fic: We Don't Heal
Title: We Don't Heal
Summary: Tigh has issues. Tyrol has issues, oh doesn't everyone?
Specs: 2175 words. For desire_of_mind's ficathon. Written for counterfeitcoin's request: Colonel Tigh, m/m of some kind (doesn't need to be explicit or the focus), um...something descriptive. Spoilers up to Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
He is off duty two hours past what his pocket watch tells him is midnight. He leaves the CIC with a report on coolant levels in rough shape in his mind, but by the time he hits the short hall to his bunk, it’s gone.
Ellen is waiting for him. Just as he’s been waiting for her for the past thirteen hours. Every spare second, with only the beep and whir of stone age monitors to disturb dry lips, heavy eyes. She’s taken over the empty space left by the old silver flask. In his breast pocket, tucked in safe and inconspicuous. Warmth if the need for comfort arises. She’s within reach.
It takes an extra moment to realize that the hatch won’t open because it’s locked from the outside. Their room - their little grey bed, the locker she’s draped with a rumpled black slip - is empty. She complains about that bed every night, it’s too small, their knees knock and the heat of sleeping bodies upsets her. She talks angry nonsense in her sleep and tosses her hair to stick against his face and neck. For one second, he remembers the bed they shared on Caprica. Bigger, big enough to hold not only the two of them, but lieutenants, colonels, capt-
There is a note. Clipped with a hair pin to the slip. He reads: Gone for a walk, darling. Couldn’t stay cooped up. When ARE you coming back?
He’d always bored her. Unwritten addendum. He wants to stay, and wait, to read or just go straight to sleep. But the thought of taking his uniform off alone breaks him, he needs her hands, and he has no more patience for waiting than she does.
So he finds her with Tyrol. In a storage locker off the flight deck. He hears her sharp, fluttered laugh, and doesn’t have to ask any of the idle deck hands. The hatch is wide open, but that is not a relief. It just means that everyone has heard them.
Tyrol is flushed, eyes dark. Ellen’s pumps are lying on the floor, and she is perched on an empty parts container. Her legs aren’t crossed, her ankles dangle. She laughs, still, when she sees him at the entrance.
“Saul! Saul, you’re off, you got my note. Too clever, finding us here. Our little chat.”
Tyrol salutes. How close had he been to her? Saul can only see bare legs, the pleated skirt she used to wear to business meetings.
He returns the salute. “Chief.” He cannot make a platitude, remembering the gossip about what Tyrol and Lieutenant Valerii did in this room, and others like it. “Ellen. It’s late.”
“Oh I know. Chief was just telling me that.” She giggles at the nickname. “He won’t tell me his first name, Saul. Can’t you make him?”
It’s obvious, she isn’t drunk. Her eyes are too bright, the tilt of her lips still ironic. “Ellen, leave the man alone to do his job.”
There is no excuse for this. She flirts a smile at Tyrol, then hops down, her skirt pulling up at her thighs. She steps into her shoes demurely. “I hope to see you again, Chief.”
He doesn’t look, but there is no response from the other man as he guides his smirking wife out of the storeroom. She tugs her arm out of his halfway across the flight deck, saying loudly “Don’t treat me like a whore, Saul.”
The silent crew remain blurs of orange in his periphery.
--
Of course he sees Sharon immediately when he follows the Colonel out, a moment later. She’s just getting on shift, her shoulder flaps still hanging loose, as they do when she’s running late and still dressing in the corridor. Her back is turned to him. She’s watching Ellen Tigh’s ass move like marble under that skirt, because that’s what the entire deck crew is doing. And watching the expression on the Colonel’s face, the one that shows him so soft and old. Most of the crew has turned back to their work before his wife’s words pass over them all like radiation.
Sharon turns, and looks at him. She sees where he’s standing, where he’s come from, and smiles. In that way, with a hard chin and flat eyes to show that there isn’t any hurt underneath. Nothing he could do, not even frakking the XO’s wife in the same room Tigh told them to break it off in, could hurt her. Crashdown touches her shoulder, leans in close and says something that stretches her smile to a grin. She doesn’t look at him again, not for the remainder of his shift. Or he assumes so, because he doesn’t look at her, either.
--
Saul closes the hatch, certain that her voice will carry through it, regardless. She starts off quiet, as if to prove him wrong.
“I hope I didn’t upset you.”
He sighs, sits down on the bed, watching her pace to the locker, tearing off jewelry. Her shoes already in a pointed pile by the door. “This is a working military base, Ellen.”
