{ split subject }

I never intended to become one of those "tasteful" literary erotica authors -- here's my attempt to get back in touch with my pr0n-writing roots. Five-part PWP series cum Tory character study, ~10,000 words total, originally posted serially for getyourtoaster's Season Three Femslash Battle (links within).

title: Arachne into a Spider
fandom: Battlestar Galactica
pairings: Tory/Starbuck, Tory/Caprica, and most of all Tory/Laura
rating: NC-17
spoilers: major through "Crossroads"
A/N: titles from Ovid's Metamorphoses (1717 translation, Pallas=Athena), thanks to lizlet
betas: variably mandysbitch, thassalia, and iamsab
summary: Whether the shapeless wool in balls she wound, / Or with quick motion turn'd the spindle round, / Or with her pencil drew the neat design, / Pallas her mistress shone in every line.


i. one at the loom

I nicked her with the knife. I concentrated on keeping the blade steady, but her leg was slick with soap and her toes curled in my lap and my hand slipped just a little. A bead of red swelled on her skin, started a bright path down her calf. Before I could think I'd caught the blood on my tongue.

Now, I understand why it tasted golden.

Laura was wearing a knee-length skirt that day, despite the chill. She crossed her legs, uncrossed them, rubbed her palms along her shins and frowned.

Since we'd ended up on that godsforsaken mudhole of a planet, I no longer tried to hide the way I stared.

She was worrying the stubble with her fingernails. "The human race is out of razors," I said.

Laura actually blushed. "It's not as if I have anyone to get gussied up for," she said, smirking. She would never have said that when she was President. "I don't know why it's bothering me now."

I knew why. I saw how she watched Maya, how she trailed her fingers absently into her own cleavage, how she squirmed in her chair, and wet her lips, and sighed. Laura is faithful to her secrets first, and she'd never surrender to Maya's wide eyes. But she wanted to.

"I have a knife with me," I said. "A sharp one." And that's how I ended up kneeling on the rug, a bowl of soapy water beside me, shaving Laura Roslin's legs.

I want to rifle through every memory, like files in a database. There was a button on Laura's blouse, between her breasts, and in the course of our late-night strategy sessions on Colonial One she would unfasten it. I used to hold my breath until that moment, when she kicked off her shoes and mussed up her hair and the lamplight drew shadows on her sternum. After our downfall, when she could pretend to be nothing but a schoolteacher, all of her came unbuttoned like the blouse. She beamed at Maya and the baby, and the yearning seeped through her skin and set her alight. I started touching her, then -- her hand, her wrist, her waist, her neck -- to see how far I could go before she stopped me. I want to reread those archival touches, now, for clues.

With her foot on my thigh, I traced the bones of her ankle, stroked my fingertips against the stubble, found the secret smoothness at the back of her knee. When I put my mouth on her, licking the cut to soothe it, she hissed and buried her fist in my hair.

I think she felt it too, the way her blood sang to mine. I looked up, and she was haloed in lust like a seraph. The hunger came to me secondhand, smoldering through Maya's days at school, but I've always been an opportunist.

I swallowed, still tasting soap and iron and the arcane hint of gold. "I'm sorry," I said. She pulled my head back and kissed me, opening to me fiercely in a blaze of tongue and teeth. My hands slid under her skirt and clutched her legs for balance. When I dug in my nails, she moaned into my mouth. I drank the sound like ambrosia and felt certain, for one desperate instant, that she would tell me to stop. But she didn't. She pushed out of the chair, toppled me onto my back, and slotted her hips against mine.

I knew that, at least since she'd promoted me, nobody had shared her bed. This was but one of the ways she laid herself bare to me, as chief advisor, in words and in a thousand subtle gestures. There was nothing subtle, now, in her starving hands. Her fast broke over me like an avalanche, marking my neck and tearing through my clothes to skin. I clung to the curves of her ass and tried not to come on her leg like a teenager.

I knew how to make love to a woman, though, and I wasn't out of practice. In our sham utopia, Laura warranted more than a quick and dirty grope on the floor. I flipped her over, panting, pinned her under me. "I wasn't finished," I said, and sat up to reach for the zipper of her skirt.

She looked at me, all she'd ever have to do, and pinched my nipple through my bra. It flamed down my belly, and I gasped and arched. "You realize," she said, "that I could have you right now if I wanted, just like this, without even getting undressed."

"You don't want to, though, do you?" I said, smiling like we weren't both about to ignite. "You want me to make it last, as if we had an eternity."

She watched me slide the skirt down her legs, her eyes dark. "Is that what you're going to do, Tory, frak me until I forget time?"

"Yes," I said. "Until you forget everything but going to school and coming home to a pretty girl, forever and ever, so say we all." I pulled off my shirt, my bra, and she watched me still. "But first, I'm going to finish shaving your legs."

Being between Laura Roslin's thighs is as close to Elysium as I've found, in this mortal life. I propped one of her knees on my naked shoulder, soaped up her skin, and ran the blade in slow, careful strokes down to the margin of her underwear. I followed it with my fingers, felt her muscles clench each time I neared the top. She shrugged out of her sweater and unfastened the buttons underneath -- one, two, three, four -- the tantalizing gap plunging lower and lower. She felt slick and cool, like marble. I rested my hand between her breasts, brushing their inner rise, and wiped the knife against the soaked cotton at her crotch. I outlined the folds, imagining their florid contours, teased her with the sharp edge, the point, and looked her in the eye as I licked her flavor off the blade.

She draped her arms above her head, luminous with desire. "Frak, Tory," she said, "now." I'd only done one leg, but I've never refused her anything.

