what some call insanity

Title: Our Empty Rooms

Author: averita

Summary: They don’t talk much, these days, looking to books and the slide of skin to say what needs to be said.

A/N: You guys, I actually wrote fic! What is this? (400 words totally counts. It's been over a year and I'm very much in poetry mode at the moment.) This was written for adama_roslin's MOL, prompt "lonely". Spoilers for 4.5, set sometime after ADFMS.

Disclaimer: Not mine. Title comes from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, because I am creative.

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“It’s okay if you blame me,” she murmurs one night, long after he thought she’d drifted off. He doesn’t know what to say but “I don’t.”

They’re lying as they often do, loose-limbed and liquid, closer than even the narrow rack requires. For the past twenty minutes he’s been whispering the same four verses of a half-forgotten poem, stock images of lilies along mud-slaked shores. He doubts she’s heard.

She snorts. It’s a familiar sound. “Bill, do you even know what I’m talking about?” she asks, twisting to face him.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, determined. Stubborn, she’d say, or would have, once. “Everything that’s happened, it’s on both of us.”

“Earth,” she muses, and hums. “We never really talked about it.”

They don’t talk much, these days, looking to books and the slide of skin to say what needs to be said. It’s enough, he thinks, desperately. Words have only ever gotten them into trouble.

Something is shining in Laura’s eyes and he looks away, stroking her arm and watching goosebumps rise as she continues, soft and contemplative. “You know, I – ever since Billy, I haven’t liked Dee very much.” She shakes her head slightly. “I know it’s irrational but it took me so long to forgive you, and Lee…to forgive her when she’d hurt him like that, when he’d loved her so much…” Her voice trembles, breaks. It’s another familiar sound. “But when I heard, all I could think was that I’m far more responsible for her than she ever was for Billy. That you have more right to blame me than I ever had to blame you, or Lee.”

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want to. You made me believe, he told her once, and he tells her again, because that’s all he knows anymore, all he needs to know. You make me believe. Her breath hitches but she says nothing, curling back into the bend of his body.

They dreamed of a world with wide skies and a quiet lake. He thinks he sees it now, Earth, in the still, dim light and the shadows on her skin. Her body is all flat expanses and sudden, subtle curves; her stomach clenches, plates shifting under a planet’s surface, and he tastes the ocean-salt along the curve of her cheek.

Laura closes her eyes, twines her fingers through his. She doesn’t know how to make him remember. Earth is a wasteland.