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bsg fic: Conversations Run Dry, redux BSG
Disclaimer: not mine.
Rating: er.. PG.
Pairing: Kara/Sam
Spoilers: big big ones for Sometimes a Great Notion (or whatever it's called). 4.5 has begun, folks.
length: 1700
Notes: Redux/rewrite fic. I wanted to see what changes if Sam were somewhere else. Sleepy thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
palmetto for the encouragement.
Conversations Run Dry
by ALC Punk!
He didn't know why he'd followed her. At first, it was because a part of him still didn't want Leoben with her, alone. But as the day wore on (and Leoben drifted further away from the both of them), Sam knew it wasn't really that. In a strange way, it wasn't even that she was his wife and the woman he loved.
Like the viper that had been wrong, there was just something he had to do.
Kara wasn't wrong, not in the way a lot of people thought, she simply was. She also wasn't speaking to him except in monosyllables and grunts. Most men would have given up. Sam liked to think he was determined, but he figured he was probably just stupid.
The grass was tall enough to tickle his arms and it was brittle and tough at the same time, pieces coming off and leaving little splinters to burrow under the skin. It was an excellent complement to the cold still battering them, the chill in the air sometimes stealing the breath from his lungs as they walked, Kara following the erratic signal for what felt like forever.
Eventually they found the radio, half-buried in a pile of leaves. Kara actually deigned to explain what it was, her tone distracted as Sam moved on into a clearing. There was something that was niggling at the back of his mind. Something that told him this was a bad idea.
When he flipped the wing up, reading out the numbers aloud, the feeling got worse.
Kara shoved past him, heading deeper into the field driven to find the answers to truths she might not be able to face. It was a feeling he knew, walking along a corridor, the music pounding in his head. He followed her, the wind kicking up flecks of broken grass in their wakes.
The half-flattened viper cockpit sent a chill down his spine as did the smell. He couldn't understand why Kara didn't notice, even as he moved to help her, silently not answering her barbs about needing his cylon muscles.
Decay was familiar, after Caprica. He'd come upon more than one dessicated corpse in his year on the nuclear-wasted planet. What was new was Kara's reaction, her almost unthinking movement that ended in her gagging at the ruin of what was inside the helmet.
Sam stared at it a moment, then looked away, knowing he'd already seen that in his dreams more often than he wanted to count.
The chime of metal on metal drew his gaze back and Kara held up the single tag and ring, identical to the ones she still wore, "What the frak am I?"
"Does it matter?" Sam asked, reaching out to brush a finger against the tags, then draw his hand back. He looked around, taking in the desolation of Earth as it now was. Flashes of something like memory tugged at the corners of his mind, but he ignored them. They weren't what was important.
Maybe they never had been.
"Of course it frakking matters--" Kara shoved at him, her movements more alive than she'd been ten minutes before, drifting through the woods.
Sam caught her arms, "Kara, it doesn't matter. What you are has never been an issue."
"Unlike you, huh, Sammy?" she pulled back, staring up at him for a moment, her panic over-written with anger, "Keeping your little secret like a good little Cylon."
"This isn't about me," he said softly. He moved away from her, to the cockpit, and ignoring the smell, reached out to touch the helmet.
"Don't!"
She was back in his personal space, smacking his hand away and glaring at him, "Don't touch--"
"Hey."
Kara closed down, turning away from him and staring at the helmet, her head down.
For a moment, Sam resisted the urge, then he carefully reached out a hand, setting it on her shoulder. "This is your ballgame, Kara. What do we do?" The wind kicked up as he asked, scattering dust and bits of grass around them in a swirl before it died back down.
She didn't answer with words.
Her movements stiff for a time, Kara shoved the tag and ring in her pocket and then moved, scouting until she found the unused parachute from the viper, still half-contained in a tiny compartment behind the pilot's chair. Sam helped her spread it out, guessing what she was planning. He handed over his knife without her asking and she cut the restraints.