Her tent, like everyone's, was one room, heated with a brazier. It was already growing colder in the evening, and we both had goosebumps. I pulled her upright, turned down the blankets on the cot next to us, and tumbled her into it. She'd shimmied out of the underpants, and my fingers were in her before she could cup my breasts and kiss me. Her moan started down there, at the ridge inside her where I pressed my fingertips. I drew them out again, circling the opening. "Do you still want it slow?" I said.

"Gods," she said, "yes."

The bed was rickety and awkward, but I managed to wedge myself headfirst under the covers. I couldn't see her, so I learned her by touch, running my thumbs along her lips to spread her open. I blew on the marrow within, inhaled her, traced my tongue down one side and up the other, from the hood of her clit to her ass. When she followed me with her hips, hand tangled in my hair, I gave her back my fingers -- three fingers, hooked behind the bone and then all the way out, excruciatingly methodical. I listened to her whimper, little choked sighs on each of my thrusts, and sucked her clit between my lips. She screamed into the pillow as she came.

In the afterglow, she helped me kick off my pants and rubbed her cheek against my bare thigh. Her nose brushed my underpants and I jumped, but she left it there, nestling her face into the salty damp. My fingers were still inside her, soaked to the wrist. "Again," she said, "faster." She melted open; I added a fourth and slid in up to my palm. I frakked her like that, with my whole hand, curling my fingers to say come, come, come, until she pushed my head aside so she could stroke herself. I frakked her harder, then, as if I could punch all the way to her heart, and felt her tighten around me. She took a mouthful of my parts in her teeth and screamed the second orgasm into my cunt.

We lay like that, her breath stuttering against my skin, until she said, "Come here." When I emerged, trying not to kick her as I twisted rightways, she was flushed and sweaty and utterly incandescent. She rolled on top of me lazily, and her hair fell around my face like a nimbus. I had catalogued all her smiles, but this was a new one, predatory and indulgent. I lost myself in it until the jolt of icy metal at my throat. She had the knife in her hand.

My eyes didn't leave hers as she shifted sideways, trailed the point of the blade along my collarbone, down my sternum, around the underside of my breast. It pricked me harder as my chest rose on each quick inhale.

"I can play make-believe with you, Tory," she said, "but don't think I've forgotten for a second who we are." She trapped my nipple between her thumb and the dull edge, and I held my breath. "All I'd have to do is touch you and you'd come, wouldn't you? We both know that's not because I'm a schoolteacher."

I was close to coming without being touched at all; I'm sure she knew that too. She transferred the knife to her other hand, keeping the blade on my shoulder, and whispering her nails down my belly to my hipbone. She kissed the corner of my lips, and I turned my face to chase her.

"Careful," she said, "not until I say." Her fingers followed the elastic between my legs and pulled the crotch aside. When they dipped inside me I liquified.

"Oh," I said, choking on the torrent of pleasure, "please."

She smirked at me, exultant. "Now," she said. Her fingertips thundered up through the wet to thrum my clit, and I couldn't help thrashing as the storm gathered there and broke. The blade sliced me, a bright flare of pain. Laura put her mouth on the cut. She tasted my blood, the truth of me, and I rippled and burst and came like a deluge.

"Damn," she said afterwards, and pressed a corner of the sheet to the nick in my shoulder. "Less hazardous toys next time, perhaps." I lay like that, cushioned against her, until the bleeding stopped, knowing my place in her bed was only borrowed.

When I pushed off the blankets and turned away from her, her hand fluttered onto my back, splayed across my spine.

"I should go," I said.

"You're so beautiful," she said, as if I'd restored her sight. She sat up, bare down to the lace edge of the bra she'd never taken off. "Kiss me before you leave."

I did, thinking about her running her hands up her thighs in the morning, one unshaven and one smooth, remembering me. I can pretend this is just another service I tender her, in the inventory of a devil's handmaid. But I knew then I was tied to her, across the warp and weft of the universe. I the thread, her the loom.


ii. the web is ty'd

Laura was making it impossible to concentrate. Even though I stared dutifully at the files, I could see her arm moving at the edge of my vision, its trajectory swallowed by the edge of the desk, the tails of her blouse, the waistband of her pants. I rubbed the rough paper with the pads of my fingers, which tingled. The chair creaked as she shifted, sinking down and spreading her legs wider. I could hear her breath, the hiss of a gasp when she adjusted her angle, the sigh that ended on a mewling hum. With my eyes closed, I could picture the precise operation of her hand, two fingertips pressed to her clit and rolling in slow circles. With my eyes open, I had a view of the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the flush blooming up her neck, the bottomless green of her eyes as she studied the shadow between my breasts.

She looked up and caught me watching. Her tongue flickered, wetting her lips. "Keep working," she said.

The records were laid out on the desk between us: notes scribbled on the backs of children's homework, stolen patrol schedules cross-referenced with surveillance dossiers, grainy photographs and Cylon invoices. We'd hunted collaborators together, on New Caprica, with information instead of with bombs. Now she was the President again, with no help from me, and she'd issued a general pardon. Officially, our precious files no longer existed.

Unofficially, we were verifying, digitizing, and encrypting the data before we destroyed the originals. The scattered scraps of paper, steeped in the desperation of evenings spent compiling evidence and frakking on her narrow cot, exuded sense memories of mud and sweat and candlelight. Laura kept opening the drawer where she'd stashed the picture of Maya, pretending she needed a new pen or a paper clip.

She hadn't touched me since the exodus. I didn't know if she'd ever want to touch me again. But it had knitted itself into me like an addiction, the impulse to buoy her when her shoulders tensed under the weight of annihilation and heartbreak. I'd undone a button on my shirt and leaned over the desk, plying her with a more pleasant vista. She'd gotten snared in my cleavage like the fly in the fable, enthralled by the miasma of habit, and slipped her hand down her pants.

