BSG fic: Maybe Especially Now (Sam, Helo [Sam/Helo], NC-17)

[cynthia_arrow]

I don't expect anyone'll want to read this. It's taken a lot of work, but I'm still not sure it's what I want it to be. It's long, and it's angstier than what I normally care to write. But I'm posting it anyway, because it's as done as it's going to be.

Title: Maybe Especially Now
Characters/Pairing: Anders, Helo (Anders/Helo); but very much concerning Kara/Anders as well as Helo/Sharon
Rating: NC-17 (references to sex are mostly slash but also some het, too)
Summary: Sam reflects back on Kara and Helo's time with the C-Bucs on Caprica. Angst. AU-ish, but trying to keep it as close to canon as possible. Spoilers for "Crossroads, part two." 10,800 words.
Notes:
1) I am probably stretching out the timeline a bit, especially how long Kara is at the Farm and what sort of plans for a rescue mission might've gone on back at Delphi Union High in the interim. Needed time for the boys to get properly angsty and lean on each other. But I'm aiming at something that looks canonical.
2) Written for bsg_slashathon, prompt #30: Come, break me down. Bury me, bury me (lyrics from "The Kill," by 30 Seconds to Mars)


Maybe Especially Now

His fists were bleeding when he came to them. It took Sam some time to notice. It's not that Helo can't make you notice him if he wants to. He mostly doesn't. Certainly not when he's hurt.

Eventually, Sam did notice, and he asked him, "You wanna take care of that?"

Helo just shrugged, perched there uneasily on the steps outside Delphi Union High. Kara gave Sam a look that suggested he leave Helo alone, let him brood, so he did. Then, he didn't know what Helo had to brood about. It took some telling. But that came later.

Before dinner that night, Sam found him sitting with his back to the west wall, watching Kara playing pyramid. For a moment, he didn't even see that it was her, which was remarkable-from the first encounter they had in the woods, he felt like he noticed everything about her. But just then he was more invested in getting a read on what sort of hell Helo was carrying around with him. Everybody had one; every one of them was a little like a walking grenade. The more silent a person, the more Sam tended to worry about pulled pins.

Sam sat down beside him, setting two bottles on the dry ground between them.

"She's good," he said as he watched this improbable woman make a rusty move over Barolay's head to score.

Helo just nodded without looking at him.

"This is gonna hurt like hell," Sam said.

Helo didn't move and he didn't take his eyes off Kara as Sam poured the hydrogen peroxide over the drying blood on his fists. A moment later, when he poured the water to rinse the red-orange foam away, Sam asked him:

"You and her…?"

Helo shook his head, then his face lit into a bitter smile. "I'm not that smart, and she's not that stupid."

That was not really Helo, of course-that defeated snarl. But that was Helo then.

In the small hours of the morning, Kara told him the story about how the toaster they'd been seeing for weeks was Kara's friend, Helo's partner. Apparently, his lover. The story seemed as strange as the eerie light that crept over the horizon. Even now, Sam thinks he understood things even less once he knew.

Maybe especially now.

*

Kara threw up most of what she ate that first day and part of the second. She wasn't used to the radiation. Helo was. The way he stuck in the needle with the meds was halfway between vicious and perfunctory.

So was his eating. Anyone left on Caprica had made up his or her mind a long time before to live, but that didn't mean they were always happy about it. In fact, there were times Sam downright resented the little things he had to do to keep himself alive. The day Kara Thrace showed up was not one of those days.

The way she knocked back ambrosia the second night meant Sam could hardly stop looking at her. It wasn't just the drinking but the way she did it, like she hadn't yet realized how terrible it all was. Or maybe like she'd known before she ever set foot on the planet again, with that crazy story about myths and arrows; maybe she chose it like she chose to tip back that dusty bottle and swallow down something sharp and bitter. But she laughed and laughed, until his own lungs stretched full of welcome air and his diaphragm hurt later.

Kara Thrace radiated something, and everyone felt it-except, apparently, Helo, sitting in the corner on an old crate, staring up at a stain on the ceiling. Sam wandered over to him once with a cup of ambrosia and said maybe he should go outside, get some air. His green eyes shone like copper in the dim orange lantern light, and he just shook his head and forced a smile.

That forced smile crept up along Sam's spine and settled in the strain on his shoulders, even when he couldn't see the tall, lean, almost gaunt figure (no less stringy and hollow than himself) hunched over his own long, long legs, swishing ambrosia in a cup, occasionally snickering at Kara's jokes, but mostly staying so quiet no one much noticed him.

Only much later did Sam realize how much he must've been watching Helo after all without quite being conscious of it. He gave off some kind of energy, too. Mostly when Sam saw him those days, he would be sitting silently in the room everyone else was in-never alone even though he was wary of everybody, even Kara. Sam had seen a lot of that, too, every time they picked up a stray. His face was pinched up, and once or twice, he flinched and Sam thought he was going to punch something. Something else, anyway.

When the better part of the group finally decided to turn off the lights and crash where they were, in a temporary oblivion of alcohol and full bellies and blissful darkness and heavy sleep, there was one man still out there searching for something and Sam had to go looking for him. Not that he thought he'd gone far. There was nowhere to go.

Scooping up the bottle and a pack of cigarettes, Sam stumbled into the night, but he found that he was afraid to say anything to Helo, even after he reached his side where he leaned there against the old playground equipment. Maybe it was the natural silence of the place, the way the empty world seemed to echo in the dark, or maybe it was just Helo.

Sam scuffed at the dirt with his shoe, and Helo said quietly, "Starbuck told you."

"Yeah."

"You told the rest of them?"

"I had to."

"I could tell by the way they looked at me." After a pause: "It's good they should know."

Sam nodded to himself but didn't reply. He searched the sky for stars, futilely. The haze was still too thick.

He was about to say something about that when Helo started talking again.

"For a couple of hours," he said, "I wished she was dead." He took in a loud breath. "But only if I could be the one to get to kill her, and I can't. I keep wondering where the frak she is. I don't even..." He shook his head, holding up his hand and closing his fist tight, gashes on display. "But for a couple of hours..."

