for: twicetoldfandom. (archive is here).
fandom: bsg, alias, the office.
characters: roslin, jack, karen.
spoilers: 3.01 & 3.02 for bsg, s1 for alias, s3 for the office.
rating: pg.
notes: many thanks to everyone who offered advice and helped me with canon issues, and of course, to fox for running this awesome challenge that actually got me to finish something! any mistakes are my own darn fault.

summary: “The window is bright and blue, and possibly not there at all.”

I.

She remembered moments like this. Or. She thought she remembered moments like this. She could smell the ocean breeze off her balcony, the Caprican sun beating hard upon her skin. She closed her eyes and it was gone.

Her cell was square, regular, no windows. She didn’t know how to keep track of time, didn’t know how many days, weeks, she had been in that cell. She didn’t remember before. Didn’t want to think about before, fought against before. In the end, she was only left with before.

She thought about dying. A dying leader will lead the way to Earth. Pythia the prophet danced in front of her eyes, reciting Scripture she didn’t understand, never wanted to understand. Pythia, the prophet she believed only as she was dying, the prophet that returned to her now. She knew she was slowly dying in her cell, as the time passed she couldn’t keep track of.

She could feel the poison coursing through her veins, quiet and insidious. If the Cylons didn’t do it first –

Roslin was tired of fighting it. Fighting the death that seemed to inevitable, the one thing she could actually do without fault. The Cylons had nothing on her own body. Death was her destiny, though she could argue it was everyone’s destiny, except the Cylons. Those machines could live forever, those machines – those models – they were different versions of perfection walking in front of her. Those machines died and were reborn, memories intact. They cheated death in ways humans couldn’t.

There were so many dead, so many dying on that gods-forsaken planet. She buried Billy there, her first sign of hope, but now she knew if she lived it would only be to leave him behind on a planet where dreams disappeared into the mist, into the mud. And Billy was her only family, her only true link to her life before, her life before Galactica and Colonial One.

Billy was her link to Laura Roslin, secretary of education. He was her conscience, and he wasn’t afraid to disagree with her. He held her hand through chamalla nightmares and visions, and he kept the number on her white board accurate. She had no clue where the board was now, and if she had it, how she would keep it updated. If she would even want to. The dead, the dying, the hopeless – they were all that she could see.

Except for that window to the Caprican sea, the startling blue reflection of the sun off the clear water.

They threatened to execute her.

Laura was beyond fearing death. She faced it once before, perhaps feared it then, and sometimes she hated the men who brought her back without her consent. She was ready to die. They weren’t. And instead of being dead and gone, she was forced to live out this miserable existence on this ridiculously named planet. She was forced to be the leader they all wanted her to be. Time passed, thousands of decisions were made, and Roslin became someone different. Baltar assumed the Presidency, and she went back to the schoolteacher she always was.

Here again, her hand was forced.

That, she believed, was the turning point, was the moment she realized she could accept genocide, because that’s what it was, after all, even if they were machines. They bled, they felt, they dreamt. The only thing they didn’t do was die.

Laura’s heard mutterings about a mass execution – Cylons tended to gossip as much as their human counterparts, the Doral-looking model especially. She was beginning to be able to tell the subtle differences in each model. Yes, there were things that were distinctly Doral-like, beyond the obvious external features. But who would have thought the Cylons were also capable of individual thought? Of discourse and discussion?

She tried not to think about it. It would be easier to order the genocide that way. If she didn’t think about them as people, if she didn’t know about their emotions. If she could just regulate them to what they were, fundamentally – machines.

With no way to record time, Laura found herself losing track of memory. She recited facts to keep her mind awake, she thought about new lesson plans for the school. She worried about Maya, alone with Isis. She worried about the resistance, if they were dead, if it even existed.

She heard they caught Kara Thrace and one day the blonde woman stumbled past Laura’s cell. Laura rushed to grab the bars of her cell and call out, but she only managed a small croak. Lt. Thrace didn’t look back. Laura heard a rather sinister laugh next to her, and recognized it immediately.

“No rest for the weary,” the one they called Cavil said. He rubbed his palms together. “Are you ready to talk now?”

Laura turned her back to him and retreated to the far corner of her cell. She adjusted her glasses, lenses covered in dirt. Running her fingers lightly against the wall, she imagined she felt her window.

