fic: the overflow of the kitchen sink (bsg)
the overflow of the kitchen sink
or, a fugue in four parts
bsg. it's almost comforting in its simplicity, but perhaps therein lies the danger; what we're talking about here is this: i want what he's got. AU; spoilers through season four. kara/lee, kara/anders, anders/six, anders/tory, helo/sharon, helo/kara. 4200 words. rated r.
notes: this is fragmented to the extreme. so, uh, just warning. pretty much the fic jumps around from everywhere from season one to where we are now. also! this is for thisisironic - especially if the heat wave got her first.
why are you always fucking ghosts?
(it’s all gonna break; broken social scene)
Human nature, she thinks, is predictably dense.
All those wide and hopeful mouths - they gape, open.
Baltar watches the high-heeled pump balance off her toes, long legs crossed, arms spread, white teeth, red lips, portrait of devilish coquette.
When the shoe falls, he almost gasps.
Almost.
I.
Kara’s going to go and try to capture the light-hearted.
Somehow, it has escaped.
-
“Whoops,” Kara whispers. Maybe she snorts. Drunk, she stumbles, flat hands against walls.
And then she falls.
Maybe she isn’t drunk - maybe she’s frakking stone cold sober.
She still falls.
(She may lay there for a moment, prone and on her back. Her knee probably aches but she still might giggle. It’s not as though she is waiting for a set of helping hands. No. Never that).
-
At first, when there was time to think something akin to restlessness began to set within her.
Sometimes, on the Galactica, there is humidity, thick, inexplicable in its origin. Sometimes people have taken to saying things like, “it’s okay to fail,” on a shrug and it’s the saddest thing Kara has ever heard.
She doesn’t know what the proper alternative is.
She thinks it might be, “well, we’re just getting started,” or maybe something delightfully more melodramatic: “it’s only the end of the world - let’s move on.”
This is, after all, the beginning.
Failure doesn’t have a place here.
-
On the back of closed eyelids she can picture it all. There is the glow of Earth that lies below - the blue, the green, slight wisps of white cloud enveloping the perfect sphere.
She can picture it, she can picture that.
It’s the part that comes next she can’t bring herself to envision.
-
Kara tries to tell herself it is accidental as opposed to intimate, but the evidence begs to differ, the shudder down her spine. It echoes, even after.
It is a hand pressed against the small of her back, the flat of his palm fitting against the soft curve there and it remains there long enough for him to say, “Excuse me,” against her ear. It’s warmer, more familiar then she thinks is right. She shouldn’t know these things about him, shouldn’t know how well he can fit against her, how much she wants for him to remain.
She nods slightly in his direction, maybe says his name - “Lee” - in recognition.
His hand is the last part of him to leave her.
-
- so, we land on earth, she thinks; we land and we try to start again, we try to build houses that can stand and praise the gods for their guidance but nothing’s going to change nothing ever changes a new landscape, perhaps, definitely, a new climate a new state of affairs and half-assed attempts at things like fidelity like honesty but she’s still kara thrace and he’s still lee adama and there is still sam anders still dee still karl agathon still sharon boomer athena what-the-frak-ever still them still names and these people all will still exist, they all will continue to bump, to crash against each other and there will be earth there might be earth there has to be earth and solid ground but it doesn’t change a thing does it? it will never change a thing -
-
Sam wraps an arm around her bare stomach. She shivers - his damp skin and the cool night air.
Her fingers curl into tight clenched fists, the nails bite deep into the skin. She shivers, doesn’t move away.
-
“I found Earth, Lee.”
His fingers tighten on her wrist and hold.
She can’t tell if his eyes spell belief or not. Too much time has passed.
It feels a bit like he is checking for a pulse.
-
Once (when infidelity smeared in something almost nice - maybe Zak maybe Dee maybe Anders maybe doesn’t matter):
There are stale sheets and quiet and her, stretched across them, and he smiles so smug she can’t even handle it.
“You total cocksucker,” she sneers, the first insult to come to mind, and her lips curl over her bared teeth. She thinks she must look positively feral; she hopes she looks positively feral. It kind of negates the fact her back is arching and her fingers are curled tight in his hair. And the fact she is more than kind of panting. Anticipation, or whatever (she’d rather not think about the other possibilities - it’s dangerous infinitely more dangerous than this), and there’s a kind of gross sheen of sweat across her bared breasts, sternum, collarbone. Her sports bra rests rucked up beneath her chin.
He chuckles, and even that makes him sound like he is oh-so-pleased with himself, or something, and Kara kicks him, a little harder than she intended to, with the leg she has slung over his shoulder. The chuckles dies quickly, and she thinks, victory!, but it’s kind of lost immediately with the way his hands are tightening on her thighs, thumbs pressing in hard against her inner thighs, and he is spreading her wider.
He breathes against her, against her embarrassingly wet briefs, and her hips might have bucked a little and she knows, she knows, she knows - that frakking victory of hers was so frakking short-lived it’s not even funny. She might be shivering, a little.
