BSG fic - "A Relationship in 200 Pieces (With a Few Screws Loose)"

[rivendellrose]

Whee, first finished fic in a good while, and the first ever in BSG.

Fandom: BSG (new)
Title: "A Relationship in 200 Pieces (With a Few Screws Loose)"
Characters: Helo, Athena, Boomer, and Starbuck.
Summary: Any relationship has its complications, and theirs is by no means normal.
Pairing: Inevitably, Helo/Athena (you didn't actually think I'd do something else for my first fic in this fandom, did you?).
Warnings: A lot of swearing, but since the majority of it is as technically safe as the show, I suppose I'm okay on that count. Other than that, I can only say that this follows canon through S4, so spoilers for anybody like me who didn't catch it first time around.
Notes: Unbeta'd, because I could sense a tendency growing in me to twiddle with it forever. If you see errors, please let me know and I'll try to correct them ASAP.




Sharon

When asked why they do the things they do, Humans talk about gut instinct. They talk about evolutionary psychology. They talk about thought and perception and insight granted from the gods. And when they talk about Cylons, Humans talk about programming, as if that was an entirely different thing from the rest.

It is.

Instinct, evolution, flashes of insight from the gods - all of these are learned, or gained, or ingrained for the benefit of the individual or the species. Nature may be cruel at times, but She is also rational, and cares about the fate of Her creations on the grand scheme of the universe. Programming - that’s something else. Programming is what the creator of the Cylons gave them to suit his or her own whims and desires, and to serve the needs of Humanity. There is no evolutionary advantage - no benefit to the Cylon ‘species,’ if they could be described as such - to the programming that they carry in their circuit-laden minds. All of it, every last impulse and desire, was written for the benefit of Humans. If they have surpassed that - if some Cylons have been able, for instance, to kill Humans and to rain fire and destruction upon their worlds - then that’s a triumph of independence. Mind over machine, an ultimate irony where the mind is a machine.

Sharon Valerii - this one, at least; the one who knew all along that she was a Cylon, the one who gave birth to a child, and accepted Karl Agathon’s proposal of marriage even though he gave it over a closed-circuit phone line into her cell in the brig - doesn’t have that kind of will.

She thought she did, once. In the radioactive forests of Caprica, when she first realized that she actually felt something for the Human she’d been sent to seduce, Sharon Valerii felt a surge of pride at her rebellion. The Six model didn’t trust her? Fine, they were all snobby bitches anyway. The Five model stared blankly at her when she reported in, clearly waiting for her to screw up like her sister models so often did? It didn’t matter. The warm and startling rush of what had grown between her and Karl was more than enough to carry her through. Even while the Six in charge of the experiment grinned as she beat her, kicked her, broke her ribs (there went another one...) to add verisimilitude to her capture by ‘enemy forces,’ Sharon felt... alive. And when Karl found her again, rescued her after her own people had left on the floor with her head in a burlap sack exactly as they’d planned, she felt complete. Fated.

Programmed.

The exact moment it occurred to her couldn’t be pinned down after the fact. The doubt whispered at night while she sat in a stinking sewer, nervous, watching for the light of search beams and listening for the dull, clanking march of the Centurions hunting them. Hunting both of them, now, because they knew that she was no longer on their side. It was a worry - no, an awareness that sulked in the corners of her mind. Why does it feel so right to love this Human? Because I’m different? Because I’m special, unique? Or because Humans built us, programmed us to serve them, and that programming is still there, hidden deep within our minds in the circuits that no amount of evolution and growth can touch. The new Centurions were programmed to be unquestioningly loyal to the Cylons, just like their ancestors (if you could call them that) were programmed to be for the Humans. Did a Centurion feel love for its Cylon masters? Did the old Cylons, clunky toasters that they were, feel love for Humans? Was it love that, squandered and unrequited, burned in their metal bellies until they broke down and rose up against their creators?

This Sharon was programmed with the same Human memories that the other Sharon (the one the Humans called Boomer) had, from her implanted childhood up to her most recent unconscious check-in. She remembered a childhood, having a mother and a father, and a brother she both hated and loved. She remembered growing up - all the stupid, petty little anguishes and triumphs that made up the teenage years, going away to the academy and the party her parents threw for her the night before she left. She remembered her first kiss, her first boyfriend, her first frak.