It took both of them to haul the body out, and Sam was never so grateful for the plastic and rubber of the flight suit before this. He'd done his share of burial duty, but there was no way to be prepared for the smell or the way a body felt.
They rolled her--it--up in the parachute. Sam kept trying not to think about who was in the flight suit, though he knew he would remember the afternoon for the rest of his life (depending on how things went, that life could be very short).
Kara slapped his hands away when he moved to help her lift the body again. Sam let her struggle for a moment, then bent and grabbed one end, "You shouldn't do this on your own."
They stumbled and staggered, the light slowly failing until they found a spot that Kara seemed to find was right.
"We need wood," Kara muttered at him, moving off before he could acknowledge the words that were half-order, half-request.
Gathering chunks of driftwood and branches that were brittle and flaking took time. Kara knew more about building the pyre than he did, and Sam wondered how many bonfires on beaches she'd been a party to. He doubted any others had contained a body wrapped in parachute cloth.
When the pile was high enough, they shifted the pilot onto it. Kara piled some kindling on, then pulled a flask from her hip and sprinkled alcohol. The sharp tang of Tyrol's rotgut tugged at the back of Sam's throat, clearing the corpse stench for a moment before both mixed with the musty smell of the wood. He coughed a little, wondering if he would ever be able to not recognize that smell again.
Kara did the honors, her lighter little-used these days, given the lack of ready cigars. The wood caught quickly, sending bronze and yellow sparks up towards the deepening sky. Night had fallen when he wasn't paying attention and the cold was now slightly-damp in a way he hadn't felt since late fall nights on Picon.
If they had ever been real.
With a strange sound, Kara sat with her back to a fallen log, eyes intent on the fire as it burned. Sometimes, she would absently track the larger sparks as they drifted up. Other times, she simply looked down at the dangling chain in her fingers, pulling at it, making the metal chime in a strange counterpoint to the crackling of the wood.
Eventually, Sam joined her, sitting cross-legged to her left, back against the same log, hands toying with one of the discarded pieces of kindling.
There was something hypnotic about the way the flames moved and danced. As though they could show him the future (though it was the past that was trying to dance through his mind, a past he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know).
"Happy I'm a Cylon, Sammy?"
"You're not." He replied, the words automatic. There was nothing to tell him why he could be so concrete about this one fact. But he was.
"How the frak do you know, are you wired to recognize other Cylons?"
"I remember being here, on Earth. Not--not when you were, you talked about it like it was yesterday or the day before. What I remember was from so long ago I can't believe it's real. There were markets, streets and people filling them. Like Caprica City during a championship, you could barely walk for all the people in the way..." he trailed off, aware she wasn't paying attention. Bitterly, he wondered what would stop her abstraction.
"There were trees." The words came almost unwillingly, "I flew through bright blue skies and I could hear birds singing--and then I crashed, Sammy. I crashed and burned and downloaded--is that what you want to hear?"
There was no heat in her voice, though. Sam shifted a little, bumping her shoulder with his arm. "You flew down the mandala, you found Earth. After that..." he shrugged, eyes tracking a spark as it flew up into the sky and died quickly. "...after that, it doesn't matter."
"You keep saying that, and you know it isn't frakking true." Now there was heat in her voice. and she moved, pushing up onto her knees and turning to batter at him with her words, though her hands remained open, one settling on his leg for balance. "I'm a Cylon. I died, I came back, I got us lost in the middle of frakking nowhere and I brought us to this frakking place, with the dead grass and the frozen trees, and--"
"So what?"
"What?"
Sam laughed a little, nudging her back to her former seat, "It's not always about you, Kara."
They lapsed into silence, watching the fire burn into the night. In the morning--before the dawn broke--they would make their way back to the raptors, Leoben trailing, appearing from somewhere as though by magic.
Nothing would be changed. Kara's hand would still be wrapped in a set of tags not her own. There would still be uncertainty about what she was, though Sam doubted anyone else in the fleet would notice (or care). Four surprise Cylons was more than most could handle.
But Sam would still have the smell of burnt plastic and history on his mind. And maybe that would be enough.
