This ended up a little more philosophical than I would have liked at the start, but trying to change it would have thrown off the rest of the chapter methinkies.

I KNOW that I had Tory in the first installement, but I realised after trying to write her in more than one or two scenes was going to do my nut, so guess what?

BILLY'S BACK!!

The lil cutie that he is.

I hope u like the ending, not quite lust, but jealousy is a close second.

Reviews are love.

Chapter 2: Core Beliefs

Laura lay awake staring at the ceiling.

As she had been doing for the last several hours.

She couldn't stop thinking about what she was now. What she had become. She was, essentially, a Cylon hybrid. The same as little Hera, the very girl she had sought to hide from her own parents and the rest of the fleet because…well, if she was honest with herself it was because she hated all things Cylon. Their very presence was an affront to all she believed in. All she held close to her heart. All she cherished.

And now she was one.

Frak.

She could hear Bill snoring softly a couple of racks down. Completely at ease with his new circumstances apparently. Laura scanned the warped support beam over her head and realised that the skinny Dana Colton had been the one to twist reinforced steel with her bare hands. Now Laura would be able to do the same thing. No human could do that. Did that make her less human? What made someone human?

Was it their spirit? Their emotions that made them human. Cylons felt emotion, or thought they did. So, following that train of thought, they would be classed as human too. But they weren't. They would never be human. They were programmed machines…but then, the human body was a machine too. Just a biological one and that brought her to her next point. If it wasn't a mental or spiritual thing that made one human, it must be a physical one. Was being human the frailty of the mortal body? If so then Bill, Colton, Edric and herself could no longer claim so much humanity and…

Laura sighed and scrubbed a hand over her face. These thoughts were running around and around in her skull like a rat trapped in a basket. The only thing she was succeeding in doing was giving herself a headache. She rolled over onto her side in the vain hope that a change in position would somehow stifle her brain process and allow her some sleep.

She saw the pale light of the lamp spilling over Colton sitting at the other end of the barracks on the low couch that had been put in to replace the one she and Edric had wrecked so gleefully earlier in the day.

Making her decision, Laura threw back the blanket that covered her and padded over to Colton. She hesitated when she saw Edric sprawled out on the couch beside Colton. The doctor's head lifted and a smile painted her lips.

"It's alright. He's dead to the world." She nodded to the cot opposite. "Have a seat and tell aunty Colton all about it."

Laura gave a wry smirk and did as she was told. She tucked her feet up under herself and leaned back against the cool bulkhead, thinking on how to phrase her first question.

"I won't disturb him?" She hedged instead.

"Not a chance." Colton snorted. "The man can, and has, slept through Cylon incursions."

Laura looked at the way Edric was lying. She hadn't realised it at first, but his head was pillowed on Colton's lap, he lay on his front so he could wrap his massive arms around her waist and he didn't appear to be in any great hurry to move away any time soon. What was more startling was the way Colton had her fingers entangled in his hair. She was stroking it back and away from his forehead, running her hand over his neck and shoulders like he was a particularly large and favoured cat before going back to his brow and starting all over again. Her other hand was occupied with the worksheet she was looking at and she seemed completely unaware of what she was doing.

"Must be a military thing." Laura said on a soft smile. It was odd to see this softer, hidden, side of Colton but it was somehow comforting. Surely something inhuman wouldn't or couldn't show such affection for another being?

"More like a man thing." Colton said absently. "You're questioning whether or not you're still human." Colton lifted her head and pierced Laura with her eyes that were, for once, without the shield of her heavy glasses. "Aren't you?"

Laura nodded.

"I've already been saved by them once. With my cancer. Hera, the hybrid baby, Baltar used her stem cells to form some kind of treatment that saved me." She studied her hands. She had told Colton about Hera a couple of days ago and the good Doctor had been only slightly less than apoplectic at the thought of denying a mother her child. It had taken Edric almost an hour to convince Colton that, no, she could not slap Laura over the head with something large and dense, like Bill. "Now, I've been saved by them again. Tiny little Cylons swimming through my blood. When do I stop being more human than Cylon? When does the line blur completely?"

Colton thought about it for a moment and Laura realised it must have been a truly difficult question to make Colton stop and think.

"Do you feel any less human than you did a week ago?"

"No."

"Do you feel a mad urge to plug yourself into the mains and try and wipe out the remainder of humanity?"