Sam lit a cigarette then and took a few drags before he held it out for Helo. He watched the red glow move closer and closer to his mouth, the smoke rise over and over into the sharp cool air. He could hear his breathing and feel the heat coming off his body and smell the familiar odor of sweat and skin.

After he heard the butt softly tap against the ground, Sam said, "You should sleep."

"I know." But he didn't move.

Neither did Sam.

When Sam woke up the next morning, before the sun, Helo was sound asleep tucked in against the wall, close enough to touch Morris but decidedly not touching him. Kara had wrapped herself around Sam when he came in, or as much as Kara was apt to let her limbs tangle with another person's. Her voice in his ear said she was starving, could they go find some food? Karl will be okay, she said, as if she could read his mind.

They ended up frakking in the kitchen, fast and hard and desperately against the wall. Her mouth tasted like stale ambrosia and that's the way she always tasted to him-after he got her back, after she found him again, after he married her, after he got her back, until she was gone.

That morning, she didn't throw up her breakfast. Helo didn't eat any, and he slept like the dead through lunch. Sam drifted in and out of the room all morning, as if even when he was asleep, Helo would know if he was alone. Sam had the strangest notion of lying down beside him, curling around him until his face was resting against the tight back of Helo's neck, and sleeping soundly. It was a foolish feeling, and he chalked it up to his own exhaustion.

He hadn't slept at all the night before, not with Kara's breasts pressed against his shoulder blades and her hands on his stomach. Not after watching the stars and wondering how someone could make love to a Cylon and not know.

*

Helo is shit for pyramid, but that's never mattered to Sam. People think he should be a snob about it, and he can be when it suits him, but when it comes down to it he's really not. When you genuinely love the game, you can play it with pros in front of crowds or with a half-exhausted, awkward raptor pilot for a cheering section of one. As long as the court is regulation and there's passion for the game.

It's not that Helo's an uncoordinated person, but there's a particular way of using your body that suits pyramid, and Helo doesn't have it. But that third day they were with them on Caprica, Sam was restless-maybe because they were with them, he thinks now-and it was good to knock bodies with someone who wasn't graceful, who left bruises.

Kara was watching, cheering either man raucously by turns. He'd played pyramid with her already, and it had led where pyramid so often did when he played it to flirt. The sex with Kara was amazing and not at all different from the game. He told her that, then. But it wasn't until the next day that the idea really caught up to him. As he said in Helo's ear, Let's call it a draw, walk away with bruises but with pride intact, he thought it: if pyramid is any indication of frakking… He didn't want to be thinking it, but he was.

He flung himself in an old chair, the metal hot in the sun, and watched Kara affectionately throw herself over Helo's shoulders, even though he tried to shrug her off. Helo stripped off his tanks and Sam gulped down a lungful of air that didn't quite fill him up. Never full; always needing too much, especially now in the wake of the attacks. He couldn’t name very many of the group that he hadn't at least literally slept with and a few he'd frakked or been frakked by-some of which, the C-Bucs, he'd sworn for years that he wouldn't, because you don't frak around with your teammates. Yet he had. But still, he couldn't remember feeling exactly the way he did once Helo and Kara arrived, so desperate for something that he couldn't even keep his eyes off either one of them. Partly, he thought, it was a irrational fear that they would disappear if he did, back into the woods where they'd come from, back to that battlestar they belonged to.

Eventually, Kara spun away from the court and back to the building, and it left his attention undivided and even sharper. As his breathing came back to him, he plodded along the wooded path to the creek just yards from the school grounds, hand on his gun, ears open, but eyes all too focused on the wide expanse of back in front of him. It was okay: Helo led with his gun, too.

Helo stripped down to his shorts and unselfconsciously began to clean himself up. After the initial shock of the cold water, his movements were careful, reined in-always, Sam noticed, except when they were playing pyramid. The dust on his arms turned to mud as he slapped water onto them, but then he rinsed himself clean and stood there looking so composed, as if he hadn't been grabbing and shoving and grunting and swearing at him just moments before. He sometimes thinks of Helo as a stone statue, one which occasionally comes to life with fierce emotion. When he does, there's a reason, and it shows first in his face. Sam learned that day to watch for those eruptions, to practically covet them, these things he even more rarely allows himself.

As Helo was bent over, scrubbing at his ankle, a tree branch broke with a crash downstream from them. Helo started to dive for his pants, his gun, but Sam called him off.

"It's nothing. It's fine."

Helo nodded, but soon he climbed back onto the bank anyway and gestured to Sam to take his turn cleaning up.

Later, Kara found so many new bruises on him, and she pressed her lips to them softly, teasingly. But as Sam stood in that cold creek, he could see only red distressed places on his skin, not yet bruises but promising. That was good. Kara didn't end up leaving any marks that lasted much beyond her fleeing the planet. Her dog tags, yes, and so many other intangible things that meant more in the long run; but as fast and hard as they frakked, she never sank her teeth in hard enough that he could see it when she was gone. But Sam kept one of Helo's pyramid bruises for so long after he was gone that he got to where he wouldn’t look at it. Couldn't.

Helo stood on the bank, and Sam could feel his eyes on him. Just what he saw he didn't know and didn't want to know. Touching would've been easier. It always was, wasn't it? It would've been so easy for Helo to come down those few paces and press up against his back, maybe even halfway innocently, to let his hands skate over Sam's skin to help get him clean.

He didn't, of course, and soon enough Kara was slipping through the trees and splashing down into the water with him, affectionate in a way that surprises him even more now than it did when he didn't know her so well. Maybe she was feeling it, he tells himself, that same desperate thing he felt. If nothing else, she was less self conscious in front of Helo than with his team. It was easier for her to touch, too. She planted kisses all over the back of his neck and almost succeeded in making him hard, standing there in a cold creek bed with Helo's eyes digging into him, into skin and down into muscle and bone.

Digging why, he doesn't know. It's hard to say, because Helo still seems like this block of stone, so many things going on inside him they can't help but well up into his eyes from time to time-but only there. Maybe, too, in the hunch of his shoulders. But that day, Sam saw only his eyes, how they looked at him appraisingly but kept cutting away to that place downstream where the branch broke. Hoping.

Helo has never stopped hoping, and not just about Sharon but so many things. Most people think that's a good thing. On his less cynical days, so does Sam.

