BSG fic: Once Out of Nature (Saul Tigh)
Title: Once Out of Nature
Character: Saul Tigh
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Future, after settling Earth. Remembering Tigh as a war hero. Spoilers for "Crossroads, part two." Perhaps a bit dark? 1350 words.
Note: Yeah, I don't know where it came from either. The muse sometimes likes to smack me with weird things. The title-and the inspiration for a lot of the thematic stuff-is from W. B. Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium (which you might read, either before or after the fic, because I think the two reflect back on each other in interesting ways).
Once Out of Nature
They say Saul Tigh was a hero. A pronouncement like that tends to take on a life of its own, snowballing sparkly white over time. This case is no different, really: they mythologize his drinking and his rash decisions and his inability to gloss his honesty with tact; they shrug off every frak up that came before because of what came after. They say he was a character, definitely, but more importantly he was a hero. But they don't have a frakkin' clue what that really means, not in this case.
To stand up and fight is easy. It always had been for him. Given the choice of life and death, he always chose life. It made him reckless sometimes, but it never seemed like a contradiction. Risk everything to save everything. Fight them so hard because they're not human, and they can't die. Even if it means coming so close to failure, prove that you can live as long as they can.
But find out you're one of them, and you discover that you never actually envied their eternity.
He didn't come to that realization immediately, of course. A man doesn't become a colonel or a resistance fighter because he wants to die. But days after that first battle for earth, the one that followed hard upon the music and the change, when he sat alone in his room watching artificial light break amber liquid in a bottle, knowing that the next time he saw Adama he might not be able to keep from telling him, he felt something worse than despair. Despair has an interval, just like life. It ends. The idea that perhaps his never would was beyond terrifying.
Fortunately for the fleet, he found that this thing beyond despair had an interval, too. If he was to live-since he was not to die-there was no way around it.
*
Tigh went out of this world on his own terms. That's what the plaque says, and it isn't wrong. He learned what he was, and he fought anyway. What they don't consider is how he had no alternative. Like all the other frakkin' toasters he'd sent stumbling, slowing them down but never really stopping them, his own life could only be stalled now, not destroyed. It wasn't for dying anymore. It was for living.
He was the first to go, so he never had the chance to find out that he was wrong: they would not resurrect like all the others. The only place he lives on is in an absurdly straight-backed statue in the square, right outside the hall of remembrance, now more metal than any chrome job. Nobody pays it much mind, but they like that it's there. To be sure, Adama used to frown at it each time he passed by, but, then again, he also frowned at the statue of Roslin. Thrace clinks it with her gun or a bottle or scuffs it with her boots. She knows a thing or two about wanting to die and learning to live. Only Tyrol has the temerity to chuckle. He has the right, they all say. But, of course, they give a lot of leeway to the last remaining old-order skinjob.
The hall of remembrance is a reminder of the last battle for earth. As it neared the end, Tigh turned a freighter full of malcontented algae-processors into a last-ditch effort at distraction and destruction. Nobody knew about him then except the other three. They'd all had a few weeks to decide: what do you do when you can't die? In the end, he chose to live the same way he had before. It was harder, though. There was no bravery anymore as a foolhardy stopgap against death. Of course, there was still bravery, but it was not an end but a means.
His own accustomed ends converted to means, then. He drank more. He swore more. He lost a lot of money at triad. He laughed until he cried in the rec room. He cried until he laughed in his quarters. He went to the dance with Thrace and had his ass kicked. He thought about his wife and what he'd done until he almost couldn't get out of bed, though he always did anyway. He listened to Adama and told him exactly what he thought. He bitched about the civilians, groused at the knuckledraggers, yelled at the pilots, and gave Felix Gaeta hell for no reason. But he stopped frakking things up, at least if he could help it. There was no longer any reason to.
Nobody knew what he really was until Anders lay dying months later and had to admit it; in the end the knowledge didn't save him, but it was too late to take it back. By then, though, people knew who their friends were (or had been), even when they were fabricated-bodies, memories, lives. When the myth of earth turned to soil under their feet, sunshine and humidity in the air, fresh water to drink, they began to value what they could see, what they could hold in their hands, over any abstract talk of "humanity." What they saw was Sharon Agathon in a colonial uniform, right there beside their admiral. If they were surprised later when they heard about Tigh, it was curiosity more than alarm.
