BSG fic: Half an Hour Or So Before Dawn (Kara/Anders)
Title: Half an Hour Or So Before Dawn
Pairing: Kara/Anders
Rating: R?
Summary: An early morning on Caprica during the occupation. A thinky, introspective sort of story. 5000 words.
Note: A while back, I asked lyssie for prompts, and she gave me so many interesting ones. Roof and Delphi Union High School are two that coalesced for the muse. Unfortunately, they conspired to make a rather heavy, emo story. Hope that's okay, dear.
Also note: I'm assuming (and possibly wrongly) that there should be no reason the school (or any non-Cylon area) would still have utilities like power and water.
Half an Hour Or So Before Dawn
The pallet shifts, waking her. She always wakes with a start here, a kick of adrenaline, so she knows she won't be getting back to sleep anytime soon. She wonders if that's why Sam's slinking out of the sleeping room, winding his way around other pallets, some with people curled up together just like she was surely wrapped around him a moment ago. She's never been the type, but she thinks that maybe life is a different thing now than it was before the attacks, especially down here. Everything's shifted; you do things you normally wouldn't do.
Her heart persists in thumping hard enough she's absurdly sure that someone will hear it and wake, but the whole lot of them are sound asleep. She knows they sleep so soundly because they're exhausted, body and soul, but she often tells herself that it's just as much because of Sam and the sort of desperate trust they put in him. She doesn't have a frakkin' clue how he's held himself together under the strain, keeping them on the run from the Cylons, but he has. She wonders if she could do the same with this many scared people. She's done a fair amount of leading, herself-with a quick wit, sharp tongue, clever brain, and sheer determination-but she tends to think of herself as better suited to be someone's blunt instrument. Sam might have just the qualities she has, but they hold together at different places. They're sturdier over the long run. She's a sprinter; he's a distance runner.
She thinks she can hear where his footsteps are going, or maybe it's just that she knows where he'll be, so she rolls carefully off the makeshift mattress and throws one of his pullovers on over her tanks. There's a dim old lantern on in the room, one that stays on all night, but the rest of the school will be fairly dark still. She grabs a flashlight from the table by the door before she quietly pads down the echoey corridor toward the kitchen.
There's no real reason to keep the meager food supplies they have in the large, industrial kitchen, but she supposes it makes them feel normal. As she comes in, she sees that he's got the door at the back by the sink propped open, but it doesn't let in much light. The sky is still mostly dark, the open doorway a rectangle of dark blue. Yet he's up anyway, trying not to make too much noise as he drags an enormous metal pot outside and deposits it on the ground beside the ashes of yesterday's fire.
"Hey," he says when he comes back in to find her already digging out the coffee. It's instant and it's terrible, but it's one of the few things they have in overabundance, so it's a morning ritual around here. She's always known it was Sam who got up in the morning and made it; she just didn't think about how he would have to be up before the sun to do so. She flicks off the flashlight and finds that her eyes are really pretty adjusted to the near darkness.
"Morning," she says.
"Not yet." He clears his throat, but his voice is still gravelly when he adds, "Sun's not up." He looks haggard and tired, but she can see the flash of his teeth as he gives her a smile and nods toward the door, going back out with a box of matches.
The world is a dark inky blue as she steps outside and into a shifting wind, light but constant.
"Were you always a morning person?" she asks.
"No. But I was never much of a sleeper. Even less, now."
When he picks up the pot to walk it over to the makeshift cistern (he said yesterday that they should stop calling things makeshift and jerry-rigged, if only because it was beginning to seem redundant), she follows him, shoving her hands into her pockets against a faint chill in the air. As she watches the outline of his back and shoulders, his muscles flexing, she can't help but think about the night before and the nights before that, the things they'd done before they joined everyone else to sleep.
His hands had been just as she expected them to be-strong and coordinated. Careful, too. Not that he held back; it was just that he knew exactly what he was doing when he pressed his thumbs into her hips and thrust into her with one long stroke. She's frakked enough pyramid players and viper jocks to know how it would be, but he was in some indefinable way different. Or maybe the situation is different. Everything's more real. She's never enjoyed sex so much, even after it's over, when they lay there for a moment listening to the night settling in around the school and she remembers to be afraid again.
If she's a little anxious here planetside, that's a thing as constant as the wind; right now, she's mostly just watchful. It's hard to be too afraid when everything's so peaceful, just the rustle of the wind in the trees. She's used to the quiet in the wake of the attacks, the eerie silence of a world empty, but here it feels different. There's so much life in this old school that sometimes she forgets for whole moments at a time that the planet isn't dead. They're nestled away here, something like safe, but she watches the tree line anyway, and she sees Sam doing the same as he pulls the large pot down. She takes up the handle on one side and helps him carry it back to the place where he'll build the fire.
As she watches him tinker with the wood, it becomes clear that he has a system, but it's one that perhaps took a lot of trial and error. For all his athleticism, he's obviously not much of an outdoorsman. Roughing it seems to sit slightly ill on his shoulders. Once he gets the fire going, he peers down at it, vaguely nervous, like it might jump up and bite him. She's never seen him like this, not during the day when a person would never guess he wasn't a park ranger or, hell, even a foot soldier by trade.
After he's sure the fire is not going to burn out, he comes over to where she's sitting on one of the low chairs that someone had dragged out to the fireside and nudges her boots with the toes of his.
"C'mon," he says.
"Where?"
He just cocks his head and smiles mysteriously at her.