“And I’m a safety hazard?”
“No. But people have to do their jobs.”
She stops, posed on one bare foot, gesticulating with the opposite hand. Her voice is earnest. “And if they’d had anything pressing to do, I would’ve gotten out of the way.”
“You’re my wife. There are certain expectations-”
“To entertain me? And do I embarrass you? Talking to Chief? The Chief- what’s his name?”
“Tyrol.”
“Chief Tyrol. We were just talking. I asked him to show me around.” She slides out of her silk jacket, hangs it up. She is naturally careful, neat. Even in her words, when she isn’t playing games.
“Like I said, the man has a job. If you’d been anyone else-” he cuts himself off, there, belatedly remembering the tryst with Valerii that he’d broken up.
“And there you go. Treating me like a whore.” She slams the locker door wide on its hinges, catches it back so that she can strip behind it. He watches skirt and panties hit the floor, only to be snatched up again and replaced with her nightgown. He knows she imagines that she’s punishing him.
She is.
“I’m not, Ellen. You know - half of it’s my job. You know how it looks.”
“So I do embarrass you!” She steps out, and he sees her eyes are dangerous. Her voice has that acidic edge, where she can curse with more eloquence and fluidity than any marine he’s ever met, where the smallest gesture means the end of the marriage, the end of the world.
The fight that broke them up, before she left for Picon, was over a phone call from Admiral Niran that he hadn’t returned. She had no taste for domesticity, then or now, it is all high drama with her.
“Yes.” He says. Careful, careful. “Occasionally.”
But she doesn’t lose control. She takes a breath, holding it, her jaw thrust out, her back stiff. She doesn’t say anything. And instead, comes to sit beside him on the bed.
Surprised, alert, he makes room for her, so their bodies don’t touch.
“For one thing,” she eventually says, “He’s not my type. He’s not even a commissioned officer.”
He is meant to laugh, but doesn’t.
“Secondly,” she still doesn’t look at him, “Me and you, we’re starting over. And I won’t screw that up.”
--
In the morning, Tyrol wakes up on two hours of sleep with the majority of the other NCOs. He goes to breakfast, grabs a plastic bowl of sludge, then goes back for another one.
He can’t stop thinking about Ellen Tigh.
He brings the bowl to Sharon.
She is sleeping, curtain pulled around her rack. There are a few other officers awake in the dim light, all of whom he recognizes. He nods at them, they smile back, clear out innocuously, read or pray in their racks.
She has a bad habit of sleeping through the morning meal when she’s on late. It shows later on, when she’s hungry and gets snippy or morose. He used to do this. He loved to see her groggy-eyed and confused, her slow resurfacing for him.
He sees this, now, as a peace offering. And the only time she’ll let him talk to her in semi-private conditions.
“Lieutenant,” he says. He pulls back the curtain, sits on the rack beside her. “Sharon.”
“What?” she wakes up instantly, for once. Seeing him she pulls herself onto her elbows, neutral. She has been dreaming about other things.
He hands her the bowl, and she shifts to take it.
“You slept in.”
“Deliberately, I know.”
“I thought you’d be hungry.”
“I am.” She slurps at the porridge. “What do you need, Chief?”
He knows what is to be distant from her. Seeing her in the corridor or the mess hall, but ignoring her. Watching as she harangues Crashdown and jokes with Starbuck. It had a certain illicit appeal when they were together, and after the inquisition, it had been necessary. But now, here she is, doing the same thing again, but she’s inches from him, and he can smell the oil in her hair, the sleep on her breath.
To force him away - by rank - when he’s this close, she must have stopped loving him.
It is all the answer he needs.
“Sir, you can tell them with authority that I didn’t touch the bitch.”
He leaves the bowl, closes the hatch on his way out.
--
Adama invites Tigh to sit and have lunch during their shift in the afternoon. They sit in opposite chairs, two old men, slurping at noodles without dignity.
It is a quick break, one or the other of them should be on watch, but Adama still finds the time to say, “Saul, your wife.”
There is a pause, and Tigh wipes at his mouth.
“There’s too much gossip. Too many rumours for an XO.”
“Let them think what they-”
“No.”
“We got through it before, didn’t we?” He tries to chuckle. He knows what the difference between then and now is.
He can almost see Adama choosing his words, and it stills him. He braces himself, tries to clear his mind. The old man says: “For all the damage - to our ranks, to credibility, to morale - she may as well be a cylon.”
