Title: The Sky Is Red Tonight
Fandom: V (2009)
Characters: Lisa, Tyler
Pairing: Lisa/Tyler
Rating: PG
Warnings: Spoilers only up to early S2
Summary: For the prompt at
mmom: V (2009) Tyler/Lisa, Lisa catches him masturbating and wants him to teach her this new emotion.
Also slightly inspired by an old Eurovision winner, Only Teardrops, which has the title as its first line and when I heard it recently the first line made me think of V.
Lisa stared at the red sky which had been a feature of the skyline for so long now and showed no sign of abating. How had it come to this, she wondered? It felt such a long time now since she was blindly following her mother’s orders at every turn, not knowing what it was to feel anything other than Anna’s bliss.
And now look at her. She was carrying around so many secrets, and she didn’t feel like she had an outlet for any of them. Joshua, the one person she could be truly honest with on the ship, had no memory of anything that had happened and had gone back to being blindly loyal to Anna. If he remembered anything that had gone before his death, would his Fifth Column loyalties return, or would he turn Lisa over to Anna without a second thought?
Then there was Anna herself, making all these demands of Lisa to prove her loyalty, and Lisa feeling sick to her stomach as she passed the tests, and yet feeling a strange kind of relief at the knowledge that she had pulled it off and that she wouldn’t meet the same fate as other suspected Fifth Colum sympathisers. And Tyler, who had started off as part of Anna’s plan but who she was now beginning to care for in a way she had never known was possible. He was the one person Lisa wanted to be totally honest with about her feelings, and yet at the same time she felt that she couldn’t. Tyler could be impulsive and hot headed at times, all Lisa had to do was look at the way he’d gone after the priest, trashing his church even when she had asked him not to. If he knew the whole truth, could he go after Anna, confront her violently and publicly, bringing down everything the Fifth Column had ever worked for? Or maybe he wouldn’t even believe her. He was so loyal to Anna, believing she could do no wrong - maybe he would just carry on accepting everything she said without question and wouldn’t even listen to Lisa. And there was Erica, whose relationship with Tyler was already difficult, and if Tyler found out about Erica’s work with the Fifth Column, that would only make matters worse.
In some ways, it would be easier for Lisa if she were like Joshua now, no human emotions, none of the confusion and pent up tension she was feeling now. Yet she knew that given the chance to go back to that state, having known and experienced human emotion, she would never choose to go back to the way she was before.
Maybe what she needed was some time with Tyler, where they could talk about anything other than Anna, the Fifth Column, the anti-V protests on the ground. Anything to take her mind off all the thoughts swirling around in her head. She headed down the hallway of the mothership, smiling to herself at the thought of spending some time alone together at last.
“Wait. What are you doing?” Lisa frowned as she opened the door, Tyler looking guilty as he took in the sight of her in the doorway. Was he sat there, pants around his ankles, hand around his penis? “Why would you be doing that? You have me for that, Tyler.”
“So, you don’t do this here?” Tyler asked.
Lisa shook her head. Since arriving on Earth, there were so many things she had come to learn, so many new emotions she was still not sure she understood. There was hatred which she was beginning to feel for Anna, the growing love for Tyler, the hurt she had felt when Joshua had looked right through her, the envy and longing she felt when she looked at Erica Evans and wondered what it must be like to have a mother like Tyler’s, the compassion she was beginning to feel for those in her adopted home, the revulsion she had felt when Anna had forced her to take part in her tests. And hope, hope that one day Anna could be stopped, that Lisa could be happy. Yet this was new to her again, something she didn’t understand.
“But maybe you can teach me,” she said. “I’d like to know.”
“Okay, well, sometimes it can be a way of releasing tension,” Tyler began, and Lisa wondered if her emotions were showing on her face, whether Tyler somehow sensed the conflict that was going on under the surface. But as she looked at him, she knew that he didn’t, that he was merely trying to teach her as she had requested. And any means of releasing tension sounded good to Lisa right about now. If she carried on for any longer as she had been, she could find herself letting it all burst out of her.
“But mostly…it’s a sex thing, and it’s something I do when I’m thinking about you, because I know, I do have you for that, but you can’t be around me all the time, and back before I joined Live Aboard, when you were up here and I was down there, that distance could be really frustrating, so I’d do that a lot when I was thinking about you and couldn’t be with you.”
“I think I understand now,” Lisa replied. “But teach me properly. So that when I can’t be with you, it will help me too.”
“Of course I will,” Tyler replied. “But now I’m living here, we don’t need to worry about being apart any more.”
Lisa wished she could be as confident as that. But he didn’t know the real Anna. She did. And she had no idea what Anna had in store for them, whether they really would be able to stay together forever as he believed. But she couldn’t think about that now, she would just make the most of this moment.