But today-when the day finally begins, that is-is probably not going to be one of them.

*

Dinner time on Caprica, at the school, was always hectic, a constant stream of people in and out of the kitchen, constant chatter. When they were there safe, biding their time and recouping, their routine was rather unvarying, comforting to some but to others like a steady drip of the faucet that keeps you awake all night. That is, of course, if a metaphor about a faucet is precisely agonizing enough for the drip of miserable days strung together in the wake of a holocaust, days when you should be dead so all that's left for you to do is to not die.

It's no wonder, he thinks, that they ended up going back to Caprica City, blowing up toasters-anything to fill the days, even that ill-advised mission of Kara's to the air strip.

Dinner was busy and loud, but breakfast was so different. Sam was usually up before the sun and before anyone else, and he could make the kitchen a sphere of serenity, of productive calm, as he rifled through their supplies and decided if it was an oatmeal or grits sort of morning, and what kind of canned fruit he might unearth from the pantry. Tea or coffee. Powdered milk or past-date juice.

Kara or Helo.

No, he thinks-he wasn't deciding that; it wasn't a decision. Never has been. The contrast, though, was still there.

Kara stood in the kitchen at sundown that second day, talking excitedly as she tried to burn some half-crazy plan into his brain. She made no effort to help him cook-hell, he couldn't imagine her even boiling water, and on another Caprica he'd learned his instincts were right-but instead she watched his hands as he opened can after can of stew. He was dumping them all into the large pot when Helo came in and Kara stopped talking altogether. Sam looked up to find them doing that weird thing they did sometimes, the talking without talking.

By that point, he'd already asked her if she'd ever frakked Helo, and she swore she hadn't. Maybe that was the problem, he thought. But it wasn't. Didn't matter if it was lust. Lust comes out in a lot of forms, and for Helo and Kara it came out only in things like sly, digging grins over Triad or inside jokes on the flight deck. He didn't see those then, of course. He only saw Kara's face quirk into a frown even as Helo stepped across the kitchen to her side.

But Helo was mostly jovial, asking her, "You gonna help out or just stand here distracting the man while he tries to make dinner?"

Sam remembers mumbling something that was supposed to sound sarcastic, about how she was full of herself or he wasn't that easily distracted, but for a second Kara wasn't paying him a damn bit of attnetion. She flicked Helo's tags with her finger and had another silent exchange with him as she moved toward the door, finally coming around to Sam's side of the middle counter to pull his face down and kiss him deep and wet.

"If I'd meant to distract…" she said, grinning at him as she went out into the din, closing the kitchen door behind her.

Sam couldn't recall it ever being closed before then, even when he and Hillard screamed at each other over a stupid plan that had ended up working. (Sometimes they didn't work. Sometimes people lived through two hells only to be carried off a barren, useless algae planet in a body bag for playing at soldier one too many times. That, too, at Sam's behest.)

He's remembering this closed door now, he thinks, because things were different that night. Not just because of Kara being there, but also because of Helo. Helo was helping add cans of stew to the pot when Sam realized his face must've been flushed. Had to have been, since he was mostly hard and praying it wasn't obvious. Didn't make it any easier to be around Helo, who moved around behind him to reach for more cans; the heat of his body made him take in a deep breath.

But Helo's voice was, of course, not seductive in the least.

"Do you do everything around here?" he said. For no good reason, he was smiling.

So Sam smiled, too, and it seemed to break open something hard in his chest. "The make me frakkin' crazy sometimes," he mumbled in reply. "Need a break somtimes."

Helo just raised an eyebrow and kept picking up cans. After they dumped in the last, he said, "So, want me to leave you alone?"

Sam found his mouth curling around a no, but he said, "Yes."

For half an hour, they talked about everything and nothing and waited for stew to begin to bubble. When someone banged on the door, it startled him out of a pair of green eyes and away from a pair of large, capable hands, both telling stories his lips were only hinting at.

It was time for the horde to come back in-and Kara, still talking to Helo with her eyes.

Before, as they had been cooking, Sam had asked him, "What was that with Kara?"

"What?"

"When you came in…?"

"Nothing."

"Didn't look like nothing."

"Known her a long time, that's all."

"And?"

"The thing you have to know about her… She never does anything halfway. Always full tilt. Doesn't stop until something stops her."

He'd felt it like a threat, but it was actually nothing so personal. Maybe it should've been. Helo said something similar to him months later, in the hall of remembrance on Galactica, but he was too frakkin' drunk to remember the words, only that vaguely infuriating tone he had that made Sam feel like he hadn't really known her.

The next morning Helo was waiting on him in the kitchen to start breakfast. He had already made some strong Picon tea, and they opened the back door to let in the crisp pre-dawn air as they drank it. Sam sat in the doorway smoking and Helo paced a bit over to the pot every few moments, to wait for it to boil again. It made Sam nervous. Neither spoke.

Finally, Sam shot him a look and he sat down. Too close. Never any sense of personal space, even for such a man as never really let people in. Gets as close as he wants to you, to understanding you in some spooky way, but doesn't quite let you in. Except Sharon.

Sometimes, that bugs him. Sam feels like he was there before Sharon in a way, at least before Sharon got that steady hand of hers wrapped completely around the man's heart. She was dangerous, everyone said. Of course. Quite. A Cylon. But her love was fixed and pure, even then. Helo must've felt it. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have been so twitchy.

That morning Sam was on edge, too. It was as if the world had turned upside down on his little rituals, those habits that added to the numbness of the days or beautifully, thankfully ordered them. The night before had been calm, bubbling stew and talk that didn't matter. Maybe he was experiencing things the way everyone else did before dinner, winding it up, winding it down, winding it out. That morning was more like everyone else's, too: waking up to everything all over again. Helo's knee grazed his, and he felt claustrophobic. The kitchen door was hanging wide open. He felt too vulnerable like that.

Gurgling water made him leap to his feet and stride across the kitchen, facts listing themselves out in his head with each step. Oatmeal. Juice. Mission today. His cigarette dangling from the end of Helo's fingers. Down the hall, fifty someodd people he was in charge of. (55, he thinks; had been 53, soon after 53 again, not that the numbers would reflect the gains, the losses, the gains…) Oatmeal. Cigarette. 55 people; 53 plus two. And somewhere, a Cylon woman pregnant with a good man's baby.