"No!"

"Do you feel like a Cylon?"

"I don't know, what does being a Cylon feel like?"

"Why don't you ask one the next time you see one?"

Laura shot her a look. The airlock one.

"How can I still hate them though?" Laura blurted. "I mean, I'm so like them now, that would mean hating part of myself and…I don't want to do that."

"Ah…hate is a very human thing." Colton toyed with Edric's hair a little more. "Self-hate especially, but you're missing something fundamentally important." She looked back at Laura. "You are not like a Cylon. They are like us."

Laura frowned.

"We made them, Laura. We built and designed the bloody things and, by the Gods, we can find a way to destroy them. They are, after all, just machines. They don't deserve to live."

"Who are we to judge that? Just because your father designed the first ones? Just because we used them as technological slaves? Just because we were born? They can give birth. They can live. They can die."

"But they're not mortal and that's the real difference." Colton tilted her head. "Nothing is final for them. They've all got another chance. Endless chances. We have one. Sure, ours is much greater than the rest of humanity because we won't die of old age, but we can still be killed. We can still feel mortal fear and, when we die, we sure as hells stay dead." Colton heaved in a sigh. "They made themselves god-like and, in doing that, they can no-longer be human-like. You can't be both."

"That sounds a lot like some of the Scriptures." Laura gave a soft smile. "Is religion a purely human thing? They do believe in their one true God."

"Heh, my theories are proved by science just the same as an acolyte's are proved by the Scriptures." Colton smirked in her way. "Somebody, somewhere, wrote it all down at some point so it's got to be true. Humans love belief. Gives them an excuse to lord it over the other guy."

"You don't have much faith, do you Colton?" Laura looked at the other woman. "You believe in science, you recognise facts but that's knowing. Do you have faith in anything?"

"I have faith, if you want to call it that, in certain things. I have faith that science will always provide me an answer if I just look long and hard enough. I have faith that I can find a way to stop this war. Hells, I even have faith that, if I do, if we win, humans at large will still find something to bitch about."

"I don't think humanity's all that bad."

"Please, Laura, put more than two of us in a room together and we'll start thinking up ways to kill each other. It's human nature. Even after everything. After the carnage of the Twelve Colonies, after near extinction, have this little band of refugees calling themselves humanity ever shown a strength of unity? Have they ever banded together for anything less than mindless hate over something that is simply different?" Colton laughed softly. "What I have isn't lack of faith, it's realism."

"Sometimes faith can be better than realism. It can give you hope."

"Hope?" Colton tilted her head. "I wonder if you'll feel so hopeful once the mob turns against you, and they inevitably will, you and Bill are different now. True, no different from Edric and I, but different from the rest and that's what will matter to them."

"I'm suddenly not feeling very reassured." Laura spoke wryly. She had been thinking the same things. She knew that this…thing that had happened to her would most likely end her political career, possibly threaten Bill's admiralty as well. It was going to change everything, not just for her and Bill, but for everybody.

"If you wanted reassurances, you'd have woken Bill. You wanted the truth, unvarnished and straight as Dogtag Vodka, so you came to me."

Edric chose that moment to shift in his sleep and pull Colton closer to him. Colton wriggled a little and tilted her body to lean on the arm rest so that she could cushion him better. Laura smiled. It was easy to forget these two had spent most of their careers together, serving on the same Battlestar. They fought all the time, but Colton was giving a very accurate impression of actually caring for her companion.

"How long have you been together?" The question was out of her mouth before she could stop it and Colton looked at her sharply, almost guiltily.

"Sometimes it feels like we're not together at all." She confessed. "Other times it feels like there's this huge empty space without him and life as I know it would be…improbable." Colton had a very specific aversion to the word 'impossible'. "We've spent most of our very long and very odd lives mixed up with one another and I don't know if it's familiarity, habit or lack of a better option, but it looks like we're stuck with one another. Apparently no matter what." She gave a somewhat helpless shrug.

"Lack of a better option?" Laura smirked, many a woman would jump at the chance to be one of Edric Adama's options. "Well, you can't have Bill." The words were out of Laura's subconscious and into the air before she could do a thing about it. She looked up at Colton, completely mortified and saw Colton grinning like a cat with the cream.

"Really?"

