For Judas Iscariot In Heaven
Fifteen years ago...maybe even ten...maybe even five...Laura Roslin would have been quite the looker. Still had great legs, which is probably why she showed them off instead of her arms.
Gaius was enjoying the view anyway, despite his objective opinion that her best days were quite behind her. Even if death and the lack of those remarkably expressive eyes had revealed that the president's looks were utterly ravaged by the last days of her illness and the fever and sweats and sudden swell from the fluids of burst tumors, one of which probably finally did the work.
There were lines carved into her face, ones around her eyes, near her mouth. Someone kinder and fonder of the president would say that age had softened, rather than destroyed, her beauty, but Gaius Baltar remembered all too well that Laura Roslin had never trusted him. Never really liked him.
"What a strange little man," she'd said of him. It had stung, hearing that calm dismissal of himself as an alien. Knowing that Roslin would never take him entirely seriously because of it.
And now, she was the alien, a newly minted corpse lying on a cold metal slab, and Gaius was the one with the power. Power to make this body disappear, to say that she hadn't died at all, and wait for the next one to appear with a mysteriously clean bill of health, or to display the remains with gusto and point and laugh when Colonial One reported that President Roslin was in fact aboard, and feeling a little better, though by no means out of the woods yet.
"So what shall I do?" Baltar asked, waiting for Six's spectral chuckle, the sex-saturated voice tickling his ear and his cock. After all, this was her cue. "What does God want me to do? What shall I do, Madam President? Shall I kiss you and wait for you to rise from the tomb?"
No answer, from either Six or her recently revealed mistress.
Gaius began a mad little softshoe, staring at the body and letting the wheels of his mind spin. It had been by chance or divine grace that she had been with him when she died -- 'til the very end, she had fought, said that her purpose was her work, and so they had been walking down a Galactica corridor, talking politics, when Laura Roslin had simply fallen down in his arms, shuddered, and died.
The letter she'd given him -- the one all Colonial presidents gave their successors -- had been very, very informative, and with a smile, Baltar had dragged the woman's body into the morgue and laid her out because options simply had to be considered, and nobody came in here who could avoid it.
Crazy, holy bitch. "You should have made yourself a little younger," Baltar said, touching her throat and feeling all the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. "Really, I can see how you would have been a great beauty a decade ago. But beauty fades, my dear Madam President -- may I call you Laura now? After all, you died in my arms, so we are close enough to drop the pretense."
He had been leaning closer during this latest address to her, so the last words were spoken mere inches from her lips. At this distance, sympathy began to overwhelm Baltar.
"Beauty fades, Laura," Baltar said, putting his fingertips on still-warm lips. "Five years ago, even, you would have been irresistible. There would have been no command you could have made that I wouldn't have obeyed. As you know, I tend to be rather woman-crazy. Women are so much more beautiful than men, and I suspect rather the wiser at that."
Five years younger, she would have been a looker. Ten years ago, and there was no doubt in Baltar's mind that he would have gone on bended knee for a taste of Laura Roslin, even to the destruction of humanity.
As it was, he had rather destroyed humanity for his blonde Cylon, but things had gone so flat with Six. Six was blatant -- all her goods in the shop window. More beautiful than even Laura at her most beautiful could have been, but shallow. Even now, Roslin had just eluded him, taunting him with her nearly available unavailability. Five years younger, and she would have been a goddess in bloom, instead of a fading corpse, albeit one who was so recently dead that rigor mortis had not yet set in.
"Gods should be beautiful," Gaius said, the unthinkable providing quite a blandishment. To be able to say one had actually had her, even under these rather unusual circumstances, would be a coup. There were so many who ignored that really, Laura Roslin was not quite beautiful anymore. Commander Adama, Captain Adama, that Zarek fellow, even that idiot Billy, their eyes had all followed those shapely legs and fine eyes with expressions that had asked to be asked. None of them had been asked, but Gaius could now have it for the taking.
Even though she was most certainly not quite beautiful now.
After all, she had kept her figure. Gaius approved of that. No need to let everything go just because age was working its inevitable will. Though he wondered if someone like Laura could understand the concept of inevitable. After all, it hardly seemed likely that Roslin would have wanted to go out so -- falling into the arms of her barely tolerated Vice President and dying within a minute, choking and stilling in an enemy's arms.
"Honestly, Laura, you can't keep lying there and not expect me to think of it," he said, cupping her face tenderly. "You are still practically viable, and I have been madly copulating with air that speaks like a beautiful blonde drag queen with her arse in the air."
Laura Roslin didn't answer. Possibly she thought it was beneath her dignity, or perhaps she was closing her eyes to think of whatever lover should have held her in those last moments. Possibly she was resigned, because the price of Baltar's silence when the next one emerged on Colonial One was this.
Or possibly she was merely dead and Gaius was perverse and insane enough to genuinely think that necrophilia, followed by a discreet disposal of one recently frakked body, was actually what God wanted, or at least, would endure in the name of the grand plan.
"After all, I am the only one who can keep your secret," Baltar whispered into her ear, flicking at the earlobe with his tongue almost as if to test Laura's reaction. "And none of my inner voices are saying this isn't what God's will is. Really, I might have to take your silence as assent."
Silence was hanging in the air like a blessing. Gaius had gotten used to endless noise, Six talking in his ear, the hum of engines, an endless low buzz that made everything so complicated. But there was sweet, blessed silence, and if the woman lying before him so invitingly was, in fact, God, a madwoman who had scrawled her last missive in the depths of insanity, or at the very least, a Cylon with delusions of divinity, then how else was Gaius to take the silence except as tacit permission?
She was so serene. As if nothing, really, could touch her, and yet Gaius found no resistance when he opened her mouth for another kiss. No angel came to forbid him, no unfortunate soul stumbling across the scene.
Obviously permission. No one except the two of them, all this sweet silence, and now she wasn't even gainsaying him by freezing up. It all made perfect sense, really.
"God's will be done," Gaius murmured.