He was too nauseated to eat. He didn't want to stir up the oatmeal. He did anyway. When he turned back to the doorway, Helo was gone. He'd heard him go.

Later, Kara asked them what they'd been talking about over bitter tea and the sunrise. He wasn't sure he'd seen the sunrise, and he wasn't sure Helo had tasted the tea, but he didn't say that because it was absurd and because Kara's eyes asked again, and Helo snapped at her:

"Don't you two have a brilliant plan to work out, Kara?"

Sam was startled to see her blue eyes narrow. She spit out, "Now why do you suppose I need a plan in the first place, Karl?"

Too many names, he thought; and who knew why they were sometimes one and sometimes the other. He was always just Anders. Except to Kara. He liked to think of her dog tags, after she left him, as half of a matching set, like there was an imaginary S. Anders around her neck that would always translate to Sam.

He has his own tags now, and they hang around his neck. S. Anders. Anders again. But he hadn't had them soon enough for one to burn up with her in that viper. What's worse is how he can't even imagine those invisible ones, the Sam to her Kara, were there with her when she went down; her own hung around her neck, right back where he'd put them over something that doesn't seem to matter anymore.

Kara is gone.

Her absence for those days on Caprica doesn't even register for him sometimes; he forgets it happened if he doesn't actively think about it. It seems a blink of the eye in comparison to this-at least when he measure it against his anger, how it hadn't even had time to burn out yet, not like it has now, burned down until all that's left is a heavy lump where his heart was. His heart that's still there somewhere, because it just keeps stubbornly beating.

*

He needs Barolay. He needs to get her here. She'd make a good pilot, he's sure. Better than him.

In the end, it had been Barolay to tell him to pay attention to whatever it was that was threatening to go black and dangerous inside him. Funny, but he hadn't even known it, not really. Yes, Kara was gone, and yes, he was angry, but Helo was the reckless one, wasn't he?

To say they played pyramid is ridiculous. You don't play when bad shit goes down and you're trying to fight your way out of it. You get so tense you want to smash things, but you don't. Not often, anyway. Instead, you don't sleep and you find yourself walking dead but, still, going round and round a pyramid court with Helo. Helo and nobody else because the rest of them knew how to hit right.

It was stupid. He should've just gone through the motions with someone who knew the motions, who knew how he always thought better when he was playing. But maybe he didn't want to think, and now even the Pyramid made thinking unavoidable. He kept thinking how it should've been Sue-Shaun that he went round and round with, the last woman he'd learned to dance so well with that he could look in her eyes and take in the curve of her back and still manage to score, to plan, to feel in control. He was just about to get there with Kara, too. And those were the very two they lost; sometimes, in his more self-centered moments, it felt like punishment.

Helo had come to him the evening of that second day after the failed strike on the airstrip, when they knew what they were going to do to recover his people but couldn't do it yet. They played with almost no light, not that it mattered: they were playing by feel, by a thigh cutting sharp against his, by a shoulder landing with a dull thud against Helo's back. Maybe Sam had really thought it would be like pyramid was supposed to be under these circumstances, reassuringly automatic. It wasn't.

Still, Helo had come to him with a ball and they'd played, and he began to see how Helo's anger had not abated since he arrived but instead calcified, rock hard like his unyielding jaw when Sam accidentally elbowed him. Moments later, Helo very purposefully kneed him in the stomach, hard enough to hurt but not enough to make him heave. Then careless knocks became purposeful smacks of skin and bones, like they had no muscles or purpose anymore, just instinct. Until Helo grabbed him too hard and for a second, they were grappling-like they didn't know each other, like they weren't even them anymore.

That's clear enough in his head now, the feeling of that suspended second of negotiation. It's really all he remembers, other than what came after, how as soon as the second was over and his heart beat out his blood painfully through him, he took Helo down, even if it meant his own knees spiked with pain as he hit the ground. For a moment, Helo's whole bulk struggled up against his, solid abdomen hot and tight and hipbones crushing against his, but he had him at enough key points of pressure to hold him fast to the cold ground, at least for a moment. A moment was all it took. After a long breath went out of Helo, he went limp under him. Only then did Sam feel the tightness in his own body, how he very nearly gave way to just sinking down into him.

But he threw himself off Helo, and when he stood looking down at him, he didn’t have to say he was sorry. They'd learned to talk without speaking, too. Hell, they'd learned to talk without talking. He can still do it with Helo, even after all this time. People must think they're saying Caprica, but they're not, not even when they find each other at the wall of remembrance at the same time, and it should be about Kara-and it is, just as much as it was that day-but it's filtered over with something else.

I know you.

People there at the game which wasn't really a game knew him, too. When he pulled Helo up off the ground, Helo gave a sardonic smile and went to go clean up, and Barolay waited only a minute or two before she shoved a hand into his lower back and pushed him toward the building.

Even when he was helping Helo up-and his hand was gripping his hard like he might as easily tug him back to the ground as he would be pulled up to pretend like they were strong enough people to keep dealing with it all-he didn't understand. Maybe Helo did; it wouldn't surprise him.

Barolay certainly did. She said, "What the frak was that?"

"What?" He shrugged. "He's had it rough. We all have, but especially him. You don’t know the-"

"I meant, you didn't have to take him down like that."

"The hell I didn't. You saw him."

"Yeah, Anders," she said, leveling him with a cool but worn out look. "I saw."

She looked for a moment like she would say something else, but she didn't. She just abandoned him to the room and his torn shirt and bleeding arm.

In the morning, Helo didn't begrudge him the bruise on his jaw. He also had the good grace to ask him to go over the plan, one more time, like it was a good plan and not one as badly-conceived as the one that lost her in the first place.

He wonders, like he often does, what her plan had been the day she went after another raider. A bogey. A phantom like Kara's a phantom now. But he did not lose her to some plan, he thinks. Least of all his.

It's no comfort.

*

They shot toasters the next morning. The metal ones. Nobody seemed to be able to look at the skin jobs as entirely machines anymore. The hatred, though, if it were possible, was greater. If there had been a hundred Sharon Valeriis in the woods between them and their field base, he would have shot every last godsdamn one.