It should have given me pause, perhaps, the vividness with which I could read her. Even peeking at her while she stroked herself, I could taste the stew of colliding wants that boiled over into sex. For an instant, I shared her recollection of the past: the glimpse of my bra as I bent to reach for a document, air still smelling toxic after a bombing, the charge of knowing I was there for the taking and the terrible seductiveness of forgetting. This diversion was more palatable than the game of life and death with its pieces arrayed between us.

She caught me watching, as per the rules. "This is a vitally important task, Tory," she said. "I'd hate to think you're so easily distracted." She stood up, unzipped pants hanging low on her waist, and walked around behind me. I followed her with my eyes, and she changed course to fit her body to mine, trapping me against the desk and pinning my hands on the files. Hips to hips, my cunt thrummed in time with hers. "Keep working," she said, "and don't turn around."

I heard the rasp of a chair on the floor when she sat down, the whisper of her jacket sliding off her shoulders, the ah of pleasure as she caressed her collarbone, her belly, her nipple.

"Who are we up to?" she said, the words thick with desire.

With my knees bent, I could catch my clit on the lip of the desk. Transfixed by the thought of Laura unravelling herself, I was too hot to see, certainly too hot to decipher the looping script in front of me. But I could call to mind every note we'd written with photographic accuracy. It should have given me pause, too, that my memory was as infallible as a computer's.

"Toni Graphia," I recited, eyes closed. "Flagged because she repeatedly returned from a supposed maintenance shift with unsoiled clothes." I jumped when Laura touched the backs of my knees, pushing up my skirt until it was bunched obscenely at my waist.

"Currently?" I could feel the huff of her breath as she spoke, her mouth inches from the curve of my ass. I forced myself to arch toward the fleet manifest instead of toward her.

"Quartered on the Calliope," I said, barely. "Recycling detail."

"Go ahead," she said, "enter it." Her nails grazed up my thighs to the line of black lace disappearing between them.

Of all the ways she punished me for reminding her what she'd lost, it was this torture I craved most. I unclenched a fist and punched at the keys, managing to type, "gRaoia, Tni - Callliopw. Risk: mOdrrate."

Laura glanced at the terminal and chuckled savagely, chewed into my muscle hard enough to bruise. My yelp thinned into a moan when her fingers stabbed home, crooked against my opening through the wet spot on the cloth.

"Can't you work under pressure, Tory?" she said. She charted the folds by feel, tapped my clit over my panties. Then she pulled them down, tangling them around my ankles so I stumbled before I could plant my feet apart. She split my cunt with her thumbs and held me there, exposed, as if she could decode the whorls inside.

I squirmed. "No," I said. "No, I can't work. I can't think. I can't breathe any more unless you frak me."

Her lips detoured along my labia and I had to lean on my arms to stay upright. "Tear them up as you finish them," she said, and folded herself onto the floor between my legs. I reached for the pile of catalogued papers, scrunching the top one as she knelt with her back against the desk and ducked under my hips. She wrapped her hands around my ass to guide me to her mouth, still spreading me to the empty air with her fingertips, and mercifully, she devoured me. I shredded a page reflexively while she razed me with her tongue, another while she purred into my cunt, another while she licked in circles, fast and slick and supple. She teased my opening with her nail, trapped my clit between her thumb and teeth, and I came catacylsmically.

I rallied enough to say, "I can't stand," before my useless legs crumpled me onto her lap. She kissed me then, adamantly, snarling her fingers in my hair. I tipped backward, caught by the chair, and she straddled me, rocked against my thighs, buried me in her breasts. I bit into the ripe swell, made her gasp and twist so I would suck her nipple through her bra.

It was different than it was on New Caprica, where the canvas walls enfolded us in a sanctuary, however make-believe. Here her abandon reverberated through me, ringing off the bright lights and the square room and the drone of Colonial One's engines. Here it was as if we were fighting to outrun the ship.

"Lords of Kobol," I said, trying to wiggle my hand down the front of her pants. I could twang her clit, but the angle was awkward, and I growled and hauled her upright. Files slid across the desk as she careened onto it, kicking off one shoe and one pant leg and pulling me in with her bare calf. We said, "oh," together when I entered her, three fingers lancing her open. She leaned back and sent papers raining onto the floor.

I frakked her recklessly, shifting her leg to my shoulder and milking her clit with my other hand. She frakked back with her hips, shimmied toward me until I had to thrust harder to keep her on the desk, panted and moaned and didn't take her eyes off me.

I licked her knee, tasting sweat, and pressed my fingertips to the pulse stuttering inside. Her cunt felt ravenous. "Do you want my fist?" I said.

"Gods, Tory," she said. "Yes."

I looked at her, sprawled across the desk on her elbows, hair wild and blouse half undone, gasping with my hand buried in her. "Ask nicely," I said.

She whimpered unabashedly, reached out and yanked me down by my collar. "Please," she said, breath hot at my ear, "frak me until I can't see."

I tucked my thumb into her and pushed. She fell flat on the desk, scrabbled for the edge and gripped it, white-knuckled. When my fingers folded over at her cervix, we went still, reduced to the flexing of my fist and her minute and breathless shudders. When I moved, every point I plotted on her flesh rippled through our bodies like a warning. When she came, she quaked into wreckage, arching up in a silent implosion that leveled us completely.

She lay there motionless, an arm thrown over her face. "I'm going to push you out," she said. With my hand free, I felt unmoored. I turned back after wiping myself on my discarded undies, and she was pulling up her pants, our orderly records strewn around her feet.

"Tory," she said. I'd never heard her this tremulous. I crouched to gather the papers, fingers shaking as I reorganized them into stacks. "We can't do this any more."

She knelt next to me, touched my cheek. I looked at her and saw a universe of want, too vast to disguise as a game or a distraction or a substitute. It was terrifying, and I didn't know whether the terror was hers or mine.

She pulled her hand back like I'd shocked it. Picking up a photo, she stood and placed it in the clear space we'd made on the desk, surrounded by the catastrophe of upset piles.

