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Achieving Rapport
by Exfilia
Fandom:
Battlestar Galactica 2005
Wrongest Pairing Ever:
Roslin/Zarek
Rating:
adult for explicit sex
Distribution:
How much do I owe you for hauling it off?
Spoilers:
Up to and including Colonial Day
Email:
exfilia at livejournal dot com
Disclaimer:
if I owned them, they'd have a lot more fun
Her security was suprisingly porous for someone who'd just survived an assassination attempt, he concluded when he found her sitting alone on a concrete bench on the terrace before the end of the Colonial Day celebration. No one impeded his approach. No one questioned him. As far as he could tell there was no one there at all except the president, her arms hugging her body, her head bowed as if in prayer. She didn't seem to notice as he sat down beside her. Only when he was that close did he hear the hitch in her breathing, the muffled sound of a sob.
"Are you all right?" he whispered.
She noticed him then, all right. She sat up straight, adjusted her glasses and then clasped her hands in her lap, very tightly.
"Mr. Zarek," she said. "I didn't see you."
"I noticed."
She stood up, her hands still clenched together, and shook her head as if trying to make herself concentrate. He shifted a bit so that the light was in her face, but couldn't get a clear look at her pupils. It would be just his luck for her to dodge the bullet, figuratively speaking, and then succumb to a poisoner. Was that why she was out here alone? Was he in the middle of a military coup?
"Perhaps...." she began, but then her thought seemed to peter out, and she looked at him, puzzled.
"Sitting out here alone is imprudent," he told her. That was less true than it might seem at the moment, since she was under the umbrella of his own security, but she absolutely did not need to know that. "You think the assassin you caught is the only one?"
Her head came up, and her spine straightened.
"No," she said, looking him straight in the eye, "I don't."
When he laughed this time, it was at himself. Of course, the one thing that would bring this woman around was her suspicion of him.
"You think," he said, "that I sat beside you and waited until you noticed me and now I'm going to kill you?"
"I don't know what you're going to do, Mr. Zarek. The workings of your mind are a mystery to me."
"Then you finally lose a round," he said with a grin, "and I am going to claim my kiss." He stepped in close and pressed his lips against her forehead. She jumped and blinked, but made no protest and didn't move away from him. He breathed in the vanilla spice scent of her hair, and decided he needed to take a step back.
"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked. No, she wasn't, he saw. Her arms were clasped around her again, just below her breasts, and she shivered visibly. "You're cold," he said. He slid out of his jacket and wrapped it around her. It came almost to her knees, and he smiled at the waifish picture she made as she stiffened in protest.
"I'm all right," she said.
Yeah, you're all right, he thought, scanning the dark garden for any tell-tale movement. You're all right, dangled out here like the bait in some adolescent slasher story. What had he walked into? He wanted this woman out of the way, yes, but he figured the electorate would take care of that for him before too very long. He certainly didn't wish her harm. This fleet had enough problems without a beloved martyr's misguided ideas impeding progress. He had a brief vision of her shattered body lying in a pool of blood on this terrace, photographed and distributed throughout the fleet, and he shivered himself.
"Have mercy," he said. She lifted an eyebrow. "Do you know what your pet pilots will do if you're found frozen to death," he asked, touching his fingers to her forehead, "with my DNA on you?"
She laughed at that, but then lapsed back into her fugue. Well, she had a right to be exhausted. It must have taken a tremendous amount of energy to make as much trouble for him as the president and her government had just done. He settled the coat on her shoulders and buttoned the top button.
"Where are your guards?" he asked her.
"I slipped away. Sometimes... I don't like anyone to see me like this."
See her how? If she could feel whatever drug this was, why did she not ask for help?
"Come on," he said. He put an arm around her and guided her toward the door. "Let's find a quiet place where I'm less likely to get hit by a bullet meant for you."