Helo was good with firearms. It didn't surprise him. He followed orders well, and somewhere in the back of Sam's mind, he hated him for it, as if it were his fault. All of it. Sharon. Kara. If he'd been a little less ready to let other people lead him… But Sam would catch his eyes across a span of trees and know it wasn't mindless following. It was believing that he was not the one to draw it all together, see it as if from above, know what the frak to do. There were reasons why Helo was a good fit with Kara.

They ended up behind the same tree, back to back, shoulders knocking together as their breaths came fast and hard. The toasters had retreated, or so it seemed, and Helo wanted to move ahead, Sam could see that. Perhaps if it had still been just him and the pregnant toaster, that might've been best; but there were too many of them, and someone was down off to Sam's left, moving but not well. They were in no condition to press forward yet, maybe never, not on this mission anyway.

Really, though, they couldn't have advanced even if they wanted to. It was never just a hit and run with the big metal jobs. That was more the style of the human-looking ones, to get off a few good shots and disappear. Made sense: they were more vulnerable. Sam felt strangely vulnerable there behind the tree with Helo, who, after all, did not entirely yield to command. There were reasons why Helo was a good fit with Kara.

"Let's move out," Helo snapped out under his breath.

"Not yet."

"She's not gonna wait on us."

"Then she doesn't wait. I can't-"

"You don't get it. She's smart. She won't move without a plan. But the thing is, she'll make a plan with what she's got, even if one person couldn't possibly pull it off."

"Helo, I can't control what the frak she does."

"No. You can dick around in the woods and let her hatch crazy plans that'll get her killed."

Sam could only breathe in response, heavy like a growl.

"Anders, I am not going back to Galactica and-"

"What makes you think you'll actually-" He cut himself off with a shallow intake of air.

Helo did the same, and after he was forced to let it out, he said through clenched teeth, "If anybody'll find a way, she will."

"Yeah, well just a second ago you were all about her getting her fool self shot in an escape attempt."

He could see Helo's angry sneer out of the corner of his eye, feel the energy gathering in him.

Helo said, "Well, I realize you've known her for all of five days, so you don't have the-"

Sam's pyramid reflexes were too fast for Helo's bulk and his static indignation. He shoved his gun crossways up and into his windpipe, and when he pressed his entire frame into Helo's, he felt every one of his muscles jump, but he didn't shove him back. He might have, if he'd wanted to, even with the threat of the toasters. Actually, he did want to, but he knew better. Or he was waiting for a cue, almost like a trained attack dog. Sam saw more in his eyes then than he'd seen all week, and it was darker and nastier than it had been before because Helo was letting it out-making Sam see it-on purpose.

Helo glared at him like if he let up even an ounce, he'd beat him within an inch of his life. Sam knows now that wasn't the case. Physically possible, even probable, but Helo rarely hits people. He uses his strong hands to protect people, even from themselves, but he doesn't attack, especially a superior, and somehow Sam had become that for him. Has always been that, the same precarious way Kara was. Helo's gun lay flat against his stomach, not an ounce of warning in it. His eyes burned him up-with anger, with wanting him to know how much damage he could do if he were a lesser man-but he didn't make a move, and Sam was defused enough by that to choke down all his vitriol, things he'd meant to say which, after all, would have been more about his own issues than Helo's unthinking retorts.

Letting up his hold a little, Sam said quietly, "We have a plan, and we're going to carry it out. You trust me to know what I'm doing?"

Helo stared at him so long it made him nervous, but in the end it wasn't about doubt, just about how he would play things. Finally, Helo just glared down at the gun, so Sam took it away.

Helo rolled right back into position looking around his side of the tree. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah."

So Sam didn't have to say they were part of his team now and he wouldn't leave them behind, just like later Helo didn't have to say I told you so. Kara really was crazy; she almost didn't make it out. But that was later. That day, they retreated to the school and nobody spoke for a while, his team because they were so damn tired of aborted missions and Helo because he was so damn tired of feeling like he'd been made a fool of.

When the next day the toaster who called herself Sharon swooped in to rescue them, it was Sam who felt the fool. He thinks he's maybe never quite forgiven her for that, even if it's absurd. He's forgiven her so many things, both for himself and because of Helo. But that day was too much. He hadn't been there to see Helo spin out of his own head at the realization that this was not Boomer but a Cylon, but he had been standing beside him when she came in that raider and something laid open his heart and he began to believe in the person she'd become.

Sam often thought, in those weeks to come, of what their life had been like, just the two of them alone trying to survive. And after the truth, what did she do when she was gone from him? It's possible she was on her own, seaparted from both Helo and the Cylons. Whether she was or not, she had endured something in losing him. What would she have done if she never found him again?

Sam doesn't have to wonder too hard at that. He felt it every time he looked at those frakkin' dog tags, and then later, every time he slept alone in his tent-his and Kara's-on New Caprica.

Kara's gone again, but it means something different this time. Not, strangely enough, because she's dead. Actually, a part of him fully expects he'll round the corner on some restless night, when he's running like she always did, and pass her in the corridor.

Hey, Sammy. I loop you yet, you lazy frakker?

Now, now that everything has changed, he doesn't wonder what he'll do if he never finds her again. He wonders what he'd say if he did.

*

Sam had entertained no serious notion of touching him, but it happened. And when it did, it was like every godsdamned conversation or pyramid game they ever had.

It's happened once since he's been on Galactica, one day when Helo found him going at the punching bag. He wasn't even supposed to be in there, but nobody ever said a frakkin' word about what Starbuck's Anders did. Helo strapped on a pair of gloves and joined him, and between punches, he let his own frustration slip, like the words were flying out of his hands. It was often, before and after then, that Sam was on the receiving end of Helo's moods. He didn't mind. He liked that he could help him burn off his anger and dissatisfaction.

That time it was about Sharon. Each punch laid out in succession every person on Galactica who had brought Sharon to her current state of scorching bitterness, but at the heart of it he was actually just as angry with her, angry that she was angry with him. Helo was making a habit of feeling persecuted then, even if most everybody liked the guy too much to really make him feel how crazy he was. Wasn't he crazy? Wasn't it crazy to trust a Cylon, much less to love one, when you knew she was one?