"That's not…it didn't come out like it sounded." Laura back-pedalled furiously. "Bill's very much a military man. A stubborn ass. He'd drive you insane more than Edric does."

"Honey, you're not fooling anyone. Not me, not you and not Bill." Colton just grinned as if this was all amazingly amusing. "There's really very little point in hiding from it."

"Even if I did," Laura found herself saying and realised this was quite the wrong way to go about putting such rumours to rest but couldn't stop herself from speaking anyway. "We both have…responsibilities we can't just sweep them aside."

"Responsibilities? To who?"

"The Fleet. The President of the Twelve Colonies and the Fleet Admiral couldn't be seen to…"

"Don't be seen then." Colton shrugged a shoulder. "People already suspect you're going at it like horny greased weasels," Laura grimaced a little at that colourful image, "you might as well enjoy the benefits."

"There's a difference between suspicions and confirmations." Laura said quietly.

"You're a better woman than I, Madame President. If I had what you and Bill have, not just the blatantly obvious chemistry," Laura suffered a brief flash-fire of panic at that, "But the true friendship you have as well…there isn't a force in the known or unknown galaxy that could stop me from taking it."

Laura chose that moment to look very pointedly at Edric's death grip around Colton's waist and the way her fingers were tangled in his hair and stroking his shoulders.

"Leave that one well enough alone. Edric and I have never done anything the easy way and I'd be extremely disappointed if we were to start now." Colton said it with such finality that Laura decided I quick change of subject was on the cards.

"What were you two beating the frak out of each other over anyway?" Laura smiled. "Did you win?"

"Of course." Colton smirked. Like any other outcome had ever been an option!

"Difficult to tell." Laura mused.

"Well, I might have let him think he was winning but he'll definitely never best me. It wouldn't do to let him think he was alpha male all the time."

Laura shared that smile. She and Bill had similar fights, admittedly, they didn't rearrange entire rooms when they did (though sometimes she felt like it) but she wasn't above pulling the Presidential Card just to get him to toe the line. A woman in a man's universe has to fight dirty after all.

"You're not going to tell me what it was about, are you?"

"Not tonight." Colton shook her head. "You won't have to deal with it for a couple of days yet. Deal with what's going on now and don't borrow worry."

"You're sure?" Not knowing was driving Laura a little bit nuts.

"Go to bed, Laura. Sleep for a while." She smiled. "Remember, family reunions tomorrow. Don't want to have baggy eyes for that, do you?"

"I'm not tired." Laura tried to ignore how much that sounded like a child's protestation.

"Hey, you might not need as much sleep as you used to, but you're not Wonder Woman yet." Colton reached up a bare toe and nudged at Laura's knee with it. "Off with ye."

Laura had to smile. She bid Colton goodnight and then prowled back to her bunk. She lay down, snuggled under the blanket and realised she was a lot more tired than she had thought.

She fell asleep listening to the rustle of Colton's reading and the gentle rhythm of Bill's breathing from two bunks away.

$inister $cribe

Laura sat watching Bill (something that was fast becoming a favourite sport of hers) as he drummed his heel against the floor and watched the hatch leading into the barracks with an intensity that would have been unnerving for any biological being to be under. Laura was quite certain that she was glad it wasn't aimed at her. The hatch, however, didn't seem to be bothered in the slightest.

They had been informed earlier that morning that Doc Cottle had finally declared them not contagious (much to the affront of Colton, who had told him the exact same thing DAYS ago) and that they would be allowed to see their nearest and dearest as soon as it could be arranged and they could be dragged in from their respective corners of the fleet. Kara and Lee were coming to see Bill, as Saul already knew what was going on and was babysitting the fleet. Billy was being shuttled over to see Laura and she was content to have her aide be the one to see her first like this.

Billy, aside from Bill, was the closest thing to family she had. She'd never had children (there was a thought, was she capable of having them now that she was 'young' again?) and adopting Billy as her son in all ways but blood had happened without her intention. Billy had been through everything with her and his loyalty was unfailing. A brief smile touched Laura's lips at the thought of how he would react to seeing her. She imagined a great deal of stammering would be had.

Her eyes skated back to Bill, still glaring at the hatch like his continued scowling would force it to open quicker.

"Bill."

He whipped his head around so fast she thought he might get whiplash.

"You say something?"

