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"You lied to me."
I am surprised to hear my own words. No longer angry. No longer bitter or cynical. My words are now coloured with the beginnings of understanding. Somehow, here, in this red and grey hell of a cylon basestar, I have found the beginnings of light. It starts, silently, finding me in the empty spaces of consciousness between jumps. It is life and death, light and dark and every shade of grey in between. Its dichotomies are consuming. It is one and immortal, yet shaking , flailing, failing in this, its last dying breath. It is the feeling of what happens. Before - after - in between the reality of it. It is and it is not. Elosha is here, by my side, comforting and questioning in equal measure and she is long since dead. You, Me, Kara, Lee, This. The impossibility. The blind miracle of it all. It has all long since come to pass, and it is yet to happen. I feel you on the periphery of my vision and all the while I know that you are not there.
"Did I?"
"I thought I was earning humanity’s right to survive."
"Oh…It’s not a vending machine Laura. You don’t save a life and cue the celestial trumpets here’s the way to Earth."
And its true. I thought that was what she was trying to tell me then, that in order to survive we must show the Gods our ability to rise above our baser instincts for petty revenge. I remember thinking that was rich coming from them. Now I know. As much as I hate him for it, Baltar survives because he desires it. Because he feels. Because he wants it, feels life, more than anyone I have ever known. Elosha told me that a bad man feels his death as keenly as a good man. We survive not because we deserve to, but because we have to. We survive for each other, because there is nothing else. And that is how we find earth, in surviving for each other. In refusing to give up. In choosing to live. To love. Now I know I must survive for you. I have been shown that the lives of all of us depend on that. But I do not know why or how. I cannot remember.
" I Know."
"JUMP"
The hybrid gasps it. Every time. She is pure. Sublime. Orgasmic in her rapture. She feels everything. All that has past, all that is to come, all that will be again. Spontaneously. She seems to exist within time itself. She has gone mad with it. Or she has wisdom beyond omniscience. Perhaps it is the same thing. I watched her for hours. So beautiful, i could not help but reach out to her. Had to touch her. Now I think that was wrong, these things were not for me too see. There are some things that are better left in ignorance. She does not agree. And now, I breathe as she breathes. We are connected. She tells me things. In each jump I see as she sees. With each jump she is trying to share with me the things she thinks I need to know. She honours me with it, but it is too much and I am an amateur. I can only hold on to the whole of it for the briefest of seconds. And it is gone. I am left only with the memory of my emotional response to it. The Hybrid smiles. Yes. That’s exactly it. It is all you need to know. Go, you can recognise it now. See it within him, within yourself.
"Disorienting isn’t It? All these limping, little steps back." Elosha’s voice, as always, guiding me through the brightness of dreams to find the truth. I smile.
"I like it. I’m used to it, every jump brings us a little bit closer to home. Galactica…My home"
It is a revelation to me. Suddenly it seems ridiculous that I never thought of it before. Never thought of you as home. Never considered that Earth, so real to me now, might also be a metaphor, for everything we hold together, between us, in blind, frightened hands. The end is coming, and with it a new beginning. It seems important to the hybrid, she believes she has seen the path to Earth in the feeling of what we find together. She knows it. It is already written. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. "maybe there’s something there for me"
" Maybe even closer."
*JUMP*
I feel the ship lurch beneath me. Each time we jump I think it’s going to leave me behind. And this time I’m sure it has. I am no longer sitting, knees clasped to my chest, on the hard cold metal deck of a cylon ship. No, I am elsewhere. Here, in a place out of time, out of body, watching myself, yet I can feel everything. I can feel more than I ever have. This is me. With you. This is the feeling of what happens between us. It is the feeling of how it has been before. It is the knowledge of how it will be again. But it is never the present.
I watch and feel myself walk across a deserted and nondescript hanger by, on an unknown ship: it does not exist, I know that much, but in a sense, it has always been. I feel the cold metal beneath my bare feet, the sheer material of her/my long dress floating , pinned, draped heavily about my/her otherwise bare shoulders in the style of the ancients. I feel the breeze in her hair, moving, dancing around her face. The breeze that cannot exist here, the breeze that cannot move the hair I no longer have. She is beautiful. Whole. I feel I am. I know I am not. She, I, we are moving toward a raptor. The sky above us makes the hanger bay dark with the coming storm. Thin shards of light seem drawn down to it, illuminating. The light is strange. It has the quality of water, its surface rippled by the wind. I know you are in there. I am desperate to run to you. Only a ghostly spectre of my own self, I cannot. She stops at the ramp of the open raptor. She is hesitant. Shaking she stands her ground but does not move. And I know, then, that all these things we are together, we are not yet. This is only the possibility. The feeling of what could be. If she goes to you. If she does not turn and run as I have, so many times.
