Shuffleupagus Fic, Battlestar Galactica
Author:
llassah
Title: Persephone Rising
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Pairings: Kara/Leoben (main), Kara/RayK (due South), Kara/Billy Tallent (HCL, post film, oblique references to end), Kara/Craig Zwiller (Last Night)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1600ish
Notes: Written for
shuffleupagus, for the prompt Kara/Leoben, the morning after No spoilers, set after the Battlestar's return to earth. Starbuck drifts.
She drifts. She drifts, and keeps drifting, as those who are left melt into the general fabric of humanity. Some stay together, given a base by the government, unable to function as citizens of this strange new world- this earth- and some want nothing more to do with the Battlestar, nothing more to do with the decisions and the deaths, the recriminations, the food shortages. In peace, the desperation of that time is forgotten swiftly. She…she doesn’t know if she blames anyone, but she drifts anyway. Blame is a word that cuts deep for her, a word she sees in the eyes of those survivors far too often to escape her troubled dreams.
She sees him.
She thinks she sees him in Chicago once, fleetingly, but just as she is deciding whether to run away or towards him she sees him arrest someone, his movements too quick, too jittery for Leoben. That is the first time. That night she goes to a bar and drinks until her hand is blurry, then starts a bar fight, just because she can. She has melted into the night by the time the cops come. Not-Leoben is there with a guy in red and a wolf. He looks at Red with the expression Leoben saves for her, and she drags her knuckles along the wall of the alley, needing something sharp and pure to get away the dull fuzzy ache that weighs down her steps.
He doesn’t see her, not until later that week when her knuckles are partly healed and he is staring into a beerglass like it holds the answer to everything. This is the first of the mornings, too, when he makes her coffee and eats candy like a five year old. He says sorry as she leaves his apartment, in a voice that is husky with sleep and thin from defeat. She tells him to save it for Red, and laughs at his expression as she takes the stairs two at a time.
She keeps going north and sees him with a cigarette in his mouth and a guitar in his hands, and the sort of deadened look in his eyes that some of the pilots had got in the last months, the look of someone who cannot continue to live, but whose heart keeps beating all the same. They frak- fuck, they say here- hard and angry on an old mattress, sheets of scribbled-on paper all over the floor, lyrics, snatches of melody, doodles of guitars and knives, of fingers on triggers and broken glasses. That is a morning of drifting too- into, together, against, away, apart- and she leaves him lying there in silence, hands twisted and bunched in the thin worn bedsheet. She wonders who he sees as he stares at the wall with an expression of fresh sparked anger. As she passes under his broken window on the street below, she hears a guitar tuning up. His heart still beats for more than survival, after all.
He sells her a can of soda in a brightly lit supermarket, informs her it might turn her skin yellow with a slightly mad grin.
He wears sunglasses, signs an autograph, ducks his head and smiles. Later, he is tugged away, kissed in a corner, away from prying eyes and cameras. She sees them, though. The guy he is with looks at her over his shoulder with a stare far too piercing, far too wise for her to stay there for long. She downs her drink, stumbles out of the bar and tries not to think about the strange half-recognition in his eyes.
He tells her the world is ending, and they frak in an alleyway. She admires his fatalism. It had ended before for her, after all. He is determined, sweet, calm. In another world, perhaps, her world, he would have been a fine pilot, steady, willing to face death with a shrug and a smile, so long as he went out doing something he loved. He doesn’t require meanings or patterns, but he tells her she is beautiful with something approaching Leoben’s reverence. Theirs isn’t a morning after; it is the thin greyness of a time beyond night, before morning. The streets look eerily deserted, and he drapes his coat around her shoulders as they walk aimlessly around the city till dawn.
When she really sees him, she expects him to be another not-him, a near miss. He’s standing leant against a wall as if he’s been waiting for her forever. They don’t say anything for a while, just look at each other, the snow chilling her already cold feet, melting in her hair and trickling down the back of her neck. It’s a strangely muted homecoming, the cold bleak street with the flickering light casting a sickly yellow glow. But he’s Leoben, and to him she’s Kara, to him she’s not a stranger, or a pilot without a Viper who doesn’t know how to cope when there are no death or glory missions, no bright-burning flights into oblivion to be taken. It might be that she sees him too, hates him sometimes, but always sees him. Maybe he needs that too, needs to be more than a remnant of a war long passed.
“You hungry?”
The same smile. She is unused to joy, keeps it secret, wraps it around her like a coat. She nods, then tries her voice. “Yeah, I am. Well, starving actually.”
It’s husky from lack of use, and from something else, something nameless and choking. He nods like she’s said something profound, silence stretching out in the space between them. She reaches out, takes his hand, kills the silence with movement.
He watches her as she eats, scarfing down the burger, fingers greasy, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. His own food lies untouched until she stops eating. She talks, then, as he eats, tells him about the times he wasn’t Leoben, about the mornings that weren’t about his blood on the carpet and paint on her hands. She tells him she is lonely, and doesn’t know how to live in peace any more. He gives no sign that he hears, but when he finishes his meal he grasps her hand with both of his, strokes it softly, soothingly, and whispers that everything will be fine. For the first time, she starts out with the desire to believe him, doesn’t need to be forced into it, doesn’t start out looking for the trick, the double meaning. It is only herself she hurts by being unwary.