He doesn't reach out to pull her up, though. For some reason, he seems reticent to touch her. She wouldn't even notice it except she finds herself strangely in need of clinging tight to somebody. To him. But it's not as though he's actually trying to avoid her. She can see that in his posture, in the way he looks at her, in his smile as he spins around, pausing to let her catch up, and heads back into the kitchen, ducking through the door with her only a few steps behind.
She can hear it in his voice now, too, even if he hasn't said much. That's striking, because he's normally the talkative sort-playful or else simply chattering to keep up morale; solving things with discussions where she might just act, but it's no matter. Here, in the quiet of the morning, shuffling down the long east hallway of this abandoned school, he's subdued. Whatever his other reasons, he's probably also doing what they all do, mostly unconsciously: keeping quiet so as not to draw any attention. For her, the impulse to withdraw until she almost fades away is worst when there's no one around to make the world feel real and normal again. It makes her wonder why he feels the need to be up and moving around this world before dawn, by himself.
When he takes that first step up the staircase at the far end of the hall, she reaches out and holds to the back of his shirt. She doesn't know why she does, but as they hit the next flight, he lets his hand drop back so she can take it if she wants to. She does. It's not like holding hands, though. Not really. It's more like what you do when you pull someone through a crowd, just trying to keep some tenuous tie with them. They go up and up like that, and soon Sam's pushing open a door that leads outside again.
After she sets her flashlight down in a hollow in the brick by the door, he lets her walk out ahead of him, and she's drawn to the edge of the roof, that stone wall that comes up to her ribs. The sky is still so dark, a deep blue-black dotted with occasional stars. It's kind of beautiful, this expanse of sky, like a deep navy blanket edged in a paler, grayer fringe, stretched out over treetops and other things she imagines she can see in her mind's eye. She thinks over what she knows of the area's geography, and she's sure she should be able to see the valley beyond the woods, civilization tucked away into the fabric of nature. She imagines that she can make out some familiar landmarks, but she can't. It's too dark, orelse they are reduced to rubble. Really, she doesn't want to know.
Sam comes up beside her, and his fingers curl around his gun as he, too, leans over the edge and surveys-not the dim view of the trees or the dark and hidden valley beyond but the ground below. He makes her nervous. She has the strange notion that the wind might pick him up and pitch him off the roof and make him land with a splat on the dry ground below. His eyes keep cutting over to her; she can feel them, even if she isn't looking. She can't look at him too much. It makes her think of the kind of what might have beens that shouldn't happen until you're miles away from someone, a sliver of regret working its way painfully in your heart for a while, then back out again. But he's right there, and that means if she looks at him, she'll hang on to him and refuse to let go. And clearly that's crazy. Until a few days ago, she didn't even know him. Never mind how much time she would have, now, to get to know him, now that the raider is gone and she isn't Starbuck from Galactica anymore. She's Kara who used to be from Galactica, the same way she used to be from a planet that wasn't in ruins.
"Do you do this every morning?" she asks suddenly, if only to break the silence.
"Yeah."
"Security?"
He shakes his head. "Nobody's stationed up here until after breakfast. I mean, somebody's down there"-he points vaguely to the end of the road-"but up here, there's nothing to see."
"Then…"
He shrugs. "Clears my head."
He pushes himself off the short wall with his hip and goes past her over to the adjacent side of the building to survey a different area below. If the view she would have here, to the south, is lovely, the one to the east would be breathtaking. A person would still see trees, to be sure, but past them would be the great river winding its way out of the valley, probably sparkling in the morning light, when it came. Nukes would not have overthrown the river, even if they obliterated everything else. In fact, the devastation might've made it easier to see. So would the coming sunrise.
"Do you want me to leave you alone?" she asks him, suddenly wondering why he's here and if she belongs.
"I didn't accidentally bring you up here," he replies. But in a moment, he turns and looks at her as if he's actually processing what her question implies, and he seems sorry for having snapped. Maybe he even wants to float over to her, but he won't make himself. So she begins to walk over to him.
"You know," she says with an smile that surely looks easier than it feels, "I used to live in Delphi."
"You told me."
"I knew this kid, Randy or Rodney or something. He lived down the hall from my old apartment with his mother. He used to come down when I was painting. After, I mean-when he heard me dump all my wrecked canvases. He could always sucker me into letting him hang out. Big stupid brown eyes, hair hanging in his face, overly dramatic about everything-you know teenagers are. He was a kind of a moron, but a nice enough kid; more funny than irritating, thank the gods. He seemed to kind of like having me bark at him and make fun of him, and he usually had weed he was willing to share, so…" She shrugs.
She's reached his side now, her hips coming into contact with the cold stone as she leans over the wall, only glancing at him as she finds herself still talking. "But, anyway, he was always chasing a new girl, every time I ended up getting high with him. I'd sit in the window watching the city lights and he'd lay on my couch, just yammering away. Told me all kinds of shit I never needed to know about the sex life of a seventeen year old, let me tell you."
He smiles at that, the first time she's seen his face really light up since she walked into the kitchen. Warmth blooms in her stomach as he stares at her for a long moment.
"Frak," she says, ducking her head. "I didn't mean to get into a long, stupid story."
"Not stupid." He shakes his head, smiling, before he focuses on the view again. He adds, "I didn't know you painted."
"Oh. Yeah. Just a… a hobby. Feels like I must've already told you." It's not a lie, but a bigger part of her can't believe she's talking about it at all.
"What do you paint?"
"Nothing realistic."
"Nothing like this view?"
"No. More…internal?"
He nods, and it hits her suddenly, the itch to put her hands to canvas. But like the longing for so many things now lost, she doesn't really believe it's possible, so she clasps her hands tighter to the wall.
She says, "I guess he's dead, too."
He nods again.
