and again
Title: Arachne into a Spider [4/5]
Prompt: Six/Tory, never
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: through "Crossroads," set after "The Woman King"
A/N: titles from Ovid's Metamorphoses (1717 translation, Pallas=Athena). thanks to thassalia and aeonian for valiant eleventh hour betas.
Summary: OTP 2.0 in 5 PWPs
[ i. one at the loom | ii. the web is ty'd | iii. with nimble flight the shuttles play | iv. then threads of gold | v. still by constant weaving ]
"Do you like to watch?" she said. She gazed at me through her eyelashes and inched her skirt up her thighs. "Was it better from behind the glass, or did you wish you could touch?"
Model Six. Caprica, they call her, after the civilization she destroyed. She was flesh and blood in front of me, but so flawlessly enticing that she might as well have been a reverie. The Cylon had become my wet dream, and that attraction was unfathomable.
"This is how Gaius touches me," she said, stroking her throat, her collarbone, her sternum. She closed her eyes, bit her lip, and moaned. Finally her fingers dipped under her neckline to follow the arc of a breast, circling her nipple behind the cloth. I blinked and tried to see the enemy.
Thing was, when her eyes were open, they reflected a well of anguish and supplication that looked treacherously human. I'd judged Baltar venal at best, but now I didn't know if I could blame him for his blindness.
Six returned her hands to their tantalizing path along her legs. "They touched the Cylon on Pegasus, you know. Raped and brutalized her until she prayed for death." Her knees spread wider on the chair, her skirt rucked up around her wrists to let me glimpse the brim of her cunt. "Could you do that, torture me, if it would get you what you wanted?"
I liked to watch. Lords help me, she traced the margin of her lips, still sealed demurely around their treasures, and I couldn't look away.
"Don't gamble on what I couldn't do," I said. "The President needs to keep her soul, but I'm her shadow. It's my job to take on her nevers."
"Never violate a prisoner?" Six said. "Is that Roslin's creed?"
I crouched in front of her, put my palms on her ivory thighs. I'd lived among the occupiers on New Caprica, spoken to Lieutenant Agathon in passing, but I realized, after the fact, that this was the first time I'd touched a Cylon. It felt like hearing through my skin. Six gasped, and it wasn't part of her performance.
She pushed against me as if to close her legs. I didn't let her. "And what happens if I won't betray Gaius," she said. "If I stop cooperating?"
I slid my hands up, all the way up, and dipped my thumbs into the pink to open her.
Six moved quickly -- faster than a human, and stronger. Before I could react, she'd slammed me against the wall and pinned me with her arm across my neck.
"What did you really come here to ask, Ms. Foster?" she said. "Is it really Gaius's secrets that concern you?"
I'd told the marines to wait beyond the windows. They knew me from Laura's recent visits to the brig, and didn't question my authority when I'd showed up alone. In retrospect, the trial was lost from its inception, and all we can do is pay, again, the wages of democracy. But then, all that seemed certain was that Six was at the center.
She'd talk to Laura, and that worried me. I wanted to buffer her from Six's scrutiny, to bring Laura back a confession so that she could stop haunting the cell. I was already recognizing that I couldn't protect myself from the pull of that place. Laura's safety was an alibi for the magnetism that I wouldn't name.
When I'd entered, Six was sitting upright in the chair, hands folded in her lap as if she could be still like that for hours, on standby. I'd waited for the door to lock, cocooning us, before I spoke.
"Do you believe that Gaius Baltar is a sinner?"
Six tilted her head to examine me, radiating her unearthly sensuality. "I don't think we've been formally introduced. Tory Foster, is it, Roslin's aide?"
"Did you have a human name, when you were undercover?" I'd said.
Six's smile was melancholy. "Yes," she'd said. "But Caprica is who I am now. All of us are sinners." She unlaced her knuckles and reached out to sketch an apparition in the air. "My sins stay with me like spirits. If you want to see the truth of Gaius in me, you have to look differently." She'd moved her hands to her skin, a provocation.