His apartment’s small but clean, piles of books stacked neatly along one wall. Some she recognises, some she doesn’t. He kisses her in the middle of the room, first with reverence, then with warmth. She wonders if she should fight him, if he expects her to, but she’s so tired, so frakking tired, and he is as alone as she is. She wants something else to fight against, something new.
He whispers as he kisses her, whispers into her skin, whispers about going north, about snow and ice, strange lights in the sky and beautiful solitude. He whispers about her viper, tells her where it is, and she clings to him and laughs breathlessly, letting her head fall back onto the pillows. His hands are warm as they skim over her sides, tracing patterns, circles that grow, move down her body and diminish until she’s crying out, breathless and aroused, his fingers strong and sure within her. She kisses him, kisses every inch of skin she can get to, sometimes licking, sometimes scraping her teeth along his skin making him shudder and offer his skin up for more.
They have the same Gods here, the same legends, diluted by time and history. They use the Colonies to tell their own fortunes, a half-hearted, wistful belief in the principles that guided her, straight and sure. Here, there are no altars, only ruins. She wraps her legs around him and tries to pretend that this is what she was striving for, that she is a Persephone who didn’t choose this life, didn’t eat those six seeds with some knowledge of what they meant. Messenger, prisoner, her roles intertwine as they are joined, as she urges him on with moans, feverish kisses, her nails down his back. She arches against him, orgasm blazing bright, purging, and she realises she is crying, trails of tears down her cheeks, sobs mingling with her cries. He licks the tears off, presses his face to the side of her neck, gasps against her skin as he comes then they cling to each other, skin cooling rapidly in the chill of the apartment. They sleep intertwined, warding off the cold and the dark, his presence a solid bedrock, his breath the chants she used to hear in the temples before, and she drifts again, this time into sleep and peace.
There have been many morning afters. Mornings with the daylight streaming through the window, mornings with the light stained red with the heavy velvet of the curtains, mornings with no light at all, with the side of the metal bunk cold on her outflung hand. Awkward mornings, lazy frakked-out mornings, mornings with laughter, tears, shouts, whispers…
Mornings with him, too, with his blood on trickling through her fingers, his body cold, his words soft, her anger bright and harsh and her face hot with rage. Mornings when he isn’t himself, is a might-have-been who wears his face and speaks with his voice. Here, it is different. Here, in this lumpy bed in this neatly shabby room, she wakes up with hope as fragile and tentative as the dawn, and smiles.
llassah
Title: Persephone Rising
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Pairings: Kara/Leoben (main), Kara/RayK (due South), Kara/Billy Tallent (HCL, post film, oblique references to end), Kara/Craig Zwiller (Last Night)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1600ish
Notes: Written for
shuffleupagus, for the prompt Kara/Leoben, the morning after No spoilers, set after the Battlestar's return to earth. Starbuck drifts.
She drifts. She drifts, and keeps drifting, as those who are left melt into the general fabric of humanity. Some stay together, given a base by the government, unable to function as citizens of this strange new world- this earth- and some want nothing more to do with the Battlestar, nothing more to do with the decisions and the deaths, the recriminations, the food shortages. In peace, the desperation of that time is forgotten swiftly. She…she doesn’t know if she blames anyone, but she drifts anyway. Blame is a word that cuts deep for her, a word she sees in the eyes of those survivors far too often to escape her troubled dreams.
She sees him.
She thinks she sees him in Chicago once, fleetingly, but just as she is deciding whether to run away or towards him she sees him arrest someone, his movements too quick, too jittery for Leoben. That is the first time. That night she goes to a bar and drinks until her hand is blurry, then starts a bar fight, just because she can. She has melted into the night by the time the cops come. Not-Leoben is there with a guy in red and a wolf. He looks at Red with the expression Leoben saves for her, and she drags her knuckles along the wall of the alley, needing something sharp and pure to get away the dull fuzzy ache that weighs down her steps.
He doesn’t see her, not until later that week when her knuckles are partly healed and he is staring into a beerglass like it holds the answer to everything. This is the first of the mornings, too, when he makes her coffee and eats candy like a five year old. He says sorry as she leaves his apartment, in a voice that is husky with sleep and thin from defeat. She tells him to save it for Red, and laughs at his expression as she takes the stairs two at a time.
She keeps going north and sees him with a cigarette in his mouth and a guitar in his hands, and the sort of deadened look in his eyes that some of the pilots had got in the last months, the look of someone who cannot continue to live, but whose heart keeps beating all the same. They frak- fuck, they say here- hard and angry on an old mattress, sheets of scribbled-on paper all over the floor, lyrics, snatches of melody, doodles of guitars and knives, of fingers on triggers and broken glasses. That is a morning of drifting too- into, together, against, away, apart- and she leaves him lying there in silence, hands twisted and bunched in the thin worn bedsheet. She wonders who he sees as he stares at the wall with an expression of fresh sparked anger. As she passes under his broken window on the street below, she hears a guitar tuning up. His heart still beats for more than survival, after all.
