Puel, Wrongsexual (puella_nerdii) wrote in kinkfest, @ 2008-03-02 02:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | a: puella_nerdii, f: battlestar galactica, march 01, p: leoben/starbuck |
Monuments to Masks (Battlestar Galactica (2004), Starbuck/Leoben)
Title: Monuments to Masks
Author: puella_nerdii
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: violence, spoilers through Flesh and Bone and beyond (if you squint).
Wordcount: 1086
Prompt: knotless restraint - "Maybe that's why you're not resisting. Maybe you've seen it too."
Summary: All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
Every night, her dreams get frakking weirder.
Kara recognizes the hold of the Gemenon Traveler, remembers the harsh lights overhead and the dents embedded in the interrogation table. She doesn’t remember being on this side of it, with Leoben Conoy facing her, his hands resting palms-up, reaching across to her.
“No shackles this time,” she says. She looks down at her wrists. Her hands are cracked and chapped and raw, but her wrists are bare, not chafed at all. No guards in the room, either. Just them and a bucket of water to her left, its sides slopping over.
He doesn’t smile, not really. She can’t rip her eyes away from his. They swallow what touches their surfaces.
“All this has happened before.” Now he smiles, his lips stretching over his teeth.
She grips the edge of the table hard until it bites into her palm. “And you don’t have anything new to say, do you? Just the same crap about cycles and streams and water.”
“The universe moves in cycles, Kara. Pythia wrote as much. You don’t agree with Pythia’s teachings?”
“You can’t possibly understand them.” Sweat builds up under her fingers, makes them slide around on the table’s surface. “You have to be human. You have to have a soul. You’re a machine. You don’t.”
“And yet there is something in me that is eternal.” He tilts his face up towards the light, arms outstretched, fingers spread, like someone’s going to grab him under the shoulders and carry him out of the room. “A quality of being that endures, that persists, that refuses to die, that will not cede to the impending darkness. I am more than what you see, more than the whispers echoing through your dreams. Isn’t that a soul?”
“That’s sick.” She presses her teeth together. “That’s software trying to fake something it can’t ever understand. It’s a perversion, and it’s disgusting.”
“A perversion,” he says. He stands up. She tries to, but he—she blinks and she feels the heat of him pressing against her side, hears him breathing, sees the sweat trickling down his knuckles as he seizes her chair’s headrest and drags her around so she’s facing him. He looms over her, framed in the stupid godsdamned light. “You imply that I’m idolatrous but I look past the riddles and webs He places in your path to confuse you, Kara, to test you, and I find the answers He hides in His creations and I reveal them. I see past the broken stone statues on dead planets. Monuments to masks. Can you?”
“I see what’s in front of me,” she says, and the angle’s awful, she can’t get enough movement in her torso and legs to put the full force of her body behind it, but she tries to bring her fist up and slam it under his chin. He catches her fist and smashes it into the table, dragging her across it by her wrist. She grunts; he’s pulling her off the chair, but at least her legs are free now, free to deliver one hell of a kick to his midsection, both feet at once. He staggers back a little, but he smiles about it and keeps his fingers clamped around her wrist, so when he moves back he ends up half-dragging her into sitting upright. She tries to get her free hand behind her so she can prop herself up more, but he closes the distance between them and before she can kick him again he pins her other fist over her head, smacks both of her hands into the table, and leans over her.
“And all of it will happen again.” His breath’s hot against her cheek, her lips. She doesn’t turn away. She won’t.
“Shut up,” she hisses. “I don’t know who programmed that into your head, but shut up.”
“Who? Oh, Kara. You know who. God did.”
“You don’t—” She twists but his hands are like vices, pinning her in place. “You don’t believe in the gods.”
“I believe in Him.” He leans closer, his lips almost against her ear. “How can I not, when I see His will made manifest all around me—even in you, Kara. Especially in you. If only you saw yourself as I saw you.”
“I’m not interested in what a toaster sees in me.” Her legs lock up, freeze in place. They won’t move even when she shouts kick, kick at them as loud as she can. “Now get the frak out of my head.”
“And even with all the force of your mind marshaled against me, you still can’t stop me.” His nose is almost touching hers. He smells like sweat, sweat and skin and nothing metallic at all. “Do you want to stop me, Kara?”
Her fists slacken. His grip on her wrists tightens. It doesn’t hurt, he hasn’t wrenched her arms out of their sockets or anything, but her breath’s coming in fits and starts anyway.
“Maybe that’s why you’re not resisting,” he says. “You’ve seen it, too.”
“I don’t know what the frak you’re talking about.”
“You do,” he says. “You’ve seen it in your dreams, haven’t you? The other ones, where you drive God’s chariot and sound His trumpet, and beneath the wheels of your craft you crush flesh and bone and worlds and time itself, you leave chaos and death and change, the seeds of something far greater than this ragtag collection calling itself the human race, you leave it all strewn in your wake. You travel God’s path, Kara Thrace, and even when you fight to shake His yoke you trace the steps he has laid out for you so long ago. These are the dreams you wake up from in a night sweat, shivering at the chill of darkness that hasn’t yet ceded to dawn’s warmth, and you’re beautiful, Kara. You’re so beautiful then.” His lips brush hers when he speaks next. “Let me show you, Kara. Through me, you will know God.”
She rears her head back as far as she can and slams it into his; her teeth jar from the impact. Blood seeps from his nose, trickles down his mouth. “You’re insane.”
“To know God is to know madness.”
The lights get brighter and brighter around him, wreathing him in some—she squints and blinks, and when she opens her eyes, her real eyes, she’s back in her rack on Galactica, with no lights or tables or toasters, but her wrists are still sore.