Already, some have stopped hating the Cylons the same way they hated Gaius Baltar, for being a truer mirror than they could stand. Made in our image, they say. For good or ill. We are like them is slowly becoming They are like us.
They are us, others say, but those are mostly kids who never lived on New Caprica, for whom the twelve colonies are as much a dream as Kobol.
*
For weeks after hearing the music, Tigh dreamed of losing his eye. He always woke up coughing, laughing bitterly at the irony. He still hated those skinjobs for it, but he was almost as curious as he was angry. Had they known? That wondering was somehow okay. But one day he woke up laughing only to stop at something that made his stomach twist itself up into a knot that he feared might never come undone: he had thought, without thinking: When I resurrect, I'll have two good eyes again.
When he began to let himself think about it, he wondered if he would be an old man, if he would be able to get back to Galactica, if anyone would recognize him. He thought they would; after all, they'd never noticed a change when the switch was flipped. Yet there was Roslin who said he seemed more like himself than he ever had. Adama might have noticed, too, if a part of him hadn't always seen him that way, as the man he once was. He used to fight like he would never die. Then, after the genocide, or maybe even before, he began to simply fight until he died.
On that freighter, they had no way of knowing that for him there was no until anymore. He had been shocked to find, one morning weeks before as he stood in the shower watching the grime go down the drain like it might've been the weariness washing itself away, that he wanted to fight. It was who he was. He'd had years to learn it, and the change couldn't shake it out of him. It was just that now he had centuries to decide who was worth fighting and what was worth fighting for.
He didn't think about what would happen if there was nothing left to fight. He certainly didn't think about how the Cylons had had generations to confront that idea themselves, that they might've found it unbearable enough to creep toward armistice station, waiting, testing, finally crossing a line.
He didn't have generations, and that's probably a good thing; maybe it's just as well he's only a statue now. Peace is too quiet for a man like him. Quiet but temporary. When it all begins again, his unblinking eyes will be there to see it. But there are two of them crafted into that cold bronze, and perhaps that will make it easier for people to remember.
~
Character: Saul Tigh
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Future, after settling Earth. Remembering Tigh as a war hero. Spoilers for "Crossroads, part two." Perhaps a bit dark? 1350 words.
Note: Yeah, I don't know where it came from either. The muse sometimes likes to smack me with weird things. The title-and the inspiration for a lot of the thematic stuff-is from W. B. Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium (which you might read, either before or after the fic, because I think the two reflect back on each other in interesting ways).
Once Out of Nature
They say Saul Tigh was a hero. A pronouncement like that tends to take on a life of its own, snowballing sparkly white over time. This case is no different, really: they mythologize his drinking and his rash decisions and his inability to gloss his honesty with tact; they shrug off every frak up that came before because of what came after. They say he was a character, definitely, but more importantly he was a hero. But they don't have a frakkin' clue what that really means, not in this case.
To stand up and fight is easy. It always had been for him. Given the choice of life and death, he always chose life. It made him reckless sometimes, but it never seemed like a contradiction. Risk everything to save everything. Fight them so hard because they're not human, and they can't die. Even if it means coming so close to failure, prove that you can live as long as they can.
But find out you're one of them, and you discover that you never actually envied their eternity.
He didn't come to that realization immediately, of course. A man doesn't become a colonel or a resistance fighter because he wants to die. But days after that first battle for earth, the one that followed hard upon the music and the change, when he sat alone in his room watching artificial light break amber liquid in a bottle, knowing that the next time he saw Adama he might not be able to keep from telling him, he felt something worse than despair. Despair has an interval, just like life. It ends. The idea that perhaps his never would was beyond terrifying.
Fortunately for the fleet, he found that this thing beyond despair had an interval, too. If he was to live-since he was not to die-there was no way around it.
*
Tigh went out of this world on his own terms. That's what the plaque says, and it isn't wrong. He learned what he was, and he fought anyway. What they don't consider is how he had no alternative. Like all the other frakkin' toasters he'd sent stumbling, slowing them down but never really stopping them, his own life could only be stalled now, not destroyed. It wasn't for dying anymore. It was for living.