“There’s more than one way,” the Cylon intoned.

Laura didn’t care. Laura would never betray, would rather die. Yes, she almost welcomed death, but her hatred for Baltar and her faith in Adama kept her from fully giving in. Not to mention the people that looked up to her –

And yet now it is Richard she remembered when she thought of the sea on Caprica. It was Richard who shared her early idealistic dreams of reform and rebirth, Richard who held her when she spoke being of reprimanded in front of her students by a politically minded principal.

And it was Richard’s hands that traced her skin in the starlight on the shore near her beach house.

Richard, whose hands stopped at the newly pink scar crossing her abdomen, and Richard who said nothing. Richard who loved another woman, married another woman, and Laura that slept with him anyway. Richard who went to fire her after she returned from finding out about the cancer, Richard who was the President.

Richard, who was dead on Caprica, along with 45 other government officials who outranked Laura Roslin.

Later, it would be Bill, later, after everything changed. After betrayal, after a holocaust, after she found herself in Richard’s shoes, contemplating an order of genocide.

Her scar faded and disease took primary precedent, and Bill was never one to probe into the past.

She could smell the air. Not the air of New Caprica – an ill-named planet – whose air was stake and damp, cold and unforgiving in the early morning hours. No, she inhaled the smell of old Caprica, of a world that had some semblance of structure and understanding, even if it would all blow up.

Laura was dying again. She knew it the way she knew the outline of her body, the way her fingers felt on her bare skin, the way the air could be lonelier than anything imaginable.

Cavil looked at her with hatred in his eyes. He said something to her, in his sternest voice, and she imagined him standing in front of a group of parishioners, sermonizing about fire and brimstone, death and destruction. Laura didn’t want to hear it anymore; Laura Roslin was tired of being threatened, especially with things that were going to pass anyway.

In the dirt of the cell, she wrote the names of those she had known, the names of the ones that died before her. Elosha, who reminded her of Scripture, who died on Kobol in a way foretold by the prophets. Her fingers trembled as she wrote Billy’s name, another senseless death to add to the pile of names she carried with her.

And later, when all she could see was the bright blue of the Caprican light reflecting off the water, after she stared out the window that wasn’t there, and smelled the ocean that only existed in memory, when the Cylon had left her alone again, she added her named to her list of the dead, written in the dirt of her cell that would soon be erased by the passage of time.

II.

He has lost track of the days. No, he can rely on one thing – meals, and as he glances at the wall, he remembers the notches he made all of the previous days, the days that he has marked in the corner of the cell.

He knows he is in solitary for good reason. Truth is, he likes it better this way, likes the quiet, likes the fact that he doesn’t have to pretend.

Jack can sit, and rethink everything. He doesn’t know if this is torture or escape.

Sydney.

He remembers taking Sydney to the beach, just after he was relocated to Los Angeles field office. Laura – Irina – wanted to go to the beach. That was the selling point on getting her to leave Washington, though now he knows she would have followed him anywhere as long as he kept talking about his work. He rubs his eyes with his hands, startled at the amount of facial hair. It has been a long time.

Jack was a traditionalist who learned to swim by being pushed off the dock into a lake.

He fingers the bright orange prison jumpsuit, and thinks of the first colored set of swim trunks he owned. He thinks of life jackets, bobbing in an open sea. He pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

He never spent much time at the ocean, though his mother would speak longingly of growing up by the shore. Jack was always more comfortable in his room with a book, in the classroom with his hand in the air, in the field with a gun in his hand.

The day he met Laura was like any other except that it wasn’t. That was the day his life changed.

Would he go back and do things differently? It is the question that plagues him, the question he turns over and over in his head.

It’s the carousel that Jack later takes Sydney back to, not the beach. He sees the symbolism, even though his beautifully bright daughter, no doubt well versed in the use of irony, allusion and metaphor, does not fully understand. The horses go round and round in his head, but the ocean, the ocean is ever-changing, never the same, never . . . there are something he doesn’t want to ruin for Sydney, and he doesn’t know to describe –

The day he sees when he looks outside the imaginary blue window that seems so real is an ordinary day in July. The fact the window appears does not bother him exactly; he is more interested in what he can see, willing to suspend reality for a chance to witness life before. Laura – no, Irina – convinced him to play hooky from work on a Wednesday and take his girls to the beach. He remembers lying to Arvin on the phone, and Sloane’s sly comment that meant he clearly didn’t believe Jack. “You know Laura,” Jack said, with a smile in his voice.