"The reason I'm thinking about him," she starts, trying to change her tone, recapture the easiness of the story. She can do that; she thinks he'll let her. "He told me about all the places you could take a girl in Delphi if you wanted to get her alone."
"Oh?"
"Apparently, this roof is number two or three on the list of good spots to get in someone's pants. Would be number one, but it's kind of a trek out here."
"Thank the gods."
"Yeah," she says somberly. Then a mischievous smile comes over her face. "That what you brought me up here for, Sam?"
She hopes she's pitched her voice right, playful but not too jarringly out of place up here on this dark morning.
He smiles the way she hoped he would. "I didn't know you were into exhibitionism."
"No one can see us."
"Thank the gods for that, too."
He doesn't mean no one the way she meant it. The Cylons are everywhere, somehow, even when they're not. She hasn't seen a centurion for a couple of days, but it doesn't matter. Everything about this life they're living is governed by when the Cylons will reappear and what they'll do.
The worst part is, the destruction works backward, too, reaches back into everything they've lost and paints over it in shades of blue and gray, just as much as all their conversations now, these proofs they have that they're still alive and well and fighting, can't help but spin back around to the Cylons and their own fragile place in the universe. The Cylons are their universe now, in ways that make her so angry she's shocked she's made it this far, hasn't just gone out in some blaze of glory seeking retribution. Or maybe she's not surprised. She's lived on anger before, and she's found it sustaining, at least as a backbone. The other things she needs to rig up around it, to build her life out of, she's never as sure of.
Of she knew nothing else a couple of weeks ago, it was that those things were all on Galactica, so much that she can't imagine how she left it. If she belonged to them, they belonged to her, didn't they? But now, she realizes with a start that she hasn't thought of Galactica even once since she rose this morning. Her raider flew off without her, and it left her feeling entirely grounded here, on Caprica, as if the weeks of escape on Galactica had been an elaborate dream, just a way to go out of this war on top. A long goodbye. Really, though, she'd done neither. What's worse, she'd left them in the lurch. She could roam all over this entire eerie planet, arrow in tow, but it wouldn't do anybody a damn bit of good. Had she really believed it could help them find earth? Had she really had enough faith in the gods to think she could just swoop down here, into this chaos and destruction, pick up a single thread of hope, and then fly off again?
"Do you believe in the gods?"
His head comes up with a start, but he takes a moment before he answers, "Yeah. I guess so."
"You can't guess. Either you do or you don't."
He doesn't say anything for a moment, but his hand reaches out and skims over hers, the calluses on his palm swirling over the back of her hand, then he begins to trace his way up and down each of her fingers in turn with his index finger.
"You really wanna know what I think?" he finally replies.
"I asked, didn't I?"
"Well, the way I see it," he says, "this should all give somebody a million reasons to think the gods don't care about us." She sees him looking up, for the first time, squinting his eyes into the darkness, against the wind. This is not a romantic sunrise. It's not a sunrise at all, yet, just the possibility of something, the sense that the sun is waiting just over the horizon. It ought to be a good anticipation, but there are other things over the horizon, too, and she realizes with a start that she no longer feels that there's any ship coming down to break up that horizon and take her home.
His voice had sounded unsure, unfinished. It rattles her, but she wants him to finish anyway. "But…"
He says, "I feel really frakkin' small up here."
"Yeah," she says, even if she's not sure that's what she means. She hadn't really been thinking about how vulnerable they were. They're safe, if only for a moment. But she can imagine the whole valley out there, crouching in the darkness, and she knows that it's defenseless now. Helo, Sam's people, other pockets of humanity still clinging to the planet-all defenseless. She and Sam will be, too, when they go back down to the fire and wait for the dawn. The light will be welcome for once-at least on the ground, at least to her-but standing here, staring out over a dark landscape, she feels afraid and alone. It's probably something she's been feeling since the attacks, but on Galactica there were so many people pressed around her all the time, and there was so much to do she didn't have time to think about it. All she seems to have here is time.
A gust of wind makes her shiver, and as she wraps her arms around herself she sees him move out of the corner of her eyes, and soon he's pressed up behind her, wrapping her up, his stomach and chest flush against her back as his chin comes to rest on top of her head. Instantly, she's surrounded by his warmth and the musk of his body, and it heightens all her senses until she thinks she can smell the smoke from the fire down below, maybe even hear it crackling. She can almost imagine that they're somewhere else, like she had the night before as they sat around the fire, everyone snuggled up with someone because that felt like the sanest thing to do. Most everyone was calm and still, even if they were talking, but he had squirmed and tickled her and playfully nipped at her collarbone with his teeth, and she never wondered why that was all they seemed to be able to handle. She wonders now.
She thinks maybe the people are stirring down below, and she imagines she hears the squeaks of old mattresses and scrapes of chair legs against tile floors. It makes her feel less alone than the reality of her standing there under this enormous sky, with Sam under the same sky, steady behind her, his hands pressed flat against her stomach. His heart beats with a relentless thump against her back, and his breath is steady, even. As the moments pass, she feels something struggle inside her, like she wants to claw her way out of her skin or else climb up onto the dividing wall and take flight from this roof. Not to die, of course; just to be above it all and moving. She's too rooted here.
She thinks he can feel her begin to squirm, because his hands tighten at her stomach, and as they do she finds herself turning in his arms, her hands struggling up to pull his face down so she can kiss him. He opens up to it almost instantly, and his hands come down to her neck as he tilts her head back a little and slips his tongue into her mouth. Before long, she's clawing at his back, to pull him closer and closer until he's making this soft, grunting noise. His cock, already hard, settles into the hollow at the join of her thigh, but he's not thrusting against her, just pressing tighter, and she can't seem to pull him as close as she needs him to be, not when he's still holding her face in his hands and trying to put all his energy not into their bodies but into kissing her.