"Yes." She did her best to repress her smile. "You need to calm down, you're beginning to warp the chair." Her eyes dropped to the metal frame of the chair that his arms were folded over. He had turned it so the back was to his front and he could straddle it. Not a position that an admiral would adopt, but he looked every inch the cocky flyboy now, as she had no doubt that he had been. Probably a woman on every battlestar…Laura pushed that thought away before she began to warp her own chair. Bill looked guiltily down at his chair and unclenched his fingers. They were both becoming better at controlling their strength, that was still increasing as the days went by, but without conscious effort it was still easy to remove doors from walls and railings from ladders.

"I'm just…"

"Nervous?"

"Wary." He gave her a sharp look at supplying such a non-Military Regulation word for his behaviour.

She propped her elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand. She smiled at him with simplicity and amusement. She was in a good mood. Not for any particular reason, she just felt good. She didn't hurt anymore. Cottle had been reluctant to give her any diloxin treatments after the debacle with the nanotech and Colton had point blank told him not to bother as the nanotech would just break it down before it could do anything. All he would succeed in doing would be to make Laura feel ill for a couple of hours and put her in a really pissy mood. Laura had liked this turn of events just fine and had deemed it unnecessary for her to do anything more than smile and say 'Colton knows best' before hopping off the medical bench and disappearing out the door as fast as her bare feet could carry her. Cottle was still scanning her for any trace of her cancer but had so far come up with bupkiss. This, also, was something that Laura was supremely fine with. Cottle had warned her not to get her hopes up but she knew, already, that he wasn't going to find anything. Before, both the first and second time, she had known about her cancer. Even if it wasn't consciously, she had known something was wrong. Now everything was right. She was better.

She just knew it.

"Stop it." He ordered her.

She arched a brow, one did not just order the President of the Twelve Colonies to do anything. Especially when it threatened her good mood.

"Oh?" She straightened a little, folded her arms under her breasts and leant forward, knowing exactly what such a position did to her now fabulously perky cleavage. "What am I doing?"

"Trying to, um…" His eyes betrayed him and dropped to study her figure. She grinned a Cheshire Cat grin. "Distract me." He finally finished. After much hard swallowing and a definite warping of the chair back.

"I thought you needed it." She smiled at him innocently. She was playing a dangerous game now. Just as when she'd been diagnosed with the cancer again, she'd felt she had nothing to lose. Now she felt like she had every reason to celebrate. To reaffirm that she was well and truly alive.

The first thing that came to mind to celebrate life, of course, was the act of creating life. She had another little grin to herself. She had no desire to actually reproduce but she'd sure as hells like to practice her technique. Make sure she was still capable of pulling all the moves she'd been well practiced at in her youth.

If that meant a little torment and flirting for Bill, well…he'd just have to deal with that, wouldn't he?

"I don't see what you're so nervous about." Laura tossed her hair over her shoulder and turned to follow his gaze and do a little hatch frowning herself.

He glared at her out of the corner of his eye again and, again, the only response she could summon was a wicked little smile.

"You're still you, Bill. Admittedly you look…" She tilted in her chair to see around the table between them and look slowly up and down his body. "Different, but they'll see through that. Give one order in your growly voice and they'll know it's you."

"Growly voice?"

"Uh-huh, you know you sound like you've been gargling on a mixture of gravel and moonshine." She gave him another one of her smiles. "Touches all the right buttons, you know."

Bill's mouth fell open a little and it took him such a long moment to try and formulate a response that she had time to fit in one more gleeful little grin before the hatch that she had managed to distract him from, swung open and admitted the three completing members of their odd little family.

Bill jack-knifed upright so fast that he sent the chair tumbling across the metal floor. Laura gained her feet more gracefully and dragged her eyes away from Bill in time to tune into Lee mid-sentence.

"…you sure this is the right place? I was told I was getting to see my dad…" Lee was talking to the security detail and Kara was studying Edric and Colton in her quick and assessing way before turning and landing her gaze on Bill and Laura. She gave a tiny frown and then her eyes widened. Laura's smile returned (it seemed she couldn't banish it for a period of more than a few moments at a time) when Kara reached blindly behind her for Lee's shoulder, grabbing at his sleeve.

"Not now, Kara, seriously guys, where's my-ack!"

