned to far more personal comments, and in his anger had hit a little too close to - and revealed a disconcerting awareness of - the emotional battle presently taking place between himself and Laura.
He'd also displayed what Bill considered a disconcerting lack of delicacy in the way he'd gone about it.
"And if you're going to be holed up in your quarters like the stubborn ass you are, make yourself useful while you're there and fix things between you and Roslin! You're adults; it's about time you two started acting like it!"
Bill had immediately tried to interrupt, but Cottle had bulldozed his way ahead, talking over his commanding officer's protests.
"You may be pissed off at her, and you may even have a good reason to be, but you're no frakking piece of perfection yourself! Get over whatever it is that happened and make up. She lived through all sorts of hell waiting for you to get better, and it wouldn't hurt if you stopped being so oblivious to that fact. The woman cares about you, for gods' sake! Hell, if she weren't such a frakked up, irritating pain in the ass, I might feel bad for her."
Knowing Cottle as he did, Bill had recognised that Jack saying he might have felt something actually meant he had. And for Cottle to feel badly for Laura, of all people...
...and for him to even suggest what he had about Laura's feelings...
Urgently trying to override the doctor's monologue, he'd glanced at the woman in question and wondered what had happened while he'd been in that blasted coma. In his sternest voice, he'd rasped, "Doctor, I think you've said more than-"
Cottle had ignored his interruption and ranted on.
"Let me finish for gods' sake!" he'd blustered, "I swear you two are just frakked up enough to frakking deserve each other! Listen, I don't know exactly what's going on between the two of you, but considering the amount of time you spend in bed together, I do know it's a lot more than people suspect! I also know that-"
Disbelief that he was hearing what he was hearing had held Bill in place as Cottle continued, but the limit of his patience had been reached when his CMO began, "Just make sure the frakking door is locked if you end up in your rack t-"
Bill had rammed the receiver into place on the opinionated bastard without hearing the rest. The satisfying slam and the accompanying pain to his hand had made him feel better.
But only slightly.
And it hadn't changed the fact that the maddening sonofabitch had given him a couple of things to think about - not least of which was to wonder what in Hades had taken place in Life Station to provide Cottle with so much to base his tirade on.
-xxx-
Stopping mid-sentence, Cottle took the phone from his ear and looked at it in surprise.
Then he frowned.
"Bastard," he muttered.
Hanging up the communications receiver with a snort, he turned and exclaimed, "He hung up on me!"
Dana Meyes stood regarding him with a horrified expression on her face.
"What?" he asked in a quarrelsome tone.
"Gods, Jack. You don't think you went a little far?" she asked.
"Why? I didn't say one thing that wasn't true!"
Her dark eyes widened. "Truth doesn't enter into anything you just said. You weren't giving him a report, you were..." her voice drifted off and she made a bewildered gesture with her hands. "I don't know what you were doing." She looked at him helplessly. "Is that how men give each other advice?" She shook her head. "No wonder you're all such frak ups. Gods..."
Feeling pushed onto the defensive, he demanded, "You don't think he needed to hear what I told him? I thought you were the one who wanted them frakking 'happily ever after'!" he added, giving little air quote signs with his fingers.
Dana looked at him in disbelief. Curving her fingers into her own air quotes, she retorted, "There's frakking 'happily ever after', and then there's 'frakking happily ever after'! That parting shot of yours about his rack..."
She found herself rendered speechless.
"Well, I still say it needed to be said and that he needed to hear it!" he declared grumpily.
"He probably needed to hear some of it," Dana amended, "but there are ways of saying things, and yelling it and using the language you did...that was just..." Finding it impossible to describe, she gave up trying to.
Cottle snorted. He knew he had maybe stepped a little over the line - maybe even more than a little - but Bill had needed to hear what he'd just said. Being angry at the time maybe hadn't helped his wording, but then again, if he hadn't been angry, he might never have said it at all. A man could get a lot more said when he was angry than he could when he was calm. He certainly hadn't planned to say anything like what he had. Nor had he known he'd fallen so firmly into the 'Roslin and Adama should give it a go' camp until the words in Roslin's defence had actually fallen out of his mouth. His lips tightened. Seeing Roslin worry over Adama, and seeing her so needy that she'd crawled into bed with him while he was in a coma had gotten to him more than he'd thought.
He eyed Meyes. Her starry-eyed, romantic nonsense hadn't helped, either.
"Nothing was wrong with my language," he said in a grumpy tone. "He said worse."
Meyes refused to be swayed. "Somehow I doubt it. And it wouldn't make it okay even if he had," she scolded.
"Maybe not, but he'll understand my intent after he's calmed down. It'll take a while for it to get through that thick skull of his, but once it has, he'll know I'm right, and fix things up between the two of them."
"Which will save you from being court-martialed or thrown in the brig when he sees you next?" she asked.
"Why would he want to do that?" he groused fearlessly.