“I think we both know,” he says, so, so, so, so close, too close, and she isn’t going to moan, no, she’s not going to give him the frakking satisfaction, but he’s kind of pulling her underwear to the side now and any manner of barrier between the two of them is gone, totally gone, and she can feel each and every one of his measured breaths against her.
“Given the present moment…” And it’s his voice that has that wicked feral thing she was going for earlier, and her heel skids a little on the sheet, one of his hands holding her thighs open and the other is cradling her ass. Gods, he is so much better at this than she is.
“That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
She doesn’t get a chance to reply or refute or toss more profanity-laced and misdirected insults at him. Instead, he licks her, the flat pink of his tongue against her, hot and wet.
“Lee…” she cracks.
He pulls back; perhaps that was what he was waiting for.
-
She wants to kiss him.
She doesn’t.
-
The problem is she can’t stop thinking in green, in blue, circular as it winds. There is too little promise in space; she is realizing this. Vast and limitless as it may be there is nothing but gas but cloud but the same people twisted in the same situations over and over again.
“What’s the point?” she asks Sam, asks Lee, and she can’t remember what it was either of them initially said to deserve this in the first place.
Probably nothing.
She thinks that’s what the problem is.
II.
Jealousy might be the easy part.
Lee doesn’t know what that says about the rest.
-
Lee Adama runs long fingers over, under and across loose papers and not once does he get cut.
He reads over the pages, relishing the large words, the multiple syllables, the need for hyphenation.
Dee used to sometimes interrupt.
That doesn’t happen anymore.
He turns the page.
-
“If you’re nice to me maybe I’ll be nice to you,” Kara pouts, orange jumpsuit and maybe something like a wrench in hand.
Despite himself Lee can feel a smile stretching; he inhales tightly and tries hard for a scowl instead. He fails.
But that was so long ago, wasn’t it?
-
They bring the Vipers in and his fingers slip on snaps.
The sight of her face rings bright like relief and that might be the most unbearable part of this.
Disappointment always follows too soon after.
(He thinks in bursts of red, of his fist connecting with Sam’s jaw, Kara’s jaw, hard flesh and the crack of enamel against enamel as teeth chop down hard against the impact. He thinks past words and the yelling of them and instead focuses on the dull beat of gloves against the heavy weight of the punching bag but it’s not enough, it’s never enough, and it should frighten him more - the desire for blood, the thirst to watch it spray from cracked and broken mouths.
He thinks of his thigh between her legs and making her writhe, making her beg and promise).
-
“I know what they think I am,” she says from behind bars. Lee stops pacing, his boots a sharp squeak against the floor; he raises a chin in her direction.
“They think I’m a Cylon,” she continues, knees tucked to chest and there isn’t nearly enough of her usual blend of cockiness and defiance, that heat he always associated with her, loaded behind it.
He doesn’t hear a question in this and he doesn’t feel a need to reply. He doesn’t move, either. He remains there, chin raised in her directions, bright eyes looking down on her curiously small compacted frame. There is a sly smile trying on her part, eyes already shining with it and he braces himself for whatever it is she might have to say next, hands tucked behind his back, knuckles white in expectation.
“Would you still want me like that? If I was one of the toasters?” The smile arrives full-blown on the last word but the question hangs in the air softly, her voice never rising above a restrained hush as she asked it.
Lee lights on Helo, lights on Sharon, Hera, for a moment and the only thing he can think of is happiness, and it’s strange. Can it work that way? Could he ever have what these two shared? He swallows quickly around it, the idea of family and easy contentedness and walks the few steps forward until he is against her cell. He curls his fingers around the bars and holds tight, angry and perhaps more than that, deprived.
“I don’t want you now,” he bites out, but the venom isn’t there and she knows it, he knows it.
Her smile is almost rueful now and his hand tightens around metal.
“Liar.”
-
- he’s going to break her wrist, he swears to the gods, it’s going to snap under his hands just like her hips are rising under them and he’s got to hold her down he’s got to hold her in place because if he yields she goes if he lifts she leaves so he presses her into the mattress that much harder that much deeper that much more and her body keeps twisting and she might say “lee” she might not but it’s still skin on skin and she’s still here she’s still here she’s still here -
he lacks the presence of mind not to say, “Kara Kara don’t you ever leave me again don’t Kara” when he comes.
The words get lost against her collarbone; her fingers dig into the back of his neck that much more.
-
Lee closes his eyes against bright and distant, lost explosions. He tries, hard, not to recall the sound of his voice - hoarse, wordless, she’s gone.
It was only two months but even over the course of that her smile - so frakking obnoxious so frakking familiar - began to shade in the macabre, the dead, the grotesque.
He found himself forgetting. He found himself forgetting her.
He likes to think it explains the wild rush of relief upon finding her again, in space. It’s a second chance, he had thought, immediately, on impulse, her voice flooding his ears and yes, she found Earth, yes, she was back, no, she wouldn’t be here to stay, she’s Kara after all.
But it was a second chance, wasn’t it?
Here it was, he had thought: a shot at memorizing her all over again, of this time making it (making her) stick.
And he’ll keep it in mind, of course. Time is never on their side.
III.
Six is slippery, trying to whistle down the wind.
She thinks she wants the tall one for company.
