fic: rough winds do shake (1/1)
Title: Rough Winds Do Shake
Rating: T
Word Count: 1,890
Warnings: None
Summary: In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Cloud Nine, Bill and Laura are together in his quarters.
---
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
---
He returned from the CIC hours later, Cloud Nine nothing more than dust in the solar wind. She sat on his couch, guarded not even by the pretense of reading a book. She turned her face, and then her eyes, to him after a slight delay to find him staring at her glassy countenance with something like caution, but mostly like reverence.
Any artifice of competency for Baltar’s presidency had been shattered like the fragile, veined petals of the peonies she had loved so much back on Caprica-they littered the floor, as numerous and inconsolable as the body count. And so he still looked to her. Perhaps he would have anyway, Laura thought, not letting it linger for very long at all.
“Did the raptor teams find anything?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head, ambling wearily towards the drink cart, unbuttoning his jacket on the way. “Nothing,” he rasped. “Laura?” he then asked, if only to have her name on his lips, treating the syllables as if they were as heady as any liquor. He poured himself a tumbler of it anyway, and drank without tasting. She watched the muscles of his throat contract. He was solid-broad shoulders, large hands, thickly-veined muscle.
In war you can only die once. In politics, you can die over and over again. She was no longer standing; he would survive. A mighty oak, perhaps, and she the crushed petals of a bloom under Baltar’s wheel. (Laura almost laughed, then, at this girlish notion. She had been, after all, ordering assassination on her deathbed.) Rough winds do shake… but she was no spring maiden.
He refilled his glass and emptied it again, fingers flexing around the glass. Laura wanted to feel his blood rushing against the thinnest parts of his skin-the insides of his wrists, the hollow of his throat, behind his ears-with the pads of her fingers, her lips, her tongue. She wanted to make him as vulnerable as she has been made, by him. (There is no promise that the thousands of souls who lived and died aboard the Cloud Nine would be alive were she still in office, but it’s a tempting thought to enthrall her conscious with.) She wanted to see him in the throes of orgasm, she wanted him outside of the bounds of his tightly-wrought control. He near-always let it slip around her, anyway.
“What do we do now?” he asked, scrubbing his face with his hands. His voice as hushed as the room, the fleet as a whole, to make an honest assessment, all of them shocked into silence by the explosion, the catastrophic loss of life. He did not want to break that silence, send it toppling over the edge like everything else.
Laura sighed.
Nothing.
But he needed an answer, because he still looked to her, because she loved him. Her mind, drifting as it was, looped backwards and erased the last of it. Vulnerable. He loved her-she saw it every time he looked to her, eyes like the beginning of summer. He was already vulnerable. It was still a luxury she could not afford. Love, another thing like a fragile, shattering flower. She would break him even if his love rested barely, gently, in the palm of her hand. He sat down next to her, and she swallowed hard. She wanted ownership of him. He was dangerous, like Richard, but in different ways.
She could love him.
“Laura?”
They could both break. She was the bud that clung tightly to the frost, and yet when she felt his urging hand upon her wrist, Laura could only turn, take his face into her hands, and kiss him.
The kiss was slow, but insistent, like some unspoken imperative she had always been waiting to answer, as unstoppable as winter’s slide into spring. He sighed complicity into her lips, cupping one of his hands through her hair to the base of her skull. Heat flooded her veins, lingered under the surface of her skin, the barest hints of arousal flaring in her fingertips and toes.
She hummed into him when his thumb traced the curve of her jaw before tilting her head just so to slip his tongue past her lips to slide along the roof of her mouth. When she shivered like the careful wisteria blossoms opening on fragile stems, he broke the kiss, his lips lingering against hers before he pulled away entirely, his thumb still caressing under her jaw. The moment was slowed, and thickened, and it took her a few moments to open her eyes against it.
His eyes were questioning, but not imposing. They had, after all, been here before.
Would he ask, now? To put a word to their lips, like the way he said her name? Or could they live here, unnoticed? There was a planet not far outside this hulking steel beast, grass and dirt and tether, not the raging uncertain ghosts of nebulae. Their future was no longer as unfathomable as stardust.
Futures? (Plural? Singular? Past participle, future imperfect.) They had been bound together by duty and genocide. It would not be so easily undone, Laura thought. Perhaps that was how they had slipped so easily into this new bond, this earthen sensuality blossoming in the place of their first, tenuous, political covenant. (Hera and Zeus’ marriage, of course, had first been political and convenient. And here they were again, on his Olympus. Even without her throne, she would always be his queen.) Bill looked at her like it was one. They had always been partners, first.