"I'm going to bed," she said. "You know the protocols. Finish this by tomorrow."

Her chair was confettied with the pages I'd ripped up. "The documents?" I said.

"Destroy them," she said. "I don't want to see them again." She tapped the keyboard, cold and mechanical. "Goodnight." She didn't meet my eyes as she walked out.

I didn't need to reassemble the files; I remembered every one. As precisely as I remembered every touch between us -- my own secret database, binding me to her as surely as the sins we weave.


iii. with nimble flight the shuttles play

After Starbuck lost her underpants, I let her win a hand. Not that I wasn't enjoying her nakedness, watching the play of muscles under creamy skin as she dealt and smoked, but her scowl had deepened each time I trounced her. She was slouching with her arms crossed over her breasts, lips clamped sourly around her cigar, uncomfortable with defeat more than with exposure. Winning at cards was routine for me; I was more interested in the underlying conquest, in the view of her nipples, pink and puckered in the shipboard chill.

When she laid down full colors, she blew smoke and smirked at me, her good humor restored. I unbuttoned my blouse coquettishly and held it out for her meager pile of spoils (my necklace and both shoes). She took it without raising her eyes from my cleavage.

"Your prize?" I said. I thought she'd want a shirt back, perhaps, to even the score. She surprised me. She stood up from the table and winked, beguiling me with the sway of her ass as she sauntered to her locker. After rattling inside she turned, hips all sass, her fist wrapped around a V-shaped cylinder of rubber and chrome: a dildo. I froze.

I'd dreamed that device: bent and bulbous, flexible at the hinge, angled to be worn half-inside without straps or handles. Since Laura ended our affair, I'd indulged often in hazy, feverish fantasies, but these dreams were different: cinematic and sunk in sleep, precise in their details which included, in this case, Starbuck sprawled on a bunk, bare and sheened with sweat, head thrown back as she jerked the cock between her legs -- where she was seating it now. She spit in her hand and stroked the shorter, knobby side, propped one knee on the table so I could see her open. I watched her part her cunt with the toy and slide it inside. She mmmmmmmed when it was all the way in, took her hands away, and the business end reared up from her bush.

"Now," she said. "We're even."

Back then, the dreams were inexplicable. Or rather, I was afraid to explain them. I pushed them from my mind in the morning, went to work and pretended that the rest of what had transpired with the President was likewise a delusion. Now, I believe I shared Anders' memories (I don't like to think they might have been Laura's): tattoos an inky spatter on Starbuck's arms as she touched herself, teeth clenched and hips churning, screaming when she came.

Before that night, I'd met Starbuck once, while she was downgraded to flying shuttles between Galactica and Colonial One. The dreams happened later. Then she came up behind me at the bar, standing too close and smelling of smoke and engines, and those visions flooded me.

"Does your boss know you're out looking for trouble?" she'd asked, her mouth almost brushing my ear. I was wearing the shortest skirt and tightest blouse that could pass for professional, not to mention the obscenity of lace underneath. Laura was in a private meeting with Admiral Adama, and I had the run of Galactica while she was engaged.

"And how'd you find this place, anyway?" Starbuck sat down next to me, uninvited. Joe's had just opened, with tools and scrap metal still piled up where the fittings were under construction.

"I don't reveal my sources." I smiled at her. I was there to wipe my memory for a few hours more, with whichever vice was on offer. I told myself I could melt Laura out of me with the burn of home-cooked rotgut or a warm body against mine. Starbuck's skin was luminous in the dim lighting. She sat with her legs splayed to either side of me, and her eyes were dark and dizzying. I was there to be indecent.

"Everyone has their price," Starbuck said.

"You can buy me a drink," I said. "See how far that gets you."

She waved Joe down and dug a cigar out of her pocket. In the dreams, she was lawless, tearing into her pleasure with the savagery of cornered prey. That same desperation was coiled in her shoulders as she lit the smoke. She held it out to me when she exhaled, and I took it, put my lips where hers had been.

Joe poured me a shot. The alcohol seared under my sternum and set my toes and fingers tingling.

Starbuck grinned. "Laura told me about the bar," I said. "Did you really think you could keep it secret?"

"How'd she find out about it, then?"

"Ah," I said. "Presidential intelligence costs more than a drink."

Starbuck scooted her stool closer and leaned in. I could almost taste the booze on her breath, the tang of sweat and girl underneath. "Perhaps you'd like to wager for it?" She reached for a deck of cards on the countertop.

I rolled my eyes. "Listen," I said. "There's a reason the political staffers don't gamble with you hotshots. We'd mop the floor with you, but we're too diplomatic to say so."

"Well then, you've got nothing to lose," she said. She was right. I was the Triad champion of Colonial One, and far less drunk already.

She stood up, taking the deck with her. "Shall we retire to my table?" she said. I wasn't about to turn down the invitation.

I picked up my briefcase. "Just remember that you asked for it."

Commander Adama had told the Old Man about Joe's, of course, and the Admiral told Laura. Starbuck won a hand on a lucky draw and laughed when I paid up the information. "Lee," she said, "that prissy little bitch." I ignored the way she blushed and bowed her head.

"Now what are we anteing?" I said. "I can't play for money, spotless reputation to maintain and all."

She unlaced one boot and thunked it between us on the table. "You familiar with the rules of strip Triad, angel?"

The game is part chance, part mathematics, part performance, but if you know what you're doing, it's mostly strategy. Standing in front of me, with a cock bobbing between her legs, Starbuck proved she had moves that could catch me off guard. I'd woken up wet from a dream like this, and I knew that want shimmered in my eyes. I was still half-dressed but more exposed than she was.

She looked down at me, at my breasts heaped in a pushup bra. "You up for another round, angel?" she said.

