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ficlet (bsg): our empty rooms
Title: Our Empty Rooms
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.
* * *
“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.
Author:
averitaSummary: 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.
“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.
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I still go back and forth on 4.5. I think that everything you said here is exactly how I imagine them around ADFMS, which is largely why I was so uncomfortable with how that episode played out, and I'm really glad that you think it came through here. I'm ultimately torn between the angst-whore and the romantic in me, and ultimately think that they were able to come to some sort of reconciliation - I think that Laura, at least, was at peace and fully content at the end. It was very jarring, though, to go from The Hub (which I view as the pinnacle of their connectedness, so to speak) to the incredibly complicated dynamic that colored 4.5. It was really sad.
Anyway, thanks for the lovely comment!