Laura did not know what he saw in her eyes, but Bill smiled in a way she had not seen before; there was reverence, yes, but understanding. He knew what they would be making, tonight, what would grow in the loamy soil where she would go to teach. The universe would hold them apart, still, build boundaries for them that would lend to obscured feelings and unspoken words. But her rebirth had already given understanding to what they had tacitly held between them these past few months. Her burdens, at least, had been set down. It was a start.
She touched her lips to his, a dare.
“Bill,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his neck. They had been here before, but she was no longer dying, no longer the president; she had no compunctions about going further. And neither, it seemed when he framed her hips with his hands and pulled her to straddle his lap, did he. They were free to speak… or to act… without forethought, or consequence. “When do you have to be back in CIC?”
He exhaled shakily. “I don’t.”
So she didn’t think, let warmth bloom under his practiced touch, his slow exhale, his tongue moving along hers, before sucking hers into his mouth with another slow but exigent move. He held her there for a sweet moment, and then grazed his teeth along her lower lip. Gods, she thought, but only barely, clenching her thighs together. Bill noticed, and pulled her down against his pelvis, rucking up the hem of her skirt with steady fingers, his thumbs tracing wide circles on her inner thighs.
Distracted by a tiny mole near the crease of her hip, he traced it with the pad of his index finger while his eyes sought out other beauty marks… until Laura cupped his chin and sucked his lower lip into her mouth, forcing his attentions back to their tactile conversation. Bill let out a low noise of understanding, breaking the seal of her lips with his tongue and slipping it into her mouth.
Stay with me.
She couldn’t give him any promises, not in this world, in the killing-frost of this post-apocalypse, where all stood on guard, the two of them more than the rest. But they could grow this between them, this unadorned, speculative bud. He knew how she felt about him, he had to… (he never made her feel like she was on display, which was why she…)
He lifted her hair from her shoulders, burrowing his fingers through it. They were both starved of touch and smell and taste, hungry for what months of standing an appropriate two feet apart deprived them of, of what holding hands and the occasional ghosting touch couldn’t provide. (Vulnerability, and she chased the thought away. There was so much she couldn’t give him, even now. But what she gave chase to had value, must have, if she sought to possess it… him. It sung in her veins, unsung-she wanted to be possessed by him, in return. It was a frightening thought, and she stifled it. Her worlds had shattered over a decade ago.) She pressed closer, lifting her hips and grinding them down into his lap. She felt him harden under her, his hips capturing her movements and answering them. Yet he still had the control to slide his palms down the sides of her arms, and with gentle imperative, his fingers honed in on the buttons on her cuffs, undoing them before he swept his hands in, parting the halves of her blouse.
She relinquished her hold on him to help him in his efforts to divest her of it, discarding the garment to the floor behind them (or the coffee table… she wasn’t quite sure.) Bill wasted no time in kissing his way down her neck, the slope of her chest, pulling her bra strap down her arm with his teeth as his hands flicked open the clasp. Laura felt like laughing, almost, when he sucked hickeys into her sternum, bit tenderly at the curve of her breast. Did laugh, when his thumbs grazed the curve of her waist, hitting ticklish spots no one had found in years. He smiled into her flesh, pausing.
"It’s nice to hear you laugh,” he rasped, voice suffused with affection and bougainvillea blooms, the woody plants she grew on her terrace, her favorites, raised with tender care, painted on the canvases she hid in the back of her closet.
Unexpectant, he looked up at her.
She drew the straps of her bra down her arms, before letting it drop to the side. A moment passed between them, a breath that they took together (we’re doing this, we’re finally doing this, after months of ignoring it and sacrificing it, finally bringing it to the surface, letting it see a little bit of light, letting it grow towards the sun) before he moved, and she moved. He bent his head towards her breasts, but his hands did not immediately seek them out; slowly, almost reverently, he learned the lines of her stomach, trailed his palms over her waist, barely-there touches that threatened to unleash the shiver coiled in her spine.
She wanted to be kissed too well, held too tightly. She wanted to be overwhelmed. She had learned to be lonesome, and now she…
He sensed her distress, somehow. Or rather, she had been thinking for too long, and he had taken notice. She startled when he lifted a hand and whisked away tears from under her eyes.
"It’s okay to cry…"
Laura laughed, and kissed him like summer’s last fury.