It’s not like he doesn’t belong among them.
-
Sam is smart enough; he is capable of doing the intricate math these social situations are steeped in.
See, Sam is going to come to blame these kinds of things on ambrosia. He’s going to blame them on a dead wife and her subsequent surprise of reanimation, her now unfamiliar lidded eyes. Loneliness is another factor that drifts to mind, more often than he’d prefer, but he refuses to let himself grab hold of it.
But this is after.
First there is another blonde.
And before that - another woman.
-
She clears her throat.
Tory’s ache is too acute to allow her to comfortably cross her legs at the knee. The chair creaks under her weight as she moves.
Her skin feels hot - she is unsure whether this is out of memory coupled with arousal or rather a quiet kind of embarrassment and shame.
She shifts in her seat again and thinks it might be both.
At the very least, it is a distraction from that distant hum. It keeps rising.
-
He thrusts up she thrusts down and a thick lock of hair catches against his mouth as he tries for an open moan; her balance shifts, fingers too tight too deep against the cut of muscle of his shoulder and the moan echoes down her neck, dark skin, dark neck, dark not light -
His hand slides past the dip of her hip, holds her rough in place and it is all so perfectly new and unfamiliar he could laugh.
-
“We’re Cylons,” echoes in a funny kind of way and Sam’s eyes lock with Tory’s, only for a moment.
It’s enough.
She looks away first.
-
Memory is well-versed enough.
Tory has long legs that tangle in sheets when she can’t sleep at night. Sam has long legs too, strong thighs she remembers tight and clenched under her own weight on top of him.
His wife was dead then. Maybe that makes this excusable.
Maybe not.
She can’t stop tapping her fingers against the mattress in time to the beat she no longer hears.
-
Alcohol burns and fear is contagious and worry is something trying to gnaw him in half.
He catches sight of a blonde in reflection off of glass.
She stays with him for the rest of the day.
-
Tory stumbles over words like, “Madam President.” At least, she thinks, there is quiet now.
She will pass Sam sometimes. She’ll wonder if it’s more appropriate to think of him as Anders now. She is still undecided.
She can’t look Sam in the eye.
She can’t meet him in the eye she can’t look at him it’s too much because his wife isn’t dead she’s back now and she frakked him she frakked him once and now it’s kind of sort of like they’re both frakking again - metaphorical sense? she never used to think like this - only it isn’t that simple it isn’t that they’re just frakking each other but that they’re frakking everyone they know or something she doesn’t know because she can’t look at him they’re one in the same and his wife was never even really dead to begin with -
and maybe the two of them were never quite alive.
(It’s not like he can fix his eyes on her either; it’s not like she’s completely alone).
-
Sometimes his wife remembers things to a beat of thirty-three and Sam doesn’t understand what that’s supposed to mean. There’s too much amassed abstention between the two of them - I was here and you were there and you wouldn’t understand even if I tried.
It all goes without saying. Like everything else.
-
- and it’s like this he thinks there are wires in his blood steel under knuckles and coil after coil connecting parts to parts to parts to spare to parts none of it organic none of it his own none of it recognizable to a biologist a textbook and there are red lights maybe there are sirens there was music and there are parts that aren’t his a man a machine a man machine he keeps on he can’t stop shuddering under the red -
-
“Where are the others?” he breathes against the mirror.
His warm breath leaves a fog of condensation on its surface.
There’s nothing, Sam. There is nothing.
-
“I want you,” she breathes into him and the corners of her mouth lift.
Sam will never ask, “do you love me?” and maybe that’s why she keeps him. His wife - Kara - not strangers.
The thought makes his chest burn.
He winds his hand into blonde curls, nips softly at a tanned shoulder, hard muscle of her midsection against the flat of his hand, small waist and the cool lack of familiarity makes his heart race, a little.
Happiness, relief, shouldn’t be this difficult to achieve.
“Don’t worry,” the woman murmurs, lips ghosting against his own. Her hand slides under his open collar, cool hand against his skin; he shifts beneath her. “I’m nothing but a stranger.”
Her grin grows - looking at her is making him dizzy. He can feel polished teeth against his top lip and he tries not to shudder.
“I won’t tell.”
Her hand slides down; his hips arch up.
He plants his feet flat against the ground, eyes heavy, and the woman’s skin flickers from golden to brown, blonde hair to dark, dark, full, and his fingers catch in it.
He brings himself off with an intelligible grunt (frak) and sweaty palms against hot skin. He can’t bring himself to ask if this is really happening.
-
“I don’t enjoy being told ‘no,’” Kara fumes, heavy with dry sarcasm. He can’t look at her; her mind is still on Earth.
Sam’s posture relaxes even more; his spine slackens, maybe out of spite. For a long moment he acts as though he hadn’t heard her - Kara’s sharp gaze punishing on his profile. He sits, still.
“And there are those of us that do?” he asks finally, the question rhetorical, ironic, unanswerable. If there is anyone left in this frakked universe who not only tolerates but seemingly thrives off that single negative syllable it would be him, wouldn’t it? The husband of one Kara Thrace, Samuel T. Anders. The thought leaves him furious and his fists curl at his side.
