Voyeurism Challenge: Obsideo by Brighid
May. 14th, 2005 09:04 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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sga_flashficChallenge: Voyeurism
Title: Obsideo
Spoilers: None, really
Rating: PG
Author: Brighid
Summary: pulse, breath, salt, longing
Note: Late, due to week from hell. And yet I still get to post!
Obsideo
by Brighid
Alone and lonely she has drifted, waiting, her voice calling him ever back. When he slips away, when he comes to her it is an echo of the days of flesh. Sliding into her metal skin there is the measured throb of muted engines, pulse echoing along power conduits, the breath of scrubbed air. He can, if he lets himself stretch thin and wide enough, remember the way salt tasted on his tongue, on her skin when it was pale and soft and naked beneath him. They would stand on the balconies and they would not speak and yet there was nothing unsaid between them. He offers her this, when he comes to her, when he touches her ghost inside the metal shell she'd chosen when the rest of them had floated free. Together they curl into one another and remember: pulse, breath, salt, longing.
This time she calls and her voice is chorus, a hum like the nightsong of small insects underlying her summons. He comes and she is stretched out in the sun and she is warm and more alive than all the centuries past and he can hear them, feel them, the fast fragility of their hearts and their hurried breaths and their short, fierce brightness.
She turns to him and she says, wordless, look what we have wrought!
She beckons and he slides down through her, feels the sweet shudder of her system moving swiftly to accommodate the many smallnesses that have made of her a multitude. She leads him forward, inward, and he passes a flickering one, and for a moment all that it ... she, she whispers, she thinks is his: food to ward off starvation, and the last of the coffee, and what to do about the loneliness of it all, so very far from home. She is like the ocean, cool blue and deep and still with strong currents. He slips free, and continues moving through.
Then this one he brushes and her mind is perfectly composed: the precise lines folding, paper into birds flying into something sweet and warm and secret.
This one's mouth is hungry for a taste of something ... tea steeped dark and sweet with milk and sugar. He wants it like the last one longed to be kissed.
This one is cold and circles slowly like hunting fish, watching everything, waiting for blood in the water, but at the heart of him there's heat.
This one is bright, like combustion, all energy and spark and so very new and he watches another dancing, his body pulsing with hers, longing as she twists and dances and lunges and he slides loose and...
she is perfect stillness, just this moment strung to the next but no further. She moves and each movement was meant but utterly unplanned and she dances like the stars he's watched, new born.
And then she is with him again, pulling him onward and he follows; he has always followed even when gone and far and there are two asleep in sunshine from wide windows, bodies curled together as he has lain with her, utterly entwined. She dips down and so does he and he opens his eyes to see a hazel gaze smiling at him.
"They came home," she says and it's her beneath the skin, all tangled up inside this child who touches her and knows her without even understanding how.
He reaches out with a broad, calloused hand and touches her and he says, "yes," but not to what she thinks, just "yes" and he leans in and he kisses her and she tastes like salt and he can feel her pulse and then they both just slip free as the children continue kissing and their bodies tangle together seeking to be one, if only for a heartbeat or less.
They watch them, touch the edges of their coupling, and remember: pulse, breath, salt, longing.
*0*
End
Title: Obsideo
Spoilers: None, really
Rating: PG
Author: Brighid
Summary: pulse, breath, salt, longing
Note: Late, due to week from hell. And yet I still get to post!
Obsideo
by Brighid
Alone and lonely she has drifted, waiting, her voice calling him ever back. When he slips away, when he comes to her it is an echo of the days of flesh. Sliding into her metal skin there is the measured throb of muted engines, pulse echoing along power conduits, the breath of scrubbed air. He can, if he lets himself stretch thin and wide enough, remember the way salt tasted on his tongue, on her skin when it was pale and soft and naked beneath him. They would stand on the balconies and they would not speak and yet there was nothing unsaid between them. He offers her this, when he comes to her, when he touches her ghost inside the metal shell she'd chosen when the rest of them had floated free. Together they curl into one another and remember: pulse, breath, salt, longing.