He was the first to go, so he never had the chance to find out that he was wrong: they would not resurrect like all the others. The only place he lives on is in an absurdly straight-backed statue in the square, right outside the hall of remembrance, now more metal than any chrome job. Nobody pays it much mind, but they like that it's there. To be sure, Adama used to frown at it each time he passed by, but, then again, he also frowned at the statue of Roslin. Thrace clinks it with her gun or a bottle or scuffs it with her boots. She knows a thing or two about wanting to die and learning to live. Only Tyrol has the temerity to chuckle. He has the right, they all say. But, of course, they give a lot of leeway to the last remaining old-order skinjob.
The hall of remembrance is a reminder of the last battle for earth. As it neared the end, Tigh turned a freighter full of malcontented algae-processors into a last-ditch effort at distraction and destruction. Nobody knew about him then except the other three. They'd all had a few weeks to decide: what do you do when you can't die? In the end, he chose to live the same way he had before. It was harder, though. There was no bravery anymore as a foolhardy stopgap against death. Of course, there was still bravery, but it was not an end but a means.
His own accustomed ends converted to means, then. He drank more. He swore more. He lost a lot of money at triad. He laughed until he cried in the rec room. He cried until he laughed in his quarters. He went to the dance with Thrace and had his ass kicked. He thought about his wife and what he'd done until he almost couldn't get out of bed, though he always did anyway. He listened to Adama and told him exactly what he thought. He bitched about the civilians, groused at the knuckledraggers, yelled at the pilots, and gave Felix Gaeta hell for no reason. But he stopped frakking things up, at least if he could help it. There was no longer any reason to.
Nobody knew what he really was until Anders lay dying months later and had to admit it; in the end the knowledge didn't save him, but it was too late to take it back. By then, though, people knew who their friends were (or had been), even when they were fabricated-bodies, memories, lives. When the myth of earth turned to soil under their feet, sunshine and humidity in the air, fresh water to drink, they began to value what they could see, what they could hold in their hands, over any abstract talk of "humanity." What they saw was Sharon Agathon in a colonial uniform, right there beside their admiral. If they were surprised later when they heard about Tigh, it was curiosity more than alarm.
Already, some have stopped hating the Cylons the same way they hated Gaius Baltar, for being a truer mirror than they could stand. Made in our image, they say. For good or ill. We are like them is slowly becoming They are like us.
They are us, others say, but those are mostly kids who never lived on New Caprica, for whom the twelve colonies are as much a dream as Kobol.
*
For weeks after hearing the music, Tigh dreamed of losing his eye. He always woke up coughing, laughing bitterly at the irony. He still hated those skinjobs for it, but he was almost as curious as he was angry. Had they known? That wondering was somehow okay. But one day he woke up laughing only to stop at something that made his stomach twist itself up into a knot that he feared might never come undone: he had thought, without thinking: When I resurrect, I'll have two good eyes again.
When he began to let himself think about it, he wondered if he would be an old man, if he would be able to get back to Galactica, if anyone would recognize him. He thought they would; after all, they'd never noticed a change when the switch was flipped. Yet there was Roslin who said he seemed more like himself than he ever had. Adama might have noticed, too, if a part of him hadn't always seen him that way, as the man he once was. He used to fight like he would never die. Then, after the genocide, or maybe even before, he began to simply fight until he died.
On that freighter, they had no way of knowing that for him there was no until anymore. He had been shocked to find, one morning weeks before as he stood in the shower watching the grime go down the drain like it might've been the weariness washing itself away, that he wanted to fight. It was who he was. He'd had years to learn it, and the change couldn't shake it out of him. It was just that now he had centuries to decide who was worth fighting and what was worth fighting for.
He didn't think about what would happen if there was nothing left to fight. He certainly didn't think about how the Cylons had had generations to confront that idea themselves, that they might've found it unbearable enough to creep toward armistice station, waiting, testing, finally crossing a line.
He didn't have generations, and that's probably a good thing; maybe it's just as well he's only a statue now. Peace is too quiet for a man like him. Quiet but temporary. When it all begins again, his unblinking eyes will be there to see it. But there are two of them crafted into that cold bronze, and perhaps that will make it easier for people to remember.
~