They wound up, without attracting any notice, in an side entrance hallway that had been closed off for the occasion. He settled her in the corner of a red velvet loveseat, and when she didn't suggest otherwise, he sat down beside her. She didn't speak. He sat back and inspected the far wall, perfectly willing to let the silence deepen into a rapport that might support a working relationship. When he glanced back at her, she was asleep, her face pressed against the collar of his coat, her glasses askew on her nose. He smiled again, and tried to ease away the spectacles for safekeeping. His touch woke her, and she sat up and reclaimed the eyewear.
"Feel better?" he asked.
"No. Did you?"
"Did I what?" Deciphering drug-imbued dialogue had never been his strong suit.
"Did you ever get over all the people who died in the explosion?"
Well, at least now she was talking to him about it, instead of treating him like a rabid animal. He wondered if feeding her a steady diet of whatever she was on tonight would improve colonial administration. Then he wondered if she already did take it regularly, and that was what was wrong with the government. He pulled himself together and answered her question.
"No," he said honestly. "I still dream about them sometimes."
"So do I," she said, "about the people we left behind that first day, the ones I killed."
"The Cylons killed them."
"I told them I'd save them, and then I abandoned them."
"You saved the rest of us," he said, surprised to find that he believed it.
"How is it that I dare to judge you?" she asked. "I've killed more people...."
"Whoa, whoa!" he said. "We can't get into that kind of contest. In the situation we're in right now, we'd run out of people very quickly."
"Still...."
"It's a different thing," he told her.
"How? You told yourself you were doing the right thing, and so did I...."
"But I did it for nothing," he said. "The Cylons came. In the end, they all died and it didn't change anything at all; it didn't improve anyone's life. Those people died for nothing."
"That doesn't change what you tried to do."
"I thought you didn't approve."
"I don't," she said. "I could have been in that building."
"I'm glad you weren't."
"Are you?"
"Yeah." He touched her cheek, and then kissed her again, and that was how it happened. In a rush of hormonal insanity to match anything in his adolescence he found himself kneeling on the floor in front of her, her skirt up around her waist, his fingertips savoring the texture of the soft skin between the top of her stockings and the lacy hem of her satin panties.
This was wrong, he told himself. She was drugged. There was no way she knew what they were doing, no way she would agree....
She stripped his tie away and started on his shirt, one button at a time, and he gave up on that train of thought. He touched the warm satin, so fine he could feel the nest of curls underneath. Her hands dipped inside the shirt, tickling him, and he pressed the silky lingerie against her, sliding it over the most sensitive parts of her, and watched the wetness soak through. She slid his shirt off his shoulders and combed her fingernails through the hair on his chest, and he felt himself grind against her in a movement as old as humankind. His fingertips slid under the lacy edge of her panties, probing deeper and deeper until they found slick warm wet and he couldn't wait any longer. He opened his pants with his free hand and pushed her lust-soaked underpants aside with the other, and then he was inside her.
He was without a doubt the least sane human being left alive. He was kneeling with his pants down in a public anteroom during a party, for Kobol's sake, having sex with an icon, with the angel who had led his people out of jeopardy and into... slightly less jeopardy. He held one of her legs in each hand just above the knee... Lords, but she was tiny... and pounded against her with all the force of unjust imprisonment, undeserved suffering and unprovoked terror. Her delicate hands lay on his shoulders, thumbs stroking his collarbones. They held him above her where she could see him... she was still wearing the fracking glasses... where she could watch his face and whisper that he was, of all things, beautiful.
He could feel her gaze wandering over him, stroking, caressing, a palpable touch until the moment she closed her eyes with spasms that rocked them both. It was the sight of her teeth on her bottom lip that did it for him, when she bit back the screams that went with her wracking climax. The storm within him broke in lightning thrusts that blinded him, deafened him, obliterated the entire structure of the world he'd built around himself and remade it to include the wonder of her.
