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When they finally came for her, they came late at night, well past curfew. Probably, she thought, so that nobody would see her being taken away. Her hands were tied, a hood thrown over her face. She had been the President of the Twelve Colonies after all, ever since the holocaust. The most photographed and well known face in all the fleet, and they wouldn’t want anyone inadvertently looking the right way, to know they had taken her, to try and stop them. To almost everyone living on New Caprica today, she was - still or once again, as the case may be - Madam President, even though the majority of them had voted against her in the last election. After Baltar threw in his lot with the Cylons and left everyone else to rot, most of those people who had been so quick to discount her when he seduced them with empty promises, had once again turned to her. Whether she wanted to or not, she had become responsible for them again.
She had taken up the mantle, just as before, because somebody had to take command, because she had never stopped feeling responsible for these, the last remnants of the human race. She had started organizing what had been an uncoordinated uprising into a full scale insurgency, making battle plans for when Bill would come back, having men and women who had no business holding a gun, trained to shoot and not miss, organizing and rehearsing evacuation protocols, under the guise of fire drills no less.
And it had all led her here, to this very moment. It was disconcerting, stumbling after her captors in the dark. The rough scratch of the hood against her face, the smell of sweat in her nostrils, not her own, some previous victim had worn this same hood, had stumbled down this same route. Her bound hands were frakking with her sense of balance; noises were distorted, the metallic clanging of Cylon Centurions, endlessly patrolling the encampment, the sound of a gate drawn open and closed. Somewhere, incongruously, she could smell a campfire and the aroma of coffee brewing, the scent so familiar and somehow safe it made her stomach ache.
They locked her in a cell, took her shoes, forced her to strip off her own clothes and put on a prison jumpsuit, took her glasses, and then, just as she thought the interrogation would begin in earnest now, they just left her there; alone in her cell. It wasn’t all that big, and completely empty, safe for a privy bucket in the corner. And it was bright, too bright. Without her glasses all she could do was squint into the glare and it was already giving her a headache. Knowing it was probably futile, she searched the cell anyway, looking in vain for any means of escape, something with which to defend herself perhaps, but there was nothing.
After three complete circuits, she gave op, found a spot where there was some small measure of shadow and settled on the floor, her back to the wall. All there was left to do now, was wait and worry. She’d seen what they’d done to others that had been taken to detention, what they’d done to Saul, and didn’t know if she’d be brave enough to take that kind of punishment and not give in to whatever it was they wanted from her. She’d never had her mettle tested in that way before. She’d never been this scared before either, not even when she was dying of cancer. That at least had been a path she’d been intimately familiar with, having had to watch her mother go through the same thing, she’d known what to expect, more or less. This was something new and unknowable and therefore terrifying.
Hours later and she was still al alone under the pitiless light, tired, so tired, but the brightness in her cell precluded sleep, it was dizzying and the incipient headache had grown into a full-fledged migraine. Every time she did manage to nod off, the clanging of a cell door, the sound of someone screaming, would be there to snap her awake. She wondered how long it had been already, the unrelenting light made it impossible to gauge the passage of time, was it morning yet, would anyone have missed her already, would they even know what had happened to her?
By the time her cell door opened and the Cavil and Doral models entered she was almost relieved. No more wondering, no more worrying. The time had come and she was a little surprised at the calm that descended over her the moment she laid eyes on her opponents.
“Ms. Roslin.” Cavil greeted her almost cordially. “I hope you haven’t been too uncomfortable.”
Laura slowly climbed to her feet; she’d been sitting on the freezing floor of her cell for what felt like days but probably had been hours, the cold, unforgiving stone wall against her back, and was chilled down to her bones. She was resolved to show them no weakness though. “Well the amenities leave something to be desired, that’s for sure.” She was rather pleased with how calm and in control she sounded.
He actually laughed and then motioned to Doral, who stood leaning against the wall, just inside the door, posture deceptively relaxed. Laura had mastered the art of reading body language though, honed it to a fine skill during her term as President, and to her, the way he held himself was more like a snake in a box than anything else. Poised to strike at the push of a button. Doral muttered something under his breath and stepped out of the cell for a moment to return with two chairs. Cavil gestured for her to take a seat while sitting down himself.
“Please,” he said, when she remained standing, “sit down. I’d like to conduct this interview in as civil a manner as possible.”
“I’d hardly call being dragged here in the middle of the night civil,” she said, pitching her voice at that timbre she’d reserved for the more unpleasant press conferences she’d had to conduct during her presidency.
She had only a moment to try and interpret Cavil’s frown and then from the corner of her eye she saw Doral uncoil. “It’s more civil than an airlock, you high and mighty bitch,” he hissed, as his fist blurred towards her, “and you’ve put enough of us out of one to earn yourself a little payback.”
The blow landed on her left cheekbone and sent her flying into the wall behind her, her head hitting the unyielding stone with an audible crunch. For a moment all she could hear was the roar of a thousand misfiring synapses in her head, all she could see were stars, whole galaxies of them; she’d always thought the expression to be an exaggeration, but no, all too real. And pretty, her disjointed thoughts whispered, seductive even, let’s stay here, it feels like home. She found herself sliding down the wall, sliding towards darkness and willed herself upright, willed herself to stay conscious.
