Disclaimer: not mine.
Pairing: Kara Thrace/Sam Anders, and Kara/Zak and Kara/Leoben references.
Setting: post-Taking a Break.
length: 1,800
Rating: PG, vague sex references, the rest is all in your head. Language.

Watching the Lights go Down
ALC Punk!

She'd use a paintbrush, but it's not the same. Kara swipes a finger through the wet paint, feeling it cling to her skin (like blood, but cold, so very cold). She rubs her thumb against it, spreading it, testing the wetness. Almost too wet for her purposes, but in this day beggars can't be choosers. She's lucky she found the half-used paints as it is. Thinning them with turpentine will make them last longer.

The cut-down piece of poster board she scrounged is almost too white and she slaps her hand against it, spreading an angry blue streak before she can stop herself.

But that's wrong, and she spends several minutes scratching at it, dabbing and shaping, twisting the line back on itself until she has to stop to get a different color. Different paints for different people, and this one feels almost warm--it's black or green, almost too dark to tell which, and she wishes briefly for the second-hand paint store she used to frequent.

Sometimes, she stole the paints she needed, walking out with them burning holes in her pockets. It was easier to do it there than the places further uptown, full of glittering lights and black-clad art students talking about shape and form.

Kara didn't really believe in either, even the emotion she smashed through the canvas only took her so far.

In her mind's eye are a hundred thousand art students, dead and burned in the first wave of the attack, caught talking about the synergy of synthesis, and she chokes on a laugh, because she'd hated that sort of shit, anyway. It's not fitting they're dead and she's alive, but it feels like it is.

She stops with the black-green and wipes her fingers on the rag, smearing the blue into indistinct splotches.

There's no shape to what's there, but if she traces a line, she can feel a memory start--it stops when she pulls back or drags the line down. And now she's got blue on her finger again.

A snore interrupts her thoughts, and she shoots a glance at the man sleeping behind her, worried that he'll wake.

He doesn't, of course, and she feels a flash of resentment that he can sleep this deeply while she can barely keep herself still--there's another line across the blue, and she grabs a different color, shoving her finger into the bright yellow before she can think--

Orange and red, those were her signature colors, before. Zak used to joke that it was how he knew her best: when she was angry and passionate, smearing color along the walls and along him and getting it in her hair and on their clothes until she stopped and they fell onto the couch, too tired to laugh as they stripped and Zak's mouth--

Her hand smears all of the colors, determined to wipe out one more memory.

Kara looks at her smeared palm, then cleans it, considering. The poster board will be unusable if she strips it again, the fabric absorbing too much paint and turpentine.

Next best thing, then. She can work with muddied blue-brown-green. It's a start and a place to come back to, if she really needs that.

This time, she takes up the brush, making short strokes with her tiny store of red. It won't take much before it's gone, but she's not sure she cares if it goes away. Memories, again, but this time they're almost bearable. Leoben and the smell of paint, white walls that she wanted to smash into pieces, beating her hands bloody to at least get some color on them--

Her hand jerks, and maybe she's not so ready for her memories.

The red smear is almost obscene, but it fits the pattern of the picture and she leaves it, going for the blue again.

Shadows and sketchy lines, a kaleidescope of images dance through her mind, swallowing Leoben whole: New Caprica and the way the breeze danced along her skin as she ran through the market, Sam following her, bellowing about cheaters getting what came to them.

Almost, a smile takes her for a moment before the memory shifts.

Caprica, dark forests and the smell of blood and damp earth. Sam had fallen asleep while the Cylons waited out there in the dark. Waited and waited, as Kara waited, for something to break, something to give. She wasn't going back to one of those farms, and Sam had promised--

And he'd meant it.

The brush stops for a moment, and Kara snorts before scrubbing it across the heart-shape she'd inscribed over the mess.

Hearts are for sentimental fools, and people who have nothing to lose.

Zak, then, and she can handle it, she thinks, letting the pale green describe meandering lines and pieces of a room that didn't exist anymore. Angular shapes gave way to smile lines, and she stops again, because Zak's apartment was in a block of buildings that was demolished to make way for another wing of the Academy. New buildings for academic excellence.

And she sneers, brush flicking across the center, distorting again.

Mixing the last of her red with a scant bit of the blue, she eyes the result and sighs, wishing she'd been able to find more red. A dab of yellow changes it from fluffy purple to rusty mauve, and that's almost perfect.

