Written for the
ar_drabbles challenge, 'his and hers - colours'.
Title: Polished
Rating: K
Word Count: 300 words each
She's like a diamond, he decides, as he sits in one of the seats on Colonial One, waiting for her to finish what she's doing before starting her meeting with him. She's juggling an antagonistic phone call with Tom Zarek, signing papers that Tory keeps putting under her hand, trying to read a report on fuel consumption, glancing his way occasionally; sometimes with an impatient expression on her face, sometimes a resigned one, once a little wink.
So many facets to her. So many colours, each one brilliant and bright, sparkling so quickly and merging together so that you could almost lose track of which was which. Reds and greens and purples and yellows and shining white, every colour of the rainbow. He can barely keep up with her.
How can one woman be so many things? President and teacher. Sarcasm and sweet nothings. Ice cold and burning hot. Soft and sweet, and hard like rock. Naïve, and the smartest person he knows. Excitable and enthusiastic and still as deep waters, watchful and calm.
Sometimes it's hard to reconcile all those facets. How could the Laura who got the giggles so badly before a debate with Baltar be the same Laura who had the bastard nearly wetting himself in fear in his cell? The quiet woman who walked onto his ship all that time ago to take part in the decommissioning ceremony be the same woman who had co-ordinated the resistance on New Caprica? How could the ice queen President who keeps them all alive through her ruthlessness be the passionate lover who curls sensuously around him in his rack and kisses him so sweetly?
He doesn't know. He doesn't care much. Laura Roslin is a diamond, precious and gleaming and rare, and he loves every colour she shows him.
* * *
Lying next to him in his rack, watching him sleep, she comes to the conclusion that Bill Adama is like an opal. One of those deep black ones that they used to mine on Aerelon. Her mother had a pendant containing one, and she'd loved to look at it when she was a little girl, watching how the blackness changed when you tilted it towards the light and streaks of multicoloured fire would appear. A line of blue there, a flash of orange here, and then so suddenly disappearing again as the pendant twisted away.
Bill is like that, she muses. So steady, so stable, so Bill, always, so you grew to believe that was all there was. Just him, exactly the way you expected him to be. And then circumstances tilt, and all of a sudden, something you would never have thought of, just for a while, before he goes back to being the Bill you knew. He could be a torturer. A saviour. A hardened battle commander. A loving father figure.
She loves those streaks of colour he shows sometimes. Who would expect the Old Man to be such a romantic? But he could be, for her. He sings to her. He rubs her feet without her needing to ask after a long day. He sat in a raptor for her, waiting to hold her or to die, whichever the universe threw at him. And then he was back to being stable, steady Bill, Admiral of the Fleet.
That he can surprise her that way thrills her. It's comforting and comfortable to be with someone who is predictable, unchanging, but those flashes of colour stop it from ever being dull. Bill Adama is an opal, deep and true and surprising, and she wouldn't have him any other way.