Finally, he pulls out of the kiss and lays his forehead against hers, just breathing, maybe ready to say something. So she nuzzles her face into the crook of his neck and presses her lips to his damp, salty skin then darts her tongue out over it, eventually baring teeth and sinking them in so lightly there won't even be a mark there. But surely he can feel it, the desperation, the way her hands still dig into his back. It's probably why his own hands finally begin to move, settling on her shoulders first but then they come down over her breasts, cupping them as his thumbs find her nipples and circle over them, easy and slow.
She arches so sharply into his touch that his hands quickly work their way up under all those layers she's wearing until she can feel his rough palms on her skin, over her breasts, his fingers no longer so calm. When one of his hands slides down below her waistband and into her underwear, she's strangely grateful. It's like relief, even if her whole body's tight with want and need.
He crushes his mouth over hers as his fingers slip down inside her and his thumb just brushes her clit at first, testing. She whimpers into his mouth, and where he'd normally chuckle at her, tease her a little more, now he gives a low, warning moan and starts touching her purposefully, relentlessly, whatever he needs to do to push her toward coming. Her hands grope at his fly, but he nudges them away, and she doesn't try again. She just leans against him, face pressed against his chest, listening to his heart beating wildly and his breath coming in a shallow pant, just as shallow as her own. His fingers slip and twist, pushing up and in harder and harder as she rolls herself against his hand, urging him to move faster, press harder, just frakking hold his thumb there while she goes to pieces. Soon, she does, with a sharpness chased by a wild throb, but it's mercifully fast and then gone, all except the way she feels unsteady on her feet, her legs wobbly after the release.
He's trying to get her to lift her head and kiss him, but she can't. She wants to just bury herself inside him somehow, but she can't press any closer. He's warm all over, just as warm as she is now, and his cock, pressing against her stomach through so many layers of fabric, is so hard it must be making him crazy. But he's not in the slightest thrusting against her, just looking down at her, perhaps confused, perhaps just worried.
She considers just letting her legs crumple beneath her so she could sink to the cold stone, just stay up here on this roof until she gets over whatever this is that makes her so shaky and needy. Instead, she bends her legs resolutely, and she's on her knees with her hand at his belt before he can protest. Not that he does, not too much, not after she draws him out and gets her mouth around him. His hands find her neck, holding on and maybe even subtly guiding a bit, but mostly he's leaning back into the wall and trying not to make any noise. But after a few minutes, after he's begun to leak in her mouth and her jaw's begun to ache in a way she'll feel for the rest of the day, he gives this grunt and his hips finally thrust forward a little and she lets him drive himself deeper once, twice, three times before he comes. After she pulls off, she leans her forehead against his thigh and just kneels there breathing and listening to him breathe, too, feeling his hands work through the wind-tangle of her hair, down to her scalp.
When she stands up again, he immediately starts tucking himself back in. As he does, she leans close to him, as close as she dares, and kisses him on the cheek, catching him a little off guard, but it means she can duck back away and they can resume the positions they were in before, side by side at the wall.
"Thanks," she says.
He chuckles. "Anytime. But it was...good?"
"Yeah. Yeah, Sam."
"You know, you didn't have to-"
"I wanted to."
"You like…?"
She finally turns to look at him, smiling as she nods.
He shakes his head at himself half-sheepishly. "I can do better than that."
Even if she's still a little shaky and off-center, she feels a warm smirk come over her face. "So can I."
They stand there quietly for a moment, then he asks her, "You okay?"
"Are any of us okay?" she replies with a roll of her eyes.
"I mean-"
"I know what you mean, Sam. Yeah. I'm okay."
"I didn't bring you up here to…"
"I know that, too." She smiles. "Not that I'm complaining."
He gives her this slow, lazy smile.
"So, uh…" she says. "I'm gonna head back down. It's kinda cold up here."
"Okay."
"You coming?"
He shakes his head. "Be down soon."
He reaches out and lays his hand on her neck, kissing her forehead like they've already come to this point, like it's already a relationship, like this is normal. That scares her, but only as he lets go of her and looks at her so seriously, like it freaks him out, too.
Then he turns around again, to look out over the treetops, out here under the sky that's somehow come over a bright shade of blue while she wasn't looking. There's a push of muted light, the rise of it over the horizon like it's seeping up, struggling out of the darkness of the land. A sunrise shouldn't be a struggle, she thinks. Everything shouldn't be a struggle like this. She turns and goes back inside.
The building is still dark, but her flashlight is waiting just where she left it. The single beam and bobble of light bounces with her steps, but she's not looking so much as feeling her feet touch off against the ground. She grows stronger and stronger, less shaky with each footfall until she's reaching the ground floor again and she can hear voices, soft and running, off down the west hallway where everyone is surely stirring. They'll eventually come into the kitchen, but for a while yet, they'll talk. At night they crash, but in the mornings, they're loath to greet the world even as they're unable to stop themselves from laying all their plans and fears out, sharing them between them. She's learned that the most honest conversations happen here in the half an hour or so before dawn.
She thinks of joining them, but instead she does what Sam would do. She shuffles her way into the hollow, silent kitchen and out through the door, where the fire is crackling and smoking and seems to have brought the water to a boil. She'll make the coffee this morning, hoping that it doesn't take away an important part of his ritual. But she thinks the most important part is probably how he's standing up there watching the light diffuse over the land until he can see the devastation she's so tired of looking at. Maybe, she thinks, she's a little afraid of it. But surely he's tired of it, too; certainly afraid. Apparently, though, he needs to keep looking anyway.