Kara had managed to grab a hold of Lee's chin and forcibly turn him around to look at Laura and Bill. Lee frowned, like he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him and then his brows raced up like they were trying to mate with his hairline. His mouth dropped open in an expression that startlingly like the one Bill had been wearing moments before.

"Holy frakking hells…" Lee muttered and the security guys took that as their cue to exit stage left.

"Hi." Bill said after a long moment.

"Hi?" Kara echoed and stepped hesitantly forward.

Billy poked his head around the other two, scanned the barracks and grinned like the little boy he was at heart when he spotted Laura. He was across the distance separating them before she could track it and he grabbed her up in a bear hug that lifted her clean off her feet so suddenly that she squeaked in surprise.

"Laura! You're better." Billy grinned at her and then realised what he was doing. He set her down and then stepped back hurriedly. "I mean…Madame President, good to see you looking so well." He smiled a little sheepishly and Laura couldn't help herself.

"You just take everything in your stride, don't you Billy?" She stepped forward again and hugged him tightly (but carefully) and kissed him on the cheek. He blushed furiously but looked absurdly pleased.

"Job requirement, Madame President." He ducked his head but couldn't stop smiling.

"Well, Old Man isn't exactly…fitting now, is it?" Laura turned back to see Kara cautiously poking at one of Bill's massive biceps. She resisted the urge to go and remove said offending finger…at the knuckle.

"Dad, you're…you're…yeah." Lee finally settled on.

"Glad to see your career as a politician has improved your vocabulary." Bill uttered wryly in his growling tone and both Lee and Kara stiffened. They looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes and nodded perfectly in unison, speaking at the same time.

"It's him."

Bill turned to look at Laura, who stood with a smug little smile on her face. She'd been right again. The sooner he accepted this was a constant of the universe, the easier his life was going to be.

"Madame President?!"

Lee was staring at her like she had grown another head.

"Mr Adama." She greeted him cordially. She could tolerate Lee, but not for long. She found him a little irritating after a while.

It seemed that forming words was a little beyond him at the moment and Bill didn't like the way his son was paying an inordinate amount of attention to The Legs…not to mention the rest of Laura. Had he not taught his sons that it was rude to ogle? Not to mention that ogling your father's woman was an express no-no in all corners of the galaxy, not just the Twelve Colonies. There should be laws against it.

There would be if he ever found a way to get Laura to sign the documentation. Mind you, in the mood she'd been in the last couple of hours, she was more likely to refuse just to tease him with it.

"Lee," Bill's hand landed on his son's shoulder like a landslide. "A word." He dragged Lee a few feet away and was disheartened to realise that, as usual, his son was oblivious to the not-so-subtle signals from his father on when to frakking quit while he was marginally ahead. How his son thought he'd survive in the political pool (especially with the barracuda that he knew Laura could be when she chose to) was quite beyond him. Lee was now openly staring at Laura, who did nothing more than arch a brow at Bill and toss her hair over her shoulder when turning to make introductions between Billy, Kara, Colton and Edric.

"Dad, she's…wow."

"Lee." Bill didn't shout, but he spoke with such command in his tone that Lee automatically snapped to attention and whirled to face his father. You could take an Adama out of the military…

"Yeah?"

"She's your Commander In Chief. Stop. Staring."

Lee looked back over to Laura and rubbed a hand over his chin. He thrust his hands into his pockets.

"Well, dad, I gotta admit…" He smiled. "She can get commanding with me any day of the week."

Bill carefully assimilated this piece of information, calculated the appropriate response and, like all good military commanders, executed both order and action to complete the chain of events.

Lee didn't even see his father's fist before it crashed into his jaw and sent him reeling to the floor. He was unconscious before he hit the deck, sprawled out like he'd been drunk under the table by Starbuck.

Bill huffed out a breath and realised that his response, perhaps, might have been a tad in the extreme.

A look up to the others in the barracks, who were all staring at him in an abrupt-conversation-breaking silence, confirmed this suspicion. He looked back down at his son and couldn't quite shake the feeling that Lee had deserved it, no matter what.

Unspoken law in the universe and all that.

However, explaining this to everyone without admitting to all and sundry that the reason he had objected to Lee's announcement so vehemently was because he was both founder and sole member of The Presidential Legs Appreciation Society. In fact, there was no easy way out of this at all. He heaved a sigh.

"Ah, frak."