None of which actually happened. None of it. Sure, the later stuff - arriving on Galactica, blowing her landings, falling in love with the Chief, meeting Helo for the first time - picked up on a reality, but that reality belonged to someone else. Another Eight in another life, on whom some of her own experiences just happened to have been built. And all the feelings that go with those memories? If the memories were false, did that make the feelings false as well? Like the old adage - if a tree falls in the middle of a forest, and no one is there to hear it...

If a Cylon remembers what love feels like in memories that were made up and implanted, then how the frak does she know that what she’s feeling now is any more real?

It was so easy to leave. To steal a heavy raider, help the Humans, help Karl, forget about her people and all their plans. And it wasn’t what they’d meant for her to do. The other Cylons would never have programmed her to turn on them, not intentionally. So in that sense, the rebellion against her programming was real. But something turned on inside her - just like a switch - in the time that she was with Karl, and later, safe and sound in an oh-so-comfortable brig cell, the thanks she got for treason, Sharon wondered if it wasn’t as simple as that. Just a switch. A Human shows some modicum of affection to the lost little toaster, and just like that some circuit gets tripped in her mechanical corollary to a hind-brain, and she’s in love with him. Like some part of her was looking for him, yearning for him, all along.

One of the Sixes used to say that all living beings naturally seek the love and glory of God - that they’re drawn to it as insects are drawn to light, or fish are drawn to spawning grounds they don’t remember. Sharon Valerii - this one, the one who felt her newborn baby’s tiny hand wrap around her finger, walked away happy, and then came back to a tiny, perfect dead body - doesn’t believe in God. God didn’t make the Cylons. Humans did. And sometimes, late at night, when she’s done so many pull-ups and stretches and crunches that her whole body aches but her mind still won’t shut off, she thinks that maybe they built that same inexorable, perverted attraction into their robot slaves. One last, monumental joke, one umbilical cord that can never be severed - the Cylons could have succeeded at destroying all of Humanity with their bombs and their Centurions and their sleeper agents, but they would have been left with gaping holes in their bio-metal hearts that they could never fill themselves, because the creation always seeks, desperate, for the love of its creator.

Alone in her cell, Sharon Valerii - the one who rebelled, who turned her back on her people for the love of a Human man and now lives as a barely-tolerated enemy among them - thinks about programming, and how in the moment that she most wanted to prove that she was above it, she may have finally proven its incomparable strength.



Evaluation

“You doing okay down here?” Always the first question he asks. As if she might’ve found some new entertainment, might’ve done some redecorating or something on the single gunmetal wall and the three walls of bars.

“Doing great,” she tells him. “I’m thinking of putting up curtains. Something lacy, maybe in a nice shade of yellow. I think they’d go great with the paint in here.”

“Yellow could be good.” He shifts the phone in his hand and looks worried. “Seriously, Sharon.”

Seriously? Seriously, she feels like a tiger in a tiny cage. She paces. She does push-ups. She does sit-ups. She does pull-ups from a bar the guards were at last willing to put up in her cell in the last week. She eats the same faintly grimy rations every day, and knowing that the crew doesn’t get anything better doesn’t help that they taste like grit and plastic, and that the water carries a metallic tang she can’t swallow down. “What do you want me to say, Karl?”

“I want to know if you’re okay.”

The worst of it is, he’s so genuine. He really does want to know. Sharon sighs. “Our baby girl is dead. I’m living in the brig. Our races are out to wipe each other off the face of the frakking universe, and the admiral’s pretty damned sure my people are going to pop out of the skies one day and finish the job on all those people down on that stupid mudball he told them not to colonize in the first place. Other than that, sure, I’m okay. How was your frakkin’ day?” The last is spat out with such venomous sarcasm that she immediately regrets it - for all his faults, Karl doesn’t deserve her bitterness just for the crime of trying to pretend for a few minutes that their life is something approaching normal. “I’m sorry. It’s just...”

“I know.” He tries to smile, doesn’t quite manage it, but his eyes shine with the same sympathy she remembers from the empty forest on Caprica. “I know.”



Proposal

The phone looks absurdly small in his hand, and his face is as grim as she ever saw it in the heat of battle.

“You want me... to marry you,” Sharon repeats. It’s not even a question - how the hell could she make that into a question? How could he? How, in their current situation, could he even think of it?

But Karl is Karl, and he just nods. “Yeah.”

He’s obviously insane. It’s just her luck that her sister and brother Cylons chose to send her on a mission to seduce the craziest, most detached-from-reality Human in the history of the Human race.

Just her luck that in the process of seducing him, she fell in love with him.

“I’m living in the brig, Karl, and our people are at war! I don’t think this is really the best way to start a marriage, do you?”