When he was done he stayed in place for a moment, swaying, and then crumpled forward, his face against her neck, breathing in the still intoxicating scent of her hair. He released her legs and they wrapped around him, holding him tight against her. He felt the warmth of her breath on his forehead, heard her soft whisper, felt the touch of her lips against his skin. He slid his hand up her body, over round hips and tiny waist and ribs that he could count even through her clothes, and cupped it around her breast.
He felt it immediately, not a tiny bump of indeterminate prognosis but a great deadly tumor beneath the round sweet flesh. He was an idiot. Of course she took drugs, for the pain. Of course she didn't want anyone to know. He met her eyes and she looked away and he was glad, because right then he hated himself. He knew in his heart that he would wish for all his life that his first thought had not been that she could not possibly survive such an aggressive cancer until the presidential election, and that his victory was thus ensured. He couldn't see through the resulting tears, until she wiped them away.
"Did I hurt you?" he whispered. She shook her head, and he kissed her yet again. Gods, he was still inside her. He levered himself up and they rearranged their clothing, and he sat once more beside her on the divan. He groped for words, but found none.
"We can't do this again," she said.
He wasn't sure she'd allow him to touch her, so pulled his jacket around her again and took his time freeing her hair from the collar.
"Of course we can," he said, "as often as... as you want."
She looked away.
"Pity makes poor bedfellows."
He turned her face back toward him, and left his hand resting on her cheek.
"Not pity," he said, "privilige. Also joy and light and a warm feeling inside." And an acceptable working rapport, but she didn't need to hear that part right now. "Don't," he begged her, "don't say never again, please."
"You are certifiably insane, you know."
"No, ma'am. If I were I would be dead in an on-planet asylum instead of off my prison ship and pestering you."
"I knew there was something to be said for insanity."
"Let me help," he said.
"With what?"
"Let me help you make a better life for the people we have left."
"I suspect that your idea of a better life differs from mine in a number of specifics."
"My idea involves everyone being able to make a contribution to society."
"And doing so. We can't afford deadbeats."
"There's your problem," he said. Gods, she was unreal. They'd gone from sex to politics in seconds, and he wasn't sure which was hotter. "It takes," he told her, "a certain level of resources to accomplish anything, and this tit for tat economy of yours ignores the needs of the people who escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Whether we're talking about barter or money, you've got to have something to begin with, especially if you're sick or have young children or just have no skills. If you have nothing, you're trapped at the bottom of someone else's society."
"And if we established a communal economy, what would be the incentive to undertake difficult or dangerous or just unpleasant tasks? The distribution of resources...."
They heard the footsteps before the pretty blond pilot and the Commander's son appeared in the archway. It was about time someone showed up, he thought, and then thanked the holy Lords of Kobol that they hadn't arrived a quarter of an hour earlier. Of course, his own staff would probably present him with a set of eight by ten glossies tomorrow, but that was beside the point.
"Madame President," the young man said, "they're looking for you for the closing prayer."
"Of course," she said. She stood up, leaving his coat behind. He collected it quickly, hoping neither of the pilots had noticed the spreading wet stain on the lining, and stood and took her proferred hand. "It was," she said, "a stimulating encounter."
"Let's do it again," he said.
Her eyes met his, and she nodded.
"Perhaps," she said, "under more controlled circumstances, next time." She squeezed his hand and was gone. The pilots hung back, glaring at him as if he had debauched their young sister. Thrace eyed his jacket as if it were something particularly slimy that had crawled out of a sewer. Well, so much for discretion.
"You two," he said, "take care of her, or I will."
They left then, and he stood in the tiny room and berated himself. He had not forwarded his agenda. He had not advanced his political position. He'd gotten laid, true, but by exploiting a partner too sick to do it and too high to know it. And he'd proven to himself once and for all that he was a power whore with no sense of perspective whatever.
And after all that, he was not unhappy. He was, in fact, elated.
She'd said "perhaps."
The End
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