That Frakking Music

Chapter V

The Old Man wouldn't have pushed Roslin too hard this first time out, aware that while she had regained her health since her battle with cancer, having to endure a prolonged illness which had brought her to the brink of death had been debilitating. He had planned to build her fitness back up gently. Of course after the stunt she'd pulled with the wiring in her quarters (and assured by Cottle that yesterday's accident wouldn't affect her performance) he was more inclined to ride her like a drill sergeant and make her run till she dropped.

'Move that ass, Roslin!'

Laura looked daggers at him but had long ago run out of breath to curse him with. Her expression said it all though as she puffed her way along the walkway above the hangar deck, red in the face both from exertion and irritation as workers looked up at Bill's none-too-polite nor quiet encouragement. If she could talk, he'd be getting such a tongue-lashing right now.

Bill knew it and as long as she still had the energy to be glaring at him like that, she had the energy to run. If she'd been trying to piss him off, she'd succeeded - perhaps they should do a victory lap. He yelled at her for another two hundred yards, at which point he realised that his use of the word 'fat' in relation to her derriere had gotten no reaction at all and she was looking as if she had finally been run ragged if not repentant.

'Alright,' he relented, more than a little glad to be stopping himself. It had been getting more and more difficult to keep up his insults with proper conviction. Laura dropped down onto the first likely object she saw, gasping for breath and pushing sweaty tendrils of hair off her face. 'You need to keep moving or you'll seize up,' he warned, but Laura slowly shook her head once, clutching her side and holding up a finger to indicate that she might be capable of acquiescing in about a minute. Maybe.

After more like three she managed to haul herself to her feet again, still breathing hard as they began walking back towards their quarters and Bill could see that she was shaking with fatigue. She'd managed a little under a kilometer, which wasn't bad going considering. This was definitely as far as he dared push her for now though, he wasn't a sadist - contrary to what Laura was probably thinking about now.

'You - bastard,' she panted, the moment she regained the ability to do so. 'I'm seeing - frakking - spots,' she complained, holding her pony-tail away from the back of her neck and fanning the area with her hand.

'Suck it up,' he said mercilessly, 'You had it coming.'

Laura seemed to think about this for a moment before saying, hopefully, 'Will you stop the music now?'

'Nope,' he said. If he stopped the music she'd have no impetus to get out of bed in the morning.

Hope extinguished, her face fell back into lines of grim annoyance. 'I changed my mind: you're an asshole.'

'I feel like I should go check on Starbuck. You seem to be channelling her spirit.'

'She thinks you're an asshole, too?'

'You'd have to ask her, but when it comes to attitude problems yours is reaching new heights,' he muttered, rethinking that second lap.

'Maybe I'd have a better attitude if I wasn't being coerced into running halfway round the frakking ship at the crack of dawn,' she posited, not troubling to lower her voice as the traffic in the corridors began to increase.

Bill didn't say anything; he wasn't about to give her an excuse to start lambasting him in public and, devoid of a reaction, Laura managed to hold her tongue, though she gave him a withering look and disappeared into the bathroom the moment they reached his quarters. By the time she re-emerged nearly an hour later she was looking thoroughly relaxed whilst Bill had to hurry not to be late for work.

Their runs continued with varying success (depending on which side of the bed Laura woke up on each morning) but Bill quickly realised his error in picking an activity which basically ensured that no conversation could be had. Most mornings they barely exchanged more than five words and he often got the impression that Laura was just going through the motions and he was merely herding her through Galactica's endless corridors. Therefore his next challenge lay in trying to get her to stay for breakfast after her post-workout shower.

Something he succeeded at, much to his own surprise, after only a week of cajoling, where Laura spontaneously admitted, 'I don't know what to do.'

Bill looked across the table at her, her hair still wet, one leg pulled up so she could rest her chin on her knee. The grey sweats he'd picked out for her had fit her perfectly and he was now slightly worried that she might grow suspicious about just how much time he'd spent admiring her figure. 'You'll figure it out.'