This time she calls and her voice is chorus, a hum like the nightsong of small insects underlying her summons. He comes and she is stretched out in the sun and she is warm and more alive than all the centuries past and he can hear them, feel them, the fast fragility of their hearts and their hurried breaths and their short, fierce brightness.
She turns to him and she says, wordless, look what we have wrought!
She beckons and he slides down through her, feels the sweet shudder of her system moving swiftly to accommodate the many smallnesses that have made of her a multitude. She leads him forward, inward, and he passes a flickering one, and for a moment all that it ... she, she whispers, she thinks is his: food to ward off starvation, and the last of the coffee, and what to do about the loneliness of it all, so very far from home. She is like the ocean, cool blue and deep and still with strong currents. He slips free, and continues moving through.
Then this one he brushes and her mind is perfectly composed: the precise lines folding, paper into birds flying into something sweet and warm and secret.
This one's mouth is hungry for a taste of something ... tea steeped dark and sweet with milk and sugar. He wants it like the last one longed to be kissed.
This one is cold and circles slowly like hunting fish, watching everything, waiting for blood in the water, but at the heart of him there's heat.
This one is bright, like combustion, all energy and spark and so very new and he watches another dancing, his body pulsing with hers, longing as she twists and dances and lunges and he slides loose and...
she is perfect stillness, just this moment strung to the next but no further. She moves and each movement was meant but utterly unplanned and she dances like the stars he's watched, new born.
And then she is with him again, pulling him onward and he follows; he has always followed even when gone and far and there are two asleep in sunshine from wide windows, bodies curled together as he has lain with her, utterly entwined. She dips down and so does he and he opens his eyes to see a hazel gaze smiling at him.
"They came home," she says and it's her beneath the skin, all tangled up inside this child who touches her and knows her without even understanding how.
He reaches out with a broad, calloused hand and touches her and he says, "yes," but not to what she thinks, just "yes" and he leans in and he kisses her and she tastes like salt and he can feel her pulse and then they both just slip free as the children continue kissing and their bodies tangle together seeking to be one, if only for a heartbeat or less.
They watch them, touch the edges of their coupling, and remember: pulse, breath, salt, longing.
*0*
End
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 04:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 04:50 pm (UTC)I thought the male was Sheppard at first, but it's not, is it?
the many smallnesses that have made of her a multitude
Love this line too... If I quoted all the lines I loved, I would copy pretty much the whole story! Just beautiful, Brighid :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 05:07 pm (UTC)Oh, beautiful, and dense.
He and she aren't humans from Earth or Atlantis, are they? They're ascended Ancients. I think.
Gorgeous.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 05:09 pm (UTC)She's the ghost in the machine of Atlantis.
And if you let it come, you'll know who everyone else is.
B
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 05:22 pm (UTC)Then this one he brushes and her mind is perfectly composed: the precise lines folding, paper into birds flying into something sweet and warm and secret.
Elizabeth? Unless it's your paper-crane-folding character whose name I've forgotten. Miko?
This one's mouth is hungry for a taste of something ... tea steeped dark and sweet with milk and sugar. He wants it like the last one longed to be kissed.
Errr. Carson, I guess, since it's McKay and Sheppard at the end.
This one is cold and circles slowly like hunting fish, watching everything, waiting for blood in the water, but at the heart of him there's heat.
Bates.
This one is bright, like combustion, all energy and spark and so very new and he watches another dancing, his body pulsing with hers, longing as she twists and dances and lunges and he slides loose and...
Ford.
she is perfect stillness, just this moment strung to the next but no further. She moves and each movement was meant but utterly unplanned and she dances like the stars he's watched, new born
Teyla.
