Me, Too
Laura Roslin believes in professional distance.
Consider it a job requirement, she tells her students. If you're going to go into oncology, she stresses, looking into their bright young faces, you absolutely cannot afford to let yourself get attached to the patients. Focus on curing the disease, not the person. This is particularly true if you go into research: by the time they walk through the door, she repeats, the patients are almost always doomed. If you let them get in your head, if you let yourself think that you can save them, you might as well quit this job right now, because you'll never do anyone any good.
Laura Roslin is very good at her job.
It's a good thing, too, because lately, she's not sure there's much else to her.
She gets up in the morning. She falls asleep at night, usually late, often collapsing, exhausted, into bed, without taking the time to wash off her makeup or take off her glasses.
In between, she works.
It's enough.
She's not lonely…not exactly. She has friends. She goes on dates. More often than not, though, Laura finds that she prefers to spend her nights alone, on her couch, in her fluffy white robe, a late-night boxing match on the television in front of her and a glass of wine in her hand. Maybe Gaius, her research partner, can be content with leaving work at work, can maintain a full—a little too full, in her opinion— personal life…but Laura just doesn't have the energy. The last real relationship Laura managed wasn't even a real relationship: just a sad, convenient little affair with her research supervisor a few years ago. Laura's not sure either of them actually ever officially broke it off; once she left Richard's practice to start her own, whatever they'd had had fizzled embarrassingly quickly.
Laura hadn't minded. She'd always known she didn't love him.
Maybe that's the problem, Laura muses. She's not actually sure she loves anybody.
Maybe that's what comes of spending your life with the dying.
There's her research assistant, of course. Sweet, dependable Billy, who brings an extra latte every morning for her, who shields her from the most difficult patients, who will either drop out of the program altogether, or become the finest doctor she's ever known; Laura isn't sure which. If she could love anybody, Laura is sure, it would be Billy.
Sometimes, when the work stops for a moment, Laura can remember that she wasn't always like this. She can remember a family, loud dinners, laughing so hard her sides hurt.
And then she remembers the bombing.
These days, Laura isn't sure which memory hurts more.
She'd been in her first year of medical school at the time. Everyone expected her to drop out, or at least take a leave of absence.
Laura graduated with honors.
Maybe it's the thirty-year anniversary of her parents' and sisters' deaths, coming up in a few months, that has her on edge. Maybe it's this new drug trial, with so much at stake, that's making her unsure, off balance.
She can't think of a single other reason why she would have given Bill Adama that book.
Searider Falcon isn't a book that she often recommends, even though it's her favorite. It's an odd, eccentric little book, and it seems to give away too much about her to share with anyone. She doesn't even keep it on her bookshelves. What could she possibly have been thinking?
He probably won't even read it.
He probably won't even come back.
It's not until Billy hands her his chart and tells her that Mr. Adama's in Treatment Room B that she realizes how much she was hoping she was wrong.
She tells herself it's only because she'd hate to have to hunt down another copy of the book.
When she opens the door, he looks up from his book—her book, she can't help but note—and smiles, in a way that her patients almost never do. It's disconcerting.
She's a cancer doctor. No one is ever happy to see her.
She smiles back—she doesn't want to be rude, does she?—and his smile grows, lights up his eyes. "Good morning," he says. "I wasn't sure I'd be seeing you today."
"You didn't think you were going to start without me, did you, Mr. Adama?" she teases gently. She's not flirting. Of course she's not.
A shadow comes over his blue eyes—very blue, under these harsh lights—and she's not sure what she did wrong. "Never crossed my mind."
She sets to work, taking his temperature, listening to his heartbeat, preparing the injections. She's giving her usual little speech as she goes—the stethoscope will be cold, the needle will be sharp—the one she barely hears anymore, much less thinks about. But Mr. Adama is listening so closely, watching her face so intently, that's she finds herself tripping over the words.
She can't remember the last time she's felt so seen.
He doesn't complain as she presses the needle into his vein; the first of many, if he sticks with the treatment. His eyes are on her hands, her face. She can't be sure, and it's ridiculous even to suspect it, but for a moment, she thinks she sees his gaze rest on her hair, and the same shadow crosses his face.
She realizes she's working slower than she usually would, dragging out her time here, and mentally scolds herself. Mr. Adama is a patient, she reminds herself. She does not get attached to patients.