Once, Helo put it to him this way: she can't help it. She can help what she does, and what she does is good. She can't help who she is.

But as Helo's fists shot out and connected with his, pleasantly jarring, he kept thinking how who she was was a lie-just long enough to get him to love her. Helo loved a lie. But Sam didn't say that. Hell, he probably didn't even believe it then.

He hasn't in months. He knows Sharon now. She knows him, too, how there was that one time with Helo on Caprica and there was another time on Galactica. For some reason, it doesn't make her angry. He gets the impression that, for her, frakking is no more tied to romantic love as it is to friendship. Trust at the back of both. So she knows he let Sam frak him once, and she knows he frakked Sam, too. That's more than Kara ever knew.

After the aborted rescue mission, Sam was filled with more adrenaline than he'd remembered he could have. With it came the need again, no longer something he could hold at bay, and then there was Helo, following him into the kitchen, slamming doors and knocking into tables and letting his gun clatter to the low counter by the sink. They should've spent all their energy running, but they hadn't, because it wasn't just energy. It was will and plan, both stunted, pressed back inside them, and who knew how they would endure it again. Especially when Helo smelled like sweat and body odor and that tall, wild grass just outside the compound, and Sam let every stupid thing he'd been thinking actually be thought, for once.

Thought-that's all it was supposed to be. As if you can think and not feel. He can't even do that now, every time Helo comes to him with a pyramid ball or drops his tags in at the dance and calls out his name. But they manage well now without it coming to anything more than bruises, so it's hard for Sam to imagine that it was ever as carefully desperate as it was that night after the heavy bag, when they went to the storage room nobody ever uses except, apparently, for frakking. Desperate but deliberate-enough, at least, that they had the length of three corridors to decide not to do it, but they did it anyway. Deliberate when Helo bent him over a shipping container and stripped down his pants, opened him with his fingers, and frakked him hard and deep. Sam's hands scrabbled at the cracking wood so much he scraped half the skin off his knuckles, and it stung for days. Didn't scar though; just something Sam can remember as he looks at his fists, even here in the relative dark.

Most of the time, it's enough for Sam just to hover in Helo's space for a while. Makes him feel less alone. If he thought it wasn't the same for Helo, he wouldn't do it, but Helo comes to him. What for, he's never quite sure, but he comes. In the kitchen of the school that night, under harsh lights and with that frustration and failure lingering in their arms and eyes, he came, looming huge and angry in that small space. For some reason, with all of Helo's tension and sheer bulk so near, Sam's body went utterly still. He leaned over the stove as he fired it up, but he didn't lean back up. He all of a sudden felt as godsdamned tired as he was.

Then Helo was quiet, too, abruptly and unexpectedly, and it made Sam's pulse pound in his ears. Quiet like a vacuum, except it was more tangible than that; a careful, heavy, knowing quiet.

Then Helo moved, shattering the air with his hulking frame for an instant then swirling Sam's world back into a fluid motion, so that it was not inside him anymore but around him, like a cocoon. He came over to the stove, and Sam let himself be shunted off to the side, where he stood, turned up inside himself and watching as Helo picked up the large pot from the drying rack and set it down gingerly on the counter.

Sam hadn't felt quite so ineffectual and helpless since right after the attacks, after the first burst of survival instinct began to wane but before he learned to keep moving forward anyway, through the steady drip of not-dying days. It had been a few hours of sheer vulnerability and despairing futility. It was nonsensical, but he felt it again then, and it would've been enough to just make him let loose all his tension and energy if the thought of doing that didn't make him curl his arms around his body even tighter.

But he managed to say what he meant to say: "Stop."

"Stop what?" Helo replied casually, still focused on dinner.

"You're pissed," Sam said wearily. "I get that. So be pissed. Don't frakkin' tiptoe around me for-"

"I'm not tiptoeing," Helo said offhand, not looking at him.

"You sure as hell are. Now, anyway."

Finally, he turned. "What do you want me to do, Anders? Make enough noise in here to wake the frakkin' dead? I can't be angry anymore today. I just can't."

"But you are. You just were."

"So what?"

"So am I." He didn't know what argument he was trying to make, only that he didn't like having this affect on Helo or vice versa. It was bordering on dangerous, the way moods and tensions bounced between them, escalating. "You don't have to babysit me. I can make dinner by myself. I've been doing it since-"

"Then frakkin' act like it," he huffed. "Act like you're angry. Don’t be like this."

"Like what? Like you were when you came here? Frak, what? Didn't you just say you can't do it anymore? Well, maybe I can't either. You know how it goes. Kara might not, but you've been here long enough to know. One day's black, the next day's gray. The next day, you might as well flip a cubit, see how it lies."

"And you hope for the gray," Helo said, nodding.

"Yeah."

The room was utterly quiet, the sort that echoed over all the stainless steel and rose above the roar of the gas cranking up in the stove.

Suddenly, Helo's voice rose, strained, his eyes narrowed, dark and lost: "Here's what's so frakkin' stupid. I swear I thought I had whole moments that were… Now I know not a damn one of them was real. Kara, though. Kara's real. So don't you sit here on your ass and tell me you aren't…" His face contorted, pressing the words back.

"I can't afford to be."

Helo just nodded, then he turned away from him abruptly and carried the pot of water over to the stove. When he turned back to the counter, his hands tore into packets of potato soup mix, opening one after another and leaving them in a messy line down the back of the counter.

Sam hardly knew what he was doing, but he stepped forward, and his hands fell at Helo's waist, only pausing before they slipped around to his stomach, his palms sliding over the warm, damp fabric clinging to his abdomen; and Helo didn't do anything in response but let his head fall forward and let a long breath escape his lips.

Sam's mouth fell against the back of his neck, but he didn't kiss him. Still, he could taste his skin, and he wanted so much more of it that he couldn't make his brain focus. Everything was in his hands now, and in how warm Helo's ass felt against his groin as he let his body come to rest against him. He was only halfway hard, but he ached with it. It was a little terrifying, but he couldn't stop it. And Helo didn't try to stop him.

His fingers rubbed in long, steady strokes across Helo's stomach, drifting lower and lower until he began to catch his waistband, running smooth along it. Eventually, their breathing came in tandem, slow like some tacit ritual, and Sam wasn't exactly sure how to break away, not that this panicked stasis was any easier, just less hard.