He doesn’t turn to look at her. Instead he catches flashes of her in his periphery. He watches the slide from hands braced on hips akimbo to arms crossed against her chest. He hears rather than sees an angry exhale of a breath from her - recognizes the exact moment when she is no longer watching him.
There is the whine of the hatch as she leaves, the resounding click as it shuts.
He takes a deep and steadying breath.
-
The woman stands too close to him, stark blonde hair and lean limbs - something artificial, something frighteningly natural about her.
Her smile continues to grow, almost coy, and the trees lean forward on the wind to watch. She raises a hand as though to cup his cheek, and Sam doesn’t move, he might not breathe for a moment, unsure whether he wants this or not. She lets her hand drop without brushing his skin. He can’t decide if that’s disappointment rising in his throat; it strikes him as inappropriate.
“Say,” she says. “I think I’ve met you before.”
“No,” he doesn’t answer. “I would have remembered a woman like you.”
He doesn’t think he would have meant it as a compliment.
He frowns. “This isn’t real,” is what he does say.
She raises her hand again and the slip of her fingers across his face, his lips is electric - almost tender as they pass over, and then gone.
He blinks twice; the trees shade to gunmetal and the walls of the barracks - then gone.
IV.
Upstairs, downstairs, up, down, he runs. He pants, slippery trigger finger. He runs. Up and down around bends and tight corners and she waits for him she waits for him she waits -
“Just do it,” she says.
Then he wakes.
“Sharon…” he mouths, no sound escaping, and he shakes.
-
One is not like the other and his wife is breathing betrayal a little too thick for his own personal comfort.
His hands are wide but they still can shake, empty.
Helo is coming around, coming around and accidental betrayal might be something real, he believes - something real he believes in like dark hair and thin wrists and the echoing hollow wound of a gunshot.
It still hurts all the same.
-
“I’d rather not talk like this,” Sharon will sometimes answer, quiet.
Helo doesn’t have it in him to argue.
He doesn’t really have it in him to question either.
-
She isn’t the only one of course.
Maybe this is what Helo can’t wrap his head around.
He drinks thick coffee, gritty with something and she, his wife, may talk quietly over and under the din around them and he might listen but more than that he is trying to understand. There is a discernible lack of justice here, if you ask him. A man can love a woman, a woman can love a man but what do you do with the multiples? What do you do with all the others complicating this between them?
He swallows hard around more of the coffee, winces against the taste and Sharon lays a hand on his and smiles.
This problem really isn’t anything new, is it?
There are always others.
(Starbuck’s laugh cracks through the hall, head thrown back and everything; Anders presses a hand firm against her back in amused agreement).
-
“Fresh milk.”
“What?” Helo asks, startled.
Kara slurps something off her spoon. “You asked me what I was thinking about. The answer? Fresh milk.”
Helo’s brow furrows a little deeper despite the faint smile on his lips. She takes another slurp, cheeks hollowed out, lips full.
“Is there some kind of subtext I’m missing here?” he asks.
She swallows and then licks her lips, the din of the mess around them both and her spoon is still in hand.
“Nope.”
The apples of her cheeks swell as she smiles and leans in for another spoonful.
-
He remembers this:
Ambrosia and sweaty limbs and maybe an ignored pack of playing cards on a sticky table somewhere while her hips would twist out of regulation and her short blonde hair would stick blunt against his palms. There was that sharp mouth and thick lips of hers and probably a proper layer of insult and mockery between the two of them, his fingers clumsy with drink still trying against her skin, between her legs, more probing than caressing.
It was easy, as expected. The way they could fit, they way her skin almost tasted like his - sweat and sweet and ambrosia-laden.
And there’s the hang-up, there’s why he keeps coming back around to it, why his eyes track Starbuck across the room like he wants her but he doesn’t.
At one point, this was easy.
-
He is forgetting how these things once worked. If ‘linear’ will ever serve as an operable word again or if instead they will just continue to unravel in unpredictable directions.
Perhaps it has always worked this way and it is true - he has forgotten.
-
Helo sees things in flashes of blonde and stretches of black. There is a baby wailing somewhere (his) and a wife somewhere wandering (never his never going to stay his own there are many copies).
“Isn’t this what you always wanted?” he thinks he hears, the voice little more than a distant coo. He thinks of Caprica, thinks of trees and forests and down on his knees.
He shoves it off with a grimace.
There is a small giggle.
They both know the answer is no.
-
“Are you alive?” Kara hisses. For a solid second he fears she might cry. Her eyes remain wide and damp - she doesn’t squeeze them shut, she doesn’t look away.
“I forget,” he doesn’t say. He doesn’t ask if this is really happening, if she remembers - flight school and card games, the Academy and them, simple things like too small mattresses and how he used to taste.
His mouth opens instead and beckons, welcomes wet and tongue.
“That’s what I thought,” she doesn’t answer.
“Yes, this is real,” she doesn’t say - yes, I remember. Yes, we can find that again.
She whimpers once, and then there is silence.
CODA
Six is discovering. There is a science to soft and irreverent things like gooseflesh and envy and false, attractive hope.
She watches; they might be real. She might be real.