“The things we do for our wives,” Sloane replied laughing, and Jack knew he was safe.

He remembers Sydney’s shock and delight, remembers how quickly she ran up the stairs, chubby little legs, to pull on her new two-piece strawberry bathing suit with a cute butt ruffle Laura bought for her.

He finds his old swim trunks and Laura laughs and asks if they had seen water before the man walked on the moon. He laughs back, and tells her he knows how to swim before grabbing her in a tight embrace. Laura giggles and pushes him away. She played her part so well.

Laura wears a black bikini – so tasteful, and yet so deliciously revealing – Jack wonders how he got so lucky.

He closes his eyes and is back in the cell, away from the beach. But he can’t stop the images from coming, he can’t stop looking out that bright blue window into the past that seems right in front of him, right outside that window. He allows himself, for a moment, to indulge.

The waves were small, the Pacific a bright blue that reminds him of Cuba, of his trips to South America. Sydney was running at the meeting of sea and sand, squealing if the waves caught her. Laura’s reading Madame Bovary – he never understood her choice in beach reading – and so he ambles down to the surf.

“Daddy! Daddy, daddy! Look!” Sydney shouted, making little pies with the wet sand at her feet. She tosses one into the oncoming waves. “I’m feeding the ocean!”

Jack could only smile.

The window to the sea, to that day, isn’t there. He knows this and yet he sees it all the same. He sees it bright in front of him, his hands tracking the panes, feeling the cool ocean breeze through the glass.

He sinks to his knees and closes his eyes again. He thinks if he ever gets out, he will go back to the ocean, and will swim until he can’t any longer, and he will flip over and float like he taught Sydney years ago.

He will float on his back in the blue Pacific, and he will wait for the tides to pull him out, he will let go and let the seas take him, the way the river took Laura (yes, Laura).

But then he thinks of Sydney, and knows he must go back to her. He cannot leave her at the shore with the impossible task of feeding the ocean alone.

He is afraid of her, afraid of what she will say, afraid that he does not know what it means to be a father. He has never been this afraid before, Sydney’s brown eyes staring at him, and that scares him more than anything he’s ever known.

Jack opens his eyes. He will leave Sydney in other ways, but he will always be there, just beyond the breaking surf, watching.

He will feed the sea with his daughter and maybe one day he’ll be forgiven.

III.

Karen will wonder why she is at this party. It will be a crappy party, held in the basement of some factory, warehouse, yet another crappy place in this decrepit city of Scranton.

She will hold a red plastic cup, the typically ever-present décor that is usually regulated to college parties. Not that Karen knew a lot about college parties – New York wasn’t the most typical place to go to college. She did try to get up to Columbia every now and then for parties, but it was remarkably easy to smile at the bouncer and get what ever she wanted for free.

Those days will be long over.

She will have followed a man to a town that wasn’t an easy commute to the city, because she will have thought she loved him. She might have loved him. She won’t know. She will know that he has chosen someone else, that he will have decided someone else was better for him. She will realize her mistake in coming, her mistake in following Jim, her mistake in thinking someone like him could really love someone like her.

The truth will be that Karen doesn’t know if she’s loveable. If she’s made of the things that make people want to stay, to stick around for the long haul.

And she will be listening to Kelly Kapour cry – no, sob – on and on about how she’s losing her precious boo, how Ryan won’t let her move with him to New York even though she’s sure to see Sarah Jessica at the corner Starbucks and be the best of friends, and isn’t a wife with celebrity connections worth something? Ryan will have taken the job she was supposed to get in Corporate. Looking down into her cup of luke-warm beer, Karen will be actually, truly thankful for the excuse to leave Scranton. How did a girl like her end up working in paper anyway?

The truth will be something close to fact, a little bit of fiction. She will have floated around after college, backpacking through Europe with her friends before realizing she needed to make ends meet. That’s when she took the job as a sales associate at a respectable company her father recommended – turned out it was a paper company run by idiots, and it’s more than remarkable there were sales even to be made. Dunder-Mifflin will be a means to an end, a stop-gap until she figures out her next move. She’ll believe it, and it will be true, until she meets Jim.

