"not waving but drowning"
Title: not waving but drowning
Fandom: Stargate Universe.
Characters: everyone, with the focus on Chloe.
Word Count: 1558
Rating: 12(ish)
Summary: If it’s not your body, can you treat it like it is? Chloe/Matt.
Warnings: mentions of sex, consent issues
Notes: Written for hc_bingo (my bingo card is lurking here), for the prompt sore muscles. Title borrowed from Stevie Smith’s poem of the same name. NEXT UP, HENRY IV FIC, YO. You think I’m kidding. So, I marathoned SGU - and the communication stones always got to me, particularly that scene with Young and his not-so-ex-wife - because issues. So, here we are.
not waving but drowning
Chloe closes her eyes in the bowels of the SGC, opens them again on Destiny - and opens them to an ache she doesn’t remember, but recognises. An ache in her thighs; an ache in the fragments of her that, for months now, have only been seen by Matt and the showers. For a moment she’s silent, confused-Matt wouldn’t; it’s not me-and her cheeks flush crimson.
“You alright there, Chloe?” Doctor Caine is leaning towards her, elbows on the table, one hand absently lodged against the stones’ controls and the other spidered out across the tabletop. “Looking a little flustered.”
There’s something in Chloe’s throat that tenses-my body, but I’m not the one who’s been ‘flustered’-but she forces a smile, pushes back the hair that’s straggled across her face. “Jumping several billion lightyears will do that to you,” she quips, but there’s no heart in it - and she doesn’t try and change that, because for all her size, Destiny is small. Caine knows her story because her father died to save him - he’ll put it down to missing her family so much it burns (aches), because she’s just a kid, in the others’ minds.
Caine sits back, rearranges the communication stones in front of him. “Well,” he says, smiling at her with a flick that whispers I’m sorry for your loss, “the hydroponics guys have made good on their promise of strawberries. Kinda.”
“Can’t wait,” she answers dryly, and then (in that same tone, because that’s easiest), “Who did I swap with, then?”
Caine shrugs, and she can tell that now the worry has passed, he’s absorbed back in the stones. “Some corporal from the SGC. Friend of Greer’s.”
(Friend as in what?)
And there’s the ache, thick in her stomach.
§§§
A curious side effect of lindyhopping between galaxies, Chloe has found, is the strength of her hunger when she’s thrown back into her own skin. Eli says it’s probably psychological-some reaction to the loss she’s just felt all over again; some reaction to her own mortality-but that doesn’t change the fact that they all know where she’ll be, upon her return.
(The hydroponiced strawberries almost taste real. She absently thinks about chocolate.)
Greer’s there, when she looks up from her empty plate, talking to Becker with a tenseness in his shoulders. Asking about supplies, she reasons. Booking a meal. Complaining about the quality. Joking. Waiting. Doing the rounds. Her fingers clench half-reflexively around the fork in her hand, nevertheless. She looks away, relaxes - forces herself to. On his way out, Greer nods to her with a thickness in his smile and a skein of relaxation over his stance. (More relaxed? Does he look more relaxed than he usually does? Does he look like he’s gotten laid at some point in the past twelve hours?)
At that point, Chloe determinedly stops thinking.
§§§
Chloe finds herself being followed through the halls by a playful kino (bobbing along at ankle level, nudging her calves like a puppy), so she drops by Eli’s corner of the ship. He affects innocence, and she steals his seat. He doesn’t ask her how her mother is, and doesn’t ask her if she’s okay - but it’s there, in his eyes and his easy accommodation of her into his space, that if she wants to talk, he’s there.
(She knows. She’s always known.)
“Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” she asks, nonchalant, and flicks a fingertip against the bank of kino monitors. (One screen swerves wildly, and she hastily retracts her finger.)
Eli snorts. “Aside from Corporal Madsen taking your body for a metaphorical fan dance?”
“Nice image, Eli.”
“Sorry,” he says, but doesn’t sound it, because it’s just a joke, and that’s the kind of thing boys tend to joke about. (That sounds sexist, even in her head, but there’s that ache, in and between her thighs. She wants Matt, abruptly, even though she knows he’ll understand even less than Eli. Men, and soldiers.)
“Who was she, then?” Chloe asks.
“Greer knew her,” Eli answers, picking at a dismantled kino. “Gave her a tour of the ship, and then she took a shine to Becker - from the mess. If you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Chloe says, and watches him tug out circuitry that they don’t quite understand. “I do.”