"I'm no angel," I said. "Not even close." I licked my lips and swallowed the dildo. Working my mouth slowly down the shaft, I wrapped my hand around the base and let spit drip to lube it up. When I pushed against her with my palm, she gasped.

I pulled back and circled the knobbed tip with my tongue, glanced up at her through my eyelashes. "Frak," she said. She rolled her hips and groped for stability, unable to lean comfortably on the table or chair. I pumped my hand some more, trapping her clit beneath the toy. "Frak," she said again, and settled her palms on my head for balance. I sucked my way back down, and she made a sound like a sob and tightened her fists in my hair.

I still wanted to win, wanted her to lose control, but when she yanked me deeper I couldn't help gagging. She took the cock away then, growled and bent to kiss me. More a bite than a kiss, really, feral and sharp as she fumbled under my skirt. I was more than wet enough when she pushed the lace aside and shoved two fingers into me.

"Yeah," she said. "You want to give it up, don't you, Little Miss Perfect? You want to get frakked until you're as dumb and deranged as one of us Viper jocks."

With the way I was clutching around her, I didn't need to answer. I stood up and kicked off my panties. She took my place in the chair, braced the toy on the seat so she could rock against the end inside her. She held it steady for me, and I straddled her lap and slid down onto it.

"Oh," I said, as the shaft opened me. The metal was chilly. I went still, for a moment, with my skirt hiked above our overlapping thighs.

"Frak yes," she said. She grabbed my ass and shifted us closer, dug her fingernails into a handful of my breast.

I tried to catch my breath, to adjust to the unforgiving breach of something hard inside me. "It's cold," I said.

She licked a path from my cleavage to my neck, humming against my skin, and squirmed a little under me. "I know how hot you are." She bit my ear. "Go ahead and warm it up."

I tightened my muscles and released them, drawing on the cock enough to make her whimper. I rested my hands on her shoulders and planted the balls of my feet on the floor, lifted myself up until the head hit my sweet spot. I moaned. She angled her hips to meet me when I sunk back down, palms on my thighs where she could feel them flexing as I moved.

She kissed with more finesse this time, lazy and deep and full of tongue. I moaned again, nipped at her lower lip, her chin, her throat. I shifted one hand to cup the lush weight of her breast, thumb swiping her nipple, and gods help me I'd wanted to do that since she stripped for me (since she stripped for me in my dreams).

She groaned as I swirled my hips into her, tipped her head back in concentration and tried to steer my thrusts. She opened her eyes and they swam with that wildness. I wondered which memories she was fleeing from.

"I don't know what china doll you've been frakking lately," she said. "But I won't frakking break."

She was beautiful like that, want strung into every curve of her body, impatiently gripping fistfuls of my flesh. I reached behind me and unhooked my bra, letting my breasts fall ripe against hers.

She tilted me forward and buried her face between them, biting me hard enough to set me off. I jerked her away by the hair and leveraged myself up in earnest, sucked her neck bruisingly and let gravity plunge the cock back in.

Starbuck snarled, an animal noise. And suddenly we were frakking in rhythm, fast and brutal, marking each other everywhere with teeth and nails. It was as combative as the Triad game, and as choreographed, and I gave myself over to the roles we played: like she was in control, like I was in oblivion.

"Uh huh," she said. "The way you take it --" Riding her all the way down, panting and scratching and slamming our hips together. "You might as well be a Cloud 9 whore, not a government big-shot."

I tried to reach between us, for my clit or hers, but there wasn't space and she pushed me off her in frustration. She spun me around till I caught myself on the table, pressed against my back and curled her arm around to pinch my clit.

"Want it?" she said.

Body to body, I could forget the dreams in the real of her. I arched my ass toward her, the dildo trapped between us. "Yes," I said.

She straightened up, one hand bending me over and the other guiding the cock between my lips, nudging the tip just inside to tease me. "Ask for it," she said. "That's my price."

"Frak me," I said. "Gods, please. Pound me hard and fast and don't stop until I come all frakking over you." This was what we could offer each other: the echo of being wanted, even for an hour in a deserted storage room.

She gave it to me just like I asked, bruising my hipbones with her fingertips, standing on tiptoes so she was plunging toward my belly. It burned and ached and felt so good I could have cried.

"Frak," she said, through clenched teeth. "Come already." It only took one swipe of my finger on my clit to finish me. I seized around the cock and heard her yell, collapsing against me and shuddering as she climaxed.

We lay like that for a moment, slumped and spent on the table, before she pulled out. I watched her tug the toy free of herself.

"Where did you get that thing, anyway?" I said.

She grinned at me, nonchalant as if she weren't standing there, naked and freshly frakked, in a public cabin. "The girls in the machine shop make them," she said, "original design. I won this one at cards."

She held the dildo out to me, still slick and body-warm. "I can win another one easy," she said. "And you thrashed me at Triad, fair and square."

I wanted to thank her, to crack a joke, but the words were drowned in a surge of shadowy fantasies, me and girls and boys and silver shafts. I took it from her with a nod, tucked my bra around it and buried it in my briefcase.

"You like working for Roslin?" she said, while we were putting on our shirts.

I swallowed a bitter laugh. "It's an honor to serve," I said, hopefully without sarcasm.

She smirked again, hips cocked and pants unzipped. "I frakked the President once. A long time ago, when she was green. Now she'll barely talk to me."

I didn't look up from the buttons on my blouse (one, two, three). I wanted to hoard the memories of that night for myself (so much of me was entwined with Laura). "Yeah," I said. "So did I."


iv. then threads of gold

"Do you like to watch?" she said. She gazed at me through her eyelashes and inched her skirt up her thighs. "Was it better from behind the glass, or did you wish you could touch?"

Model Six. Caprica, they call her, after the civilization she destroyed. She was flesh and blood in front of me, but so flawlessly enticing that she might as well have been a reverie. The Cylon had become my wet dream, and that attraction was unfathomable.