“But that’s the thing, right?” Karl leans forward, and Sharon realizes suddenly that he’s been thinking about this a long time, seriously, in that dog-with-a-bone way that Karl Agathon gets when he’s determined to work something out. He’s not the brightest bulb in the ship by far, but once he starts thinking about something he doesn’t stop until he’s come up with an answer and a solution to whatever problem he’s set himself. Her heart sinks. Whatever it is, this isn’t just a passing fancy: he not only means it, but he’s not giving it up without a fight. “I’ve been looking through the legal codes--”

“You what?”

He rolls his eyes at her. “The admiral has all his father’s law books in his office, and he’s given those of us who are still here free access his library. I could bring you something to read, if you want... Later. The point is, I picked up a few of the books to keep busy when I’m off-duty and I can’t be down here. I thought I might run across something that could help us, and I did. Listen.” He pulls a sheaf of note paper out of his jacket’s inner pocket - the paper has been folded and unfolded so many times the creases are almost see-through, and the edges of the white paper have picked up the dark blue of his jacket in places. He reads the passages he’s written down slowly and carefully, stopping sometimes to rearrange the pages and explain something he had to look up in another book, or an obscure term he had to look up in the dictionary. It takes a while for her to put it all together, but she can hear barely-restrained excitement in his voice as he gets to the end.

If they’re married, the admiral can’t legally refuse them the opportunity to see each other on a regular basis. If they’re married, she’s legally entitled to a modicum of privacy during their visits. And if they’re married, she’s legally a real person (nobody marries an electrical appliance), and a citizen of the Twelve Colonies, entitled to all the rights and privileges thereof. No longer a captured enemy combatant, nor even a defector and informant. A citizen. The laws don’t say anything about what can or can’t be done to Sharon Valerii, model Eight, a Cylon so stupid she ran straight into the arms of the enemy, but they do have a number of things to say about the rights that would have to be accorded to Sharon Agathon, wife of Galactica’s acting X.O.

“It doesn’t solve all our problems,” Karl concludes, folding and unfolding the papers awkwardly, open and shut, open and shut in his long fingers, and that explains why they look like they’re going to fall apart any minute now. “But it solves some of them, and... Sharon, I want this. I want to be your husband. I want you to be my wife. I want us to be together. The laws... they’re a bonus. They’re not the reason. At least I don’t want them to be. I love you.”

Objectively speaking, it’s probably among the least romantic proposals in the history of the Twelve Colonies, but Sharon Valerii feels tears welling up in her eyes, and a pit disappearing from her stomach that had up to that moment been threatening to eat her from the inside out.

“So... what do you think?” Karl’s still running his fingers along the paper, open and shut, open and shut, constantly moving, but his eyes are locked on hers, and he’s totally earnest, totally present and focused and with her. Totally wanting this, as much as he said. All the doubts, all the dark wondering about programming and rebellion and love and humanity don’t matter so much all of a sudden. What’s the point? If her programming led her here, then maybe it’s not all bad being a frakking toaster, after all.

Sharon pulls a smile out of distant memories and a tiny, but growing, spark of hope for the future, and says, “Yes.”



Ceremony

Her implanted memories tell her that this is nothing like any wedding that any Sharon Valerii ever imagined for herself.

She remembers that when she turned seventeen her mother had helped her to put away her childhood things - the last of her toys and dolls that she hadn’t yet given away or thrown out - along with a few of her school papers and a clipping of her baby hair that her mother had been keeping safe in a box in her dresser. Her mother told her that one day, when she was getting ready for her wedding, they would go together and put the box on the altar of Artemis to thank her for her protection through childhood, and ask blessing on her entry into the adult world. “I’m going to be an adult anyway, mom,” Sharon had protested. “That’s so totally old-fashioned. Marriage doesn’t make you an adult anymore. It hasn’t for hundreds of years.”

“You’ll understand when it’s time,” her mother had told her with a smile.

She understands now. She wished she could hold those things in her hands, touch them, and have a solid link to a childhood, to a past. She wants her mother to be there, brushing her hair and teasing her and giving her chirpy, bossy, loving advice. But the toys weren’t real, and neither was her mother. Just more memories that didn’t really happen to her.

There aren’t many guests - Karl had asked Starbuck and Anders up, and they’d come along with the return of the latest supply shuttle. Kat and a few of the other pilots had agreed to attend as well. Karl said nothing about the reactions of the rest to his invitation - a wedding in the brig, to a Cylon? Not exactly the social event of the season.