Helo seemed to get warmer and warmer in his arms until they were both sweating. Sam's fingers slipped down below his waistband, and when Helo drew in a sharp, shallow breath, Sam felt suddenly shaky. His knuckles brushed across the head of Helo's cock, half hard and growing harder as Helo's hips shifted slightly. So Sam thrust his hand down to take hold of Helo's cock through his underwear, and Helo thrust his hips forward into it, though he was clearly a little bewildered and fighting it.

"I don't… Anders… Sam, I'm not…"

"Let me. Please." His heart leapt up into his ribs. "Or tell me to stop."

Helo's head fell forward even further. Sam's mouth followed it, and his body followed Helo's as his thighs came to rest against the edge of the counter and Sam came flush with his back, from his broad shoulders all the way down to his tight ass. He sucked at the salty, sweaty skin at the back of his neck as he worked his fingers over the fastenings on Helo's pants. Helo held himself so rigid he practically vibrated, but he didn't struggle or push him away, nor did he seem to want to. When Sam finally got Helo's pants and underwear down around his hips, just far enough, Helo's cock slid up through his grasp so easily, and when he tightened his grip, Helo finally let out a moan.

"Gods," he said. Then a few strokes later, "I don't know why you're… Frak, Sam. That's… But I don't want this if you don't-"

"Helo," he said. "Stop."

Helo did, but he also clenched up a little.

"You feel this?" Sam said, rutting his erection into Helo's naked ass.

"Okay," Helo said. "Yeah. Okay."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Helo said, finally unclenching a little. When he did, Sam could feel that he was shaking a little. "Just… Gods."

"Can I…? I need-- Shit, you're so warm. Wanna feel your skin against mine. That okay?"

Helo just nodded, so Sam let go of him long enough to strip down his own pants and underwear, and as he pressed back up against him, the hard length of his cock meeting Helo's lower back and his balls coming to rest against his ass, he was suddenly overwhelmed with sensations, with skin and with tastes and with smells and with the sound of Helo's breath hitching as his hips rocked back against him and forward into his hand.

Then Helo began to talk. Who could remember what the frak he said. It wasn't what he said that mattered anyway. He might've been begging or complaining or ordering; Sam can never be sure, even when he tries his hardest to remember. He does, sometimes, imagine being with Helo again, and there's always talk involved, but he can never get a handle on what the man actually said that night. Whatever it was left Sam shaky with need and adrenaline, everything focused down to the slide of his palm over Helo's cock and the way he could feel every shift and shudder and groan from deep in the man's body.

"Oh, shit," Helo huffed. "Shit. Gods, I need… I'm…"

"Want you. You get that, right? How much."

"Shit," he whined though clenched teeth. "Sam."

"I know you're not-- But I need… I need this. Please."

Helo didn't reply, only shivered. When he came a moment later, shooting off all over the counter and the floor, his breath came in ragged gasps as Sam pulled it all out of him, his own cock now throbbing and thrusting up between the cheeks of Helo's ass.

"Gods," Helo moaned, but only once.

When Helo came back to himself, still jerking his hips back into Sam's, he became strangely somber, like everything that had been weighing on him had suddenly pulled him down. Sam could feel it, and it made him nervous, that feeling at war with how hard and desperate he was.

After a long few seconds of internal debate, Sam started to pull away from him, to take himself in hand and just be done with it, but Helo said, low and serious, "You wanna frak me, Sam?"

Sam couldn’t move for a moment. Helo moved for him, thrusting an arm out behind him to catch Sam at the waist, drawing him back toward his body again. Sam drifted back, helpless.

Sam said, "Have you…?"

Helo shook his head. "Not that."

"Karl, I-"

"But you have, haven't you?"

"That's not the-"

"Sam. It's okay."

His hands were on Helo's hips, and he pressed his face up behind his ear even as he grimaced in confusion and, somehow, hurt. Everything hurt, and he was so hard he ached. But Helo's body was still warm against his, inviting him to linger a little while longer.

Those words, It's okay, still dig up from inside him at the most unexpected times-even the day they had the memorial for her, as it hit him he had nothing to bury, if there had even been a safe spot of ground to put her in.

When Helo frakked him on Galactica, it was slow and controlled, hard and overwhelming but measured. But when Sam frakked Helo in the kitchen on Caprica, though he wasn't unkind, he wasn't gentle. Maybe things had started that way, as comfort and reassurance Helo could take from him, but Helo had seen it through, and what he stayed for was giving it instead of taking it, letting Sam prepare him relentlessly but thoroughly with his own come and shove inside him all at once, so the hurt would be too much but fast. He grunted and clung to the countertop, knuckles white, and Sam had just enough patience to wait for Helo to breathe again, release his ribs and drop his head, before he pulled out and thrust back into him again.

Sam could feel when it started to be less like a brutal, relentless, but awkward game of pyramid and more like that kind of deliberate dance pyramid could be, and that's when he started to do some talking of his own, as he pounded into him, hips sloppy and hands clutching though Helo kept his pace. Sam remembers exactly what he said as he slipped in and out of him, but it embarrasses him to think about it. Too frakkin' honest. It's a wonder they can look each other in the eyes, even after all this time, even the day they put the absence of Kara's body supposedly to rest.

Helo was tight around him, and he only yielded as much as he needed to. Some people-and Sam was one of them for a time-mistake Helo's stoicism for reticence, but it isn't. He knows exactly how much to give. If Sam had planned it out, if it had been something a person planned, he would've wanted Helo inside him that night on Caprica, frakking him so patiently and thoroughly that he broke him down, broke it down, this thing like a lead weight in his gut, his heart.

But life wasn't what anybody planned or wanted, so Sam thrust into him over and over, still holding all those pieces of himself together because that's what he did back then, that's who he was and that's probably who he'll always be. He can blame circumstance-Caprica, New Caprica-but it was only that being the one in charge, being the leader, was easier, a good excuse to put himself out of his own mind, even as his hips slid up against Helo's, Helo's jerked against the table, and he wondered if Helo was doing the same thing. Surely he was, only it must've been harder for him.

