BSG fic: If It's Worth It (Chief/Sam, PG-13)
Title: If It's Worth It
Pairing: Chief/Sam, mentions of Chief/Cally and Kara/Sam (y'all know I'm a shipper, but I'm playing with the dark side of the K/S here)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Some angsty pondering post-"Revelations" (4.12). 1100 words.
Note: For Grab Bag: Week One at bsg_slashathon, inspired by the image prompt and the song prompt "Starlight," by Muse (from which I took the title).
If It's Worth It
It's easy enough to draw circles in the sand, to look only down, because down is the cool grit of the shore. And the cold slap of wind could be anywhere, anything else: coming out of the arena on Picon with a bum knee and a victory; running through familiar Caprica woods without a chrome job on your tail for once and finding yourself smiling; eating beans cold out of a can in front of a tent on New Caprica as you watch the dim sun (the only sun you've got, but it's a sun) go down.
But the problem is Sam can't really pretend he's somewhere he's not. Worse, he can feel Tyrol's eyes on his back the same way he got to feeling them when they were planetside.
Get the frak out, he said with a lazy grin one afternoon of doing nothing, of nothing to do so no way to survive, except maybe to laugh and pretend; maybe that was survival. He'd turned from watching Kara to find Tyrol watching him, and he rolled his eyes as if to say, Like you know. Like any of you have done anything but wish to the gods you knew what it was like to be with her.
And then the Chief's knowing smile. Could've been anything in the world; Sam didn't know him well enough, which might've been why it irked him that he could be that easily read. That smile from him might've been, Like I haven't been there, Anders. Might've been, I wouldn't take on a swirling ball of chaos like that for all the cubits in the galaxy. Might've been, Is that why you're doing it, to prove you can? So it bothered him maybe a little.
It's not that he doesn't remember how soul-saving it was to have the Chief by his side. He feels it keenly when he stoops down and stares at the pale-gold-gray nothing of the ground, the sky a blanket of whites washed too many times, faded but never quite clean, like all their clothes, too many cycles now that there's nothing but them and what they have. What they are.
And what they were, always were. He'd love to say that's what makes New Caprica feel like worse than a bad dream. All the killing, and for what? All the killing, and they were always the same stuff as what they blew up with bombs and stood with their chins up in the face of. The occupation was hell, but then again, it was a distraction from all the things that weren't working and never had. Government and harvest. Other things.
He doesn't hate Tyrol for knowing he and Kara were frakked up. So were Tyrol and Cally, most days. He hates that in the midst of all that there was always a look on Tyrol's face, small and cool like his eyes, that said, I would know you like the lines on my own hand; take you down to the priest and claim you as my own; sleep under your tent, under your sky, under your hands.
And Sam would've done it, probably. If not for Kara and Cally and the way Tyrol didn't half know what his eyes were saying (maybe wouldn't even want to mean it), he'd have done it. In fact, maybe he'd go back and undo things, redo them if he could weave them into a different, stronger tapestry, of just the two of them.
But it was just the two of them; still is. They don't have to come shocked and gasping awake in some tank to walk off into the world unfettered (not brand new; even the rest weren't, when they could still do it). They could do it because they're alone (like humanity's alone). Cally's gone and Kara's moved on. He and Tyrol are walking alone through the wide empty world now, with the sand under their heels and nothing to look at but death and decay. Death and decay, and them in the middle of it.
Surely they're walking through something bigger, too, or they could be. Possibility, he thinks. Future. Hope. Sure, it's hard, but what the frak do they have without the trying? The more he looks over this barren earth, the more he wants to fight. This is what he does: pushes through. Last five minutes of the game, last five hundred yards to a chrome job walking bombed-out streets, last five weeks with Kara locked away. New Caprica, before and after, wasn't always the Chief staring gooseflesh down his back over things. It was good sometimes. They played shitty pyramid. They built things that fell down and then rebuilt them. Kara married him. Nicky was born. There were always reasons to smile, even after the occupation, as they would toast the empty blink of a radar screen, the daily gesture at hope that often turned up nothing, but they kept on making it.
Lying on the ground one night in that bunker, warm if only from the rotgut, they said they'd go down fighting. Tyrol gave him a crooked smile, took a swig from a bottle with a smirk on his face halfway between wicked and cynical. Like Kara's smile, just less sharp.
So why he hates him: it's complicated. It's complicated and it's simple. He could stand all this if they clung to each other, really clung instead of spun and spun and then simply fell together, stuck like magnets. But they never have, even now. There are only five in the universe, and they are two, and Tyrol doesn't look at him anymore like any of it matters. They aren't fighting; they aren't even walking toward anything, just crawling out over the beach like everyone else, like nuts dropping hard off trees and just rolling, rolling in whatever direction they roll.
Once, they sat down shoulder to shoulder, and Tyrol could understand him even when he didn't want to be understood. Now, if they're here together it's incidental, as pathetically instinctive as he and Kara ever were, but without the rush of passion to make it a good lie. Now, they're walking, stride matching stride, and their boots make a scraping, crunching noise like the sound of nothing, and Sam can't stop thinking and knowing.