"This is how Gaius touches me," she said, stroking her throat, her collarbone, her sternum. She closed her eyes, bit her lip, and moaned. Finally her fingers dipped under her neckline to follow the arc of a breast, circling her nipple behind the cloth. I blinked and tried to see the enemy.

Thing was, when her eyes were open, they reflected a well of anguish and supplication that looked treacherously human. I'd judged Baltar venal at best, but now I didn't know if I could blame him for his blindness.

Six returned her hands to their tantalizing path along her legs. "They touched the Cylon on Pegasus, you know. Raped and brutalized her until she prayed for death." Her knees spread wider on the chair, her skirt rucked up around her wrists to let me glimpse the brim of her cunt. "Could you do that, torture me, if it would get you what you wanted?"

I liked to watch. Lords help me, she traced the margin of her lips, still sealed demurely around their treasures, and I couldn't look away.

"Don't gamble on what I couldn't do," I said. "The President needs to keep her soul, but I'm her shadow. It's my job to take on her nevers."

"Never violate a prisoner?" Six said. "Is that Roslin's creed?"

I crouched in front of her, put my palms on her ivory thighs. I'd lived among the occupiers on New Caprica, spoken to Lieutenant Agathon in passing, but I realized, after the fact, that this was the first time I'd touched a Cylon. It felt like hearing through my skin. Six gasped, and it wasn't part of her performance.

She pushed against me as if to close her legs. I didn't let her. "And what happens if I won't betray Gaius," she said. "If I stop cooperating?"

I slid my hands up, all the way up, and dipped my thumbs into the pink to open her.

Six moved quickly -- faster than a human, and stronger. Before I could react, she'd slammed me against the wall and pinned me with her arm across my neck.

"What did you really come here to ask, Ms. Foster?" she said. "Is it really Gaius's secrets that concern you?"

I'd told the marines to wait beyond the windows. They knew me from Laura's recent visits to the brig, and didn't question my authority when I'd showed up alone. In retrospect, the trial was lost from its inception, and all we can do is pay, again, the wages of democracy. But then, all that seemed certain was that Six was at the center.

She'd talk to Laura, and that worried me. I wanted to buffer her from Six's scrutiny, to bring Laura back a confession so that she could stop haunting the cell. I was already recognizing that I couldn't protect myself from the pull of that place. Laura's safety was an alibi for the magnetism that I wouldn't name.

When I'd entered, Six was sitting upright in the chair, hands folded in her lap as if she could be still like that for hours, on standby. I'd waited for the door to lock, cocooning us, before I spoke.

"Do you believe that Gaius Baltar is a sinner?"

Six tilted her head to examine me, radiating her unearthly sensuality. "I don't think we've been formally introduced. Tory Foster, is it, Roslin's aide?"

"Did you have a human name, when you were undercover?" I'd said.

Six's smile was melancholy. "Yes," she'd said. "But Caprica is who I am now. All of us are sinners." She unlaced her knuckles and reached out to sketch an apparition in the air. "My sins stay with me like spirits. If you want to see the truth of Gaius in me, you have to look differently." She'd moved her hands to her skin, a provocation.

Since Six surrendered herself she'd seemed so subdued, so vulnerable. As she assaulted me, I wondered if I'd made a mortal miscalculation, if she would snap my spine before I could yell and bring the marines running. The adrenaline crackled through me and froze me there, every muscle tense against her.

Then Six, Caprica, eased her hold. The bulkheads slanted outward from the floor, and her body rested heavy along mine on the slope. Her gaze hadn't changed, still bottomless with yearning, and the violent gesture turned into a caress. I sparked like prophecy and didn't resist.

"I never understood why humans denounce this," Caprica said. Her fingers flowed over my chest like streams of water. "Were you ashamed, your first time with a woman?"

My first time was with Christine Giles from debate club, backstage in our high school auditorium. I closed my eyes and was there again, five senses in perfect recall: the satiny twine of her curls through my fists, the little growl she made when I tugged them, the freckles dusting her cheeks, and her cloying vanilla lipgloss. Christine was older than me, more effortlessly glamorous, but I was the stronger competitor. The championship was as fierce as foreplay, and after I beat her she dragged me behind a backdrop and fumbled under my lapels until her hands were on my breasts (like Six's hands were, gravity pulling them down the curve, beneath my clothes, toward the peaks of my nipples). After that, after she got so turned on frakking me that she came riding my leg, Christine told everyone that I'd tried to grope her. My classmates stared, and snickered, and muttered "dyke" just loud enough, but it was all worth it for the memory of the girl unraveling in my arms.

I opened my eyes and, gods, I was still backstage, in the wings of the Caprica City Opera. I could see the cell, but the vision overpowered it, displacing the reality I know. Across the stage, in place of the one-way glass, the closed curtain fell in opulent folds and hid the audience from view. It was an eerie, portentous vertigo.

Caprica's lips were at my ear, inciting me with flutters of teeth and tongue, whispering, "Who do you wish were watching us?"

"What are you doing to me?" I said.

Caprica laughed, tinged with bitterness. "I'm touching you with love," she said. "This isn't a program that I run." Apparently she hadn't entered my hallucination. Not yet.

She knelt, pressed her face into my lap through my skirt, inhaling me. She hummed her pleasure and I rubbed helplessly against the ridge of her nose. Her chin rested on me like a promise when she tilted her head to meet my eyes.

"Roslin studies me from that room. She tries to see Gaius in my memory. What would she think, if she were behind the window now?" I let Caprica draw my underwear down my legs, over the thigh-high stockings I still buy black market because, some days, I can flash Laura a peek of lace in a way we both pretend is accidental. Caprica brushed the bare flesh above them with her fingernails.

