given that our blood is just like the atlantic {sam/ellen}
Title: Given That Our Blood Is Just Like The Atlantic
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Ellen, hints of other pairings.
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,161
Author's Note: Trying to get out of the rut I'm in with that Grey's fic, by writing different fandoms. Here's to all two of you that will read this -- thanks to crickets for the handholding.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 4.5. The seasons have started dictating their actions, and he isn't ever really surprised by that. It's cyclical like that.
They did not have four seasons on Earth. They had two polar opposites - extremely cold and extremely hot, severe changes that seemed to sneak up on them overnight.
A few cycles of this and Sam was able to come to the fairly sad but unsurprising conclusion that seasons and weather patterns served as a good indicator for how they acted around each other. Cold and withdrawn in the winter, free and aggressive in the summer. It was Ellen’s favorite time of the year, right when the seasons changed, bitter cold temperatures giving away to blinding heat, something else he didn’t find very surprising. The transition had her written all over it - calm, cool, collected, switching to angry, passionate, wild quicker than he could catch up.
Sam goes to sleep one night with the comforter pulled up to his chin, and wakes with it kicked right off the bed. Ellen’s in the water that very same day with a mischievous smirk on her face, waiting for him to drop onto the edge of the shore with his guitar in tow, and so it starts again.
---
Work takes a backseat when the weather turns warmer.
“I always get my best ideas out here anyways,” she says, as the water swirls around her, ripples from where she’d just broken the surface. Ellen never did look much like she was thinking about anything other than the sun and the water on those days, but he knew enough to know it was a front. Experience taught her that it was best to play dumb, empty-headed; you learn more when people underestimate you.
He hums the first few bars of something, a lyric-less tune that’s been playing on repeat in his mind for the past few days. This is just the first time that he’s had the chance to get his hands on his guitar since then. “Yeah?” He asks, absentmindedly, his fingers trying strings, starting and stopping as he tries to recreate the tune that’s currently exists only in his mind. “Got any right now?”
For a moment, the lack of a quick response makes him think they’re going to stay in serious territory. But when he looks up, made curious by the silence, she’s half out of the water, long, lean limbs wet and glistening in the sunlight. “A few,” she tells him, and the way she moves, shoulders held back, perfect posture, narrow hips swaying just enough that he’ll notice, suggests that what she’s got, in fact, are a few bad ideas that he’s going to fall into without ever meaning to. Like always.
She’s still got Saul, and he’s got a girl too -- one that gives him soft smiles and gentle kisses, but still sleeps in her own bed in her own house and doesn’t hold him on nearly a short enough leash for her, their, own good - but Ellen’s never heard of the word ‘enough’, or at least never taken it to heart, and Sam’s always liked a challenge anyway.
---
Ellen claims “I’ve got a friend who’s got a hunch, something that might help - it’ll only be a few days” at half past ten, when Saul’s already given into his vice, glass bottle cradled in his hands, forget the glass.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he says, before he starts in about something else that Sam can barely decipher because Saul’s laughing through his words, that laugh that no one’s ever quite been able to replicate and never seems to fit him until he’s halfway through a bottle. Ellen catches his eye, brief, self-satisfied, because they have plans in the worst sense of the word, and Tyrol’s looking at them both like they’re complete frakkin’ idiots, and they probably are.
(“What the hell are you doing?” Tyrol asks, later, outside the bar when everyone else is going. He pushes Sam by the shoulders, until his back is against brick, and neither of them stumbles, neither of them even buzzed enough to be full of anything but good judgment and common sense; Sam is just electing not to use his.
He says, “you’re reading too much into this,” like a warning, back off now, and it doesn’t faze Tyrol, nothing Sam really says does, and it’s what frustrates him, it’s what pisses him off, it’s what drives him to do things like this thing with Ellen, because Ellen and Tyrol are the ones who have this whole thing figured out, this organic memory transfer, and Saul and Tory fit into that the way lovers and significant others do, which leaves him as a fifth wheel. It leaves him as the expendable, doesn’t amount to very much part of the equation, even if they’d all probably tell him otherwise. He’s the most curious, but he’s the least of a lot of other things, and the scales don’t quite ever balance the way he’d like them too.)