~
Pairing: Kara/Anders
Rating: R?
Summary: An early morning on Caprica during the occupation. A thinky, introspective sort of story. 5000 words.
Note: A while back, I asked lyssie for prompts, and she gave me so many interesting ones. Roof and Delphi Union High School are two that coalesced for the muse. Unfortunately, they conspired to make a rather heavy, emo story. Hope that's okay, dear.
Also note: I'm assuming (and possibly wrongly) that there should be no reason the school (or any non-Cylon area) would still have utilities like power and water.
Half an Hour Or So Before Dawn
The pallet shifts, waking her. She always wakes with a start here, a kick of adrenaline, so she knows she won't be getting back to sleep anytime soon. She wonders if that's why Sam's slinking out of the sleeping room, winding his way around other pallets, some with people curled up together just like she was surely wrapped around him a moment ago. She's never been the type, but she thinks that maybe life is a different thing now than it was before the attacks, especially down here. Everything's shifted; you do things you normally wouldn't do.
Her heart persists in thumping hard enough she's absurdly sure that someone will hear it and wake, but the whole lot of them are sound asleep. She knows they sleep so soundly because they're exhausted, body and soul, but she often tells herself that it's just as much because of Sam and the sort of desperate trust they put in him. She doesn't have a frakkin' clue how he's held himself together under the strain, keeping them on the run from the Cylons, but he has. She wonders if she could do the same with this many scared people. She's done a fair amount of leading, herself-with a quick wit, sharp tongue, clever brain, and sheer determination-but she tends to think of herself as better suited to be someone's blunt instrument. Sam might have just the qualities she has, but they hold together at different places. They're sturdier over the long run. She's a sprinter; he's a distance runner.
She thinks she can hear where his footsteps are going, or maybe it's just that she knows where he'll be, so she rolls carefully off the makeshift mattress and throws one of his pullovers on over her tanks. There's a dim old lantern on in the room, one that stays on all night, but the rest of the school will be fairly dark still. She grabs a flashlight from the table by the door before she quietly pads down the echoey corridor toward the kitchen.
There's no real reason to keep the meager food supplies they have in the large, industrial kitchen, but she supposes it makes them feel normal. As she comes in, she sees that he's got the door at the back by the sink propped open, but it doesn't let in much light. The sky is still mostly dark, the open doorway a rectangle of dark blue. Yet he's up anyway, trying not to make too much noise as he drags an enormous metal pot outside and deposits it on the ground beside the ashes of yesterday's fire.
"Hey," he says when he comes back in to find her already digging out the coffee. It's instant and it's terrible, but it's one of the few things they have in overabundance, so it's a morning ritual around here. She's always known it was Sam who got up in the morning and made it; she just didn't think about how he would have to be up before the sun to do so. She flicks off the flashlight and finds that her eyes are really pretty adjusted to the near darkness.
"Morning," she says.
"Not yet." He clears his throat, but his voice is still gravelly when he adds, "Sun's not up." He looks haggard and tired, but she can see the flash of his teeth as he gives her a smile and nods toward the door, going back out with a box of matches.
The world is a dark inky blue as she steps outside and into a shifting wind, light but constant.
"Were you always a morning person?" she asks.
"No. But I was never much of a sleeper. Even less, now."
When he picks up the pot to walk it over to the makeshift cistern (he said yesterday that they should stop calling things makeshift and jerry-rigged, if only because it was beginning to seem redundant), she follows him, shoving her hands into her pockets against a faint chill in the air. As she watches the outline of his back and shoulders, his muscles flexing, she can't help but think about the night before and the nights before that, the things they'd done before they joined everyone else to sleep.
His hands had been just as she expected them to be-strong and coordinated. Careful, too. Not that he held back; it was just that he knew exactly what he was doing when he pressed his thumbs into her hips and thrust into her with one long stroke. She's frakked enough pyramid players and viper jocks to know how it would be, but he was in some indefinable way different. Or maybe the situation is different. Everything's more real. She's never enjoyed sex so much, even after it's over, when they lay there for a moment listening to the night settling in around the school and she remembers to be afraid again.
If she's a little anxious here planetside, that's a thing as constant as the wind; right now, she's mostly just watchful. It's hard to be too afraid when everything's so peaceful, just the rustle of the wind in the trees. She's used to the quiet in the wake of the attacks, the eerie silence of a world empty, but here it feels different. There's so much life in this old school that sometimes she forgets for whole moments at a time that the planet isn't dead. They're nestled away here, something like safe, but she watches the tree line anyway, and she sees Sam doing the same as he pulls the large pot down. She takes up the handle on one side and helps him carry it back to the place where he'll build the fire.
As she watches him tinker with the wood, it becomes clear that he has a system, but it's one that perhaps took a lot of trial and error. For all his athleticism, he's obviously not much of an outdoorsman. Roughing it seems to sit slightly ill on his shoulders. Once he gets the fire going, he peers down at it, vaguely nervous, like it might jump up and bite him. She's never seen him like this, not during the day when a person would never guess he wasn't a park ranger or, hell, even a foot soldier by trade.
After he's sure the fire is not going to burn out, he comes over to where she's sitting on one of the low chairs that someone had dragged out to the fireside and nudges her boots with the toes of his.
"C'mon," he says.
"Where?"
He just cocks his head and smiles mysteriously at her.
He doesn't reach out to pull her up, though. For some reason, he seems reticent to touch her. She wouldn't even notice it except she finds herself strangely in need of clinging tight to somebody. To him. But it's not as though he's actually trying to avoid her. She can see that in his posture, in the way he looks at her, in his smile as he spins around, pausing to let her catch up, and heads back into the kitchen, ducking through the door with her only a few steps behind.
