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Distraction by SwooningSummary: Idle speculation on a possible reason the President might find arelationship with the Admiral too "distracting." It's crack, of a sort. A/R, someRoslin/Adar, Adama/Carolanne (flashbacks). MA for mature themes (D/s) and graphicsex.Categories: General, Drama Characters: NoneGenres: AngstWarnings: BDSMChallenges: NoneSeries: NoneChapters: 9 Completed: No Word count: 26876 Read: 16345 Published: Jul 08, 2007Updated: Dec 31, 20081. Distraction by Swooning2. Meanwhile, on Galactica... by Swooning3. The Telephone Hour by Swooning4. Secure Space by Swooning5. Rapture by Swooning6. Intermezzo by Swooning7. The Taste of Home by Swooning8. Accessories Make the Outfit by Swooning9. After the Storm by SwooningDistraction by SwooningAuthor's Notes:Note on the BDSM warning: Please be aware that although this fic does not involveS & M specifically, it involves some D/s philosophy (and some light bondage anddiscipline) and is probably not to everyone's taste. If it bothers you to considerthis, please just think of it as crack or ignore it altogether. The standarddisclaimers apply: If I owned these characters I would be all about themarketability, which certainly wouldn't include spanky D/s between middle-agedpeople on national television since we know THAT would never sell. /ironyIt hadnt been all the time. It hadnt been every time. But it also hadnt been

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the first time, for Laura, and she supposed Richard had just sensed it, smelled iton her somehow, like the wolf hed been.

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She prided herself on her self-sufficiency, on her private nature. She had beensingle throughout her career, as a teacher and a principal, a districtsuperintendent in the Colonies largest district, and then planetary Director of

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Education for Caprica. And at no time had there been scandal, had there beengossip, had there been a hint of any proclivity that was the least bit

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unconventional.Oh, of course people knew that she was sleeping with Adar, and had been for atleast ten years prior to her appointment as Secretary of Education. That hardlymattered, she was still the logical candidate for the job, and shed been more

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than skilled enough in that role to more than counteract any suggestion shed

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slept her way there. She hadnt Adar would have been foolish to appoint anyone

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else, and he had never been foolish. Other things, but never that.But the precise nature of their relationship that was what might have raised some

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eyebrows, even in sophisticated Caprica City, especially from those who assumedthe liason was all about convenience and ambition. It wasnt. Or from those who

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assumed that the dynamic had her at the top, a strong woman carrying that roleinto the bedroom. She hadnt.

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What bothered her sometimes, though not always, was why. She wasnt nave, she

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knew how she was wired, and clearly Adar had known as well. There had been hints,flirting with possibility, since she worked on his early campaigns. He spotted herin the crowd, favored her, moved her up through the ranks and increased hervisibility. It never hurt, he later pointed out with rather cruel cynicism, tohave the most efficient worker in the bunch also be the prime eye candy to placebehind his shoulder at the photo ops.Not until after he was the mayor of Caprica City had the flirting taken on a moreliteral note. Eye contact, fleeting brushes of fingers as documents were passed inmeetings, the usual sort of thing but more, there was an intimacy when he spoke

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to her. No longer about campaign work, of course; a woman in her position (at thetime, the district superintendent in the city of which he was mayor) did notvolunteer in political campaigns; she appeared at dinners, at functions. Sheattended select cocktail parties, and rarely gravitated towards Adar on theseoccasions because she had her own agenda of mingling to pursue. But if she wasnext to him, and chance had it that nobody was likely to overhear, it was as ifshe was still answering phones at campaign headquarters, preparing mailouts,assembling poll results he would half-glance her way, and state what he wanted,

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and she would get it or do it without a second thought. A drink, an hors douevre

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little things. No name spoken to catch her attention, no request. He said it, shemade it happen, just like always. A pattern that was lost on neither of them. Apattern that might have startled most people that knew her, with the exception ofa very few men who werent likely to say anything.