Sam tells his girlfriend the opposite. Talks up a big story about work and research and excuses he’s used before, and she’s just sweet enough, maybe just gullible enough, to believe him. Maybe he’s just looks like the kind of guy you believe, the kind that would never hurt you if he could help it. Or maybe she’s just good at denial and he’s good at lying, much in the same way that Saul keeps the laughter and the booze flowing as Ellen tells him that she’s leaving for the weekend, and he says “good idea” like he doesn’t already know that she’s slept with half of her underlings, research assistants and the like.
In the end they get as far as the bedroom, behind the locked door of Sam’s house, and he tries to believe that this all something more than a means to an end with her hips grinding into his and her nails digging raw half-moon marks into his skin.
---
It gets stuffy inside four walls under burning sunlight after awhile, and Ellen usually takes her lunch outside into the courtyard that forms the center of the sizeable building, getting as far away from the aptly and unofficially titled research and development wing as possible.
She also rarely comes back in until it’s time to leave.
He joins her sometimes, under the pretense of getting some fresh air and “you look lonely” and she squints at him in the sunlight like she sees right through him, because Ellen Tigh never looks lonely or desperate unless she means to.
Her bare legs cross, as she smoothes the edge of her skirt that hits just above the knee before leaning back on her elbows in the grass, taking in the fresh air and relative privacy. The people inside, they have no need for sunlight, not most of them anyway - not that Ellen or Sam or any of the other three have really fit so well in that group of reclusive scientists that cohabit the building with them. They’ve always been something different.
Sam isn’t thinking in terms of strictly her anymore by the time her lips catch his, which is probably why she makes the move in the first place. Even as he’s kissing her back, a hand tangling in her hair, he’s got his ears perked, listening for movement or voices, a sign that they’ve been caught, because a part of him just wants to get this out and over with, has been wanting to get it out and over with for years, and yet that opportunity never quite comes.
She fights his efforts to pull back after a moment, pressing into him that much closer for it, and his tongue searches for that hint of alcohol on her lips, in the taste of her mouth, but finds none, which is perhaps more surprising than the kiss itself.
“Loosen up,” she laughs, like someone much younger than she is, like a giggly schoolgirl, after she’s pulled back on her own terms.
Even after she’s gone and the sun is fading, clouds rolling into obscure it from sight, graying skies a warning to seek cover while he still can before the storms come in, he still does not move.
---
“We’re so close,” Ellen moans, and he can find the irony in the fact that she is in fact not talking about them or their current situation, her knees tight around his waist, bony and hitting his ribs at the wrong angle. What she means is their research and resurrection, and he isn’t sure if that’s what gets her hot or if she’s trying not to think about him or if she’s just really good at multitasking.
It makes for some interesting pillow talk, regardless.
In the moments right after she comes, there is this sort of twitch that one might call aftershocks, places where her breath catches and her grip on him tightens - he likes to think it’s almost like electricity is running through her veins instead of blood, synthetic and misleading.
---
His girlfriend (Kayla, he starts interjecting, a year too late, and he wonders what that says about them that he’s bothering to focus on her name instead of her title now) leaves him mid-summer. She places no blame, just packs up the few necessities she keeps at his place and leaves with nothing more than a kiss on the cheek, disappearing into a windy day.
Later:
Sam writes a song, a dedication to go along with it, shrouded in anonymity to anyone who doesn’t know him, and he holds her gaze from across the bar, trying to say something with his eyes about how if nothing else she’s jolted him into something like productivity. She looks away, finding something more interesting in her glass, and his eyes fall to Ellen.
And this is not our fate, falls from his lips in time with the tight smile she’s giving him.
He ends up with his body sliding against Kayla’s, sweat slick and hungry, before the night is over. It’s her who leaves in the morning, again, still no goodbye, and he discovers that maybe she isn’t anything like that sweet girl he thought she was and he had just never bothered to notice.