-f-
Rating: er.. PG.
Pairing: Kara/Sam
Spoilers: big big ones for Sometimes a Great Notion (or whatever it's called). 4.5 has begun, folks.
length: 1700
Notes: Redux/rewrite fic. I wanted to see what changes if Sam were somewhere else. Sleepy thanks to
palmetto for the encouragement.Conversations Run Dry
by ALC Punk!
He didn't know why he'd followed her. At first, it was because a part of him still didn't want Leoben with her, alone. But as the day wore on (and Leoben drifted further away from the both of them), Sam knew it wasn't really that. In a strange way, it wasn't even that she was his wife and the woman he loved.
Like the viper that had been wrong, there was just something he had to do.
Kara wasn't wrong, not in the way a lot of people thought, she simply was. She also wasn't speaking to him except in monosyllables and grunts. Most men would have given up. Sam liked to think he was determined, but he figured he was probably just stupid.
The grass was tall enough to tickle his arms and it was brittle and tough at the same time, pieces coming off and leaving little splinters to burrow under the skin. It was an excellent complement to the cold still battering them, the chill in the air sometimes stealing the breath from his lungs as they walked, Kara following the erratic signal for what felt like forever.
Eventually they found the radio, half-buried in a pile of leaves. Kara actually deigned to explain what it was, her tone distracted as Sam moved on into a clearing. There was something that was niggling at the back of his mind. Something that told him this was a bad idea.
When he flipped the wing up, reading out the numbers aloud, the feeling got worse.
Kara shoved past him, heading deeper into the field driven to find the answers to truths she might not be able to face. It was a feeling he knew, walking along a corridor, the music pounding in his head. He followed her, the wind kicking up flecks of broken grass in their wakes.
The half-flattened viper cockpit sent a chill down his spine as did the smell. He couldn't understand why Kara didn't notice, even as he moved to help her, silently not answering her barbs about needing his cylon muscles.
Decay was familiar, after Caprica. He'd come upon more than one dessicated corpse in his year on the nuclear-wasted planet. What was new was Kara's reaction, her almost unthinking movement that ended in her gagging at the ruin of what was inside the helmet.
Sam stared at it a moment, then looked away, knowing he'd already seen that in his dreams more often than he wanted to count.
The chime of metal on metal drew his gaze back and Kara held up the single tag and ring, identical to the ones she still wore, "What the frak am I?"
"Does it matter?" Sam asked, reaching out to brush a finger against the tags, then draw his hand back. He looked around, taking in the desolation of Earth as it now was. Flashes of something like memory tugged at the corners of his mind, but he ignored them. They weren't what was important.
Maybe they never had been.
"Of course it frakking matters--" Kara shoved at him, her movements more alive than she'd been ten minutes before, drifting through the woods.
Sam caught her arms, "Kara, it doesn't matter. What you are has never been an issue."
"Unlike you, huh, Sammy?" she pulled back, staring up at him for a moment, her panic over-written with anger, "Keeping your little secret like a good little Cylon."
"This isn't about me," he said softly. He moved away from her, to the cockpit, and ignoring the smell, reached out to touch the helmet.
"Don't!"
She was back in his personal space, smacking his hand away and glaring at him, "Don't touch--"
"Hey."
Kara closed down, turning away from him and staring at the helmet, her head down.
For a moment, Sam resisted the urge, then he carefully reached out a hand, setting it on her shoulder. "This is your ballgame, Kara. What do we do?" The wind kicked up as he asked, scattering dust and bits of grass around them in a swirl before it died back down.
She didn't answer with words.
Her movements stiff for a time, Kara shoved the tag and ring in her pocket and then moved, scouting until she found the unused parachute from the viper, still half-contained in a tiny compartment behind the pilot's chair. Sam helped her spread it out, guessing what she was planning. He handed over his knife without her asking and she cut the restraints.
It took both of them to haul the body out, and Sam was never so grateful for the plastic and rubber of the flight suit before this. He'd done his share of burial duty, but there was no way to be prepared for the smell or the way a body felt.