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It was never related to work, not to the work she did for money, at any rate, eventhough it had started with the campaigning. Richard was a professional, she was aprofessional, and in that life she was as likely to run things as he was but she

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knew all too well that people can lead all sorts of lives, some of them seeminglycontradictory, and that Richard was tacitly suggesting they cross a line bysometimes drawing her into that other dynamic. He just knew, and he knew that sheknew

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It was after a legitimate meeting that the inevitable finally happened, thatthings ran late, that she was the last attendee on her way out the door. He heldher back on some pretext, it hardly mattered what, as both of them knew they wereonly waiting a half-hour or so for safetys sake, to make sure nobody would return

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for a forgotten file, to know that the secretaries and assistants had all clearedout for the evening.There was no seduction. No honeyed words, no demeaning ones either on thatparticular occasion, just the aloof command she expected, the breathlesscompliance he knew she would provide. Her knees were somewhat sore the next dayfrom the amount of time shed spent kneeling in front of him that night, but

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afterward he had praised her, stroking her hair, and rewarded her further byletting her come, too, when he frakked her hard and fast on his desk.It hadnt always been so easy to earn such rewards, of course. It wasnt an

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explicit bargain, she wasnt a slave, but it was clear to both that he owned a

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certain part of her from the outset: the part that had the orgasms, specifically.He played it superbly, was fond of being completely and professionally distantwith her one day, and displaying an almost conventional lover-like affection whennext they met. Keeping her guessing, wondering what the tone would be, and it only

grew easier when he appointed her to his cabinet they worked in adjacent

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buildings, then, and had every excuse in the world to stay late. They were alsocloser to her place, although she preferred to keep that space to herself and hewas practiced enough not to insist.It had been inevitable because of who she was, because of who Adar was, notconvenience but serendipity that events should bring two such like-minded people

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into such close proximity that they really couldnt avoid one another forever. And

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if Laura sometimes wondered why she needed this particular extreme in arelationship, when she was so very much in control in almost every other aspect ofher life well, to give Richard credit where it was due, she might have wondered,

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but she usually didnt care.

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He didnt overplay it, which was probably why it went on as long as it had. Near

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the end what turned out to be the end things had started to change. It was

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subtle, but it was there. Lauras guard was up too firmly, perhaps, because she

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was more concerned with the cancer (about which Richard did not know) than she waswith Richards pleasure, and he sensed that she was withholding something. It was

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he who crossed the line between personal and professional, using her obviousdistraction to slip the double-cross with the union past her; she wondered,sometimes, if she would have ended it with him then, had things not gone as theyhad.But of course, that no longer mattered. In fact, to say it no longer mattered

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was an understatement of stunning degree. Because Richard had shortly thereafterbeen blown to smithereens, and she had his job now for the second time sinceleaving Caprica for good, and she had a new and wholly unexpected set of things todistract her. The cancer, for one thing. Although the prospect that there might besome new Cylon-based cure still lurked out there, coloring her perspective andgiving her a hope she wasnt sure she wanted. Hope was itself a distraction, it

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led to inevitable what-if thinking, which she didnt have time for.

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She also didnt have time for the distraction that was Adama, who she knew to be

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very different from Adar in so many fundamental ways. He was not nearly as easy,for one thing. She would have said that he was ethical to the bone, and was nopolitician but then there was the lie about Earth, his use of the Cylons body to

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try to trick the terrorists holding Billy and Lee and the others hostage. Shewould have said he was born to command, but on the other hand he seemed to have agenuinely egalitarian view of leadership, allowing his staff more freedom inachieving their ends than micromanaging Richard would ever have dared. A freedomhe could allow them because, she knew, they had such a deep and abiding loyalty toAdama. He might have been lacking something, some key element that those at thetop needed there was a reason hed never really been made an admiral during his

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career but Laura had to wonder whether lacking that quality was such a bad

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thing. If Adar and Cain were the standards, then how could Adama be considered aninferior model?So, while she steadfastly told herself that ethical, egalitarian Adama was plainvanilla, entirely unlikely to be a provider of whatever it was, that strange thingshe knew she needed, that dynamic that she hated to call domination or submissionbecause there was more going on than that for her while she told herself that,

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she had occasionally caught something in his voice, an edge, a stoniness, and beendevastated by the what-if. She always had to slam the door shut on that line of

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thinking, stuff it back as deep into her subconscious as she could, but theperversity of her nature meant that it couldnt stay there long. She played on the

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edge, daring him to give her commands, flirting with the part of the dynamic thathad nothing to do with sex but it did, of course it did, and even as she laughed

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at his gruff orders, at his stony-faced authority, she knew there was a venue in