What surprises Sharon isn’t so much what’s missing - the pretty dress and the flowers, the hordes of adoring friends and family, the music and dancing and tables of food and ambrosia - as what’s there. Like Starbuck and Kat, who show up first thing in the morning while Sharon is still going through the groggy motions of her morning sit-ups, and tell her guard to take a hike. “Admiral’s orders,” Kat insists, and holds out a signed hard-copy as her proof.

“Really?” Sharon asks when the guard is gone.

The two Viper pilots wear matching Cheshire cat grins. “Really.”

It’s not much of a bridal party, but Starbuck being Starbuck smuggled in a bottle of horrible gut-rot liquor they’ve been fermenting down on New Caprica, and Kat brought a bar of rose-scented soap she’d bought (or stolen) from the gods alone knew who or where. They walked with her to the showers and sang horrible, bawdy songs while she washed up, and after she’d gotten dressed again they escorted her not back to her cell in the brig but up to the observation deck, where the remaining handful of guests were waiting, with Admiral Adama and Karl, for the ceremony. It’s short and simple - no big invocations or adorations of the gods, no grand sacrifices - but Adama smiles a little as he intones the old words, and Karl squeezes her hand and kisses her, chaste but hard, when the Admiral gives the word. There’s no music, and they walk down to the brig again instead of to the gorgeous house she’s built up in her mind, but someone has hauled an old, low sofa into the cell along with her bed and the low table she uses as a desk, and they’ve hung up curtains inside. They’re not yellow, and they’re not totally opaque, but they’re something.

“Get in there, you two.” Starbuck makes a face, and shooing motions with her hands. “I don’t want to see either of you again until tomorrow morning.”

Karl’s face clouds. “I have CAP--”

“Already handled. I traded with you.” Kat punches his shoulder, though she almost has to stand on her toes to do it. “You think I’m gonna send you out flying CAP on the morning after your wedding? Get out of here. And congratulations,” she adds, turning another brilliant grin at Sharon, “both of you.”

She leaves, but Starbuck is still standing at the door, hands on her hips, smirking at them.

“What?” Karl asks.

“Haven’t you ever been to a wedding before, dumbass? The groom’s best friend’s gotta guard the door to the bridal chamber, make sure he doesn’t get interrupted. Besides, I figure you might need a blow-by-blow. I remember in flight school you never could get the hang of shit the first time--”

“Oh, shut up--”

“Make me!”

Karl feints toward her and she dances out of his reach, cackling.

“Have it your way, Helo - but don’t say I didn’t warn you!” She turns to Sharon, and for a brief moment her eyes almost look serious, and Sharon is afraid she’ll say something awful, something to remind them both about everything out there, everything wrong in their world. “From one married woman to another, Sharon,” she says - “Don’t go easy on him.”

Sharon glances at Karl. He’s trying to scowl at his friend, but laughter’s threatening to overwhelm his eyes. “I won’t.”

“Good woman.” Starbuck laughs, slides down the wall just outside the door, and pulls a bottle with the last of the rot-gut out of her coat.

“Starbuck...” Helo begins.

“You want me, or you want the guards back?” she said, and if ever Starbuck’s voice could be describe as soft, it is now. She’s looking at the bottle, won’t even lift her head to meet his eyes.

“Is that the choice?” Karl sounds like he doesn’t want to believe it. He always was, Sharon thinks before she can stop herself, more than a bit naive. It’s one of the things she loves about him, she reminds herself. But gods, what more does he expect? Does he honestly think this wedding will change Adama’s word overnight?

“That’s about it. For now.” A smile plays at Starbuck’s lips. “The old man’s working it through, Helo. He’s getting used to it. You give it some time, he’ll get over it, but right now...”

“He still doesn’t trust us,” Sharon finishes for her.

Starbuck shrugs. “You... Boomer tried to kill him. Not to mention the whole not-telling-us-about-the-chaplain thing, which you actually did. Or didn’t do - whatever. Can’t blame a guy for being a little unsure after shit like that.” She leans back, tilting her head up to look at them now. “Look at it this way - if I call the guard you can bet he’ll be duty-ready and sober. You stick with me, you’ll get the traditional send off with the annoying drunken singing, and I’ve got enough booze here...” She pauses to peer into the flask, then nods. “Enough that I’ll probably be out like a light in not too long. Damned time change from that mudball underneath us, my brain thinks it’s about two in the morning right now. But, hey, if you want a sober and serious marine instead, I’m happy to go let ‘em know I’m gonna sleep it off in the bunks...”