She can hear it in his voice now, too, even if he hasn't said much. That's striking, because he's normally the talkative sort-playful or else simply chattering to keep up morale; solving things with discussions where she might just act, but it's no matter. Here, in the quiet of the morning, shuffling down the long east hallway of this abandoned school, he's subdued. Whatever his other reasons, he's probably also doing what they all do, mostly unconsciously: keeping quiet so as not to draw any attention. For her, the impulse to withdraw until she almost fades away is worst when there's no one around to make the world feel real and normal again. It makes her wonder why he feels the need to be up and moving around this world before dawn, by himself.
When he takes that first step up the staircase at the far end of the hall, she reaches out and holds to the back of his shirt. She doesn't know why she does, but as they hit the next flight, he lets his hand drop back so she can take it if she wants to. She does. It's not like holding hands, though. Not really. It's more like what you do when you pull someone through a crowd, just trying to keep some tenuous tie with them. They go up and up like that, and soon Sam's pushing open a door that leads outside again.
After she sets her flashlight down in a hollow in the brick by the door, he lets her walk out ahead of him, and she's drawn to the edge of the roof, that stone wall that comes up to her ribs. The sky is still so dark, a deep blue-black dotted with occasional stars. It's kind of beautiful, this expanse of sky, like a deep navy blanket edged in a paler, grayer fringe, stretched out over treetops and other things she imagines she can see in her mind's eye. She thinks over what she knows of the area's geography, and she's sure she should be able to see the valley beyond the woods, civilization tucked away into the fabric of nature. She imagines that she can make out some familiar landmarks, but she can't. It's too dark, orelse they are reduced to rubble. Really, she doesn't want to know.
Sam comes up beside her, and his fingers curl around his gun as he, too, leans over the edge and surveys-not the dim view of the trees or the dark and hidden valley beyond but the ground below. He makes her nervous. She has the strange notion that the wind might pick him up and pitch him off the roof and make him land with a splat on the dry ground below. His eyes keep cutting over to her; she can feel them, even if she isn't looking. She can't look at him too much. It makes her think of the kind of what might have beens that shouldn't happen until you're miles away from someone, a sliver of regret working its way painfully in your heart for a while, then back out again. But he's right there, and that means if she looks at him, she'll hang on to him and refuse to let go. And clearly that's crazy. Until a few days ago, she didn't even know him. Never mind how much time she would have, now, to get to know him, now that the raider is gone and she isn't Starbuck from Galactica anymore. She's Kara who used to be from Galactica, the same way she used to be from a planet that wasn't in ruins.
"Do you do this every morning?" she asks suddenly, if only to break the silence.
"Yeah."
"Security?"
He shakes his head. "Nobody's stationed up here until after breakfast. I mean, somebody's down there"-he points vaguely to the end of the road-"but up here, there's nothing to see."
"Then…"
He shrugs. "Clears my head."
He pushes himself off the short wall with his hip and goes past her over to the adjacent side of the building to survey a different area below. If the view she would have here, to the south, is lovely, the one to the east would be breathtaking. A person would still see trees, to be sure, but past them would be the great river winding its way out of the valley, probably sparkling in the morning light, when it came. Nukes would not have overthrown the river, even if they obliterated everything else. In fact, the devastation might've made it easier to see. So would the coming sunrise.
"Do you want me to leave you alone?" she asks him, suddenly wondering why he's here and if she belongs.
"I didn't accidentally bring you up here," he replies. But in a moment, he turns and looks at her as if he's actually processing what her question implies, and he seems sorry for having snapped. Maybe he even wants to float over to her, but he won't make himself. So she begins to walk over to him.
"You know," she says with an smile that surely looks easier than it feels, "I used to live in Delphi."
"You told me."
"I knew this kid, Randy or Rodney or something. He lived down the hall from my old apartment with his mother. He used to come down when I was painting. After, I mean-when he heard me dump all my wrecked canvases. He could always sucker me into letting him hang out. Big stupid brown eyes, hair hanging in his face, overly dramatic about everything-you know teenagers are. He was a kind of a moron, but a nice enough kid; more funny than irritating, thank the gods. He seemed to kind of like having me bark at him and make fun of him, and he usually had weed he was willing to share, so…" She shrugs.
She's reached his side now, her hips coming into contact with the cold stone as she leans over the wall, only glancing at him as she finds herself still talking. "But, anyway, he was always chasing a new girl, every time I ended up getting high with him. I'd sit in the window watching the city lights and he'd lay on my couch, just yammering away. Told me all kinds of shit I never needed to know about the sex life of a seventeen year old, let me tell you."
He smiles at that, the first time she's seen his face really light up since she walked into the kitchen. Warmth blooms in her stomach as he stares at her for a long moment.
"Frak," she says, ducking her head. "I didn't mean to get into a long, stupid story."
"Not stupid." He shakes his head, smiling, before he focuses on the view again. He adds, "I didn't know you painted."
"Oh. Yeah. Just a… a hobby. Feels like I must've already told you." It's not a lie, but a bigger part of her can't believe she's talking about it at all.
"What do you paint?"
"Nothing realistic."
"Nothing like this view?"
"No. More…internal?"
He nods, and it hits her suddenly, the itch to put her hands to canvas. But like the longing for so many things now lost, she doesn't really believe it's possible, so she clasps her hands tighter to the wall.
She says, "I guess he's dead, too."
He nods again.
"The reason I'm thinking about him," she starts, trying to change her tone, recapture the easiness of the story. She can do that; she thinks he'll let her. "He told me about all the places you could take a girl in Delphi if you wanted to get her alone."