"Would she be outraged? Betrayed? Impressed?" She slid my hem up, slowly. "Or would she be transfixed? Would she raise her skirt, like this, her hands imitating mine?" Caprica ruffled the curls there, caught a bead of moisture and smeared it on my skin.

The opera house looked deserted, but I could hear an orchestra tuning, sets scraping into position, the expectant murmur of the audience. Laura could be waiting behind the curtain, searching along the velvet for the gap to pull it aside. Laura could be concealed behind the glass, watching as we'd watched Six before. That was Caprica's fantasy, or a fantasy she'd read from me, and both options were disturbing.

When my legs were bared, Caprica's tongue followed her fingers, tasting me on my thigh. "I'd like to see that," she said. "The President teasing herself through her panties. Spiraling closer and closer to the throb." Her mouth reached the crease of my hip, teeth tugged at my lips to drag them against my clit.

"Is she patient?" Caprica said. "How long till she slips her hand inside, opens herself and spreads the wetness around?"

I grabbed Caprica's plantinum hair and pulled her into me, splitting my cunt on her face. I wanted to muss her immaculate surface, I wanted, a little, to hurt her. I wanted her -- whether or not she was evil, whether or not we got caught -- and that unnerved me. These alien dimensions of myself were becoming harder to ignore. I clung to the wall and tried to stay stay upright.

Caprica whimpered, perfect porn star noises, and consumed my cunt in an open-mouthed kiss. When Christine touched me that day, urgent under my waistband, it was a revelation, as if she carried a current that turned me inside out. Caprica's lips were like that, electrifying every spot.

She kept whimpering, one hand moving between her legs (the way Laura might touch herself, the way Caprica might imagine it). Her other hand danced beside her tongue, and it felt like a thousand fingers were fondling me. She sucked my clit, teeth at the hood, flicking it until it was so swollen that I had to frak her mouth with my hips. She slicked around my opening with her fingertips, didn't push inside, just kneaded the spongy ridge while the muscle contracted in rhythm against the pressure, now, now, now.

I thought of Laura watching, almost impassive, palm on the window as she stroked down, up, down to our tempo. I felt the heat on my face as the stage lights turned on, and came so hard I had to bite my arm to keep from screaming.

Caprica came silently. I shoved her off me when I finished and her mouth was an ecstatic O.

She got up and wiped her hands on the sheets. "Did you get what you wanted?" she said.

"That never happened," I said.

Caprica shrugged. "Keep your nevers. If I told them you raped me, if I told them you made love to me, do you think they would believe me?"

"They seem to believe whatever Gaius Baltar tells them."

"Gaius is not your enemy," she said. "And neither am I. Gaius and I, you and Laura Roslin, we're all part of a vaster constellation that has yet to be mapped."

For a moment, I could hear the creak of ropes and pulleys putting tension in the lines, the curtain poised to open and reveal us to each other.

Then Caprica ran her fingers through her hair, and as it fell back into elegant waves the room shook off its doubleness -- nothing but a stark, utilitarian cell.

I didn't look back when the marines clanged the door shut behind me. I might be my own enemy, in the end. But, by all that is holy, I will never be Laura's. Even if, for her, I have to tear myself to shreds.


v. still by constant weaving

I shouldn't have bothered her. I shouldn't have wanted her. I shouldn't have dreamt of her.

I shouldn't be undoing my shirt while she watches, licking my fingers and painting a shine on the curve of my breast.

I shouldn't be an I. But some days, desire eats at me worse than the cancer. Some days, the way this girl stares is the only reminder that I'm still human.

Some days, I hate her for it. Tonight, I love the way she looks at me, like my body is a delicacy and not a disease.

"Tory," I say. She raises her eyes from the stripe of skin bared by my open buttons. "If you're done using it, give it to me." One hand makes a fist, but with the other she holds out the sex toy. The heft of the metal is tantalizing. I slip out of my pants slowly, a striptease, watching her face as my hips, my thighs, my knees come into view. When I kick them aside, I'm naked except for the oversized shirt I wore to bed.

It was the damn dreams that woke me. They're worse since I increased the chamalla, since Baltar was acquitted, since Starbuck was reborn. I sleep when I have to; otherwise I barricade myself in work. Tory keeps vigil with me, mostly, napping on the office couch. It was too quiet when I sent her home. I fled back to consciousness from the opera house, sweating and trembling, disoriented in the bedroom hush. When she's in the office, I can hear her breathing through the curtain.

I shouldn't have gone to her room. She likes to tell me that terminal illness earns me some indulgences. She likes to do what she can to help me sleep. I don't think she knew that I look in on her to calm myself. Her quarters are little more than a cubicle with a cot; it's easy enough to peek around the partition. I didn't expect her to be awake.

The makeshift door scraped on the carpet. When I leaned into the gap, she was scrambling to cover herself: pushing down her nightshirt, pulling up the sheet. If I hadn't seen the dildo before she tossed the bedding over it, I would have retreated, mortified. I recognized the dildo. Galactica's sex toy exchange tends to pass through Kara.

I stepped into the room. "Don't let me interrupt."

Tory was flushed with embarrassment.

"You must be happy your girlfriend's back," I said. "Starbuck doesn't make those available to just anyone."

Tory crossed her arms. She was angry. Angry is appealing on her. "I frakked her once," she said. "And not that it's any of your business, Laura, but she's not the only one."

"That was a hell of a frak, I imagine."

Tory wet her lips. "You would know."

Now I was angry. "If you're not going to finish," I said, "you won't mind if I take a turn."

If I close my eyes while I strip, I could be onstage at the opera, lights blinding me to the faces in the audience (Caprica and Athena? Kara and Tory?). In the dreams, I sometimes think I glimpse Tory (dark hair rounding a corner, just beyond my field of vision). I always wake then, before I can catch her.