She turns. Smiles, beckons me to her, reaches out and takes my hand, lacing her fingers between my own, tightening then loosening, the touch lingering. It is the feeling of forgiveness. Of understanding. It is the feeling of reassurance, a promise that all is not lost. We can go in together.
There you are. Sitting cross- legged on the floor of the raptor. Eyes closed. I tilt my head and look at you curiously. I have imagined you many times, in many ways, but I would never have imagined that you were one for meditation. I have never seen you with such a look of peace and contentment on your face. I am consumed with the feeling of it. It is not how I think of you, and so again I believe that this is, must be real, from another time perhaps, but real, for I have no frame of reference to fantasise, to dream of seeing you this way. She? I? lets go of my hand. Breathes of the air deeply, closes her eyes and reaches for the clasps at her shoulders. The dress pools around her feet. I watch myself kneel naked before you, and clasp your head in her hands. Her, My, face so close to yours. You open your eyes. I gasp with the feeling of the look you share, the leaden weight of it coiling in my stomach. You reach for her smiling. Your large hands, in her hair, at the back of her neck, foreheads pressed against each other. I am watching you, us together. I feel you touch her, as surely as if your hands were on me. But you are sharing words. Sharing words of love and devotion I can barely hear. Only the odd phrase floats to me, carried on the breeze;
"…You’re here.."
"…yes…"
"…missed you…"
I feel her, the want of it all, I see it in your eyes, yours and hers. I lurch forward, and suddenly I am her. Inside her, kissing you forcefully. I am everywhere, holding onto you, urging you onto your knees, pushing my naked body into you and pulling away, we are all biting lips and forcing tongues and urgent gasps. My hands are under your shirt, plain white and cotton, it is one I have never seen before, one I have never imagined you owning. In my fantasies it is always your uniform that scrapes against my skin, all buckles and buttons and grey blue wool. I run my hands up you chest, in search of the scar I cannot find. This all feels slightly wrong, slightly off, as if I have wandered into myself in some alternate universe, in some alternate place. I push the shirt off over your head and recapture your mouth in more bruising kisses, determined, not to care. Your hands do no know where to be. I feel your calloused, hard, working hands, kneading my back, clutching at my arse, back up to my back, dragging down my sides, around, to find my breasts. I gasp and cry out as skilled fingers that are not quite your own, flick at my nipples. I do not recognise my voice. It is not mine, it is a strange singing language I have never uttered, but I understand it. And I do not care. It is beautiful.
One of your hands is on my clit, the other on my hip as I undulate against you, guiding my movements. My hands are on your shoulders, holding on for dear life, our faces so close together, breathing each other’s gasps, eating each others sounds, nothing but feral lust left in our eyes. You place a hand at my back pressing me into your torso, your hand still moving, trapped between us. I feel the heat. The hardness of you pressed against my stomach as you lower us to the deck. My hands clutch at you desperately as you fumble with the fastenings of your uniform pants. The blue wool scratches at my knees as you kneel between them. This is the feeling of what will happen and I am content to feel it.
"Bill.."
"Laura.."
We gasp each other’s names as you push into me. In doing so we confirm who we are, if not where. I push my hips upward clutching at your arse, urging you deeper, harder. Your hand moves between us, against me, drawing circles on my clit. Your mouth never leaves my breasts. My head is thrown back, and I am again making sounds I am sure I have never uttered in my life, tiny little, gasping whimpers. This time for a different reason. This time I am sure it is me, my voice. This time it is because of you. Hard and thick and deep within me. I open my eyes to look at you. You are watching me. And in that thought is my release, the blinding hard white of Chamalla induced visions carries me away…
Here I am. Standing in your arms. You are here. You did come for me. But you are in a flight suit, and now it seems all wrong again. Wrong because this is not the feeling of what happens. This must be the reality and I don’t know what to do with the knowledge of it. The thing that has, for me, already passed between us. So I clutch at your neck, desperately trying to hold on to the memory of it. It must have happened. Must have been real, the evidence of it is between my legs, wet and stretched and aching at the loss of you. And here, in my breasts, still begging for the ghost of your touch. I say the only thing I know to be true and real in the confusion of reality and fantasy;
" I Love You."
When you kiss me this time it is on the cheek, the eyebrow. And I know it was you. It has always been you. These are not kisses that promise consummation. They are kisses of already consummated love, they are the promise of future times, and places. But then I feel how you hold me to you, tightly, as if you still think I might disappear, or run from you, just as I have so many times before. And I don’t think it could have been you. I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. And I am suddenly terrified of everything but the surety of your existence; Real, in the here and now. I hold you tighter and close my eyes to the tears streaming down my face.