Together, though, they tumble through space.
fin
or, a fugue in four parts
bsg. it's almost comforting in its simplicity, but perhaps therein lies the danger; what we're talking about here is this: i want what he's got. AU; spoilers through season four. kara/lee, kara/anders, anders/six, anders/tory, helo/sharon, helo/kara. 4200 words. rated r.
notes: this is fragmented to the extreme. so, uh, just warning. pretty much the fic jumps around from everywhere from season one to where we are now. also! this is for thisisironic - especially if the heat wave got her first.
why are you always fucking ghosts?
(it’s all gonna break; broken social scene)
Human nature, she thinks, is predictably dense.
All those wide and hopeful mouths - they gape, open.
Baltar watches the high-heeled pump balance off her toes, long legs crossed, arms spread, white teeth, red lips, portrait of devilish coquette.
When the shoe falls, he almost gasps.
Almost.
I.
Kara’s going to go and try to capture the light-hearted.
Somehow, it has escaped.
-
“Whoops,” Kara whispers. Maybe she snorts. Drunk, she stumbles, flat hands against walls.
And then she falls.
Maybe she isn’t drunk - maybe she’s frakking stone cold sober.
She still falls.
(She may lay there for a moment, prone and on her back. Her knee probably aches but she still might giggle. It’s not as though she is waiting for a set of helping hands. No. Never that).
-
At first, when there was time to think something akin to restlessness began to set within her.
Sometimes, on the Galactica, there is humidity, thick, inexplicable in its origin. Sometimes people have taken to saying things like, “it’s okay to fail,” on a shrug and it’s the saddest thing Kara has ever heard.
She doesn’t know what the proper alternative is.
She thinks it might be, “well, we’re just getting started,” or maybe something delightfully more melodramatic: “it’s only the end of the world - let’s move on.”
This is, after all, the beginning.
Failure doesn’t have a place here.
-
On the back of closed eyelids she can picture it all. There is the glow of Earth that lies below - the blue, the green, slight wisps of white cloud enveloping the perfect sphere.
She can picture it, she can picture that.
It’s the part that comes next she can’t bring herself to envision.
-
Kara tries to tell herself it is accidental as opposed to intimate, but the evidence begs to differ, the shudder down her spine. It echoes, even after.
It is a hand pressed against the small of her back, the flat of his palm fitting against the soft curve there and it remains there long enough for him to say, “Excuse me,” against her ear. It’s warmer, more familiar then she thinks is right. She shouldn’t know these things about him, shouldn’t know how well he can fit against her, how much she wants for him to remain.
She nods slightly in his direction, maybe says his name - “Lee” - in recognition.
His hand is the last part of him to leave her.
-
- so, we land on earth, she thinks; we land and we try to start again, we try to build houses that can stand and praise the gods for their guidance but nothing’s going to change nothing ever changes a new landscape, perhaps, definitely, a new climate a new state of affairs and half-assed attempts at things like fidelity like honesty but she’s still kara thrace and he’s still lee adama and there is still sam anders still dee still karl agathon still sharon boomer athena what-the-frak-ever still them still names and these people all will still exist, they all will continue to bump, to crash against each other and there will be earth there might be earth there has to be earth and solid ground but it doesn’t change a thing does it? it will never change a thing -
-
Sam wraps an arm around her bare stomach. She shivers - his damp skin and the cool night air.
Her fingers curl into tight clenched fists, the nails bite deep into the skin. She shivers, doesn’t move away.
-
“I found Earth, Lee.”
His fingers tighten on her wrist and hold.
She can’t tell if his eyes spell belief or not. Too much time has passed.
It feels a bit like he is checking for a pulse.
-
Once (when infidelity smeared in something almost nice - maybe Zak maybe Dee maybe Anders maybe doesn’t matter):
There are stale sheets and quiet and her, stretched across them, and he smiles so smug she can’t even handle it.
“You total cocksucker,” she sneers, the first insult to come to mind, and her lips curl over her bared teeth. She thinks she must look positively feral; she hopes she looks positively feral. It kind of negates the fact her back is arching and her fingers are curled tight in his hair. And the fact she is more than kind of panting. Anticipation, or whatever (she’d rather not think about the other possibilities - it’s dangerous infinitely more dangerous than this), and there’s a kind of gross sheen of sweat across her bared breasts, sternum, collarbone. Her sports bra rests rucked up beneath her chin.
He chuckles, and even that makes him sound like he is oh-so-pleased with himself, or something, and Kara kicks him, a little harder than she intended to, with the leg she has slung over his shoulder. The chuckles dies quickly, and she thinks, victory!, but it’s kind of lost immediately with the way his hands are tightening on her thighs, thumbs pressing in hard against her inner thighs, and he is spreading her wider.
He breathes against her, against her embarrassingly wet briefs, and her hips might have bucked a little and she knows, she knows, she knows - that frakking victory of hers was so frakking short-lived it’s not even funny. She might be shivering, a little.
“I think we both know,” he says, so, so, so, so close, too close, and she isn’t going to moan, no, she’s not going to give him the frakking satisfaction, but he’s kind of pulling her underwear to the side now and any manner of barrier between the two of them is gone, totally gone, and she can feel each and every one of his measured breaths against her.