I don't close my eyes. I keep them on her as I move the chair to face her, sit down with my legs spread. Tonight, I'm alive. I can feel the pulse in my cunt when I part the lips with my fingers; it's been weeks since even I touched myself there. I arch my back and the shirt falls to expose one of my nipples. Tory squirms on the bed, rubs her bare leg.

I pick up the dildo, trace the double shafts, test the bend in the rubber hinge. The giving end is ovoidal, tapered like a fist. I hiss when I push it inside me, muscles out of practice. Tory bunches her fingers in the sheet. Her gaze is hot on my skin.

"Oh," I say, rolling my hips. The bulb hits me just right. "I see why Kara likes this."

Tory makes a strangled noise and then she's on me, kissing me, groping my breasts and the cock. Gods, I missed her mouth. Her desperate tongue opens me more than the toy does.

She bites my neck and squeezes my nipple. She pumps the cock against my clit. "I was thinking about you," she says. "When I was frakking myself. Not anyone else."

I run my hands up her spine, hard enough to feel the friction between us. She lifts her arms so I can pull the shift over her head. She's perfect, nude, curved and burnished. I want to mark her. I shouldn't frak her. I shouldn't care who she fraks. I shouldn't remember how to be a woman, not now. Tory reminds me.

I take handfuls of her ass and pull her closer, warm and solid and real. The dildo is pinned between us, and she grinds against the ridge, fingers tangled in my hair, nipples tracing patterns on my chest. "Please," she says. I try not to imagine the ways she could finish that sentence.

"How wet are you?" Her throat tastes salty. She reaches for my wrist, drawing my hand between her legs. "No," I say. "I want you to show me. Show me what you were doing when I walked in on you."

She groans, but clambers off me when I nudge her hips. Splayed on the cot, she mirrors me, legs open and hand between them. I palm the dildo, holding it against me. She dips two fingertips inside her, and spreads her lips so I can see her glistening center. She slides the fingers up until they frame her clit. She whimpers, and never stops looking at me.

"I know how you like to watch me," she says, stroking herself in circles. "Are you going to spend the rest of your life watching? Or are you going to take what you frakking want, for once?"

In the dreams, she's always just out of focus, just out of reach. Here, she's all presence and flesh. "Turn over," I say.

I kneel behind her on the mattress. From what I know of the mechanics, the position will be easiest to finesse. And I've always loved this view: the cello of her back, the peach of her ass, her cunt a juicy bite mark. On her knees and elbows, she tilts her hips toward me, pleading. I haven't touched her yet. I put one hand on her thigh, digging into the muscle. With the other, I aim the cock, tip poised to enter her.

"Hold still," I say. I can hear her breathing, fast and shallow. I lean into her, and the cock comes with me, inch by inch. It's like sorcery: in, and the vee presses on my clit; out, and the egg rocks against me. When I move, we gasp in tandem.

"It's not a good quality in an assistant, being so desirable." I move faster; she moans louder. "It's inappropriate. It's dangerous." I grab a fistful of her hair, arching her into me.

"Please," she says. "Can I touch myself?" Her voice is hoarse.

"Can you be less distracting, less reckless? No, I don't think so." Tonight, she's mine.

I don't expect her to disobey. She pulls away without warning, flips me over and pins me under her. I forget, sometimes, how fierce she is.

"No?" she says, holding me down. "You don't really want to tell me no."

I forget, sometimes, how the weight of her body thrills me. "What do I want, Tory?"

Straddling me, she holds the cock and sinks down onto it. She leans forward to lick my ear, and I feel her breath stuttering. "You want me to tell you yes," she says. Then she pushes upright, cups her breasts and rides me. "Yes," she says. The dildo churns inside me, to the rhythm of her hips. "Frak, yes," she says. "Laura."

She's close, luminous and shaking. It's true: there's nothing I want more than to watch her come. I wedge my fingers between us, curling them against the slip-slide of her clit. She goes rigid, claps a hand over her mouth to catch the scream. Almost gone myself, I reach up and squeeze her throat. "Look at me," I say. Her gaze is searing. Choking and trembling, she's pure life, and I want to leech her into me. I know she'd take the cancer from me, if she could.

When she's spent, she falls prone on top of me, pillowed by my shoulder. "Ask me another question," she says.

I cross my arms over her back, holding her. "Will I see Earth before I die?"

She picks up her head and kisses me. She kisses my jaw, my collarbone, my sternum, my belly. She settles between my legs and kisses my hipbone. Then she looks up at me. "Yes," she says, and tugs the dildo till my cunt releases it.

Gods, I missed her mouth. The way she devours me, I don't feel empty, but she fills me with her fingers anyway. The first time, cramped in a cot like this one, she slayed me with this hunger and precision. Her mouth resurrects me.

If I close my eyes, the visions swirl out of the darkness. I prop myself on my elbows to watch her, and try to steer her face with my hips.

She stops to press me back down, palm over my heart. "Hold still," she says. "Trust me."

I shouldn't trust her. I shouldn't be here, in this fantasy, with her. I shouldn't close my eyes, but I do. I lay back, supine on the opera's grand staircase, and let her take me. Anchored on her tongue and fingers, I can inhabit this place without running. The pleasure is too captivating to escape.

I shouldn't come. Tonight, I don't give a frak what I shouldn't do.

I don't realize I'd slept until her caresses wake me. I wasn't dreaming. She's walking her fingers up the ladder of my ribs to my armpit, where I'm ticklish. She's nestled half on top of me, and I turn my head to look at her.

"If I needed you to kill me," I say, "could you do it?"

Her hand stills on my skin. "No," she says. Our hair is intermingled on the pillow, like a tapestry. She inhales. "Could you? Kill me, if you had to?"

I trace her lips, her brow, her cheekbones. I forget, sometimes, how beautiful she is.

"Yes," I say. "I think I could."

end