§§§
She’s overreacting, perhaps, but there’s some part of her that’s glad that it wasn’t Greer. (‘It’, like she doesn’t care. ‘It’, like she can’t stop thinking about why she aches. The ache that isn’t an ache; the ache that’s something more.) Greer’s her friend, maybe, and he’s definitely Matt’s - and that would make things awkward. She doesn’t think she’s going to be able to look Becker in the eye again, knowing what he knows.
Her and the showers and Matt - and now, Darren Becker, the closest they have to a gourmet chef.
Chloe does shower, now, and cleansing mist is all well and good, but there’s nothing better than the thunder of hot water when you just want to lean your forehead against the cool tiles and pretend you’re not crying. It doesn’t help that the shower rooms don’t have doors - and when TJ passes by, palm cradled to her stomach, Chloe rubs at her face, pretending she’s washing, not hiding. Not drowning; just waving, slow as long grass on a summer’s day.
It’s her body, and she only realises that when it isn’t wholly hers anymore.
§§§
Chloe shares a room with Matt, now, but it’s not his room - his quarters, she means, the ones he was assigned in those first few days, trying to scrape by. She’s the daughter of the senator who became a hero; she gets the room with a view, and double covers.
She goes to that room, now-the room that she calls ‘that’ because she doesn’t know whether to say her or their-and gets into bed, fully clothed, at what they arbitrarily call eighteen hundred hours. She lies curled beneath the covers, and wants to focus on anything but the ache that’s barely subsided in four hours - but can’t, of course, because she just finds herself wondering why the throb is quite so persistent. She’s ached before, but Matt is a puzzling blend of gentle and rough that leaves bruises, sometimes-on both of them, particularly his neck (because she’d never admit it, but she likes the hiss he breathes at the nip of her teeth)-but rarely aches, and never this bad. Her first time, she hurt, back at Harvard, but it was sharper than this - like something lost, and something gained. This was ferocious, perhaps, and shot through with no emotion other than lust, animalistic.
They didn’t mean any harm.
Chloe chokes, twists her hands into the blankets she lies beneath, buries her head in the pillows.
(She feels fragmented. Like something broken.)
§§§
Chloe dozes.
She half-dreams of faceless men and other women in her body, and she stands in the hallway of her mother’s house (her house? she doesn’t live there anymore) and says, “I don’t like it.” Her mother looks at her, with disapproving eyes, and thinks, your father would be disappointed.
Upon waking, Chloe knows that her dreams are making even less sense than usual.
“Chloe,” Matt says, sitting next to her, “hey.”
She looks up at him, face lit by the rush of FTL, and sees that he’s not changed - still wrapped in head to toe black, but, nonetheless, here with her, in the room they made their own. “Matt,” she answers, and finds his hand, grips it tight. “Where were you? I got back from Earth, and I couldn’t find you.”
There’s something almost soft in his eyes, which is strange. Chloe doesn’t tend to associate Matt with softness-he’s hard in his youth, forced into a position of authority he really shouldn’t have to assume; her knight in inky fatigues-but it’s there, nevertheless - and he touches her jaw, tentatively, like she might bolt. (She might.) “With Greer,” he says, “and Becker.”
Chloe’s fingers twitch, against his thigh, and if the fabric of his pants were looser, she’d be winding her touch into his clothes on the fleeting whim of her subconscious.
There’s a lot they don’t say, and not just because, on some level, Matt likes to pretend that he’s the soldier’s emotional caricature. ‘Love’ isn’t a word that’s spoken, or perhaps even felt - Chloe hasn’t sifted through her feelings for him on a case by case basis, because she’s afraid of what she might find. Schoolgirl crush come alive is one thing; a connection, something true, is something else. But here, now, with an ache between her thighs and in her heart, Chloe hears with Greer and Becker and knows that it means he cares, and might just understand.
There’s a thickness in her voice (a mirror to the tears in her eyes) when she says, “Thank you.”
Wordless, he gathers her up in his arms, like she’s hay at harvest time. She presses her cheek to his shoulder, into his neck, and one of his hands winds into her hair, touch stroking, soothing. “Thank you,” she says again, muffled into the strength of his chest, and his head dips towards her in a flow that forgets the ache, for a moment.
