She can't help but come home again. This is what humanity's capable of at its highest moments: faith and mercy, beyond anger or fear. That's what strength looks like, and it's how we're going to win. She's so charming when she's at a loss, when she's forgotten to be angry or manipulative; there's a disarming kind of rawness and humor behind everything she does, when she's forgetting to be Madam Airlock for a second. "Okay. Sorry. You have this, uh... You have this big hole in your hide, as Cottle would say. Okay. All right. I'm gonna do this again..." He can't believe her; as he slips into the morpha he's amazed by her. "It's the least I can do. I think you're gonna live. As usual." Heh. "You know something?" he says drowsily, as she continues to work. "You're very pretty." Duh. She snorts and keeps working on him. "Man, that morpha worked fast." Thy drugs are quick.

BHARGO DEVASAYA DHIMAHI

"Still," Gaius says, grinning, climbing higher and higher. "Do you know why I'm so serene right now?" Laura, indulging and funny: "You're doped out of your mind?" No, of course not. He's a crazy cult leader! It's gotta be because... Yep. "Because I know God. You need God, Laura. Really, you'd be a different woman." Word. "I know God, therefore I know myself. Truth is I was harboring the most awful, desperate guilt."

Laura freezes.

"A heavy, dark... Unimaginable, soul-breaking guilt." Their hands over his wound, holding him together. The fragile bodies of us all. He looks at her face. "Now it's gone. Now it's gone, it's been transformed. Into... I have been transformed."

She's angry at him for doing this; nothing moves. There is no movement. Her tone is questioning, light, as she asks. "What was your guilt about?"

Gaius smiles. "I have no guilt."

"What was your guilt about?" Begging him to say it, begging him not to say it. Begging it not to be true. Because if she finds herself, as the body politic, standing over that, if she finds out that his innocence, far from simply dubious, is covered in more blood than she could ever contemplate, if she is standing above the man to blame not only for New Caprica but for the Exodus, if these things are true, then another part of the world falls down. Maybe an integral part. Maybe the essential part.