It’s then that he starts to want her.
Everything is cyclical like that.
---
Sometimes he wonders how the hell he came to be this way. He never had any designs on being that guy, the almost-scientist, almost-musician, almost-homewrecker, hooking up like clockwork with a woman who has turned fucking people over into an art form if it gets her where she wants and what she needs.
It drives him crazy that he now thinks in shades of ‘too late’ and ‘never meant to but did’ like there’s no turning around, and maybe there just isn’t. Maybe you are meant to be someone, one certain way, and there’s just no getting around it.
That means, in a way, that he’s doomed to chase after people he isn’t ever going to catch and probably wouldn’t want even if he did, and, he thinks, in a sad sort of way, lesson learned. But knowledge doesn’t really amount to a whole lot until it’s put to use.
It’s still summer, and he’s still just dipping his toes in the water and strumming his guitar, waiting for things to change around him instead of because of him.
---
They don’t break up. They were never together in the first place. Instead it’s like someone presses the pause button.
One minute she’s nearly purring “you are fantastic” into his ear, blind flattery, referring to some idea that he had not ten minutes ago before she pulled him into a closet just off their wing, maybe passing it off as something else. He’s breathing, shallow, and the piece of hair that’s fallen into her face sways with each breath he takes, like the ticking of the hand of a grandfather clock and it holds his attention for just long enough before her hands start grabbing at his clothes, needy.
The next, she’s giving him the same smiles she gives to Tyrol or Tory, half of them put on for show, and she doesn’t even seem to notice when her fingers accidentally brush his arm or she stands just close enough for her to be considered in his personal space.
“Is this just…” she squints at him, outside where he’s stopped her as they’re just leaving work for the day.
“Is this just what?” Ellen asks, like someone who could be called innocent, like he’s misreading signals that she’s oblivious to. Like this is all him, and he fell out of this just as accidentally as he fell into it. Like always.
“Nevermind,” he says, eyes on the dry ground beneath his feet. A cold wind blows through as he hears her footsteps start up again, the rustling of her coat as she pulls it tighter around herself.
Winter has come.
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Ellen, hints of other pairings.
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,161
Author's Note: Trying to get out of the rut I'm in with that Grey's fic, by writing different fandoms. Here's to all two of you that will read this -- thanks to crickets for the handholding.
Summary: Spoilers for Season 4.5. The seasons have started dictating their actions, and he isn't ever really surprised by that. It's cyclical like that.
They did not have four seasons on Earth. They had two polar opposites - extremely cold and extremely hot, severe changes that seemed to sneak up on them overnight.
A few cycles of this and Sam was able to come to the fairly sad but unsurprising conclusion that seasons and weather patterns served as a good indicator for how they acted around each other. Cold and withdrawn in the winter, free and aggressive in the summer. It was Ellen’s favorite time of the year, right when the seasons changed, bitter cold temperatures giving away to blinding heat, something else he didn’t find very surprising. The transition had her written all over it - calm, cool, collected, switching to angry, passionate, wild quicker than he could catch up.
Sam goes to sleep one night with the comforter pulled up to his chin, and wakes with it kicked right off the bed. Ellen’s in the water that very same day with a mischievous smirk on her face, waiting for him to drop onto the edge of the shore with his guitar in tow, and so it starts again.
---
Work takes a backseat when the weather turns warmer.
“I always get my best ideas out here anyways,” she says, as the water swirls around her, ripples from where she’d just broken the surface. Ellen never did look much like she was thinking about anything other than the sun and the water on those days, but he knew enough to know it was a front. Experience taught her that it was best to play dumb, empty-headed; you learn more when people underestimate you.
He hums the first few bars of something, a lyric-less tune that’s been playing on repeat in his mind for the past few days. This is just the first time that he’s had the chance to get his hands on his guitar since then. “Yeah?” He asks, absentmindedly, his fingers trying strings, starting and stopping as he tries to recreate the tune that’s currently exists only in his mind. “Got any right now?”
