Fic: Thirty Three
Ficlet written for an episode prompt over at laura_lee_bsg. Just because it's, like, wordz. And I feel I must celebrate wordz at the moment in the hope it will encourage new wordz to emerge, so I'm putting this here for posterity.
Title: Thirty Three
Characters: Laura, Billy, Lee (mentioned)
Rating: PG
Word count: c. 800
Minute eighteen, cycle ... she doesn't even know anymore. One hundred and seventy something.
The cabin is full of people trying to catch a moment's rest before the next jump. There's a man in the corner who has perfected the art of sleeping through them now, and he's been snoring for the past three hours. The sound reverberates through her, jarring her tenuous concentration on the paper in front of her, and the words begin to swim across the page, making sinuous patterns that seem to mean something, but she can’t decipher them anymore.
Pushing back her chair, she slowly, achingly, gets to her feet, her muscles screaming in protest. Billy starts from the doze he’s been drifting into, looking up at her with a sleepy, questioning expression on his face. “Madame President, I...”
She shakes her head a little, gesturing him to settle back down again. She just needs to stretch, needs to give her sore muscles a workout, even if it’s just by walking to the bathroom.
There’s an empty seat in the next section, next to the window, and she settles into it on her way back. Minute twenty five, and her body is already starting to anticipate the jump, the sharp stab she knows she’ll feel in her left breast when that feeling of contraction occurs. With everything that’s going on around them, she’d expected to be able to forget about the cancer, but that ache keeps bringing it back to the forefront of her mind. Every thirty three minutes, another reminder, like a slow heartbeat. Cancer. Terminal. Cancer. And every time, she has to fight the urge to curl up in a ball and give in. Just stop.
The window is cool against her cheek, the stars no longer beautiful, but just vast, twinkling in the emptiness. They make her feel small, irrelevent, and she finds her exhausted mind starting to wonder whether all of this is worth anything. Whether there’s any point to her trying to hold this tiny civilisation together when they’re on the verge of annihilation at any moment.
Minute thirty one, and the alert fighters begin to pour from the dark bulk of Galactica. So few. She watches them weave in and out of the fleet, and this, this she finds beautiful. Humanity, fighting back, clinging on to life in defiance of the vastness of space that threatens to swallow them whole.
It’s his face she pictures when she thinks of humanity’s bravery. The stubborn set to his jaw, the intelligence and gentleness in his eyes, the warmth of his skin beneath her fingertips when she helped him to his feet. Captain Apollo. Lee. The realisation startles her for a moment, and then she gives in to it, remembering the smiles he gave her that brightened the room, the way she knew what he was going to say before he said it. The urge she’d had to reach for him before he left, to thank him for being the steadiness at her right hand when she said those words, to ask him to stay.
She wonders which ship is his. She wonders if he’ll make it through the next attack, and the next, and the next. And the thought that he might not makes her heart ache as sharply as her breast as the captain announces the jump and that sickening feeling washes over her. His ship, whichever it is, disappears from view, and she finds herself gripping the arm of the chair, counting the minutes until that flash and the darkening of space tells her Galactica has jumped back into view.
The tiredness of her body is almost an afterthought as she makes her way back to her desk, her eyes seeking out Billy who is on the comm to Galactica. He gives her a little smile, and mouths “no casualties”, and she realises her heart has been hammering in anticipation of bad news.
She settles back into the uncomfortable desk chair that is her seat of office, gazing at that page on her desk that had eluded her before with a renewed determination to make some sense of it. She’s not going to give in. She’s not going to stop. Because this tiny civilisation needs to stay together for people like him. People with their whole lives ahead of them. People so full of beauty and bravery that they are the very reason humanity deserves to survive.
And when this is over, she’ll call him back here and reach for him. She’ll thank him for being the steadiness at her right hand. And maybe she’ll ask him to stay.
Title: Thirty Three
Characters: Laura, Billy, Lee (mentioned)
Rating: PG
Word count: c. 800
Minute eighteen, cycle ... she doesn't even know anymore. One hundred and seventy something.
The cabin is full of people trying to catch a moment's rest before the next jump. There's a man in the corner who has perfected the art of sleeping through them now, and he's been snoring for the past three hours. The sound reverberates through her, jarring her tenuous concentration on the paper in front of her, and the words begin to swim across the page, making sinuous patterns that seem to mean something, but she can’t decipher them anymore.
Pushing back her chair, she slowly, achingly, gets to her feet, her muscles screaming in protest. Billy starts from the doze he’s been drifting into, looking up at her with a sleepy, questioning expression on his face. “Madame President, I...”
She shakes her head a little, gesturing him to settle back down again. She just needs to stretch, needs to give her sore muscles a workout, even if it’s just by walking to the bathroom.
There’s an empty seat in the next section, next to the window, and she settles into it on her way back. Minute twenty five, and her body is already starting to anticipate the jump, the sharp stab she knows she’ll feel in her left breast when that feeling of contraction occurs. With everything that’s going on around them, she’d expected to be able to forget about the cancer, but that ache keeps bringing it back to the forefront of her mind. Every thirty three minutes, another reminder, like a slow heartbeat. Cancer. Terminal. Cancer. And every time, she has to fight the urge to curl up in a ball and give in. Just stop.
The window is cool against her cheek, the stars no longer beautiful, but just vast, twinkling in the emptiness. They make her feel small, irrelevent, and she finds her exhausted mind starting to wonder whether all of this is worth anything. Whether there’s any point to her trying to hold this tiny civilisation together when they’re on the verge of annihilation at any moment.
Minute thirty one, and the alert fighters begin to pour from the dark bulk of Galactica. So few. She watches them weave in and out of the fleet, and this, this she finds beautiful. Humanity, fighting back, clinging on to life in defiance of the vastness of space that threatens to swallow them whole.
It’s his face she pictures when she thinks of humanity’s bravery. The stubborn set to his jaw, the intelligence and gentleness in his eyes, the warmth of his skin beneath her fingertips when she helped him to his feet. Captain Apollo. Lee. The realisation startles her for a moment, and then she gives in to it, remembering the smiles he gave her that brightened the room, the way she knew what he was going to say before he said it. The urge she’d had to reach for him before he left, to thank him for being the steadiness at her right hand when she said those words, to ask him to stay.
She wonders which ship is his. She wonders if he’ll make it through the next attack, and the next, and the next. And the thought that he might not makes her heart ache as sharply as her breast as the captain announces the jump and that sickening feeling washes over her. His ship, whichever it is, disappears from view, and she finds herself gripping the arm of the chair, counting the minutes until that flash and the darkening of space tells her Galactica has jumped back into view.
The tiredness of her body is almost an afterthought as she makes her way back to her desk, her eyes seeking out Billy who is on the comm to Galactica. He gives her a little smile, and mouths “no casualties”, and she realises her heart has been hammering in anticipation of bad news.
She settles back into the uncomfortable desk chair that is her seat of office, gazing at that page on her desk that had eluded her before with a renewed determination to make some sense of it. She’s not going to give in. She’s not going to stop. Because this tiny civilisation needs to stay together for people like him. People with their whole lives ahead of them. People so full of beauty and bravery that they are the very reason humanity deserves to survive.
And when this is over, she’ll call him back here and reach for him. She’ll thank him for being the steadiness at her right hand. And maybe she’ll ask him to stay.