"Oh?"
"Apparently, this roof is number two or three on the list of good spots to get in someone's pants. Would be number one, but it's kind of a trek out here."
"Thank the gods."
"Yeah," she says somberly. Then a mischievous smile comes over her face. "That what you brought me up here for, Sam?"
She hopes she's pitched her voice right, playful but not too jarringly out of place up here on this dark morning.
He smiles the way she hoped he would. "I didn't know you were into exhibitionism."
"No one can see us."
"Thank the gods for that, too."
He doesn't mean no one the way she meant it. The Cylons are everywhere, somehow, even when they're not. She hasn't seen a centurion for a couple of days, but it doesn't matter. Everything about this life they're living is governed by when the Cylons will reappear and what they'll do.
The worst part is, the destruction works backward, too, reaches back into everything they've lost and paints over it in shades of blue and gray, just as much as all their conversations now, these proofs they have that they're still alive and well and fighting, can't help but spin back around to the Cylons and their own fragile place in the universe. The Cylons are their universe now, in ways that make her so angry she's shocked she's made it this far, hasn't just gone out in some blaze of glory seeking retribution. Or maybe she's not surprised. She's lived on anger before, and she's found it sustaining, at least as a backbone. The other things she needs to rig up around it, to build her life out of, she's never as sure of.
Of she knew nothing else a couple of weeks ago, it was that those things were all on Galactica, so much that she can't imagine how she left it. If she belonged to them, they belonged to her, didn't they? But now, she realizes with a start that she hasn't thought of Galactica even once since she rose this morning. Her raider flew off without her, and it left her feeling entirely grounded here, on Caprica, as if the weeks of escape on Galactica had been an elaborate dream, just a way to go out of this war on top. A long goodbye. Really, though, she'd done neither. What's worse, she'd left them in the lurch. She could roam all over this entire eerie planet, arrow in tow, but it wouldn't do anybody a damn bit of good. Had she really believed it could help them find earth? Had she really had enough faith in the gods to think she could just swoop down here, into this chaos and destruction, pick up a single thread of hope, and then fly off again?
"Do you believe in the gods?"
His head comes up with a start, but he takes a moment before he answers, "Yeah. I guess so."
"You can't guess. Either you do or you don't."
He doesn't say anything for a moment, but his hand reaches out and skims over hers, the calluses on his palm swirling over the back of her hand, then he begins to trace his way up and down each of her fingers in turn with his index finger.
"You really wanna know what I think?" he finally replies.
"I asked, didn't I?"
"Well, the way I see it," he says, "this should all give somebody a million reasons to think the gods don't care about us." She sees him looking up, for the first time, squinting his eyes into the darkness, against the wind. This is not a romantic sunrise. It's not a sunrise at all, yet, just the possibility of something, the sense that the sun is waiting just over the horizon. It ought to be a good anticipation, but there are other things over the horizon, too, and she realizes with a start that she no longer feels that there's any ship coming down to break up that horizon and take her home.
His voice had sounded unsure, unfinished. It rattles her, but she wants him to finish anyway. "But…"
He says, "I feel really frakkin' small up here."
"Yeah," she says, even if she's not sure that's what she means. She hadn't really been thinking about how vulnerable they were. They're safe, if only for a moment. But she can imagine the whole valley out there, crouching in the darkness, and she knows that it's defenseless now. Helo, Sam's people, other pockets of humanity still clinging to the planet-all defenseless. She and Sam will be, too, when they go back down to the fire and wait for the dawn. The light will be welcome for once-at least on the ground, at least to her-but standing here, staring out over a dark landscape, she feels afraid and alone. It's probably something she's been feeling since the attacks, but on Galactica there were so many people pressed around her all the time, and there was so much to do she didn't have time to think about it. All she seems to have here is time.
A gust of wind makes her shiver, and as she wraps her arms around herself she sees him move out of the corner of her eyes, and soon he's pressed up behind her, wrapping her up, his stomach and chest flush against her back as his chin comes to rest on top of her head. Instantly, she's surrounded by his warmth and the musk of his body, and it heightens all her senses until she thinks she can smell the smoke from the fire down below, maybe even hear it crackling. She can almost imagine that they're somewhere else, like she had the night before as they sat around the fire, everyone snuggled up with someone because that felt like the sanest thing to do. Most everyone was calm and still, even if they were talking, but he had squirmed and tickled her and playfully nipped at her collarbone with his teeth, and she never wondered why that was all they seemed to be able to handle. She wonders now.
She thinks maybe the people are stirring down below, and she imagines she hears the squeaks of old mattresses and scrapes of chair legs against tile floors. It makes her feel less alone than the reality of her standing there under this enormous sky, with Sam under the same sky, steady behind her, his hands pressed flat against her stomach. His heart beats with a relentless thump against her back, and his breath is steady, even. As the moments pass, she feels something struggle inside her, like she wants to claw her way out of her skin or else climb up onto the dividing wall and take flight from this roof. Not to die, of course; just to be above it all and moving. She's too rooted here.
She thinks he can feel her begin to squirm, because his hands tighten at her stomach, and as they do she finds herself turning in his arms, her hands struggling up to pull his face down so she can kiss him. He opens up to it almost instantly, and his hands come down to her neck as he tilts her head back a little and slips his tongue into her mouth. Before long, she's clawing at his back, to pull him closer and closer until he's making this soft, grunting noise. His cock, already hard, settles into the hollow at the join of her thigh, but he's not thrusting against her, just pressing tighter, and she can't seem to pull him as close as she needs him to be, not when he's still holding her face in his hands and trying to put all his energy not into their bodies but into kissing her.