He sells her a can of soda in a brightly lit supermarket, informs her it might turn her skin yellow with a slightly mad grin.
He wears sunglasses, signs an autograph, ducks his head and smiles. Later, he is tugged away, kissed in a corner, away from prying eyes and cameras. She sees them, though. The guy he is with looks at her over his shoulder with a stare far too piercing, far too wise for her to stay there for long. She downs her drink, stumbles out of the bar and tries not to think about the strange half-recognition in his eyes.
He tells her the world is ending, and they frak in an alleyway. She admires his fatalism. It had ended before for her, after all. He is determined, sweet, calm. In another world, perhaps, her world, he would have been a fine pilot, steady, willing to face death with a shrug and a smile, so long as he went out doing something he loved. He doesn’t require meanings or patterns, but he tells her she is beautiful with something approaching Leoben’s reverence. Theirs isn’t a morning after; it is the thin greyness of a time beyond night, before morning. The streets look eerily deserted, and he drapes his coat around her shoulders as they walk aimlessly around the city till dawn.
When she really sees him, she expects him to be another not-him, a near miss. He’s standing leant against a wall as if he’s been waiting for her forever. They don’t say anything for a while, just look at each other, the snow chilling her already cold feet, melting in her hair and trickling down the back of her neck. It’s a strangely muted homecoming, the cold bleak street with the flickering light casting a sickly yellow glow. But he’s Leoben, and to him she’s Kara, to him she’s not a stranger, or a pilot without a Viper who doesn’t know how to cope when there are no death or glory missions, no bright-burning flights into oblivion to be taken. It might be that she sees him too, hates him sometimes, but always sees him. Maybe he needs that too, needs to be more than a remnant of a war long passed.
“You hungry?”
The same smile. She is unused to joy, keeps it secret, wraps it around her like a coat. She nods, then tries her voice. “Yeah, I am. Well, starving actually.”
It’s husky from lack of use, and from something else, something nameless and choking. He nods like she’s said something profound, silence stretching out in the space between them. She reaches out, takes his hand, kills the silence with movement.
He watches her as she eats, scarfing down the burger, fingers greasy, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. His own food lies untouched until she stops eating. She talks, then, as he eats, tells him about the times he wasn’t Leoben, about the mornings that weren’t about his blood on the carpet and paint on her hands. She tells him she is lonely, and doesn’t know how to live in peace any more. He gives no sign that he hears, but when he finishes his meal he grasps her hand with both of his, strokes it softly, soothingly, and whispers that everything will be fine. For the first time, she starts out with the desire to believe him, doesn’t need to be forced into it, doesn’t start out looking for the trick, the double meaning. It is only herself she hurts by being unwary.
His apartment’s small but clean, piles of books stacked neatly along one wall. Some she recognises, some she doesn’t. He kisses her in the middle of the room, first with reverence, then with warmth. She wonders if she should fight him, if he expects her to, but she’s so tired, so frakking tired, and he is as alone as she is. She wants something else to fight against, something new.
He whispers as he kisses her, whispers into her skin, whispers about going north, about snow and ice, strange lights in the sky and beautiful solitude. He whispers about her viper, tells her where it is, and she clings to him and laughs breathlessly, letting her head fall back onto the pillows. His hands are warm as they skim over her sides, tracing patterns, circles that grow, move down her body and diminish until she’s crying out, breathless and aroused, his fingers strong and sure within her. She kisses him, kisses every inch of skin she can get to, sometimes licking, sometimes scraping her teeth along his skin making him shudder and offer his skin up for more.
They have the same Gods here, the same legends, diluted by time and history. They use the Colonies to tell their own fortunes, a half-hearted, wistful belief in the principles that guided her, straight and sure. Here, there are no altars, only ruins. She wraps her legs around him and tries to pretend that this is what she was striving for, that she is a Persephone who didn’t choose this life, didn’t eat those six seeds with some knowledge of what they meant. Messenger, prisoner, her roles intertwine as they are joined, as she urges him on with moans, feverish kisses, her nails down his back. She arches against him, orgasm blazing bright, purging, and she realises she is crying, trails of tears down her cheeks, sobs mingling with her cries. He licks the tears off, presses his face to the side of her neck, gasps against her skin as he comes then they cling to each other, skin cooling rapidly in the chill of the apartment. They sleep intertwined, warding off the cold and the dark, his presence a solid bedrock, his breath the chants she used to hear in the temples before, and she drifts again, this time into sleep and peace.
There have been many morning afters. Mornings with the daylight streaming through the window, mornings with the light stained red with the heavy velvet of the curtains, mornings with no light at all, with the side of the metal bunk cold on her outflung hand. Awkward mornings, lazy frakked-out mornings, mornings with laughter, tears, shouts, whispers…
Mornings with him, too, with his blood on trickling through her fingers, his body cold, his words soft, her anger bright and harsh and her face hot with rage. Mornings when he isn’t himself, is a might-have-been who wears his face and speaks with his voice. Here, it is different. Here, in this lumpy bed in this neatly shabby room, she wakes up with hope as fragile and tentative as the dawn, and smiles.