Sisyphus Recumbent
It takes a good imagination and a certain sort of reckless abandon to fuck someone who isn't there.
Gaius Baltar prides himself on his intelligence and always has; now he's starting to think he's some sort of frakking genius when it comes to being delusional. He sees other women—that blonde pilot, for instance, the one who walks like a man but smiles at him like a bitch in heat—and he wonders if he would remember what to do with a woman beneath him whose touch was real, whose legs were smooth and supple and wrapped like a vise around his waist.
A woman who doesn't vanish into nothing at the sound of a knock or someone saying his name, whose laugh doesn't echo like a memory half-forgotten in his mind.
She's real enough when it matters, he supposes, but there's a coldness beneath her caresses that feels like wind ghosting over ice. Not real, pulsing warmth like he imagines that pilot—Starbuck—would be; all hot, grasping hands and a clever, eager mouth. No, she's cold, like he's kissing snow newly fallen on warm earth and sinking into icy water that will one day drown him.
She will kill him, probably, one day. He'll sink beneath in the madness that is her, and he'll find himself locked up in the brig or wherever they put crazy people in this new world order. Possibly the airlock, Gaius, keep it together before you find out for certain.
Such reminders of cold reality are easier when there's nothing beside him but air; when he doesn't smell her scent, spicy-sweet like apples bathed in ginger, or feel fingers nimble and quick sliding beneath the collar of his shirt.
Beneath his hands she feels like one of those marble statues he remembers from back in the museums on Caprica; eyes wide and gaping like shadows painted on granite, mouth curved in that archaic smile that says nothing and everything at once. Her body is supple and gorgeous—no one could argue he doesn't have impeccable taste, even in his fantasies—and if he didn't vaguely remember what a woman really feels like, maybe he'd be tricked into thinking this is the same.
It's trickier when he's in his lab working on that thrice-damned Cylon detector. He can bend her over the desk and make it as hard as he wants, but in the end he's embarrassed and he's made a mess and his fingers curl into air where once there was warm willing flesh. At night in bed, it's easier to lose himself in the fantasy, to pretend the sheets twine around two instead of one. To pretend her gasps of pleasure aren't just echoes of a woman dead on Caprica.
"I will be here again," she murmurs, breath hot against the sweat-slicked skin of his neck. How can he feel her breathing if she's not there—how in the name of all the Gods is this even possible? Her body is writhing like a bed of vipers beneath his rough, driving possession, and in lucid moments he doesn't know if he's trying to fuck her or kill her.
When she comes, there is a light in her eyes makes him feel like a sinner taunted with the promise of unattainable salvation. It makes him think that perhaps he died on Caprica after all, and maybe this is his hell. Sisyphus has his rock, Tantalus his ever-shrinking river, and Gaius Baltar has a woman who isn't real, yet whose heartbeat he can hear racing beneath her breast and whose mouth tastes like cherries and sin.
If so, maybe being damned isn't that bad, after all.