Rating: T
Word Count: 1,890
Warnings: None
Summary: In the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Cloud Nine, Bill and Laura are together in his quarters.
---
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
---
He returned from the CIC hours later, Cloud Nine nothing more than dust in the solar wind. She sat on his couch, guarded not even by the pretense of reading a book. She turned her face, and then her eyes, to him after a slight delay to find him staring at her glassy countenance with something like caution, but mostly like reverence.
Any artifice of competency for Baltar’s presidency had been shattered like the fragile, veined petals of the peonies she had loved so much back on Caprica-they littered the floor, as numerous and inconsolable as the body count. And so he still looked to her. Perhaps he would have anyway, Laura thought, not letting it linger for very long at all.
“Did the raptor teams find anything?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head, ambling wearily towards the drink cart, unbuttoning his jacket on the way. “Nothing,” he rasped. “Laura?” he then asked, if only to have her name on his lips, treating the syllables as if they were as heady as any liquor. He poured himself a tumbler of it anyway, and drank without tasting. She watched the muscles of his throat contract. He was solid-broad shoulders, large hands, thickly-veined muscle.
In war you can only die once. In politics, you can die over and over again. She was no longer standing; he would survive. A mighty oak, perhaps, and she the crushed petals of a bloom under Baltar’s wheel. (Laura almost laughed, then, at this girlish notion. She had been, after all, ordering assassination on her deathbed.) Rough winds do shake… but she was no spring maiden.
He refilled his glass and emptied it again, fingers flexing around the glass. Laura wanted to feel his blood rushing against the thinnest parts of his skin-the insides of his wrists, the hollow of his throat, behind his ears-with the pads of her fingers, her lips, her tongue. She wanted to make him as vulnerable as she has been made, by him. (There is no promise that the thousands of souls who lived and died aboard the Cloud Nine would be alive were she still in office, but it’s a tempting thought to enthrall her conscious with.) She wanted to see him in the throes of orgasm, she wanted him outside of the bounds of his tightly-wrought control. He near-always let it slip around her, anyway.
“What do we do now?” he asked, scrubbing his face with his hands. His voice as hushed as the room, the fleet as a whole, to make an honest assessment, all of them shocked into silence by the explosion, the catastrophic loss of life. He did not want to break that silence, send it toppling over the edge like everything else.
Laura sighed.
Nothing.
But he needed an answer, because he still looked to her, because she loved him. Her mind, drifting as it was, looped backwards and erased the last of it. Vulnerable. He loved her-she saw it every time he looked to her, eyes like the beginning of summer. He was already vulnerable. It was still a luxury she could not afford. Love, another thing like a fragile, shattering flower. She would break him even if his love rested barely, gently, in the palm of her hand. He sat down next to her, and she swallowed hard. She wanted ownership of him. He was dangerous, like Richard, but in different ways.
She could love him.
“Laura?”
They could both break. She was the bud that clung tightly to the frost, and yet when she felt his urging hand upon her wrist, Laura could only turn, take his face into her hands, and kiss him.
The kiss was slow, but insistent, like some unspoken imperative she had always been waiting to answer, as unstoppable as winter’s slide into spring. He sighed complicity into her lips, cupping one of his hands through her hair to the base of her skull. Heat flooded her veins, lingered under the surface of her skin, the barest hints of arousal flaring in her fingertips and toes.
She hummed into him when his thumb traced the curve of her jaw before tilting her head just so to slip his tongue past her lips to slide along the roof of her mouth. When she shivered like the careful wisteria blossoms opening on fragile stems, he broke the kiss, his lips lingering against hers before he pulled away entirely, his thumb still caressing under her jaw. The moment was slowed, and thickened, and it took her a few moments to open her eyes against it.
His eyes were questioning, but not imposing. They had, after all, been here before.
Would he ask, now? To put a word to their lips, like the way he said her name? Or could they live here, unnoticed? There was a planet not far outside this hulking steel beast, grass and dirt and tether, not the raging uncertain ghosts of nebulae. Their future was no longer as unfathomable as stardust.
Futures? (Plural? Singular? Past participle, future imperfect.) They had been bound together by duty and genocide. It would not be so easily undone, Laura thought. Perhaps that was how they had slipped so easily into this new bond, this earthen sensuality blossoming in the place of their first, tenuous, political covenant. (Hera and Zeus’ marriage, of course, had first been political and convenient. And here they were again, on his Olympus. Even without her throne, she would always be his queen.) Bill looked at her like it was one. They had always been partners, first.