~
Pairing: Chief/Sam, mentions of Chief/Cally and Kara/Sam (y'all know I'm a shipper, but I'm playing with the dark side of the K/S here)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Some angsty pondering post-"Revelations" (4.12). 1100 words.
Note: For Grab Bag: Week One at bsg_slashathon, inspired by the image prompt and the song prompt "Starlight," by Muse (from which I took the title).
If It's Worth It
It's easy enough to draw circles in the sand, to look only down, because down is the cool grit of the shore. And the cold slap of wind could be anywhere, anything else: coming out of the arena on Picon with a bum knee and a victory; running through familiar Caprica woods without a chrome job on your tail for once and finding yourself smiling; eating beans cold out of a can in front of a tent on New Caprica as you watch the dim sun (the only sun you've got, but it's a sun) go down.
But the problem is Sam can't really pretend he's somewhere he's not. Worse, he can feel Tyrol's eyes on his back the same way he got to feeling them when they were planetside.
Get the frak out, he said with a lazy grin one afternoon of doing nothing, of nothing to do so no way to survive, except maybe to laugh and pretend; maybe that was survival. He'd turned from watching Kara to find Tyrol watching him, and he rolled his eyes as if to say, Like you know. Like any of you have done anything but wish to the gods you knew what it was like to be with her.
And then the Chief's knowing smile. Could've been anything in the world; Sam didn't know him well enough, which might've been why it irked him that he could be that easily read. That smile from him might've been, Like I haven't been there, Anders. Might've been, I wouldn't take on a swirling ball of chaos like that for all the cubits in the galaxy. Might've been, Is that why you're doing it, to prove you can? So it bothered him maybe a little.
It's not that he doesn't remember how soul-saving it was to have the Chief by his side. He feels it keenly when he stoops down and stares at the pale-gold-gray nothing of the ground, the sky a blanket of whites washed too many times, faded but never quite clean, like all their clothes, too many cycles now that there's nothing but them and what they have. What they are.
And what they were, always were. He'd love to say that's what makes New Caprica feel like worse than a bad dream. All the killing, and for what? All the killing, and they were always the same stuff as what they blew up with bombs and stood with their chins up in the face of. The occupation was hell, but then again, it was a distraction from all the things that weren't working and never had. Government and harvest. Other things.
He doesn't hate Tyrol for knowing he and Kara were frakked up. So were Tyrol and Cally, most days. He hates that in the midst of all that there was always a look on Tyrol's face, small and cool like his eyes, that said, I would know you like the lines on my own hand; take you down to the priest and claim you as my own; sleep under your tent, under your sky, under your hands.
And Sam would've done it, probably. If not for Kara and Cally and the way Tyrol didn't half know what his eyes were saying (maybe wouldn't even want to mean it), he'd have done it. In fact, maybe he'd go back and undo things, redo them if he could weave them into a different, stronger tapestry, of just the two of them.
But it was just the two of them; still is. They don't have to come shocked and gasping awake in some tank to walk off into the world unfettered (not brand new; even the rest weren't, when they could still do it). They could do it because they're alone (like humanity's alone). Cally's gone and Kara's moved on. He and Tyrol are walking alone through the wide empty world now, with the sand under their heels and nothing to look at but death and decay. Death and decay, and them in the middle of it.
Surely they're walking through something bigger, too, or they could be. Possibility, he thinks. Future. Hope. Sure, it's hard, but what the frak do they have without the trying? The more he looks over this barren earth, the more he wants to fight. This is what he does: pushes through. Last five minutes of the game, last five hundred yards to a chrome job walking bombed-out streets, last five weeks with Kara locked away. New Caprica, before and after, wasn't always the Chief staring gooseflesh down his back over things. It was good sometimes. They played shitty pyramid. They built things that fell down and then rebuilt them. Kara married him. Nicky was born. There were always reasons to smile, even after the occupation, as they would toast the empty blink of a radar screen, the daily gesture at hope that often turned up nothing, but they kept on making it.
Lying on the ground one night in that bunker, warm if only from the rotgut, they said they'd go down fighting. Tyrol gave him a crooked smile, took a swig from a bottle with a smirk on his face halfway between wicked and cynical. Like Kara's smile, just less sharp.
So why he hates him: it's complicated. It's complicated and it's simple. He could stand all this if they clung to each other, really clung instead of spun and spun and then simply fell together, stuck like magnets. But they never have, even now. There are only five in the universe, and they are two, and Tyrol doesn't look at him anymore like any of it matters. They aren't fighting; they aren't even walking toward anything, just crawling out over the beach like everyone else, like nuts dropping hard off trees and just rolling, rolling in whatever direction they roll.
Once, they sat down shoulder to shoulder, and Tyrol could understand him even when he didn't want to be understood. Now, if they're here together it's incidental, as pathetically instinctive as he and Kara ever were, but without the rush of passion to make it a good lie. Now, they're walking, stride matching stride, and their boots make a scraping, crunching noise like the sound of nothing, and Sam can't stop thinking and knowing.
~