maybe there's a light that's always on {sam/ellen}
Title: Maybe There's A Light That's Always On
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Ellen, some Sam/Kara, Tigh/Ellen
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,170
Prompt: #46 - Past for 100_tales
Author's Note: You know when you shouldn't write fic for a show? When you haven't seen 30% of it. But I did it anyway. My first non-drabbley BSG fic.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 4.5. It starts as a waking dream, the kind that leaves you gasping for air and grasping for sheets you don't recognize.
It starts as a waking dream, the kind that leaves you gasping for air and grasping for sheets you don’t recognize.
There is a house, small and grey and cold, like the skies above, only it’s half ruined and there’s something in the air that stings when he breathes, makes his eyes burn. In the distance a woman screams.
And then he wakes. His eyes flutter open and there is still screaming and he thinks, this is just a sign of what’s to come, his subconscious working overtime.
This is New Caprica.
---
Sam’s always had a thing for blondes.
“Now,” Kara will say, sometimes, coming in after flying CAP for too long or punching thruster pedals for thirty minutes straight before slamming into the deck on a particularly shitty landing. Anyone else would be craving sleep, but she’s never more awake, alive. She grabs him by the shoulders, presses him into her rack, hands and hips moving the second they’re down.
Maybe, Sam will sometimes think, in the after, it’s not a thing for blondes, it’s a thing for women who know what they want.
---
There are times when he’ll catch a glimpse of something in a pane of glass or the mirror. An outline of a woman, tall and thin, and he can never tell if it’s a reflection off the glass or the mirror, or just the back of his eyes, some hidden memory.
No one else ever sees.
They all have their ghosts; it’s just odd that he’s being haunted by one he can’t quite place.
---
“We’re Cylons,” rings in his ears, and his hands still shake even when Tyrol is inches away telling him exactly who he’s supposed to be.
you’re Sam Anders, you’re Sam Anders, you’re Sam Anders
Somehow this is supposed to make things clearer.
---
He’ll come back to it sometimes.
She’ll move down and he’ll move up and she’s got her hands on his shoulders or splayed against his bare chest. Sometimes her fingers will curl into hard muscle and hold there until it hurts, conflicts with the rhythm of her hips.
His fingers run through blonde waves (dirty, if he’d bother to open his eyes for more than a second, note the contrast) and down sides, counting ribs and grasping a hold of her hips, cradling her ass. She’s silent when she comes, lip catching between her teeth, but he can still feel her clench around him, the way her legs shake and she seems to sway a little above him.
All of this is underscored with, “he’ll never know,” harsh and broken as it echoes off the walls, the only sound in the room.
---
When they find out, about him, about them (Tyrol and Tigh and Tory, except she’s gone by now, she knew to get while the getting was good, always knew more than him - they all did), it’s funny because even after almost getting airlocked most people look at him the same way - it’s fake but he appreciates the effort.
Not Kara. No, never her.
(No one knows what or who she is and so all she does is look at him like she’s wondering how she can spin this into a positive reflection on herself, the woman with the Cylon husband - it’s a fairly impossible task but Kara’s never been afraid of a challenge).
---
Tory wasn’t the first anymore than Lee was Kara’s. Because before Tory there was New Caprica and four months of loneliness colored in things like pneumonia and bombs and some rotgut Tyrol had gotten (because if they can’t have freedom then they can at least have the illusion of it).
Ellen had this way about her like she could promise you all the stars in the galaxy, Earth even, and you’d probably believe her. He knew she frakked Cavil for a chance at getting her husband back, except he didn’t throw accusations about conspiracies and cooperating with the enemy because the part of him not run by logic, tinged in black and white and no in-between, understood. People do stupid things in the endless, often trivial, pursuit of love that will only eventually lead to disappointment and a hollow ache you can’t scratch or twist or beat out.
He understood and he told her so with hands on the sides of her face and eventually lips on hers. It was her who parted his lips with her tongue though, searching and probing just as her hands do and this was supposed to be some newfound comfort, something to break up the routine of everything, of good and bad and new plans and new bombs and new bodies to bury.
Instead it feels like another facet of the old, another ‘been there, done that’ on this godsdamn planet, and he wonders if everything just loses its spark when you’re this worn down.
---
Earth smells like empty promises, looks like a holocaust, but his fingers run over bones, ridged by centuries of dust and the elements, run over debris and artifacts while his lips move along to a song he’s both never and always known.
so let us not talk falsely now, because the hour is getting late
Sam hasn’t felt this at home in years.
---
It all comes back to them in stages.
Tyrol first, simple as a hand against a blackened shadow on a building that’s long since been destroyed, an outline traced by the tips of fingers. Sam next, with that song, a scene in his head, playing it for the woman he loved (he can’t find her face), for all of them. Then there’s Tigh, digging memories of corpses out of the sea; even the water here is gray, gray like the sky above their heads and the land beneath their feet (there used to be colors, vivid, vibrant, but they’ve been sucked dry just like everything else).
“The fifth,” Tigh will say on an exhale. “Ellen was the fifth.”
Something clicks in his mind. Again.
---
This has all happened before and it will all happen again
The words ring in his ears, voices he isn’t quite yet acclimated to. Cylons, he knows intuitively, just like him.
Never a truer statement, he thinks, because he can see her now. He can see her face, he can feel her beneath him, and he can taste her kiss on his lips. He can hear her voice clear as day in his mind, just like before, except he can feel those eyes burning into him that weren’t quite there before.
Ellen.
Tigh talks in ‘what if’s’ and circles about her, sometimes, when he thinks no one’s listening, at least no one that matters. Sam will avert his eyes, won’t meet the other man’s for days at a time.
He thinks, somehow, everything from before, the fact that he, they, had done this before, makes this excusable.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Kara would sometimes tell him, that insufferable tone in her voice. He shivers now.