Jim changes everything. Jim will change everything. Karen will be forced to wake up, be forced to face the reality that he never really loved her. Karen was Jim’s stop-gap, in the way paper was a stop-gap for Karen’s career, and she wants to hate him for that, will always want to hate him for that. Except she won’t be able to.

In the end, she will have come to Scranton for a man, and she will leave because of one too.

When Jim leaves her in New York, when he goes back to Scranton to ask out the frumpy receptionist art student Karen honestly likes, she will realize New York’s the only thing that’s ever really been there for her.

No matter where she lives, she will come here and know where the Knitting Factory is, where the parks are, how the subways run. She will feel safe in a city of a million strangers, in that city of crime and broken dreams. She won’t have to see Jim and Pam every morning and pretend the world’s okay, though one day, years from now, she will see them on the street. He’ll be buying her a hot dog from a street vendor, and Pam’s hair will be the same, but her clothes will look more trendy. Karen will hear Jim’s voice from across the street, and her head will spin, and she’ll stand rooted to the spot. They won’t notice her, and that’ll be fine with Karen. She won’t want to hear how happy-perfect their lives are now. She won’t enjoy this reminder of her past.

She will regret the things she told the camera about Pam, and in her final talk with the camera, she will say, don’t you understand? She walks across coals and tells Jim, my boyfriend, while I’m sitting right there – while everyone is there, that she called off her wedding for him. Karen’s eyes will well with tears, but she’ll brush them back before they can fall. She’ll blame her contacts.

“Will I miss it? Nah. I never really fit in here. I think people tolerated me because I was Jim’s girlfriend, and well, like Kevin says, I have a nice ass.” Karen will smile for the camera one last time, and then she’ll walk off screen into a new life.

But she will miss it, when she watches the shadows lengthen across the Brooklyn Bridge. She’ll miss the odd sense of camaraderie, of being in a sinking ship that everyone was trying to keep afloat out of some dumb loyalty to a crazy captain.

She’ll tell herself she can vacation in Florida, in the Caribbean, so much easier. She’ll live in a place with culture. A place where the only good housing isn’t two blocks from the boy you moved for, though it will be overpriced and take more than a third of your rather healthy salary.

She’ll tell who ever asks, I was always too smart for paper, and she’ll take classes in computer science from BMCC at night, making money as a cocktail waitress at the Marriott by day.

Karen will have friends. Friends from before Dunder-Mifflin, and friends after, and Dwight will send her periodic updates on the state of the Scranton branch. Karen will decide to change her e-mail address after a year, and amazingly, it will be as if Scranton never existed. She’ll avoid the corporate office, she’ll dread running into Ryan.

Standing in the crappy basement of an apartment in Scranton, Karen will stare at the wall until she sees a window, blue and bright. She’ll be running her fingers over the wall where she knows the window is, when it will occur to her that perhaps she refilled her red plastic cup a few too many times. The window will be so real, she’ll start to cry. Kelly will stop talking for a moment to ask if she’s okay. Karen will merely shrug, stumble through the basement to find her coat. She will pack that night, everything she owns or cares about in her little Toyota Prius. (In the end she will only take the first piece of furniture she ever bought – a bookcase – and her works of art. One of them will be a piece Pam painted for her, and Karen will think about burning it. Instead she’ll wrap it in bubble wrap, and place it carefully on the back seat of her car.) Karen will leave a note for her landlord along with a check for next month’s rent, and buy all new stuff from the IKEA in Elizabeth when she gets to the city.

She’ll sell her car, buy a monthly metrocard, and she will feel something like a real New Yorker. She will swear it to anyone who asks, until she starts to believe it herself.

She’ll find an apartment in the FiDi, near Water Street and hoards of NYU students grumbling about the distance between them and campus, about the latest strike being held, about whether or not the school should accept celebrities. Her apartment will have stunning views of the water, of the Brooklyn Bridge, and even though the East River never gets that Caribbean blue, it will be good enough for Karen, good enough for a girl who will leave her heart in post-industrial Scranton, where paper is a way of life, and true love conquers all.

*

(darkness falls. the curtain rises.)
  . send a flower .
    . back to the garden .