Title: Punk Rock Poetry #1

Author: L0C

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Harper's first girlfriend.

Series: Punk Rock Poetry: It's about Harper and girls. This is the first one.

Spoilers: None.

Content Warning: Some light swearing.

Disclaimer: Andromeda is property of Tribune.

PUNK ROCK POETRY

Seamus Harper lived on the north side of the river, where the ground was muddy clay all gray brown and black.

She lived on the other, the opposite side of the river, where everything was the same and yet strangely different. They were both from this camp, they had both spent their lives in the grey twilight and the rocky terrain.

They met in the mass graves, picking jewelry from dead bodies. She was wearing a skirt that barely reached her thighs and something grey and tight that stretched across her chest.

She had an ex-boyfriend, who glared at Seamus with dead black eyes. Seamus would've fought him if he needed to. That's how you win a girl in the refugee camp, you use your fists and your kicks and not your heart or your wit.

But Seamus had wit, to a point, and plenty of heart, and eventually the girl in the skirt and the grey saw the light.

That river, and the grey sky, and the mass pits filled with bodies that crudely passed as graves. Seamus and her would walk up and down, hand in hand, with a connection that Seamus was sure no one else in the history of the universe had ever experienced.

She had legs that curved in a way he couldn't imagine, and hair that swished back and forth past her shoulders. She had valleys in her skin from too little sleep and too much work that Seamus admired, she wore her life and her love and hardships like a soldier wears a badge.

Something grey that stretched across her chest revealed a belly that was just big enough to be full, just big enough to be sexy, larger than Seamus and something to envy. Stretch marks, scars, a tattoo of ownership.

She had lived through so much and come back for more.

And he loved her.

They were so very close and ten years apart. He wanted what she had felt, and she wanted to spare him from it, or so she said.

Oh those legs, that river, that sky, that scar.

He visited her in her home on the other side of the river, but he never moved in. He talked about it, like he talked about going into space and becoming rich and famous, but it never happened.

She had a whole room to herself, with a window and a couch. She worked doing laundry for a Nietzschean base, ten whole guilder a week. A window and a couch. This was living.

They had their first kiss in that mass grave by the river, and he made love to her there in her one-window room. It was his first time, but she had had babies before- ones that had died as was their destiny.

Whatever.

He loved her.

They made rough, dirty, unprotected love, vulnerable love, with a sense of wrongness that Seamus couldn't quite wash from any of his life.

They had rough, dirty, unprotected sex on her couch under the window, washed in the red white and blue of the dilapidated flag that hung over it, the stripes wafting up and down under a field of blue and white.

She didn't let him move it. "I face a brick wall, and I only have one window!" She would say.

Only one.

But he loved her.

He took her home to his parents on the north side of the river. To the parents who had given him everything and sacrificed so much, who weren't that much older than her.

His father kept a collection of coins buried in one corner. Seamus wasn't entirely sure if or when he had told her of it, but she knew.

They hit it off right away, his parents and her, drinking and cursing and laughing the kind of laugh that only the mad can understand.

Seamus disappeared in the dark alcoves to help his mother with the meager cleaning up, taking their possessions from one side to the other. When he got back he saw those legs wrapped around a waist, that wave of hair cascading down her back, those scars undulating...

And, sure, he was mad. But he was no fight for his father.

She had used him.

They didn't talk much after that, he and her, or he and him. But he couldn't stay mad, because his parents were killed shortly after. A few days. A few lifetimes. It was all the same in muddy clay all gray brown and black.

She tried to talk to him, but he didn't respond. He had grown up now, and he understood.

Oh those legs, that river, that sky, that scar.

Whatever.

He didn't love her anymore.