They sit, entwined, and Chloe’s breath shudders in the quiet.
finis
Fandom: Stargate Universe.
Characters: everyone, with the focus on Chloe.
Word Count: 1558
Rating: 12(ish)
Summary: If it’s not your body, can you treat it like it is? Chloe/Matt.
Warnings: mentions of sex, consent issues
Notes: Written for hc_bingo (my bingo card is lurking here), for the prompt sore muscles. Title borrowed from Stevie Smith’s poem of the same name. NEXT UP, HENRY IV FIC, YO. You think I’m kidding. So, I marathoned SGU - and the communication stones always got to me, particularly that scene with Young and his not-so-ex-wife - because issues. So, here we are.
not waving but drowning
Chloe closes her eyes in the bowels of the SGC, opens them again on Destiny - and opens them to an ache she doesn’t remember, but recognises. An ache in her thighs; an ache in the fragments of her that, for months now, have only been seen by Matt and the showers. For a moment she’s silent, confused-Matt wouldn’t; it’s not me-and her cheeks flush crimson.
“You alright there, Chloe?” Doctor Caine is leaning towards her, elbows on the table, one hand absently lodged against the stones’ controls and the other spidered out across the tabletop. “Looking a little flustered.”
There’s something in Chloe’s throat that tenses-my body, but I’m not the one who’s been ‘flustered’-but she forces a smile, pushes back the hair that’s straggled across her face. “Jumping several billion lightyears will do that to you,” she quips, but there’s no heart in it - and she doesn’t try and change that, because for all her size, Destiny is small. Caine knows her story because her father died to save him - he’ll put it down to missing her family so much it burns (aches), because she’s just a kid, in the others’ minds.
Caine sits back, rearranges the communication stones in front of him. “Well,” he says, smiling at her with a flick that whispers I’m sorry for your loss, “the hydroponics guys have made good on their promise of strawberries. Kinda.”
“Can’t wait,” she answers dryly, and then (in that same tone, because that’s easiest), “Who did I swap with, then?”
Caine shrugs, and she can tell that now the worry has passed, he’s absorbed back in the stones. “Some corporal from the SGC. Friend of Greer’s.”
(Friend as in what?)
And there’s the ache, thick in her stomach.
§§§
A curious side effect of lindyhopping between galaxies, Chloe has found, is the strength of her hunger when she’s thrown back into her own skin. Eli says it’s probably psychological-some reaction to the loss she’s just felt all over again; some reaction to her own mortality-but that doesn’t change the fact that they all know where she’ll be, upon her return.
(The hydroponiced strawberries almost taste real. She absently thinks about chocolate.)
Greer’s there, when she looks up from her empty plate, talking to Becker with a tenseness in his shoulders. Asking about supplies, she reasons. Booking a meal. Complaining about the quality. Joking. Waiting. Doing the rounds. Her fingers clench half-reflexively around the fork in her hand, nevertheless. She looks away, relaxes - forces herself to. On his way out, Greer nods to her with a thickness in his smile and a skein of relaxation over his stance. (More relaxed? Does he look more relaxed than he usually does? Does he look like he’s gotten laid at some point in the past twelve hours?)
At that point, Chloe determinedly stops thinking.
§§§
Chloe finds herself being followed through the halls by a playful kino (bobbing along at ankle level, nudging her calves like a puppy), so she drops by Eli’s corner of the ship. He affects innocence, and she steals his seat. He doesn’t ask her how her mother is, and doesn’t ask her if she’s okay - but it’s there, in his eyes and his easy accommodation of her into his space, that if she wants to talk, he’s there.
(She knows. She’s always known.)
“Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” she asks, nonchalant, and flicks a fingertip against the bank of kino monitors. (One screen swerves wildly, and she hastily retracts her finger.)
Eli snorts. “Aside from Corporal Madsen taking your body for a metaphorical fan dance?”
“Nice image, Eli.”
“Sorry,” he says, but doesn’t sound it, because it’s just a joke, and that’s the kind of thing boys tend to joke about. (That sounds sexist, even in her head, but there’s that ache, in and between her thighs. She wants Matt, abruptly, even though she knows he’ll understand even less than Eli. Men, and soldiers.)
“Who was she, then?” Chloe asks.
“Greer knew her,” Eli answers, picking at a dismantled kino. “Gave her a tour of the ship, and then she took a shine to Becker - from the mess. If you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Chloe says, and watches him tug out circuitry that they don’t quite understand. “I do.”
