Title: Intermezzo Author: A.j. Rating: Parental Guidance suggested. Spoilers: Season 2 opener. But nothing over. Hell, I don't know what I'm doing. It's Dad! Notes: Written because I got hit with a phrase that was so Dad it had to be written down. All mistakes are my own. Summary: Life in a hospital ward. *** Will knows he's alive because everything hurts. The chest is a given. Fuzzy as his last few moments of conscious are - Lee screaming and Tigh screaming and everyone |screaming| - he knows he got shot there. Right on the deck of his own command. He'd laugh if he wasn't sure his chest would explode. The way his side is twinging, it might even be concussive. He's fairly certain that the remaining maintenance crew wouldn't be all that thrilled with cleaning his guts off the bulkheads. Again. He's sure Doc Cottle would laugh at that if Will could get those words out around the breathing tube. Will's days involve a lot of blinking in incremental amounts. It's all rather frustrating when it comes to detailed and witty communication. Blinking, glaring, and physical therapy. In his darker moments before being shot, he'd thought everything would have been easier if they'd all just been blown out of the sky on D-Day. Fiery death and then nothing. Easy. Simple. Clean. Now, it's a rare ten minutes when he isn't thinking that. He wiggles his toes. The sheets are scratchy with the after effects of industrial detergent - medbay having a lock on most of the sanitation supplies - and smell faintly of lemon. He wiggles his toes some more. And hey, whaddya know, it hurts. He's not exactly liking this theme. He has absolutely nothing to do. The machines he's hooked up to breathe in and out for him. Beeping quietly in time with what he assumes is his heart. It's lulling. The monotone of the electronics is hypnotizing. He sleeps more than he should. The beeping next to him continues. Pushing and pulling him back down. He'd slept for five days. Blood loss and stress and fatigue and a great gaping hole in his chest conspiring to keep him down and out. And he still sinks down down down in a moment's notice. Sleep. Dozing. Sleep. The beeping fades, and there is nothing but dark until the dreaming begins. Strangely, he dreams of Laura Roslin. She is sitting in his apartment back on Caprica - which is entirely impossible and a dead give away that this is a dream - settled comfy as you please on his couch. She is reading to him from the collected works of Gilliam Naedrus She is beautiful and soft and female, and when she smirks at him over the top of her book, her reading glasses slide to the end of her nose. She never even stumbles over the formal metered phrasing. He thinks he could have loved her, given different circumstances. Given these circumstances. And that realization is bitter in his mouth and the back of his throat. Her dream voice is quiet and steady. She reads of gods and men and visions, but he hears none of that. Just her voice rising and falling over words. His dream self watches her turn the pages, fingers graceful and body backlit by the bright Caprican sun. She was a teacher in another life. Laura Roslin shaped young minds. Lead them towards knowledge. He's not sure there's really that much of a difference now. He wakes again to his beeping and an empty bedside. Everything hurts. -fin-