Meyes thought his bravado a little forced, but said nothing. Perhaps Jack really did think he'd been giving advice, and not ranting 'fix it or else, you ass' at his commanding officer.
It certainly reconfirmed for her the fact that men were indeed strange creatures.
But also very endearing ones.
So hopefully what Cottle had said would help matters in some strange, testosterone-infused way she couldn't yet fathom.
She sighed inwardly and decided it was time to stop worrying about Jack Cottle's ham-fisted role in the President and Admiral's love life. As the doctor was about to pull out his cigarettes, she asked quickly, "Have you looked in on the blood work you started?"
His hand stilled and moved away from his pocket. Meyes smiled inwardly. Timing was critical if you wanted to reduce the number of cigarettes he smoked in a day.
"I've got free time at the moment," she offered, "So if you like, I can help you with some of the other tests."
Cottle nodded. "That would help. I've got to make a quick call to the galley first, then we'll get started."
-xxx-
Laura regarded Bill quietly as he resumed his semi-reclined position on the sofa. She'd watched him undo his uniform buttons and matched his actions, electing to hang her own jacket on the back of a chair, however, rather than leaving it to simply lie open. Once she was divested of the jacket, she sat down on the smooth leather a couple of feet from him. Still not sure she was prepared to continue the conversation that had been interrupted by Cottle's call, she casually asked, "I didn't have the chance to ask before, but what did you remember today?"
He turned his head slightly and examined her silently for a long moment. His eyes were clouded with thought, and a part of him seemed still preoccupied by whatever he'd just listened to on the phone. When they finally truly focussed on her, however, they did so with a dark intensity that held her breathless.
"I remembered you," he said in a quiet rasp. "You threw yourself in front of me just before the cylon opened fire." His voice took on a tone she wasn't sure of when he added, "It was a foolish thing to do."
Her eyes never leaving his, she shook her head slowly. "I couldn't let you be killed," she said.
He seemed to have no response to that. Being killed was all he'd wanted. Their eyes dropped away, and silence fell between them once again.
After a moment, Bill exhaled softly. Sitting up, he leaned forward and poured himself another drink. Still holding the bottle, he hesitated when he saw that her glass appeared untouched.
She put out her hand to cover the top of the glass. "I'm fine," she told him. She'd tried to take a drink earlier. When she'd held it up to her mouth, the distinctive, heavy aroma of the alcohol had assailed her nostrils and elicited an unexpected wave of nausea. Carefully, she'd set her drink aside.
"Would you like water instead?" he asked.
She nodded gratefully. "I'm sorry," she apologised, "I thought I was dying for something stronger, but..." Her stomach roiled at the thought of drinking anything but water, and she suddenly realised she hadn't eaten for hours. Water was definitely the more sensible choice.
He shrugged. "That's all right; it won't go to waste."
He rose, and took momentary refuge in filling a thermos with water and getting another glass for her. When they were set on the coffee table in front of her, he poured her ambrosia into his own and settled himself once again.
As he did so, a sense of inevitability washed over him.
Without looking, he could describe the way her hair fell across her forehead, the way her eyes glinted green in the muted lighting, the way her slender fingers held her glass...
And without looking, he knew she was feeling what he was feeling and thinking what he was.
He closed his eyes.
Here they were.
Again.
The silence, the warmth, the heavy feeling of anticipation...
It had all happened before; it would all happen again...
This was how it always ended - the two of them here, sorting out what to do next.
Together.
He couldn't let her die, no matter the cost...
...and she couldn't let him...
"Why did you do it?"
The question tumbled unbidden from his lips.
She'd asked the same of him, but in an angry tone, when she'd learned to her horror that cylon blood ran through her veins...
"You know why," he'd said, his eyes steady.
And she had understood.
Would he?
"You know why," she said, echoing his past response.
He turned his head against the back of the sofa and held her gaze.
"Do I?"
The deep rumble of his voice stirred something inside her. She broke their eye contact and moved to put her glass of water on the coffee table. Turning back, she said firmly, "Yes, you do. You may not believe it, but you know. All the things that have happened...It's always been between us." She looked at his hatch door and inclined her head towards it. "It doesn't matter what's out there. What matters is here, between you and me. What matters is what we've built and what we feel for one another." Her face tightened. "And what we need to regain."
He looked at her and knew what she said was more true than he liked to acknowledge.
There was a power to their union that was undeniable. It was a heady, satisfying, all-encompassing thing... but he was wary, now, of its potence and of the potentially destructive nature of it. There was an element of the unknown in loving Laura Roslin, and he felt it now proven that without trust, they could not withstand either the inevitable outside pressures or their own, internal doubts and disputes.
She saw his hesitation and her heart sank. Rising, she put distance between them once again, then turned to look down at him.
"If we fix what's wrong between us, we'll be able to fix what's wrong out there in the fleet," she promised desperately. "We'll be able to do what needs to be done; we'll be able to go on." She hesitated. "And we need to go on..."