“Given the present moment…” And it’s his voice that has that wicked feral thing she was going for earlier, and her heel skids a little on the sheet, one of his hands holding her thighs open and the other is cradling her ass. Gods, he is so much better at this than she is.
“That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
She doesn’t get a chance to reply or refute or toss more profanity-laced and misdirected insults at him. Instead, he licks her, the flat pink of his tongue against her, hot and wet.
“Lee…” she cracks.
He pulls back; perhaps that was what he was waiting for.
-
She wants to kiss him.
She doesn’t.
-
The problem is she can’t stop thinking in green, in blue, circular as it winds. There is too little promise in space; she is realizing this. Vast and limitless as it may be there is nothing but gas but cloud but the same people twisted in the same situations over and over again.
“What’s the point?” she asks Sam, asks Lee, and she can’t remember what it was either of them initially said to deserve this in the first place.
Probably nothing.
She thinks that’s what the problem is.
II.
Jealousy might be the easy part.
Lee doesn’t know what that says about the rest.
-
Lee Adama runs long fingers over, under and across loose papers and not once does he get cut.
He reads over the pages, relishing the large words, the multiple syllables, the need for hyphenation.
Dee used to sometimes interrupt.
That doesn’t happen anymore.
He turns the page.
-
“If you’re nice to me maybe I’ll be nice to you,” Kara pouts, orange jumpsuit and maybe something like a wrench in hand.
Despite himself Lee can feel a smile stretching; he inhales tightly and tries hard for a scowl instead. He fails.
But that was so long ago, wasn’t it?
-
They bring the Vipers in and his fingers slip on snaps.
The sight of her face rings bright like relief and that might be the most unbearable part of this.
Disappointment always follows too soon after.
(He thinks in bursts of red, of his fist connecting with Sam’s jaw, Kara’s jaw, hard flesh and the crack of enamel against enamel as teeth chop down hard against the impact. He thinks past words and the yelling of them and instead focuses on the dull beat of gloves against the heavy weight of the punching bag but it’s not enough, it’s never enough, and it should frighten him more - the desire for blood, the thirst to watch it spray from cracked and broken mouths.
He thinks of his thigh between her legs and making her writhe, making her beg and promise).
-
“I know what they think I am,” she says from behind bars. Lee stops pacing, his boots a sharp squeak against the floor; he raises a chin in her direction.
“They think I’m a Cylon,” she continues, knees tucked to chest and there isn’t nearly enough of her usual blend of cockiness and defiance, that heat he always associated with her, loaded behind it.
He doesn’t hear a question in this and he doesn’t feel a need to reply. He doesn’t move, either. He remains there, chin raised in her directions, bright eyes looking down on her curiously small compacted frame. There is a sly smile trying on her part, eyes already shining with it and he braces himself for whatever it is she might have to say next, hands tucked behind his back, knuckles white in expectation.
“Would you still want me like that? If I was one of the toasters?” The smile arrives full-blown on the last word but the question hangs in the air softly, her voice never rising above a restrained hush as she asked it.
Lee lights on Helo, lights on Sharon, Hera, for a moment and the only thing he can think of is happiness, and it’s strange. Can it work that way? Could he ever have what these two shared? He swallows quickly around it, the idea of family and easy contentedness and walks the few steps forward until he is against her cell. He curls his fingers around the bars and holds tight, angry and perhaps more than that, deprived.
“I don’t want you now,” he bites out, but the venom isn’t there and she knows it, he knows it.
Her smile is almost rueful now and his hand tightens around metal.
“Liar.”
-
- he’s going to break her wrist, he swears to the gods, it’s going to snap under his hands just like her hips are rising under them and he’s got to hold her down he’s got to hold her in place because if he yields she goes if he lifts she leaves so he presses her into the mattress that much harder that much deeper that much more and her body keeps twisting and she might say “lee” she might not but it’s still skin on skin and she’s still here she’s still here she’s still here -
he lacks the presence of mind not to say, “Kara Kara don’t you ever leave me again don’t Kara” when he comes.
The words get lost against her collarbone; her fingers dig into the back of his neck that much more.
-
Lee closes his eyes against bright and distant, lost explosions. He tries, hard, not to recall the sound of his voice - hoarse, wordless, she’s gone.
It was only two months but even over the course of that her smile - so frakking obnoxious so frakking familiar - began to shade in the macabre, the dead, the grotesque.
He found himself forgetting. He found himself forgetting her.
He likes to think it explains the wild rush of relief upon finding her again, in space. It’s a second chance, he had thought, immediately, on impulse, her voice flooding his ears and yes, she found Earth, yes, she was back, no, she wouldn’t be here to stay, she’s Kara after all.
But it was a second chance, wasn’t it?
Here it was, he had thought: a shot at memorizing her all over again, of this time making it (making her) stick.
And he’ll keep it in mind, of course. Time is never on their side.
III.
Six is slippery, trying to whistle down the wind.
She thinks she wants the tall one for company.
It’s not like he doesn’t belong among them.