Since Six surrendered herself she'd seemed so subdued, so vulnerable. As she assaulted me, I wondered if I'd made a mortal miscalculation, if she would snap my spine before I could yell and bring the marines running. The adrenaline crackled through me and froze me there, every muscle tense against her.
Then Six, Caprica, eased her hold. The bulkheads slanted outward from the floor, and her body rested heavy along mine on the slope. Her gaze hadn't changed, still bottomless with yearning, and the violent gesture turned into a caress. I sparked like prophecy and didn't resist.
"I never understood why humans denounce this," Caprica said. Her fingers flowed over my chest like streams of water. "Were you ashamed, your first time with a woman?"
My first time was with Christine Giles from debate club, backstage in our high school auditorium. I closed my eyes and was there again, five senses in perfect recall: the satiny twine of her curls through my fists, the little growl she made when I tugged them, the freckles dusting her cheeks, and her cloying vanilla lipgloss. Christine was older than me, more effortlessly glamorous, but I was the stronger competitor. The championship was as fierce as foreplay, and after I beat her she dragged me behind a backdrop and fumbled under my lapels until her hands were on my breasts (like Six's hands were, gravity pulling them down the curve, beneath my clothes, toward the peaks of my nipples). After that, after she got so turned on frakking me that she came riding my leg, Christine told everyone that I'd tried to grope her. My classmates stared, and snickered, and muttered "dyke" just loud enough, but it was all worth it for the memory of the girl unraveling in my arms.
I opened my eyes and, gods, I was still backstage, in the wings of the Caprica City Opera. I could see the cell, but the vision overpowered it, displacing the reality I know. Across the stage, in place of the one-way glass, the closed curtain fell in opulent folds and hid the audience from view. It was an eerie, portentous vertigo.
Caprica's lips were at my ear, inciting me with flutters of teeth and tongue, whispering, "Who do you wish were watching us?"
"What are you doing to me?" I said.
Caprica laughed, tinged with bitterness. "I'm touching you with love," she said. "This isn't a program that I run." Apparently she hadn't entered my hallucination. Not yet.
She knelt, pressed her face into my lap through my skirt, inhaling me. She hummed her pleasure and I rubbed helplessly against the ridge of her nose. Her chin rested on me like a promise when she tilted her head to meet my eyes.
"Roslin studies me from that room. She tries to see Gaius in my memory. What would she think, if she were behind the window now?" I let Caprica draw my underwear down my legs, over the thigh-high stockings I still buy black market because, some days, I can flash Laura a peek of lace in a way we both pretend is accidental. Caprica brushed the bare flesh above them with her fingernails.
"Would she be outraged? Betrayed? Impressed?" She slid my hem up, slowly. "Or would she be transfixed? Would she raise her skirt, like this, her hands imitating mine?" Caprica ruffled the curls there, caught a bead of moisture and smeared it on my skin.
The opera house looked deserted, but I could hear an orchestra tuning, sets scraping into position, the expectant murmur of the audience. Laura could be waiting behind the curtain, searching along the velvet for the gap to pull it aside. Laura could be concealed behind the glass, watching as we'd watched Six before. That was Caprica's fantasy, or a fantasy she'd read from me, and both options were disturbing.
When my legs were bared, Caprica's tongue followed her fingers, tasting me on my thigh. "I'd like to see that," she said. "The President teasing herself through her panties. Spiraling closer and closer to the throb." Her mouth reached the crease of my hip, teeth tugged at my lips to drag them against my clit.
"Is she patient?" Caprica said. "How long till she slips her hand inside, opens herself and spreads the wetness around?"
I grabbed Caprica's plantinum hair and pulled her into me, splitting my cunt on her face. I wanted to muss her immaculate surface, I wanted, a little, to hurt her. I wanted her -- whether or not she was evil, whether or not we got caught -- and that unnerved me. These alien dimensions of myself were becoming harder to ignore. I clung to the wall and tried to stay stay upright.