Did I guess right? And if I did, do I win a prize? ::sits patiently::
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 09:58 pm (UTC)All I have to offer is my admiration. *g*
B
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 04:06 am (UTC)For some reason I like to think the "he" is Janus. But that's perhaps just me.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 05:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 06:14 pm (UTC)This time she calls and her voice is chorus, a hum like the nightsong of small insects underlying her summons.
this was beautiful ,I love the idea of the..spirit(? I guess you would call it) of Atlantis "living" and experiencing through the expedition.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 06:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 09:18 pm (UTC)Very poignant.
This story really got me emotionally invested in a short amount of time.
::loves::
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 09:21 pm (UTC)I liked your Teyla and Elizabeth descriptions very much. It was good to see the Crane Wife again. And that final image of children and love was luminous.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 10:10 pm (UTC)I thought at first Atlantis was seeing thru Sheppard's eyes and the first person he goes by is McKay.
But then there was this sentence at the end
"She dips down and so does he and he opens his eyes to see a hazel gaze smiling at him."
So Atlantis isn't looking thru Sheppard's eyes, since he's the one with the hazel eyes.
So I went back and stared at this confusing sentence (to me)
"She leads him forward, inward, and he passes a flickering one, and for a moment all that it ... she, she whispers, she thinks is his: food to ward off starvation, and the last of the coffee, and what to do about the loneliness of it all, so very far from home."
This first seemed liked McKay, and I thought this is saying that for one brief moment the thoughts of Atlantis are McKay's thoughts as Atlantis passes by McKay. It was the "he passes a flickering one" that threw me. It sounds like Atlantis is passing by McKay.
But then there was the next sentence
"She is like the ocean, cool blue and deep and still with strong currents."
So the person thinking about food and coffee and loneliness is female. That must be Elizabeth. None of the other descriptions sound like her and I can't believe you would leave her out.
Who is this?
"the precise lines folding, paper into birds flying into something sweet and warm and secret."
Is this is Miko with her secret crush on McKay? I'm thinking it is because of the sentence in the next paragraph
"He wants it like the last one longed to be kissed."
Which kind of supports the theory that it's McKay walking around since Miko would think about kisisng when McKay passes her.
The tea drinker I think is Beckett. Then it's Bates.
Then it seems like it must be Ford watching Teyla having a stick practice session. "so very new" First in Ford's mind then in Teyla's.
But we've only seen Sheppard practice with Teyla. It seems this is Sheppard and Teyla except for that "new" remark. Let's say it's Ford since you haven't described him yet.
At the end it's seems to be that it's McKay opening his eyes to see Sheppard. And it's Atlantis inside McKay as Sheppard reaches out to him.
If I have this right, then wow. McKay and Atlantis is so different. It's usually Sheppard and Atlantis. But who better to understand the machine she has become than McKay?
If I have this wrong, then I just made up a good AU on your story (haha).
Then you have this sentence
"They watch them, touch the edges of their coupling,"
Which makes me think there are two "ghosts" walking around. I thought you would have written "She watches them..."
I hope you'll help me out here. Oh, please?
~anonymouse
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 10:16 pm (UTC)But you can see all that I went thru to figure this out.
~anonymouse
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 02:32 am (UTC)Cheers.
B
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-14 11:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 01:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 01:41 am (UTC)you're getting my eliot icon, since i don't have pound for imagism :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 03:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 03:10 pm (UTC)I wouldn't even have tried to get all the characters right, but since everyone else is guessing... :). I haven't seen Miko yet, I think. Elizabeth, Ford, Teyla, and Bates are clear. Sheppard also, not only the eyes, but the knowing without understanding. The person with the tea could also be Zelenka, I thought. But he'd probably drink his tea without milk. :)
The person Sheppard is with is not mentioned at all, right? It didn't occur to me that it is McKay, because the pronouns confused me at first. But it's probably his broad hand, so it's definitely a man, at least. :) (Note how I'm the biggest McShep shipper ever, but trying to argue my way out of this one. //) )
Cool story, poetical and fun and riddle all in one. (Where's the chocolate? ;) )
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 10:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-15 11:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-16 05:38 am (UTC)Thank you so much for sharing...