“For gods’ sake, Bill-”
“We know she isn’t. She passed the damned test. But right now, we need our ducks in order, you know that. She has to know it, too.”
“Are you ordering me - my own wife - ”
“Not ordering. Come on. You see it, too. Don’t be blind.”
They pause, wait. Feeling sagged and heavy, Saul eventually looks up. “Don’t you think if I could do something about her, I would?”
“You love her. If she loves you, she’ll come around.”
--
He knows he has done the right thing. For fifty different reasons, he knows he is right. But Ellen Tigh is still in his head, legs swinging, eyes sharp.
If you love her, does it matter?
He hasn’t felt like this since he was a teenager. Every conversation hurts. He can feel Cally’s eye on him through every shift, every part change, every inspection. She watches him, as do they all. Everyone except Sharon.
But then, they watch her, too.
He has started to envy her, because she can leave. She darts off in that Raptor of hers, wallowing through space without a single question to tag along behind. Crashdown is loyal to the core, he knows, because she was that way with Helo. Rook pilots are like that. Every flying bird a god to the fledglings. Maybe why so many of them are named after divinity.
In the end, trapped and claustrophobic, he goes to Tigh.
The Colonel is in his office. Bare, grey, a dress jacket hanging off the chairback. Tyrol salutes, Tigh straightens in his seat. He looks sore, old, exhausted.
“Chief.” Again, no platitudes.
Tyrol can remember why he hates this man, the logic of it - eighty-five dead, Sharon forsaken, the smell of whiskey that still lingers over paperwork even after weeks of level-headed decisions from the top. But the fury is missing. He wonders where it is, and sits down without being asked.
“Sir, I wanted you to know, that nothing happened with your wife.”
“You think I don’t know that? She’s my wife, crewman.”
“I know. But I’ve heard the rumours, too.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you can’t trust what comes out of her mouth.”
Tigh stares at him. Balding, lined, pale from years without sun. Tyrol knows to hate his clean hands, but forgives the gold ring that glints on the left one.
“Count yourself lucky, chief.”
That’s all. Tyrol rises to leave. He knows Ellen was right. Only about Tigh, though. Not about him. The Colonel could forgive her anything, far past the end of the world, maybe to the end of humanity. She is enough, for him.
Summary: Tigh has issues. Tyrol has issues, oh doesn't everyone?
Specs: 2175 words. For desire_of_mind's ficathon. Written for counterfeitcoin's request: Colonel Tigh, m/m of some kind (doesn't need to be explicit or the focus), um...something descriptive. Spoilers up to Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
He is off duty two hours past what his pocket watch tells him is midnight. He leaves the CIC with a report on coolant levels in rough shape in his mind, but by the time he hits the short hall to his bunk, it’s gone.
Ellen is waiting for him. Just as he’s been waiting for her for the past thirteen hours. Every spare second, with only the beep and whir of stone age monitors to disturb dry lips, heavy eyes. She’s taken over the empty space left by the old silver flask. In his breast pocket, tucked in safe and inconspicuous. Warmth if the need for comfort arises. She’s within reach.
It takes an extra moment to realize that the hatch won’t open because it’s locked from the outside. Their room - their little grey bed, the locker she’s draped with a rumpled black slip - is empty. She complains about that bed every night, it’s too small, their knees knock and the heat of sleeping bodies upsets her. She talks angry nonsense in her sleep and tosses her hair to stick against his face and neck. For one second, he remembers the bed they shared on Caprica. Bigger, big enough to hold not only the two of them, but lieutenants, colonels, capt-
There is a note. Clipped with a hair pin to the slip. He reads: Gone for a walk, darling. Couldn’t stay cooped up. When ARE you coming back?
He’d always bored her. Unwritten addendum. He wants to stay, and wait, to read or just go straight to sleep. But the thought of taking his uniform off alone breaks him, he needs her hands, and he has no more patience for waiting than she does.
So he finds her with Tyrol. In a storage locker off the flight deck. He hears her sharp, fluttered laugh, and doesn’t have to ask any of the idle deck hands. The hatch is wide open, but that is not a relief. It just means that everyone has heard them.
Tyrol is flushed, eyes dark. Ellen’s pumps are lying on the floor, and she is perched on an empty parts container. Her legs aren’t crossed, her ankles dangle. She laughs, still, when she sees him at the entrance.
“Saul! Saul, you’re off, you got my note. Too clever, finding us here. Our little chat.”