As the room came back into too bright focus, she saw Cavil holding a furious Doral back, away from her. Cavil was arguing something, it seemed, Doral was screaming at him, at her, but the clamor in her head wouldn’t quiet down enough for her to make sense of what they were saying. She reached up, touched her cheek. It had already gone numb, safe for a line of fire traveling across what she guessed was going to be a pretty impressive bruise. She idly wondered if he’d cracked her cheekbone. Her fingers came away wet. Trying to focus on her hand, so close in front of her straining eyes, made the pain in her head ratchet up another notch, so she gave up the attempt. The red smear she was able to make out was a dead giveaway anyway.
Laura closed her eyes for a moment, willing the tsunami in her head to subside, she’d had enough practice at this during her fight with cancer after all, she was intimately familiar with pain, they were on a first name basis. After a moment she found the calm at the center of the storm and a measure of clarity returned to her.
“Don’t,” she heard Cavil say, his voice a hiss. “First, we try this my way. Second, if that doesn’t work, we leave no visible marks. She walks out of here obviously battered like that and we’ll have a problem. The moment she steps through those doors, all eyes will be turned towards her, make no mistake, there’s a small mob of them outside already, waiting for her. We do not need her to become a martyr to their cause, they’re already calling her Madam President again.”
“Then she’ll just have to stay and enjoy our hospitality until that heals, which gives us more time to get what we need from her. Give something back for every time she put one of us out of an airlock. I don’t see the downside.”
“Then look with better eyes. The longer she stays here, the bigger the chance that they’ll mount a rescue operation and this insurgency will grow into a full size rebellion,” Cavil’s voice was low and dangerous. “Now back off.”
As Laura opened her eyes, squinting against the light, Doral shrugged out of Cavil’s grasp, adjusting his tie, nodding his assent. He stepped towards her and reached out his hand, grasping her arm, pulling her with him. She willed herself not to recoil at his touch, let him steer her towards the chair. Being in motion made her aching head swim. Each footfall reverberated through her skull and she was becoming increasingly nauseous. As he pushed her down, his hands on her shoulders, gripping her with bruising force, she caught a smear of red, a glint of gold. He must have cut her cheek with his ring as he hit her, she realized. It would probably scar. She chuckled softly at the irrelevancy of her thoughts and caught the look of surprise the two Cylons shared between them. Inappropriate humor at important times, it had always been one of her flaws, although Bill had turned it into a strength during her first debate for the presidency. The thought of him gave her strength enough to face her interrogators as they placed themselves in front of her again.
“Let’s cut through the chase, gentlemen,” she said. Her voice was steady, of which she was inordinately proud, which added to her urge to start giggling again. That, and her use of the term gentlemen and the fact that sarcasm was apparently lost on the two of them. She looked them in the eye, one by one, although the effort to turn her head, to swivel her eyes, was almost too great and made her nausea that much worse. “What is it you want from me?”
Cavil’s smooth voice made her skin crawl. “Your cooperation, Laura,” he said. “May I call you Laura?”
She didn’t deign to reply, only raised an eyebrow at the word cooperation. The little bit she had picked up from their earlier discussion gave her some small measure of hope that she was going to get out of here relatively in one piece, though apparently not all Cylons agreed that was the road to take. For the moment though, it seemed Cavil did, and he looked to be in charge, so it’s him she tried to concentrate on, though the incessant pounding in her head made it difficult to focus.
“So Laura it is.” Cavil said, leaning forward well within her personal space. “I need you to tell me who your colleagues are.”
“I have no colleagues. I’m the only qualified teacher around, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.” She deliberately misinterpreted his question and was rewarded by a small flicker in his eyes that betrayed his annoyance.
“The leaders of the insurgency, I need their names.”
“I’m afraid I can’t give them to you.”
Even though her head hurt like her cancer had returned and had taken up residence in her brain, she managed to conjure the smile she knew drove her political opponents nuts. That small, enigmatic smile she’d perfected over the years that was meant to unbalance her adversaries, make them think she knew more than them, had seen through their tactics, and was planning to wipe the floor with them any minute now.
“Don’t be mistaken, Laura.” Cavil’s tone of voice was becoming sharper, knife edges becoming unsheathed. “We will get them from you. It’s your choice whether we do this the easy way, or the hard way.”
“You already have my answer.”
Cavil climbed to his feet with an exasperated grunt. “We’ll be back later, you obviously need some time to think this over,” he said. With what sounded like a sigh, he grasped her shoulders and half lifted her out of her chair in a move almost as if he were going to embrace her. Then, with lightning speed, his knee came up and crushed into her midriff, robbing her of air. She doubled over in pain, retching miserably, and crashed down onto her knees on the harsh stone floor as he let go of her shoulders. The small pain of knees bruised as they violently hit the ground hardly even registered through the tempest in her head, the agony in her chest.
Cavil’s voice came to her as if he was speaking to her from the other end of a long, echoing tunnel. “Remember. Only you can make this stop. Next time we’ll not be so gentle with you.”
Everything receded as they left and fear and despair took up residence in their wake; footsteps, retreating, further and further, the scrape of chair legs across her cell, the clang as they closed her cell door.
She sank down sideways onto the floor, slowly, carefully, resting her throbbing head against the cold stone, finding a small measure of relief there, even though her face was just inches away from the small puddle of vomit she had deposited on the floor just now.
Quietly, she passed out.
End Notes:
More to come...
Feedback is food for the soul, so feed me :)
Feedback is food for the soul, so feed me :)