§§§
She’s overreacting, perhaps, but there’s some part of her that’s glad that it wasn’t Greer. (‘It’, like she doesn’t care. ‘It’, like she can’t stop thinking about why she aches. The ache that isn’t an ache; the ache that’s something more.) Greer’s her friend, maybe, and he’s definitely Matt’s - and that would make things awkward. She doesn’t think she’s going to be able to look Becker in the eye again, knowing what he knows.
Her and the showers and Matt - and now, Darren Becker, the closest they have to a gourmet chef.
Chloe does shower, now, and cleansing mist is all well and good, but there’s nothing better than the thunder of hot water when you just want to lean your forehead against the cool tiles and pretend you’re not crying. It doesn’t help that the shower rooms don’t have doors - and when TJ passes by, palm cradled to her stomach, Chloe rubs at her face, pretending she’s washing, not hiding. Not drowning; just waving, slow as long grass on a summer’s day.
It’s her body, and she only realises that when it isn’t wholly hers anymore.
§§§
Chloe shares a room with Matt, now, but it’s not his room - his quarters, she means, the ones he was assigned in those first few days, trying to scrape by. She’s the daughter of the senator who became a hero; she gets the room with a view, and double covers.
She goes to that room, now-the room that she calls ‘that’ because she doesn’t know whether to say her or their-and gets into bed, fully clothed, at what they arbitrarily call eighteen hundred hours. She lies curled beneath the covers, and wants to focus on anything but the ache that’s barely subsided in four hours - but can’t, of course, because she just finds herself wondering why the throb is quite so persistent. She’s ached before, but Matt is a puzzling blend of gentle and rough that leaves bruises, sometimes-on both of them, particularly his neck (because she’d never admit it, but she likes the hiss he breathes at the nip of her teeth)-but rarely aches, and never this bad. Her first time, she hurt, back at Harvard, but it was sharper than this - like something lost, and something gained. This was ferocious, perhaps, and shot through with no emotion other than lust, animalistic.
They didn’t mean any harm.
Chloe chokes, twists her hands into the blankets she lies beneath, buries her head in the pillows.
(She feels fragmented. Like something broken.)
§§§
Chloe dozes.
She half-dreams of faceless men and other women in her body, and she stands in the hallway of her mother’s house (her house? she doesn’t live there anymore) and says, “I don’t like it.” Her mother looks at her, with disapproving eyes, and thinks, your father would be disappointed.
Upon waking, Chloe knows that her dreams are making even less sense than usual.
“Chloe,” Matt says, sitting next to her, “hey.”
She looks up at him, face lit by the rush of FTL, and sees that he’s not changed - still wrapped in head to toe black, but, nonetheless, here with her, in the room they made their own. “Matt,” she answers, and finds his hand, grips it tight. “Where were you? I got back from Earth, and I couldn’t find you.”
There’s something almost soft in his eyes, which is strange. Chloe doesn’t tend to associate Matt with softness-he’s hard in his youth, forced into a position of authority he really shouldn’t have to assume; her knight in inky fatigues-but it’s there, nevertheless - and he touches her jaw, tentatively, like she might bolt. (She might.) “With Greer,” he says, “and Becker.”
Chloe’s fingers twitch, against his thigh, and if the fabric of his pants were looser, she’d be winding her touch into his clothes on the fleeting whim of her subconscious.
There’s a lot they don’t say, and not just because, on some level, Matt likes to pretend that he’s the soldier’s emotional caricature. ‘Love’ isn’t a word that’s spoken, or perhaps even felt - Chloe hasn’t sifted through her feelings for him on a case by case basis, because she’s afraid of what she might find. Schoolgirl crush come alive is one thing; a connection, something true, is something else. But here, now, with an ache between her thighs and in her heart, Chloe hears with Greer and Becker and knows that it means he cares, and might just understand.
There’s a thickness in her voice (a mirror to the tears in her eyes) when she says, “Thank you.”
Wordless, he gathers her up in his arms, like she’s hay at harvest time. She presses her cheek to his shoulder, into his neck, and one of his hands winds into her hair, touch stroking, soothing. “Thank you,” she says again, muffled into the strength of his chest, and his head dips towards her in a flow that forgets the ache, for a moment.
They sit, entwined, and Chloe’s breath shudders in the quiet.
finis