Fic: Nightmare (Battlestar Galactica)
I'm posting each of the little fics I've written in the earlier meme separately so I can link them in my omnibus post and maybe spread them to communities. I think I'm doing pretty good, if a little rusty on some voices. Never written for BSG before, but I love Chief, so this prompt worked out.
Title: Nightmare
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: PG
Summary: Prompt was "Chief Tyrol. A lifetime of fixing things."
Author's Notes: Sometime during the year on New Caprica, between the incident where he beat Cally while delirious and when they finally got a clue and hooked up. I have not seen most of seasons 3 & 4, but yes, I know the spoilers and this was written with later events in mind. :(
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Nightmare
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He knows he's going to be okay when he realizes he hasn't broken Cally. In people, he has lost sight of the definition between fractured and whole; in machines, quality is external and uncomplicated. Plastic valve rings are either brittle or they aren't. Shielding buckles. Solder chips. He can hammer out the kinks in a Viper in half a day, but he knows, in a fearful and avoiding way, that the faults in people somehow make them more complete. The faults in people are subjective and shifting. They slide the scale of good and evil like the bubble in a level.
When he was younger, he had tried to think of people like machines. He had tried to fix them when he thought they were damaged. He had learned. Now he thought that maybe it was the quality of the construction material that mattered, not the amount of damage done to it.
Sharon, everyone says in hushed and hateful tones, is a machine. Galen knows she isn't, not in the way everyone else tries to convince themselves she is. Galen knows machines. Sharon, even this new one, the one who loves Helo (yes, loves; Galen believes her capable of it), is just as indecipherable now as she had been when Galen had believed her human.
He knows the human-model Cylons belong in the sliding-scale category of brokenness: it is why he fears he might be one. Sharon hadn't known. She had experienced feelings independent of her conscious mind, impulses which were later revealed to be programming. Galen drifts, disconnected, often enough: it comes with war. But he fears the moment when feeling returns, because he doesn't know anymore if the feeling is genuine or planted, because of Sharon, because the Cylons are a kind of machine he can't fix, any more than he can fix people - any more than he can fix himself.
He has been drifting when Cally comes to him. He is still drifting when he thinks he breaks her. When feeling returns, it's all pain and confusion. He grieves without knowing why. He is more afraid than he has ever been in his life.
When he finally goes to her, ready to accept her hate, her eyes are full of forgiveness. He knows then that he hasn't broken her and he feels, for the first time in a long time, like he might still be human. He vows never to drift again. Something is affirmed between them, a pact to keep each other safe. To fix what can be fixed and to feel no guilt over what can't.
Cally grounds Galen. And even though, in the back of his mind, Galen knows the Cylons are capable of love, he thinks: not like this. He begins to forget Sharon, living with Cally on New Caprica.
He recovers from his crisis of identity and, at last, feels comfortable with his own faults. At last, he believes himself to be human.
Title: Nightmare
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: PG
Summary: Prompt was "Chief Tyrol. A lifetime of fixing things."
Author's Notes: Sometime during the year on New Caprica, between the incident where he beat Cally while delirious and when they finally got a clue and hooked up. I have not seen most of seasons 3 & 4, but yes, I know the spoilers and this was written with later events in mind. :(
---------
Nightmare
---------
He knows he's going to be okay when he realizes he hasn't broken Cally. In people, he has lost sight of the definition between fractured and whole; in machines, quality is external and uncomplicated. Plastic valve rings are either brittle or they aren't. Shielding buckles. Solder chips. He can hammer out the kinks in a Viper in half a day, but he knows, in a fearful and avoiding way, that the faults in people somehow make them more complete. The faults in people are subjective and shifting. They slide the scale of good and evil like the bubble in a level.
When he was younger, he had tried to think of people like machines. He had tried to fix them when he thought they were damaged. He had learned. Now he thought that maybe it was the quality of the construction material that mattered, not the amount of damage done to it.
Sharon, everyone says in hushed and hateful tones, is a machine. Galen knows she isn't, not in the way everyone else tries to convince themselves she is. Galen knows machines. Sharon, even this new one, the one who loves Helo (yes, loves; Galen believes her capable of it), is just as indecipherable now as she had been when Galen had believed her human.
He knows the human-model Cylons belong in the sliding-scale category of brokenness: it is why he fears he might be one. Sharon hadn't known. She had experienced feelings independent of her conscious mind, impulses which were later revealed to be programming. Galen drifts, disconnected, often enough: it comes with war. But he fears the moment when feeling returns, because he doesn't know anymore if the feeling is genuine or planted, because of Sharon, because the Cylons are a kind of machine he can't fix, any more than he can fix people - any more than he can fix himself.
He has been drifting when Cally comes to him. He is still drifting when he thinks he breaks her. When feeling returns, it's all pain and confusion. He grieves without knowing why. He is more afraid than he has ever been in his life.
When he finally goes to her, ready to accept her hate, her eyes are full of forgiveness. He knows then that he hasn't broken her and he feels, for the first time in a long time, like he might still be human. He vows never to drift again. Something is affirmed between them, a pact to keep each other safe. To fix what can be fixed and to feel no guilt over what can't.
Cally grounds Galen. And even though, in the back of his mind, Galen knows the Cylons are capable of love, he thinks: not like this. He begins to forget Sharon, living with Cally on New Caprica.
He recovers from his crisis of identity and, at last, feels comfortable with his own faults. At last, he believes himself to be human.