For a moment, the lack of a quick response makes him think they’re going to stay in serious territory. But when he looks up, made curious by the silence, she’s half out of the water, long, lean limbs wet and glistening in the sunlight. “A few,” she tells him, and the way she moves, shoulders held back, perfect posture, narrow hips swaying just enough that he’ll notice, suggests that what she’s got, in fact, are a few bad ideas that he’s going to fall into without ever meaning to. Like always.
She’s still got Saul, and he’s got a girl too -- one that gives him soft smiles and gentle kisses, but still sleeps in her own bed in her own house and doesn’t hold him on nearly a short enough leash for her, their, own good - but Ellen’s never heard of the word ‘enough’, or at least never taken it to heart, and Sam’s always liked a challenge anyway.
---
Ellen claims “I’ve got a friend who’s got a hunch, something that might help - it’ll only be a few days” at half past ten, when Saul’s already given into his vice, glass bottle cradled in his hands, forget the glass.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he says, before he starts in about something else that Sam can barely decipher because Saul’s laughing through his words, that laugh that no one’s ever quite been able to replicate and never seems to fit him until he’s halfway through a bottle. Ellen catches his eye, brief, self-satisfied, because they have plans in the worst sense of the word, and Tyrol’s looking at them both like they’re complete frakkin’ idiots, and they probably are.
(“What the hell are you doing?” Tyrol asks, later, outside the bar when everyone else is going. He pushes Sam by the shoulders, until his back is against brick, and neither of them stumbles, neither of them even buzzed enough to be full of anything but good judgment and common sense; Sam is just electing not to use his.
He says, “you’re reading too much into this,” like a warning, back off now, and it doesn’t faze Tyrol, nothing Sam really says does, and it’s what frustrates him, it’s what pisses him off, it’s what drives him to do things like this thing with Ellen, because Ellen and Tyrol are the ones who have this whole thing figured out, this organic memory transfer, and Saul and Tory fit into that the way lovers and significant others do, which leaves him as a fifth wheel. It leaves him as the expendable, doesn’t amount to very much part of the equation, even if they’d all probably tell him otherwise. He’s the most curious, but he’s the least of a lot of other things, and the scales don’t quite ever balance the way he’d like them too.)
Sam tells his girlfriend the opposite. Talks up a big story about work and research and excuses he’s used before, and she’s just sweet enough, maybe just gullible enough, to believe him. Maybe he’s just looks like the kind of guy you believe, the kind that would never hurt you if he could help it. Or maybe she’s just good at denial and he’s good at lying, much in the same way that Saul keeps the laughter and the booze flowing as Ellen tells him that she’s leaving for the weekend, and he says “good idea” like he doesn’t already know that she’s slept with half of her underlings, research assistants and the like.
In the end they get as far as the bedroom, behind the locked door of Sam’s house, and he tries to believe that this all something more than a means to an end with her hips grinding into his and her nails digging raw half-moon marks into his skin.
---
It gets stuffy inside four walls under burning sunlight after awhile, and Ellen usually takes her lunch outside into the courtyard that forms the center of the sizeable building, getting as far away from the aptly and unofficially titled research and development wing as possible.
She also rarely comes back in until it’s time to leave.
He joins her sometimes, under the pretense of getting some fresh air and “you look lonely” and she squints at him in the sunlight like she sees right through him, because Ellen Tigh never looks lonely or desperate unless she means to.
Her bare legs cross, as she smoothes the edge of her skirt that hits just above the knee before leaning back on her elbows in the grass, taking in the fresh air and relative privacy. The people inside, they have no need for sunlight, not most of them anyway - not that Ellen or Sam or any of the other three have really fit so well in that group of reclusive scientists that cohabit the building with them. They’ve always been something different.
Sam isn’t thinking in terms of strictly her anymore by the time her lips catch his, which is probably why she makes the move in the first place. Even as he’s kissing her back, a hand tangling in her hair, he’s got his ears perked, listening for movement or voices, a sign that they’ve been caught, because a part of him just wants to get this out and over with, has been wanting to get it out and over with for years, and yet that opportunity never quite comes.