Bill watched her twist her hands in an unconscious expression of the stress she was feeling and sighed inwardly. Laura couldn't take back what she had done any more than he could take back some of his own actions; the past and their mistakes could not be rewritten. She was right about moving forward. Now that his life had so unceremoniously been given back to him, what other choice did he have?
The issue, of course, was now about how they would move forward. Could he step back into what they had shared before? Both the professional and personal aspects of their relationship had, over time, become tightly entwined, the points of connect and disconnect between one and the other barely discernable. Could he (and did he even want to) open himself up to more of what he'd experienced already? Could he resume a professional standing with her without also engaging in a personal one?
It had all happened before; it would happen again...
A part of him considered a number of options, but he knew, deep inside the very centre of his being, that there was truly only one open to them. Because he loved her. He had for a while; longer, certainly, than he probably realised.
And on top of that, he believed her when she said that she loved him.
Recent events, however, had changed him. He'd experienced a betrayal the depth of which he hoped to never experience again. Shaken to the core, he'd had to re-evaluate the things he believed in.
Having slid to the edge of his seat, he now sat with elbows on knees, hands clasped around his drink. It was hard to know where to start, difficult to determine where, if there were such a place, to easily begin.
Laura looked at him and felt a tremor of realisation shudder through her.
"We've fallen apart and put ourselves and the fleet at risk twice now. Both times involved my breaking a personal trust with you. The first time, you managed to forgive me, and reunited the fleet by following me to Kobol. This second time was different. You were unforgiving and distant, and I knew I had to follow you to Kobol. I knew I had to mend the rift between us, just as you had that first time. I-"
Before she could continue, he cleared his throat. "You stopped all communication with me, embarked on the affair with Zarek, and never, not once, ever mentioned anything about any of it upon your return. All I knew was that once you'd rejoined the fleet, Zarek had been dumped, he saw fit to award you the presidency, and you appeared ready to resume our relationship where you had left off. That kind of behaviour...it made me question things. And helped me realise if I could make a judgement call about you that mistaken, I could easily have made many more." He hesitated, then forged ahead. "I wondered if you'd have ended up with Baltar, had the opportunity presented itself. He was, after all, top dog down there. Zarek was only a poor second choice, just as he is here."
Her quick inhalation told him she understood the full meaning of what he was saying and that it had cut as deeply and painfully as he'd thought it might.
Clutching her hands against her stomach as though to soothe an internal ache, she felt revulsion that he should think and dare to say such a thing. A slow anger began to build against the hurt his words had caused. "Bill, that's not how it was. That's not-"
He saw her hurt, and saw the denial, and saw the righteous anger beginning to build. He sighed, already regretting his words and the hurt they had intended to cause. This wasn't an argument he was interested in having. It, oddly enough, wasn't close to being the real issue between them. His shoulders dropped. "Perhaps not," he admitted, trying to avert an all-out debate on the matter. "But making that observation - no matter how untrue - made me question other things I'd believed and done. It made me realise that trust is a rarer, more precious thing than I took it for. I gave it too freely to too many, and allowed myself to be betrayed by it too many times. My willingness to trust coloured my decisions and perspective too deeply."
"So you cut yourself off emotionally from everyone and everything."
He nodded, glad that she understood that trust was more than a logical response to known facts. The emotional and intuitive sides to it governed with a compelling hand. "If something doesn't work repeatedly, you're a fool to keep trying," he told her. "Trusting people stopped working for me - at least when you were involved, too."
She looked at him helplessly. She'd always known that trust in others was a sort of compass for him. It was the thing by which he guided his days and his decisions. From the very beginning, he had trusted in her, trusted that, as leader of the Twelve Colonies, she would handle the work the Fates had given her. He had shielded her, counselled her, and supported and defended her actions because he trusted it was the right thing to do. She had broken that trust many times, and he had regrouped, somehow accommodated for it, and never wavered.
But on New Caprica, she had stepped over a line that in a relationship with a man like Bill was drawn deep in the sand. She could try to twist her actions into something else, but what she had done had been such a personal betrayal of his trust that, looking back, it made her shiver with shame. No wonder he'd been reduced to considering a pattern in the men she chose to be involved with.
She closed her eyes, trying to think of a way to respond to make him understand that of everything, the one thing he could trust in absolutely was what she felt for him. All of him. The admiral, the man, the friend, the confidant... they were all inextricably intertwined and held her heart firmly.
Inhaling deeply, she marshalled her thoughts and prepared to speak.
A sound at the hatch stopped her. Someone was knocking.
End
Chapter 31
AN: I apologise for they way I ended this chapter, but to put it anywhere else would have made the chapter too short or too long. Thank you for reading As you can see, it's still messy, but hey, they're messed up people, right? I think it's very hard for them to keep track of all the angles on their problems...I promise it won't be so many weeks before the next chapter is up, though.
Reagan, thanks for mentioning the crossover story - I didn't know it existed, and I'm really enjoying it! Fran, you make me smile. Thanks for the support! grin