Finally, he pulls out of the kiss and lays his forehead against hers, just breathing, maybe ready to say something. So she nuzzles her face into the crook of his neck and presses her lips to his damp, salty skin then darts her tongue out over it, eventually baring teeth and sinking them in so lightly there won't even be a mark there. But surely he can feel it, the desperation, the way her hands still dig into his back. It's probably why his own hands finally begin to move, settling on her shoulders first but then they come down over her breasts, cupping them as his thumbs find her nipples and circle over them, easy and slow.
She arches so sharply into his touch that his hands quickly work their way up under all those layers she's wearing until she can feel his rough palms on her skin, over her breasts, his fingers no longer so calm. When one of his hands slides down below her waistband and into her underwear, she's strangely grateful. It's like relief, even if her whole body's tight with want and need.
He crushes his mouth over hers as his fingers slip down inside her and his thumb just brushes her clit at first, testing. She whimpers into his mouth, and where he'd normally chuckle at her, tease her a little more, now he gives a low, warning moan and starts touching her purposefully, relentlessly, whatever he needs to do to push her toward coming. Her hands grope at his fly, but he nudges them away, and she doesn't try again. She just leans against him, face pressed against his chest, listening to his heart beating wildly and his breath coming in a shallow pant, just as shallow as her own. His fingers slip and twist, pushing up and in harder and harder as she rolls herself against his hand, urging him to move faster, press harder, just frakking hold his thumb there while she goes to pieces. Soon, she does, with a sharpness chased by a wild throb, but it's mercifully fast and then gone, all except the way she feels unsteady on her feet, her legs wobbly after the release.
He's trying to get her to lift her head and kiss him, but she can't. She wants to just bury herself inside him somehow, but she can't press any closer. He's warm all over, just as warm as she is now, and his cock, pressing against her stomach through so many layers of fabric, is so hard it must be making him crazy. But he's not in the slightest thrusting against her, just looking down at her, perhaps confused, perhaps just worried.
She considers just letting her legs crumple beneath her so she could sink to the cold stone, just stay up here on this roof until she gets over whatever this is that makes her so shaky and needy. Instead, she bends her legs resolutely, and she's on her knees with her hand at his belt before he can protest. Not that he does, not too much, not after she draws him out and gets her mouth around him. His hands find her neck, holding on and maybe even subtly guiding a bit, but mostly he's leaning back into the wall and trying not to make any noise. But after a few minutes, after he's begun to leak in her mouth and her jaw's begun to ache in a way she'll feel for the rest of the day, he gives this grunt and his hips finally thrust forward a little and she lets him drive himself deeper once, twice, three times before he comes. After she pulls off, she leans her forehead against his thigh and just kneels there breathing and listening to him breathe, too, feeling his hands work through the wind-tangle of her hair, down to her scalp.
When she stands up again, he immediately starts tucking himself back in. As he does, she leans close to him, as close as she dares, and kisses him on the cheek, catching him a little off guard, but it means she can duck back away and they can resume the positions they were in before, side by side at the wall.
"Thanks," she says.
He chuckles. "Anytime. But it was...good?"
"Yeah. Yeah, Sam."
"You know, you didn't have to-"
"I wanted to."
"You like…?"
She finally turns to look at him, smiling as she nods.
He shakes his head at himself half-sheepishly. "I can do better than that."
Even if she's still a little shaky and off-center, she feels a warm smirk come over her face. "So can I."
They stand there quietly for a moment, then he asks her, "You okay?"
"Are any of us okay?" she replies with a roll of her eyes.
"I mean-"
"I know what you mean, Sam. Yeah. I'm okay."
"I didn't bring you up here to…"
"I know that, too." She smiles. "Not that I'm complaining."
He gives her this slow, lazy smile.
"So, uh…" she says. "I'm gonna head back down. It's kinda cold up here."
"Okay."
"You coming?"
He shakes his head. "Be down soon."
He reaches out and lays his hand on her neck, kissing her forehead like they've already come to this point, like it's already a relationship, like this is normal. That scares her, but only as he lets go of her and looks at her so seriously, like it freaks him out, too.
Then he turns around again, to look out over the treetops, out here under the sky that's somehow come over a bright shade of blue while she wasn't looking. There's a push of muted light, the rise of it over the horizon like it's seeping up, struggling out of the darkness of the land. A sunrise shouldn't be a struggle, she thinks. Everything shouldn't be a struggle like this. She turns and goes back inside.
The building is still dark, but her flashlight is waiting just where she left it. The single beam and bobble of light bounces with her steps, but she's not looking so much as feeling her feet touch off against the ground. She grows stronger and stronger, less shaky with each footfall until she's reaching the ground floor again and she can hear voices, soft and running, off down the west hallway where everyone is surely stirring. They'll eventually come into the kitchen, but for a while yet, they'll talk. At night they crash, but in the mornings, they're loath to greet the world even as they're unable to stop themselves from laying all their plans and fears out, sharing them between them. She's learned that the most honest conversations happen here in the half an hour or so before dawn.
She thinks of joining them, but instead she does what Sam would do. She shuffles her way into the hollow, silent kitchen and out through the door, where the fire is crackling and smoking and seems to have brought the water to a boil. She'll make the coffee this morning, hoping that it doesn't take away an important part of his ritual. But she thinks the most important part is probably how he's standing up there watching the light diffuse over the land until he can see the devastation she's so tired of looking at. Maybe, she thinks, she's a little afraid of it. But surely he's tired of it, too; certainly afraid. Apparently, though, he needs to keep looking anyway.
~