"Do you have any questions?" she asks, her tone professional again.
He shakes his head, then reconsiders. "Are you enjoying Dark Day?"
She's read it twice already.
"More than I was planning to," she says.
He brings Searider Falcon with him to the second treatment.
"How far are you?" she can't help but ask.
"I got to the last chapter, and then I started over," he admits. He gives her a smile, half sheepish, half rueful. "I like it so much, I don't want it to be over."
As she lingers in the room, listening to him talk about the book, taking his pulse a second, unnecessary time, Laura knows what he means.
He mentions during the treatment that he's begun experiencing some side effects—nausea, fatigue, muscle pain—and he hasn't quite figured out what to do with himself yet, how to keep busy but not wear himself out.
While she's out one day, she sees a book on model shipbuilding and buys it, on impulse, and brings it to his third treatment.
"It reminds me of you," she says.
Laura Roslin does not cry; not anymore, not ever, not since the day she walked into the student lounge in her dorm and saw "breaking news" flashing on the television. She does not allow herself to be touched that deeply.
But the look on his face as she hands him the book almost brings tears to her eyes, and she has to invent an emergency with another patient to get herself out of the room until she regains control.
Out in the hallway, she opens his chart, forces herself to reread his test results and scans. He is dying. She is his doctor. She knows better than this.
She walks back into the room with her professional face back on.
She pretends she doesn't notice his disappointment.
The fourth treatment takes place on a Monday, exactly one month since they first met. He is thinner than he was, paler, his posture more stooped. She wonders if he's eating enough, if he's sleeping enough, if he has someone to take care of him when he needs it.
She realizes he's never once had someone come with him to treatment.
She realizes she's grateful for it.
"How was your weekend?" he asks.
Her weekend was like all of her weekends: quiet, productive, and thoroughly uninspiring.
"Busy," she says instead. That is what she would say to a patient.
She wonders when she stopped thinking of Bill Adama as a patient, when he became something else, someone else.
"How was your weekend?" she asks.
His smile lights up his face. "I started building a ship," he says.
She doesn't even pretend not to care.
During his fifth treatment, he passes out cold, slumping down in his seat before she realizes what's happening.
"Bill," she calls urgently, feeling for his pulse, not realizing she's slipped and called him by his first name. "Stay with me."
His smile is crooked. "I'm not going anywhere, Laura."
It's the first time he's called her by name.
It feels right.
She has to force herself to let go of his hand to call for help.
"What can I get you?" she asks after he comes around again.
Pain and exhaustion have dimmed the bright blue of his eyes, and it hurts her to realize it. "Tell me something about you," he says.
Never, not once, has Laura told a patient about the bombing. It is not a story she shares with casual acquaintances, or on dates, or at work, or…with anyone, really. Even all these years later, the wound is still too raw, too painful, to risk exposure.
Sitting there on the cold tile beside his chair, her hand in his, Laura talks about her family.
She doesn't cry.
He does.
She runs his blood work three times.
Even Gaius, usually oblivious to her moods, tears himself away from their research assistant, Caprica, long enough to ask if there's something wrong.
She can't tell him that she's never felt this way about a patient before.
She can't tell him that she's afraid she's never felt this way about anyone before.
She can't tell him that she is either losing her mind, or falling in love, and she's not sure which possibility terrifies her more.
"A patient isn't responding to the treatment," she says instead. "I think…" Her voice is uncharacteristically unsteady. "I think I'm going to lose him."
"How long?" Bill asks.
"Weeks," she says. She will not cry. She is the doctor. He is the patient. She will not have him comforting her. "A month at the outside."
A muscle in his jaw twitches, then stills. His face smooths out. "Okay, then," he says.
She wants to say that she did her best; she did. She wants to say that she'll keep him comfortable; she will. She wants to say that she's sorry…oh, but she is.
"Does that—" He clears his throat. "Does that mean that I won't be seeing you again? I had hoped—"
In her heels, they are nearly the same height. She doesn't even have to rise up onto her toes as she presses her palm to his chest and brings her lips to his.
There was never any question about whether or not he would kiss her back.
She thinks that that's been true since the moment he first walked through the door.
She pulls away, gently, and the tears in his eyes match those running down her face.
"Just goes to show you," she says. "Never give up hope."