Filling in more shadows destroys the original lines of her finger-work, but she doesn't care. This isn't something anyone will ever see--or not anyone who will care. The art students she used to dodge would decry her lack of planning.

Too much shadow and she dabs at the yellow again, smearing it into the green and cursing softly, because she'll have to find more canvas soon, or there won't be anything left to paint with that isn't mottled brown.

Leoben, again, his hands hovering just over her shoulders. Like he wanted to touch and knew that he shouldn't, that it would break whatever he thought he'd created. He'd created nothing except her hatred, she tries to convince herself of that as she paints him out, leaving only the monster under the bed (or the monster in the bed, when she's there).

Her mother.

She flinches and the brush jumps.

It's too soon for that.

She glances back at the man in the bed, wondering how he can take the things she tells him so calmly, without breaking. She wants to ask him, wants him to break--

And her fingers are in the paint again, smearing across the canvas and destroying everything.

Kara would paint the mandala, but she's so frakking tired of it, it isn't funny. And if she paints it again, it's one more brick in her own private hole in the wall.

Self-portraits never turn out well, Kara decides. She smears some more and then looks at the half-destroyed paints. Time to pack up and get the frak out of here--before he wakes, or she does something stupid. She once went home with an art school girl. Got drunk on ambrosia and then high on some shit the girl's roommate had. They frakked on the balcony, the girl reciting lines of incredibly bad poetry at her until she'd come, blissed-out and sated.

A hand settles on her back, and she wonders when he stopped snoring.

"Kara."

Don't, she thinks. But she's turning and reaching out to stop him and instead her fingers slip along his cheeks and now he's the one marked with her color. Her own living canvas, only she paints him with reds and dark bruises.

"Hey." His eyes are dark with sleep.

Kara falls into them, moving and pressing him back down on the mattress, almost laughing at his befuddlement until he gets it, and then his hands aren't tentative or careful.

Afterwards, Kara grabs up her rag, cleaning her fingers and then the pieces of his skin that she touched. He's smeared with it, and she almost draws a mandala on his chest for spite, but there's not enough, and she doesn't want to waste more paints than she has to.

He laughs at her attempts, but lets her, until there's only two streaks of muddied color across him cheek.

Kara leaves them and gets up, staggering a little before she steadies herself on the chair she'd been using. It's quick work to pack the paints, and even now she can see them slowly mixing, congealing into the muddied brown that will be all she has left, soon. Maybe she can start finger-painting the head.

The canvas stares at her from the floor where she'd dropped it and she leaves it there while she dresses.

Maybe there's nothing for him to say, she thinks. Because he's normally talking, now, normally chattering, trying to get her to stay. Like it will help. Like he has some magic gift that will change her (even if he's never said that. Even if all he does is love her, she can't help but wonder if he would prefer her fixed--a nice little woman like Racetrack would be better for him, in the end).

She has her boots on before he rolls onto his side and says, "I didn't watch."

Her head snaps up and she blinks at him, finally deciphering what the frak he means. She blinks again, this time against what feel suspiciously like tears, and they are frakking stupid. Frak, she's stupid. "Poor Sammy. I know you're a voyeur."

"Only when it comes to you," he mutters.

She ties her last boot and looks at the ruined canvas on the floor. "Can you dump that for me?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I can. You want it air locked, or just recycled?"

"Whichever," she tosses at him, tone careless. She wonders if he knows that's a lie. If he guesses this is the only olive branch she has right now.

"You sure you have to go?"

Gods. He's so pathetic, not to mention predictable. She glares at him, then jerks up and off the bed, heading for the hatch. Anger is an easier refuge, and she remembers that being said by more than one professor as they reamed her out for some stupid prank. "Sam. I--there's a CAP in three hours, and I'm on duty."

Her paints in her hand, she's out the door and halfway down the corridor before she wonders if he can figure that one out--or if she can figure it out, herself.

Frak. Maybe he really does deserve a less difficult woman.

"Kara!" The bellow catches her at the corner, "See you two days from now?"

Gods, he is such an idiot. Frakker knows her schedule almost better than she does, "In your dreams, Anders!"

"All the time!"

She's around the corner, jogging and shaking her head. He won't follow--not naked, anyway. At least, she hopes not. As amusing as it would be, she'd rather not share him with anyone. Not unless she was getting something out of the deal.

-f-