Caprica whimpered, perfect porn star noises, and consumed my cunt in an open-mouthed kiss. When Christine touched me that day, urgent under my waistband, it was a revelation, as if she carried a current that turned me inside out. Caprica's lips were like that, electrifying every spot.
She kept whimpering, one hand moving between her legs (the way Laura might touch herself, the way Caprica might imagine it). Her other hand danced beside her tongue, and it felt like a thousand fingers were fondling me. She sucked my clit, teeth at the hood, flicking it until it was so swollen that I had to frak her mouth with my hips. She slicked around my opening with her fingertips, didn't push inside, just kneaded the spongy ridge while the muscle contracted in rhythm against the pressure, now, now, now.
I thought of Laura watching, almost impassive, palm on the window as she stroked down, up, down to our tempo. I felt the heat on my face as the stage lights turned on, and came so hard I had to bite my arm to keep from screaming.
Caprica came silently. I shoved her off me when I finished and her mouth was an ecstatic O.
She got up and wiped her hands on the sheets. "Did you get what you wanted?" she said.
"That never happened," I said.
Caprica shrugged. "Keep your nevers. If I told them you raped me, if I told them you made love to me, do you think they would believe me?"
"They seem to believe whatever Gaius Baltar tells them."
"Gaius is not your enemy," she said. "And neither am I. Gaius and I, you and Laura Roslin, we're all part of a vaster constellation that has yet to be mapped."
For a moment, I could hear the creak of ropes and pulleys putting tension in the lines, the curtain poised to open and reveal us to each other.
Then Caprica ran her fingers through her hair, and as it fell back into elegant waves the room shook off its doubleness -- nothing but a stark, utilitarian cell.
I didn't look back when the marines clanged the door shut behind me. I might be my own enemy, in the end. But, by all that is holy, I will never be Laura's. Even if, for her, I have to tear myself to shreds.
Prompt: Six/Tory, never
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: through "Crossroads," set after "The Woman King"
A/N: titles from Ovid's Metamorphoses (1717 translation, Pallas=Athena). thanks to thassalia and aeonian for valiant eleventh hour betas.
Summary: OTP 2.0 in 5 PWPs
[ i. one at the loom | ii. the web is ty'd | iii. with nimble flight the shuttles play | iv. then threads of gold | v. still by constant weaving ]
"Do you like to watch?" she said. She gazed at me through her eyelashes and inched her skirt up her thighs. "Was it better from behind the glass, or did you wish you could touch?"
Model Six. Caprica, they call her, after the civilization she destroyed. She was flesh and blood in front of me, but so flawlessly enticing that she might as well have been a reverie. The Cylon had become my wet dream, and that attraction was unfathomable.
"This is how Gaius touches me," she said, stroking her throat, her collarbone, her sternum. She closed her eyes, bit her lip, and moaned. Finally her fingers dipped under her neckline to follow the arc of a breast, circling her nipple behind the cloth. I blinked and tried to see the enemy.
Thing was, when her eyes were open, they reflected a well of anguish and supplication that looked treacherously human. I'd judged Baltar venal at best, but now I didn't know if I could blame him for his blindness.
Six returned her hands to their tantalizing path along her legs. "They touched the Cylon on Pegasus, you know. Raped and brutalized her until she prayed for death." Her knees spread wider on the chair, her skirt rucked up around her wrists to let me glimpse the brim of her cunt. "Could you do that, torture me, if it would get you what you wanted?"
I liked to watch. Lords help me, she traced the margin of her lips, still sealed demurely around their treasures, and I couldn't look away.
"Don't gamble on what I couldn't do," I said. "The President needs to keep her soul, but I'm her shadow. It's my job to take on her nevers."
"Never violate a prisoner?" Six said. "Is that Roslin's creed?"