Tyrol salutes. How close had he been to her? Saul can only see bare legs, the pleated skirt she used to wear to business meetings.
He returns the salute. “Chief.” He cannot make a platitude, remembering the gossip about what Tyrol and Lieutenant Valerii did in this room, and others like it. “Ellen. It’s late.”
“Oh I know. Chief was just telling me that.” She giggles at the nickname. “He won’t tell me his first name, Saul. Can’t you make him?”
It’s obvious, she isn’t drunk. Her eyes are too bright, the tilt of her lips still ironic. “Ellen, leave the man alone to do his job.”
There is no excuse for this. She flirts a smile at Tyrol, then hops down, her skirt pulling up at her thighs. She steps into her shoes demurely. “I hope to see you again, Chief.”
He doesn’t look, but there is no response from the other man as he guides his smirking wife out of the storeroom. She tugs her arm out of his halfway across the flight deck, saying loudly “Don’t treat me like a whore, Saul.”
The silent crew remain blurs of orange in his periphery.
--
Of course he sees Sharon immediately when he follows the Colonel out, a moment later. She’s just getting on shift, her shoulder flaps still hanging loose, as they do when she’s running late and still dressing in the corridor. Her back is turned to him. She’s watching Ellen Tigh’s ass move like marble under that skirt, because that’s what the entire deck crew is doing. And watching the expression on the Colonel’s face, the one that shows him so soft and old. Most of the crew has turned back to their work before his wife’s words pass over them all like radiation.
Sharon turns, and looks at him. She sees where he’s standing, where he’s come from, and smiles. In that way, with a hard chin and flat eyes to show that there isn’t any hurt underneath. Nothing he could do, not even frakking the XO’s wife in the same room Tigh told them to break it off in, could hurt her. Crashdown touches her shoulder, leans in close and says something that stretches her smile to a grin. She doesn’t look at him again, not for the remainder of his shift. Or he assumes so, because he doesn’t look at her, either.
--
Saul closes the hatch, certain that her voice will carry through it, regardless. She starts off quiet, as if to prove him wrong.
“I hope I didn’t upset you.”
He sighs, sits down on the bed, watching her pace to the locker, tearing off jewelry. Her shoes already in a pointed pile by the door. “This is a working military base, Ellen.”
“And I’m a safety hazard?”
“No. But people have to do their jobs.”
She stops, posed on one bare foot, gesticulating with the opposite hand. Her voice is earnest. “And if they’d had anything pressing to do, I would’ve gotten out of the way.”
“You’re my wife. There are certain expectations-”
“To entertain me? And do I embarrass you? Talking to Chief? The Chief- what’s his name?”
“Tyrol.”
“Chief Tyrol. We were just talking. I asked him to show me around.” She slides out of her silk jacket, hangs it up. She is naturally careful, neat. Even in her words, when she isn’t playing games.
“Like I said, the man has a job. If you’d been anyone else-” he cuts himself off, there, belatedly remembering the tryst with Valerii that he’d broken up.
“And there you go. Treating me like a whore.” She slams the locker door wide on its hinges, catches it back so that she can strip behind it. He watches skirt and panties hit the floor, only to be snatched up again and replaced with her nightgown. He knows she imagines that she’s punishing him.
She is.
“I’m not, Ellen. You know - half of it’s my job. You know how it looks.”
“So I do embarrass you!” She steps out, and he sees her eyes are dangerous. Her voice has that acidic edge, where she can curse with more eloquence and fluidity than any marine he’s ever met, where the smallest gesture means the end of the marriage, the end of the world.
The fight that broke them up, before she left for Picon, was over a phone call from Admiral Niran that he hadn’t returned. She had no taste for domesticity, then or now, it is all high drama with her.
“Yes.” He says. Careful, careful. “Occasionally.”
But she doesn’t lose control. She takes a breath, holding it, her jaw thrust out, her back stiff. She doesn’t say anything. And instead, comes to sit beside him on the bed.
Surprised, alert, he makes room for her, so their bodies don’t touch.
“For one thing,” she eventually says, “He’s not my type. He’s not even a commissioned officer.”
He is meant to laugh, but doesn’t.
“Secondly,” she still doesn’t look at him, “Me and you, we’re starting over. And I won’t screw that up.”
--
In the morning, Tyrol wakes up on two hours of sleep with the majority of the other NCOs. He goes to breakfast, grabs a plastic bowl of sludge, then goes back for another one.
He can’t stop thinking about Ellen Tigh.