They rolled her--it--up in the parachute. Sam kept trying not to think about who was in the flight suit, though he knew he would remember the afternoon for the rest of his life (depending on how things went, that life could be very short).
Kara slapped his hands away when he moved to help her lift the body again. Sam let her struggle for a moment, then bent and grabbed one end, "You shouldn't do this on your own."
They stumbled and staggered, the light slowly failing until they found a spot that Kara seemed to find was right.
"We need wood," Kara muttered at him, moving off before he could acknowledge the words that were half-order, half-request.
Gathering chunks of driftwood and branches that were brittle and flaking took time. Kara knew more about building the pyre than he did, and Sam wondered how many bonfires on beaches she'd been a party to. He doubted any others had contained a body wrapped in parachute cloth.
When the pile was high enough, they shifted the pilot onto it. Kara piled some kindling on, then pulled a flask from her hip and sprinkled alcohol. The sharp tang of Tyrol's rotgut tugged at the back of Sam's throat, clearing the corpse stench for a moment before both mixed with the musty smell of the wood. He coughed a little, wondering if he would ever be able to not recognize that smell again.
Kara did the honors, her lighter little-used these days, given the lack of ready cigars. The wood caught quickly, sending bronze and yellow sparks up towards the deepening sky. Night had fallen when he wasn't paying attention and the cold was now slightly-damp in a way he hadn't felt since late fall nights on Picon.
If they had ever been real.
With a strange sound, Kara sat with her back to a fallen log, eyes intent on the fire as it burned. Sometimes, she would absently track the larger sparks as they drifted up. Other times, she simply looked down at the dangling chain in her fingers, pulling at it, making the metal chime in a strange counterpoint to the crackling of the wood.
Eventually, Sam joined her, sitting cross-legged to her left, back against the same log, hands toying with one of the discarded pieces of kindling.
There was something hypnotic about the way the flames moved and danced. As though they could show him the future (though it was the past that was trying to dance through his mind, a past he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know).
"Happy I'm a Cylon, Sammy?"
"You're not." He replied, the words automatic. There was nothing to tell him why he could be so concrete about this one fact. But he was.
"How the frak do you know, are you wired to recognize other Cylons?"
"I remember being here, on Earth. Not--not when you were, you talked about it like it was yesterday or the day before. What I remember was from so long ago I can't believe it's real. There were markets, streets and people filling them. Like Caprica City during a championship, you could barely walk for all the people in the way..." he trailed off, aware she wasn't paying attention. Bitterly, he wondered what would stop her abstraction.
"There were trees." The words came almost unwillingly, "I flew through bright blue skies and I could hear birds singing--and then I crashed, Sammy. I crashed and burned and downloaded--is that what you want to hear?"
There was no heat in her voice, though. Sam shifted a little, bumping her shoulder with his arm. "You flew down the mandala, you found Earth. After that..." he shrugged, eyes tracking a spark as it flew up into the sky and died quickly. "...after that, it doesn't matter."
"You keep saying that, and you know it isn't frakking true." Now there was heat in her voice. and she moved, pushing up onto her knees and turning to batter at him with her words, though her hands remained open, one settling on his leg for balance. "I'm a Cylon. I died, I came back, I got us lost in the middle of frakking nowhere and I brought us to this frakking place, with the dead grass and the frozen trees, and--"
"So what?"
"What?"
Sam laughed a little, nudging her back to her former seat, "It's not always about you, Kara."
They lapsed into silence, watching the fire burn into the night. In the morning--before the dawn broke--they would make their way back to the raptors, Leoben trailing, appearing from somewhere as though by magic.
Nothing would be changed. Kara's hand would still be wrapped in a set of tags not her own. There would still be uncertainty about what she was, though Sam doubted anyone else in the fleet would notice (or care). Four surprise Cylons was more than most could handle.
But Sam would still have the smell of burnt plastic and history on his mind. And maybe that would be enough.
-f-
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I did like how it played out last night with Leoben, but man. THIS. This would have been so much better.
no subject