I crouched in front of her, put my palms on her ivory thighs. I'd lived among the occupiers on New Caprica, spoken to Lieutenant Agathon in passing, but I realized, after the fact, that this was the first time I'd touched a Cylon. It felt like hearing through my skin. Six gasped, and it wasn't part of her performance.
She pushed against me as if to close her legs. I didn't let her. "And what happens if I won't betray Gaius," she said. "If I stop cooperating?"
I slid my hands up, all the way up, and dipped my thumbs into the pink to open her.
Six moved quickly -- faster than a human, and stronger. Before I could react, she'd slammed me against the wall and pinned me with her arm across my neck.
"What did you really come here to ask, Ms. Foster?" she said. "Is it really Gaius's secrets that concern you?"
I'd told the marines to wait beyond the windows. They knew me from Laura's recent visits to the brig, and didn't question my authority when I'd showed up alone. In retrospect, the trial was lost from its inception, and all we can do is pay, again, the wages of democracy. But then, all that seemed certain was that Six was at the center.
She'd talk to Laura, and that worried me. I wanted to buffer her from Six's scrutiny, to bring Laura back a confession so that she could stop haunting the cell. I was already recognizing that I couldn't protect myself from the pull of that place. Laura's safety was an alibi for the magnetism that I wouldn't name.
When I'd entered, Six was sitting upright in the chair, hands folded in her lap as if she could be still like that for hours, on standby. I'd waited for the door to lock, cocooning us, before I spoke.
"Do you believe that Gaius Baltar is a sinner?"
Six tilted her head to examine me, radiating her unearthly sensuality. "I don't think we've been formally introduced. Tory Foster, is it, Roslin's aide?"
"Did you have a human name, when you were undercover?" I'd said.
Six's smile was melancholy. "Yes," she'd said. "But Caprica is who I am now. All of us are sinners." She unlaced her knuckles and reached out to sketch an apparition in the air. "My sins stay with me like spirits. If you want to see the truth of Gaius in me, you have to look differently." She'd moved her hands to her skin, a provocation.
Since Six surrendered herself she'd seemed so subdued, so vulnerable. As she assaulted me, I wondered if I'd made a mortal miscalculation, if she would snap my spine before I could yell and bring the marines running. The adrenaline crackled through me and froze me there, every muscle tense against her.
Then Six, Caprica, eased her hold. The bulkheads slanted outward from the floor, and her body rested heavy along mine on the slope. Her gaze hadn't changed, still bottomless with yearning, and the violent gesture turned into a caress. I sparked like prophecy and didn't resist.
"I never understood why humans denounce this," Caprica said. Her fingers flowed over my chest like streams of water. "Were you ashamed, your first time with a woman?"
My first time was with Christine Giles from debate club, backstage in our high school auditorium. I closed my eyes and was there again, five senses in perfect recall: the satiny twine of her curls through my fists, the little growl she made when I tugged them, the freckles dusting her cheeks, and her cloying vanilla lipgloss. Christine was older than me, more effortlessly glamorous, but I was the stronger competitor. The championship was as fierce as foreplay, and after I beat her she dragged me behind a backdrop and fumbled under my lapels until her hands were on my breasts (like Six's hands were, gravity pulling them down the curve, beneath my clothes, toward the peaks of my nipples). After that, after she got so turned on frakking me that she came riding my leg, Christine told everyone that I'd tried to grope her. My classmates stared, and snickered, and muttered "dyke" just loud enough, but it was all worth it for the memory of the girl unraveling in my arms.
I opened my eyes and, gods, I was still backstage, in the wings of the Caprica City Opera. I could see the cell, but the vision overpowered it, displacing the reality I know. Across the stage, in place of the one-way glass, the closed curtain fell in opulent folds and hid the audience from view. It was an eerie, portentous vertigo.
Caprica's lips were at my ear, inciting me with flutters of teeth and tongue, whispering, "Who do you wish were watching us?"