-
Sam is smart enough; he is capable of doing the intricate math these social situations are steeped in.
See, Sam is going to come to blame these kinds of things on ambrosia. He’s going to blame them on a dead wife and her subsequent surprise of reanimation, her now unfamiliar lidded eyes. Loneliness is another factor that drifts to mind, more often than he’d prefer, but he refuses to let himself grab hold of it.
But this is after.
First there is another blonde.
And before that - another woman.
-
She clears her throat.
Tory’s ache is too acute to allow her to comfortably cross her legs at the knee. The chair creaks under her weight as she moves.
Her skin feels hot - she is unsure whether this is out of memory coupled with arousal or rather a quiet kind of embarrassment and shame.
She shifts in her seat again and thinks it might be both.
At the very least, it is a distraction from that distant hum. It keeps rising.
-
He thrusts up she thrusts down and a thick lock of hair catches against his mouth as he tries for an open moan; her balance shifts, fingers too tight too deep against the cut of muscle of his shoulder and the moan echoes down her neck, dark skin, dark neck, dark not light -
His hand slides past the dip of her hip, holds her rough in place and it is all so perfectly new and unfamiliar he could laugh.
-
“We’re Cylons,” echoes in a funny kind of way and Sam’s eyes lock with Tory’s, only for a moment.
It’s enough.
She looks away first.
-
Memory is well-versed enough.
Tory has long legs that tangle in sheets when she can’t sleep at night. Sam has long legs too, strong thighs she remembers tight and clenched under her own weight on top of him.
His wife was dead then. Maybe that makes this excusable.
Maybe not.
She can’t stop tapping her fingers against the mattress in time to the beat she no longer hears.
-
Alcohol burns and fear is contagious and worry is something trying to gnaw him in half.
He catches sight of a blonde in reflection off of glass.
She stays with him for the rest of the day.
-
Tory stumbles over words like, “Madam President.” At least, she thinks, there is quiet now.
She will pass Sam sometimes. She’ll wonder if it’s more appropriate to think of him as Anders now. She is still undecided.
She can’t look Sam in the eye.
She can’t meet him in the eye she can’t look at him it’s too much because his wife isn’t dead she’s back now and she frakked him she frakked him once and now it’s kind of sort of like they’re both frakking again - metaphorical sense? she never used to think like this - only it isn’t that simple it isn’t that they’re just frakking each other but that they’re frakking everyone they know or something she doesn’t know because she can’t look at him they’re one in the same and his wife was never even really dead to begin with -
and maybe the two of them were never quite alive.
(It’s not like he can fix his eyes on her either; it’s not like she’s completely alone).
-
Sometimes his wife remembers things to a beat of thirty-three and Sam doesn’t understand what that’s supposed to mean. There’s too much amassed abstention between the two of them - I was here and you were there and you wouldn’t understand even if I tried.
It all goes without saying. Like everything else.
-
- and it’s like this he thinks there are wires in his blood steel under knuckles and coil after coil connecting parts to parts to parts to spare to parts none of it organic none of it his own none of it recognizable to a biologist a textbook and there are red lights maybe there are sirens there was music and there are parts that aren’t his a man a machine a man machine he keeps on he can’t stop shuddering under the red -
-
“Where are the others?” he breathes against the mirror.
His warm breath leaves a fog of condensation on its surface.
There’s nothing, Sam. There is nothing.
-
“I want you,” she breathes into him and the corners of her mouth lift.
Sam will never ask, “do you love me?” and maybe that’s why she keeps him. His wife - Kara - not strangers.
The thought makes his chest burn.
He winds his hand into blonde curls, nips softly at a tanned shoulder, hard muscle of her midsection against the flat of his hand, small waist and the cool lack of familiarity makes his heart race, a little.
Happiness, relief, shouldn’t be this difficult to achieve.
“Don’t worry,” the woman murmurs, lips ghosting against his own. Her hand slides under his open collar, cool hand against his skin; he shifts beneath her. “I’m nothing but a stranger.”
Her grin grows - looking at her is making him dizzy. He can feel polished teeth against his top lip and he tries not to shudder.
“I won’t tell.”
Her hand slides down; his hips arch up.
He plants his feet flat against the ground, eyes heavy, and the woman’s skin flickers from golden to brown, blonde hair to dark, dark, full, and his fingers catch in it.
He brings himself off with an intelligible grunt (frak) and sweaty palms against hot skin. He can’t bring himself to ask if this is really happening.
-
“I don’t enjoy being told ‘no,’” Kara fumes, heavy with dry sarcasm. He can’t look at her; her mind is still on Earth.
Sam’s posture relaxes even more; his spine slackens, maybe out of spite. For a long moment he acts as though he hadn’t heard her - Kara’s sharp gaze punishing on his profile. He sits, still.
“And there are those of us that do?” he asks finally, the question rhetorical, ironic, unanswerable. If there is anyone left in this frakked universe who not only tolerates but seemingly thrives off that single negative syllable it would be him, wouldn’t it? The husband of one Kara Thrace, Samuel T. Anders. The thought leaves him furious and his fists curl at his side.