She fights his efforts to pull back after a moment, pressing into him that much closer for it, and his tongue searches for that hint of alcohol on her lips, in the taste of her mouth, but finds none, which is perhaps more surprising than the kiss itself.
“Loosen up,” she laughs, like someone much younger than she is, like a giggly schoolgirl, after she’s pulled back on her own terms.
Even after she’s gone and the sun is fading, clouds rolling into obscure it from sight, graying skies a warning to seek cover while he still can before the storms come in, he still does not move.
---
“We’re so close,” Ellen moans, and he can find the irony in the fact that she is in fact not talking about them or their current situation, her knees tight around his waist, bony and hitting his ribs at the wrong angle. What she means is their research and resurrection, and he isn’t sure if that’s what gets her hot or if she’s trying not to think about him or if she’s just really good at multitasking.
It makes for some interesting pillow talk, regardless.
In the moments right after she comes, there is this sort of twitch that one might call aftershocks, places where her breath catches and her grip on him tightens - he likes to think it’s almost like electricity is running through her veins instead of blood, synthetic and misleading.
---
His girlfriend (Kayla, he starts interjecting, a year too late, and he wonders what that says about them that he’s bothering to focus on her name instead of her title now) leaves him mid-summer. She places no blame, just packs up the few necessities she keeps at his place and leaves with nothing more than a kiss on the cheek, disappearing into a windy day.
Later:
Sam writes a song, a dedication to go along with it, shrouded in anonymity to anyone who doesn’t know him, and he holds her gaze from across the bar, trying to say something with his eyes about how if nothing else she’s jolted him into something like productivity. She looks away, finding something more interesting in her glass, and his eyes fall to Ellen.
And this is not our fate, falls from his lips in time with the tight smile she’s giving him.
He ends up with his body sliding against Kayla’s, sweat slick and hungry, before the night is over. It’s her who leaves in the morning, again, still no goodbye, and he discovers that maybe she isn’t anything like that sweet girl he thought she was and he had just never bothered to notice.
It’s then that he starts to want her.
Everything is cyclical like that.
---
Sometimes he wonders how the hell he came to be this way. He never had any designs on being that guy, the almost-scientist, almost-musician, almost-homewrecker, hooking up like clockwork with a woman who has turned fucking people over into an art form if it gets her where she wants and what she needs.
It drives him crazy that he now thinks in shades of ‘too late’ and ‘never meant to but did’ like there’s no turning around, and maybe there just isn’t. Maybe you are meant to be someone, one certain way, and there’s just no getting around it.
That means, in a way, that he’s doomed to chase after people he isn’t ever going to catch and probably wouldn’t want even if he did, and, he thinks, in a sad sort of way, lesson learned. But knowledge doesn’t really amount to a whole lot until it’s put to use.
It’s still summer, and he’s still just dipping his toes in the water and strumming his guitar, waiting for things to change around him instead of because of him.
---
They don’t break up. They were never together in the first place. Instead it’s like someone presses the pause button.
One minute she’s nearly purring “you are fantastic” into his ear, blind flattery, referring to some idea that he had not ten minutes ago before she pulled him into a closet just off their wing, maybe passing it off as something else. He’s breathing, shallow, and the piece of hair that’s fallen into her face sways with each breath he takes, like the ticking of the hand of a grandfather clock and it holds his attention for just long enough before her hands start grabbing at his clothes, needy.
The next, she’s giving him the same smiles she gives to Tyrol or Tory, half of them put on for show, and she doesn’t even seem to notice when her fingers accidentally brush his arm or she stands just close enough for her to be considered in his personal space.
“Is this just…” she squints at him, outside where he’s stopped her as they’re just leaving work for the day.
“Is this just what?” Ellen asks, like someone who could be called innocent, like he’s misreading signals that she’s oblivious to. Like this is all him, and he fell out of this just as accidentally as he fell into it. Like always.
“Nevermind,” he says, eyes on the dry ground beneath his feet. A cold wind blows through as he hears her footsteps start up again, the rustling of her coat as she pulls it tighter around herself.
Winter has come.