Sam came hard and messy inside him with a grunt, and when he pulled out, Helo breathed out a loud, shallow breath.

Sam could only say, "I'm sorry."

"I know," he replied, without a hint of censure. Not that Sam doesn't feel it all the same.

The time they frakked on Galactica, Sam had a fleeting moment of wanting to be possessed by someone who would know just how to keep them both pulled tight, impervious, someone who would know just how deep to go; but it was soon gone, just as surely as it never bloomed at all on Caprica. There was Kara. There was a copy of an Eight who had a name and was a person. There was too much left to do that required a face of stone.

When they dressed after, Helo stopped him as he went to pull on his boots, grabbing him by the back of the neck and holding his head still so he could look him in the eyes and then kiss him on the mouth, familiar, friendly, brief.

"Tomorrow," Sam said. "We'll go get her tomorrow."

"Okay."

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

The water was boiling, so he dumped packet after packet of soup mix into the pot. Helo wiped up the semen on the counters and the floor.

Dinner was late.

*

The night before the aborted rescue mission on Caprica, Sam had what he thinks might've been his first panic attack. He's not sure if he should call them that, because there's never any immediate trigger. The room was dark and close and safe. Nothing woke him up but his own heart beating too fast and a wave of heat and nausea coming over him. His skin, his arms, his face felt heavy; he couldn't make himself move.

It's happened since then, but only maybe half a dozen more times. If he wears himself down enough, or if the world wears him down without just breaking him, he'll have these episodes. Always in bed, as he lies down to sleep, or startling him awake.

It's why he's lying awake now, rolling his mind over things he tries so hard not to think about. It's often this way. Doesn't matter that any number of other things might be the current problem-the time on Caprica, after, is the default position for his deepest, blackest fears. It had been that way on New Caprica, too. Kara was gone, and sometimes when he woke up in the morning, he expected to see the peeling paint on the ceiling of that derelict classroom, Helo's long form stretched out beside his.

Sometimes he still expects to see him. As he's lying here forced to be honest with himself, he thinks he wants to.

That night on Caprica when panic woke him, he wanted to slip out into the courtyard and just breathe. He wondered when he'd become that frakking claustrophobic. Maybe it was when he shifted and sighed and opened his eyes again to find a body moving across the room to him, a vague enough shape in the dim light of the lamp they kept burning at all hours, but he knew who it was instantly. Nobody else would have come. They'd learned to read him a long time ago.

Helo hadn't, unless there were signals he didn’t know he was sending. Helo sat down at his feet, leaning up against the wall.

He whispered, "Anders?"

"Yeah?"

"Just me." Then Helo's hand suddenly landed on his leg, thumb burning hot into his calf. It didn't at all help his panic, just focused it to his body.

After a moment, Helo added, "You sleep. I'm awake."

"Can't."

"Try," he said. He didn't move his hand.

Eventually-too quickly? too slowly?-Sam fell back asleep.

But tonight, he probably won't. He decides to give up the bed, then, wondering if he should've done that that night. Things might've been different. But, no-Helo's frakking kindness would've found him out eventually like it did the next night, lighting him up unexpectedly when what he needed was to burrow deeper, dig in harder. So he had.

Sometimes Helo's eyes are on him on the flight deck when he stumbles out of his viper (always stumbling, as if he's never really going to be in this world) ready to tear into somebody, usually Tyrol or the major. (Helo told him once that it was like watching Kara. Or Boomer.) With a look, Helo can level something inside him until it settles, if not smooth at least flat. Helo can, but he doesn't always. He doesn't always see or know, or else he doesn't understand how much Sam needs to keep all the pieces of himself held together, how bad a job he does of it sometimes. After all, Helo has never done a bad job of it for himself.

Sam lay awake that night for as long as he dared, not willing to do what he really wanted, which was to pull Helo down beside him and wrap himself around him. Something yielding and unyielding and warm under his hands, against his body. If Helo had only let that hand travel up the inside of his leg…

But he didn't. There was Kara. There was Sharon. There was Helo himself.

Sam climbs out of his bunk, pulling on his sweats silently. He doesn't want to fight with himself tonight in another close room where he can hear deep breathing that ought to comfort him but doesn't. Even more importantly, he doesn't want to wake up here, alone.

He woke up early as always after that panicked night on Caprica, conscious of the warmth of a body near his but not too near. Helo's knuckles just brushed his side. The dim morning light played over his face in a way that made Sam refuse to breathe very deeply, holding his chest as still as he could. He imagined that body lying protectively around a Cylon just days before. He closed his eyes against it, futilely thinking he could sleep a little longer, and if he did, when he woke up, things would be different.

They never, ever are, and that's what keeps him awake nights. Not all of them panic nights, either. Sometimes, he's just as tired as he was on Caprica, just as hopeless, just as sleepless as Helo was that second night he was at Delphi Union High.

The next night after Sam's panic attack, Helo was sleeping three bodies away from him, but Sam was turning something over in his head that kept him near in his thoughts. He's still turning something over. He still doesn't know if Helo's the one to tell, but he yearns to do it. Deep down he thinks that Helo has maybe always been the only one to tell.

He sits on the edge of his rack and thinks, One day I woke up a-

One day Helo woke up to his Sharon being someone else entirely. Yet still herself?

One day, that morning after the panic, Helo woke up to Sam's hand on his shoulder, soft and careful. Helo just blinked at him, the simple but terrifying way he'd blink his eyes open in guarded concern even now, tonight, if Sam did what he really wanted to do, something much harder than draw him into his arms to sleep.

When Helo struggled up off the floor, Sam said, "Can't sleep. Working out the plan. Need your help. You know best how she'd be thinking." He always did.

But, I don't understand it any better than you do, Helo had said at the wake. That- that giving up is not her.

It's not Sam either. That's the trouble.

Helo got up without a word that morning and followed him into the kitchen, but it didn't turn out to matter at all what they did, all their worry and fear and careful planning. Kara was already breaking herself free, and then Sharon came swooping out of the sky, decisively turning her back on the--

One day I woke up a Cylon.

If Helo was in the bunk room, even three racks away, he might tell him. But he isn't. So Sam turns the hatch open and steps out into the corridor and takes off in a jog toward the flight deck alone.

~