He doesn’t turn to look at her. Instead he catches flashes of her in his periphery. He watches the slide from hands braced on hips akimbo to arms crossed against her chest. He hears rather than sees an angry exhale of a breath from her - recognizes the exact moment when she is no longer watching him.
There is the whine of the hatch as she leaves, the resounding click as it shuts.
He takes a deep and steadying breath.
-
The woman stands too close to him, stark blonde hair and lean limbs - something artificial, something frighteningly natural about her.
Her smile continues to grow, almost coy, and the trees lean forward on the wind to watch. She raises a hand as though to cup his cheek, and Sam doesn’t move, he might not breathe for a moment, unsure whether he wants this or not. She lets her hand drop without brushing his skin. He can’t decide if that’s disappointment rising in his throat; it strikes him as inappropriate.
“Say,” she says. “I think I’ve met you before.”
“No,” he doesn’t answer. “I would have remembered a woman like you.”
He doesn’t think he would have meant it as a compliment.
He frowns. “This isn’t real,” is what he does say.
She raises her hand again and the slip of her fingers across his face, his lips is electric - almost tender as they pass over, and then gone.
He blinks twice; the trees shade to gunmetal and the walls of the barracks - then gone.
IV.
Upstairs, downstairs, up, down, he runs. He pants, slippery trigger finger. He runs. Up and down around bends and tight corners and she waits for him she waits for him she waits -
“Just do it,” she says.
Then he wakes.
“Sharon…” he mouths, no sound escaping, and he shakes.
-
One is not like the other and his wife is breathing betrayal a little too thick for his own personal comfort.
His hands are wide but they still can shake, empty.
Helo is coming around, coming around and accidental betrayal might be something real, he believes - something real he believes in like dark hair and thin wrists and the echoing hollow wound of a gunshot.
It still hurts all the same.
-
“I’d rather not talk like this,” Sharon will sometimes answer, quiet.
Helo doesn’t have it in him to argue.
He doesn’t really have it in him to question either.
-
She isn’t the only one of course.
Maybe this is what Helo can’t wrap his head around.
He drinks thick coffee, gritty with something and she, his wife, may talk quietly over and under the din around them and he might listen but more than that he is trying to understand. There is a discernible lack of justice here, if you ask him. A man can love a woman, a woman can love a man but what do you do with the multiples? What do you do with all the others complicating this between them?
He swallows hard around more of the coffee, winces against the taste and Sharon lays a hand on his and smiles.
This problem really isn’t anything new, is it?
There are always others.
(Starbuck’s laugh cracks through the hall, head thrown back and everything; Anders presses a hand firm against her back in amused agreement).
-
“Fresh milk.”
“What?” Helo asks, startled.
Kara slurps something off her spoon. “You asked me what I was thinking about. The answer? Fresh milk.”
Helo’s brow furrows a little deeper despite the faint smile on his lips. She takes another slurp, cheeks hollowed out, lips full.
“Is there some kind of subtext I’m missing here?” he asks.
She swallows and then licks her lips, the din of the mess around them both and her spoon is still in hand.
“Nope.”
The apples of her cheeks swell as she smiles and leans in for another spoonful.
-
He remembers this:
Ambrosia and sweaty limbs and maybe an ignored pack of playing cards on a sticky table somewhere while her hips would twist out of regulation and her short blonde hair would stick blunt against his palms. There was that sharp mouth and thick lips of hers and probably a proper layer of insult and mockery between the two of them, his fingers clumsy with drink still trying against her skin, between her legs, more probing than caressing.
It was easy, as expected. The way they could fit, they way her skin almost tasted like his - sweat and sweet and ambrosia-laden.
And there’s the hang-up, there’s why he keeps coming back around to it, why his eyes track Starbuck across the room like he wants her but he doesn’t.
At one point, this was easy.
-
He is forgetting how these things once worked. If ‘linear’ will ever serve as an operable word again or if instead they will just continue to unravel in unpredictable directions.
Perhaps it has always worked this way and it is true - he has forgotten.
-
Helo sees things in flashes of blonde and stretches of black. There is a baby wailing somewhere (his) and a wife somewhere wandering (never his never going to stay his own there are many copies).
“Isn’t this what you always wanted?” he thinks he hears, the voice little more than a distant coo. He thinks of Caprica, thinks of trees and forests and down on his knees.
He shoves it off with a grimace.
There is a small giggle.
They both know the answer is no.
-
“Are you alive?” Kara hisses. For a solid second he fears she might cry. Her eyes remain wide and damp - she doesn’t squeeze them shut, she doesn’t look away.
“I forget,” he doesn’t say. He doesn’t ask if this is really happening, if she remembers - flight school and card games, the Academy and them, simple things like too small mattresses and how he used to taste.
His mouth opens instead and beckons, welcomes wet and tongue.
“That’s what I thought,” she doesn’t answer.
“Yes, this is real,” she doesn’t say - yes, I remember. Yes, we can find that again.
She whimpers once, and then there is silence.
CODA
Six is discovering. There is a science to soft and irreverent things like gooseflesh and envy and false, attractive hope.
She watches; they might be real. She might be real.
Together, though, they tumble through space.
fin