'I just can't shake this feeling that something awful's going to happen.'

'Maybe it won't be as bad as you think.'

She snorted, 'Yeah, right. He hadn't been president five minutes before nearly three thousand people were dead.' She chewed her lip but was finally unable to refrain from adding, 'Killed by the nuclear bomb from his lab!'

'There was no evidence that Baltar had anything to do with the explosion,' he reminded her. If there had been it was a sure bet he would be sitting in a jail-cell right now, not lording it up aboard Colonial One. And, besides, what possible motive could Baltar have to blow-up Cloud 9 during his own inauguration? 'Now repeat after me: The president's problems are not my problems.'

'I'd love to be his though,' she muttered sourly, draining the remains of her coffee and dropping her foot to the floor.

'Laura,' he sighed. She was like a dog with a frakking bone and her continued obsession with Baltar was starting to wear his patience thin.

'Oh what?' she said, narrowing her eyes combatively. 'I'm just supposed to put him out of my mind for the next four years?'

'How about for five minutes?'

He regretted it the instant he said it. The expression on her face was glacial.

'I'd better get going, I'm sure Colonel Tigh will be here any minute. Thanks for breakfast,' she said flatly, though she had hardly touched it.

'I'll see you tomorrow,' he said quietly, standing too, if only to get a better view of her leaving. More than five words exchanged, even more than five whole sentences, that was progress, and whatever string of expletives had been going through her head, she had refrained from actually saying them. He was encouraged.

'You know that's the second time this week I've seen Roslin leaving your quarters first thing in the morning,' noted Tigh, looking over his shoulder as he stepped through the hatch into Bill's quarters. 'Something you want to tell me?'

'You know we've been going running,' said Bill, resolutely ignoring the annoyingly inaccurate inference. He wished 'going running' was a euphemism.

'I know that before this you hadn't gone running in five years or more,' he said slyly.

'Yeh, well I didn't think she'd take to boxing.' Nor was he fool enough to put a pair of boxing gloves on Laura Roslin and stand within striking distance.

'Why are you doing this?' asked Saul curiously.

'The woman's just been made redundant. You remember what that's like and she hasn't got anyone. I've got Lee, you've got Ellen, we're the lucky ones.'

'Lucky, yeh,' scoffed Saul, not feeling so lucky with Ellen giving him earache about moving down to the surface. 'And why do we care?'

'Because she was prepared to give her dying breath for this fleet and she deserves more than to be tossed aside,' said Bill with perhaps a little more vehemence than he'd intended, judging by the way Tigh was now looking at him anyway.

Truth was, he still hadn't shaken the impressions left with him since he'd found out about her illness; her strength and selflessness had humbled him, her courage far surpassing his own, which had seemed to diminish with the hours of her life as he realised how difficult it would be to lead the fleet without her. Some part of him knew that he had placed her on a pedestal back then, one she would no doubt have remained upon forever had nature taken its course.

Of course Laura's continued existence meant that he must inevitably find her out to be as human as the rest of them and sure enough, a few months after her recovery, she proved her fallibility on an ambitious scale. Still, he'd been able to see the good intention behind the criminal act and that she had not, finally, gone through with stealing the election left his lofty image of her largely untarnished. It wasn't that he thought she was perfect, she'd made her fair share of mistakes, but even her mistakes (so far as he could discern) came from a selfless place. She'd been willing to sacrifice not only her life but her principles, her soul, if it meant doing what was best for everyone else.

He'd realised back on Kobol that she was everything he'd always hoped for in a President, someone he could honestly look to for hope and guidance. People were idiots to trade Laura's honest, unwavering devotion to their well-being for Baltar's pie-in-the-sky promises - but democracy said they had every right to be idiots. No amount of sitting around calling them idiots was going to change that.

He just hoped Laura would remember that soon.