Laura did not know what he saw in her eyes, but Bill smiled in a way she had not seen before; there was reverence, yes, but understanding. He knew what they would be making, tonight, what would grow in the loamy soil where she would go to teach. The universe would hold them apart, still, build boundaries for them that would lend to obscured feelings and unspoken words. But her rebirth had already given understanding to what they had tacitly held between them these past few months. Her burdens, at least, had been set down. It was a start.
She touched her lips to his, a dare.
“Bill,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his neck. They had been here before, but she was no longer dying, no longer the president; she had no compunctions about going further. And neither, it seemed when he framed her hips with his hands and pulled her to straddle his lap, did he. They were free to speak… or to act… without forethought, or consequence. “When do you have to be back in CIC?”
He exhaled shakily. “I don’t.”
So she didn’t think, let warmth bloom under his practiced touch, his slow exhale, his tongue moving along hers, before sucking hers into his mouth with another slow but exigent move. He held her there for a sweet moment, and then grazed his teeth along her lower lip. Gods, she thought, but only barely, clenching her thighs together. Bill noticed, and pulled her down against his pelvis, rucking up the hem of her skirt with steady fingers, his thumbs tracing wide circles on her inner thighs.
Distracted by a tiny mole near the crease of her hip, he traced it with the pad of his index finger while his eyes sought out other beauty marks… until Laura cupped his chin and sucked his lower lip into her mouth, forcing his attentions back to their tactile conversation. Bill let out a low noise of understanding, breaking the seal of her lips with his tongue and slipping it into her mouth.
Stay with me.
She couldn’t give him any promises, not in this world, in the killing-frost of this post-apocalypse, where all stood on guard, the two of them more than the rest. But they could grow this between them, this unadorned, speculative bud. He knew how she felt about him, he had to… (he never made her feel like she was on display, which was why she…)
He lifted her hair from her shoulders, burrowing his fingers through it. They were both starved of touch and smell and taste, hungry for what months of standing an appropriate two feet apart deprived them of, of what holding hands and the occasional ghosting touch couldn’t provide. (Vulnerability, and she chased the thought away. There was so much she couldn’t give him, even now. But what she gave chase to had value, must have, if she sought to possess it… him. It sung in her veins, unsung-she wanted to be possessed by him, in return. It was a frightening thought, and she stifled it. Her worlds had shattered over a decade ago.) She pressed closer, lifting her hips and grinding them down into his lap. She felt him harden under her, his hips capturing her movements and answering them. Yet he still had the control to slide his palms down the sides of her arms, and with gentle imperative, his fingers honed in on the buttons on her cuffs, undoing them before he swept his hands in, parting the halves of her blouse.
She relinquished her hold on him to help him in his efforts to divest her of it, discarding the garment to the floor behind them (or the coffee table… she wasn’t quite sure.) Bill wasted no time in kissing his way down her neck, the slope of her chest, pulling her bra strap down her arm with his teeth as his hands flicked open the clasp. Laura felt like laughing, almost, when he sucked hickeys into her sternum, bit tenderly at the curve of her breast. Did laugh, when his thumbs grazed the curve of her waist, hitting ticklish spots no one had found in years. He smiled into her flesh, pausing.
"It’s nice to hear you laugh,” he rasped, voice suffused with affection and bougainvillea blooms, the woody plants she grew on her terrace, her favorites, raised with tender care, painted on the canvases she hid in the back of her closet.
Unexpectant, he looked up at her.
She drew the straps of her bra down her arms, before letting it drop to the side. A moment passed between them, a breath that they took together (we’re doing this, we’re finally doing this, after months of ignoring it and sacrificing it, finally bringing it to the surface, letting it see a little bit of light, letting it grow towards the sun) before he moved, and she moved. He bent his head towards her breasts, but his hands did not immediately seek them out; slowly, almost reverently, he learned the lines of her stomach, trailed his palms over her waist, barely-there touches that threatened to unleash the shiver coiled in her spine.
She wanted to be kissed too well, held too tightly. She wanted to be overwhelmed. She had learned to be lonesome, and now she…
He sensed her distress, somehow. Or rather, she had been thinking for too long, and he had taken notice. She startled when he lifted a hand and whisked away tears from under her eyes.
"It’s okay to cry…"
Laura laughed, and kissed him like summer’s last fury.