He brings the bowl to Sharon.
She is sleeping, curtain pulled around her rack. There are a few other officers awake in the dim light, all of whom he recognizes. He nods at them, they smile back, clear out innocuously, read or pray in their racks.
She has a bad habit of sleeping through the morning meal when she’s on late. It shows later on, when she’s hungry and gets snippy or morose. He used to do this. He loved to see her groggy-eyed and confused, her slow resurfacing for him.
He sees this, now, as a peace offering. And the only time she’ll let him talk to her in semi-private conditions.
“Lieutenant,” he says. He pulls back the curtain, sits on the rack beside her. “Sharon.”
“What?” she wakes up instantly, for once. Seeing him she pulls herself onto her elbows, neutral. She has been dreaming about other things.
He hands her the bowl, and she shifts to take it.
“You slept in.”
“Deliberately, I know.”
“I thought you’d be hungry.”
“I am.” She slurps at the porridge. “What do you need, Chief?”
He knows what is to be distant from her. Seeing her in the corridor or the mess hall, but ignoring her. Watching as she harangues Crashdown and jokes with Starbuck. It had a certain illicit appeal when they were together, and after the inquisition, it had been necessary. But now, here she is, doing the same thing again, but she’s inches from him, and he can smell the oil in her hair, the sleep on her breath.
To force him away - by rank - when he’s this close, she must have stopped loving him.
It is all the answer he needs.
“Sir, you can tell them with authority that I didn’t touch the bitch.”
He leaves the bowl, closes the hatch on his way out.
--
Adama invites Tigh to sit and have lunch during their shift in the afternoon. They sit in opposite chairs, two old men, slurping at noodles without dignity.
It is a quick break, one or the other of them should be on watch, but Adama still finds the time to say, “Saul, your wife.”
There is a pause, and Tigh wipes at his mouth.
“There’s too much gossip. Too many rumours for an XO.”
“Let them think what they-”
“No.”
“We got through it before, didn’t we?” He tries to chuckle. He knows what the difference between then and now is.
He can almost see Adama choosing his words, and it stills him. He braces himself, tries to clear his mind. The old man says: “For all the damage - to our ranks, to credibility, to morale - she may as well be a cylon.”
“For gods’ sake, Bill-”
“We know she isn’t. She passed the damned test. But right now, we need our ducks in order, you know that. She has to know it, too.”
“Are you ordering me - my own wife - ”
“Not ordering. Come on. You see it, too. Don’t be blind.”
They pause, wait. Feeling sagged and heavy, Saul eventually looks up. “Don’t you think if I could do something about her, I would?”
“You love her. If she loves you, she’ll come around.”
--
He knows he has done the right thing. For fifty different reasons, he knows he is right. But Ellen Tigh is still in his head, legs swinging, eyes sharp.
If you love her, does it matter?
He hasn’t felt like this since he was a teenager. Every conversation hurts. He can feel Cally’s eye on him through every shift, every part change, every inspection. She watches him, as do they all. Everyone except Sharon.
But then, they watch her, too.
He has started to envy her, because she can leave. She darts off in that Raptor of hers, wallowing through space without a single question to tag along behind. Crashdown is loyal to the core, he knows, because she was that way with Helo. Rook pilots are like that. Every flying bird a god to the fledglings. Maybe why so many of them are named after divinity.
In the end, trapped and claustrophobic, he goes to Tigh.
The Colonel is in his office. Bare, grey, a dress jacket hanging off the chairback. Tyrol salutes, Tigh straightens in his seat. He looks sore, old, exhausted.
“Chief.” Again, no platitudes.
Tyrol can remember why he hates this man, the logic of it - eighty-five dead, Sharon forsaken, the smell of whiskey that still lingers over paperwork even after weeks of level-headed decisions from the top. But the fury is missing. He wonders where it is, and sits down without being asked.
“Sir, I wanted you to know, that nothing happened with your wife.”
“You think I don’t know that? She’s my wife, crewman.”
“I know. But I’ve heard the rumours, too.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you can’t trust what comes out of her mouth.”
Tigh stares at him. Balding, lined, pale from years without sun. Tyrol knows to hate his clean hands, but forgives the gold ring that glints on the left one.
“Count yourself lucky, chief.”
That’s all. Tyrol rises to leave. He knows Ellen was right. Only about Tigh, though. Not about him. The Colonel could forgive her anything, far past the end of the world, maybe to the end of humanity. She is enough, for him.