"What are you doing to me?" I said.
Caprica laughed, tinged with bitterness. "I'm touching you with love," she said. "This isn't a program that I run." Apparently she hadn't entered my hallucination. Not yet.
She knelt, pressed her face into my lap through my skirt, inhaling me. She hummed her pleasure and I rubbed helplessly against the ridge of her nose. Her chin rested on me like a promise when she tilted her head to meet my eyes.
"Roslin studies me from that room. She tries to see Gaius in my memory. What would she think, if she were behind the window now?" I let Caprica draw my underwear down my legs, over the thigh-high stockings I still buy black market because, some days, I can flash Laura a peek of lace in a way we both pretend is accidental. Caprica brushed the bare flesh above them with her fingernails.
"Would she be outraged? Betrayed? Impressed?" She slid my hem up, slowly. "Or would she be transfixed? Would she raise her skirt, like this, her hands imitating mine?" Caprica ruffled the curls there, caught a bead of moisture and smeared it on my skin.
The opera house looked deserted, but I could hear an orchestra tuning, sets scraping into position, the expectant murmur of the audience. Laura could be waiting behind the curtain, searching along the velvet for the gap to pull it aside. Laura could be concealed behind the glass, watching as we'd watched Six before. That was Caprica's fantasy, or a fantasy she'd read from me, and both options were disturbing.
When my legs were bared, Caprica's tongue followed her fingers, tasting me on my thigh. "I'd like to see that," she said. "The President teasing herself through her panties. Spiraling closer and closer to the throb." Her mouth reached the crease of my hip, teeth tugged at my lips to drag them against my clit.
"Is she patient?" Caprica said. "How long till she slips her hand inside, opens herself and spreads the wetness around?"
I grabbed Caprica's plantinum hair and pulled her into me, splitting my cunt on her face. I wanted to muss her immaculate surface, I wanted, a little, to hurt her. I wanted her -- whether or not she was evil, whether or not we got caught -- and that unnerved me. These alien dimensions of myself were becoming harder to ignore. I clung to the wall and tried to stay stay upright.
Caprica whimpered, perfect porn star noises, and consumed my cunt in an open-mouthed kiss. When Christine touched me that day, urgent under my waistband, it was a revelation, as if she carried a current that turned me inside out. Caprica's lips were like that, electrifying every spot.
She kept whimpering, one hand moving between her legs (the way Laura might touch herself, the way Caprica might imagine it). Her other hand danced beside her tongue, and it felt like a thousand fingers were fondling me. She sucked my clit, teeth at the hood, flicking it until it was so swollen that I had to frak her mouth with my hips. She slicked around my opening with her fingertips, didn't push inside, just kneaded the spongy ridge while the muscle contracted in rhythm against the pressure, now, now, now.
I thought of Laura watching, almost impassive, palm on the window as she stroked down, up, down to our tempo. I felt the heat on my face as the stage lights turned on, and came so hard I had to bite my arm to keep from screaming.
Caprica came silently. I shoved her off me when I finished and her mouth was an ecstatic O.
She got up and wiped her hands on the sheets. "Did you get what you wanted?" she said.
"That never happened," I said.
Caprica shrugged. "Keep your nevers. If I told them you raped me, if I told them you made love to me, do you think they would believe me?"
"They seem to believe whatever Gaius Baltar tells them."
"Gaius is not your enemy," she said. "And neither am I. Gaius and I, you and Laura Roslin, we're all part of a vaster constellation that has yet to be mapped."
For a moment, I could hear the creak of ropes and pulleys putting tension in the lines, the curtain poised to open and reveal us to each other.
Then Caprica ran her fingers through her hair, and as it fell back into elegant waves the room shook off its doubleness -- nothing but a stark, utilitarian cell.
I didn't look back when the marines clanged the door shut behind me. I might be my own enemy, in the end. But, by all that is holy, I will never be Laura's. Even if, for her, I have to tear myself to shreds.