“We’ll take our chances with you,” Sharon interrupts. Helo nods sharply, and a guilty twinge goes through Sharon - his jaw’s getting that set and grit to it that means he’s remembering everything that’s wrong with their relationship, everything that’s wrong with all the universe. She touches his arm, but glances back to Starbuck. “Thank you.”

Another shrug, another swig out of the bottle, and she throws them a wicked grin. “Somebody’s gotta keep you from hurting that poor bastard, you big bad toaster. Go on, get in there, or I’ll start regretting it and decide I want a nice soft bunk to sleep in after all. Get on with it. Shoo. I promise I’ll keep my back turned and I’ll try not to listen too much.”

Karl looks about set to argue with her, so Sharon grabs his arm and pulls him into the cell, closing the door behind them. With the curtains, it almost feels like a real room, and outside, true to her word, Starbuck begins singing again - almost sweetly, if such a thing could be believed. She hasn’t got a bad voice, when she’s not trying to just sound loud and lewd.

“I still hate that you’re stuck in here,” Karl said. “I’ll talk to the admiral again, he’s got to understand by now--”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Sharon told him. “Not tonight. We’re married. You and me. I’m your wife. Isn’t that a better thing to think about?”

The corner of his lip curled up toward a smile, and then collapsed. “You don’t mind...?” he gestured outside the cell. Starbuck’s voice singing some old song, maybe a love song, maybe a lullaby, wafts in on the tinny and redistributed air.

Sharon shrugs. “We’ll deal with it. She already sounds like she’s falling asleep. I think we can outlast her. Besides, doesn’t everybody want live music at their wedding?”



Athena

There were always people who’d talk. People who’d quiet down when he walked into a room, and whispers that maybe they thought he couldn’t hear once he’d passed them by. “The one who married the toaster.”

Ever since she came back on duty and earned her new call-sign - her own call-sign, finally - he’d heard something new on and off. “He’s married to Athena.”

It’s a good feeling, her having her own name - one that’s only hers - and hearing people accept it and call her by it even when they don’t think he’s listening. Sharon always pretended that she didn’t care, but he could see before that it got her down, feeling like the whole ship thought she was no different from the other one, the one who shot the admiral, or any of the others out there. She’s her own woman, now, completely different from the rest.

Except, well, in that she’s not. Not completely.

Actually, it’s all pretty frakking confusing sometimes.

When he fell in love with her initially - the woman he used to know, the woman he went on flights with and teased and joked with and loved from the minute he met her - she was another woman. That woman, the Sharon he'd pined after for months without the slightest hope that she’d give him a second glance as more than a friend, was a totally different person. Or, sort of was, at least. She shot the captain. (But wasn’t that her programming? They said she didn’t even remember, after it happened, and that she’d screamed and cried along with the rest of the crew as they dragged her down to the brig...) She’d loved another man. (But they said she’d broken up with him, toward the end...) She’d died in his arms. (But she was back, now, Sharon said - she'd recognized Boomer as the other Sharon - the other Eight - who tried to come aboard with the Six called Natalie, and outed her to the security detail.) She was a different person.

But his Sharon, the one he loved and had married, remembered everything about his time together with the first one. She remembered being in a relationship with the Chief, talked about it like any woman would talk about any past relationship - faintly regretful, something that couldn’t be helped and was best not thought of much now that she was happy (she swore she was happy) with her new, true love. She remembered him teasing and joking with her, remembered the long conversations while they were out on boring, routine missions, and she admitted that she’d guessed he had a thing for her back then. How could she not? Helo was under no illusions about the transparency of his character. Starbuck’d always told him he was a terrible liar, totally worthless when he tried not to wear his heart written all over his face, and she’d known him longer than anybody else on the ship, so she had to know.

If she remembered all that, then how was she not that woman? If Sharon - his Sharon - remembered all those things that other woman had done, how could he say that she was totally different from the other one?

Think of it like they’re sisters or something, he told himself. Think of it like they’re twins. (...But don’t think about it too much, and definitely not when you’re alone.)

She likes the rest of the crew to call her Athena. It’s finally something - along with him, she says - that’s hers alone, belonging as well to not even a single one of her model sisters. “Cylons don’t have much of anything in the way of privacy or property,” she tells him. “What’s ours is ours all together. Before, when I lived with the others, I didn’t even have a shirt that was only my own. Now I have you, and I have this call-sign, and this ship... all mine, to share with no other Sharon in the universe. I love that.”

He grins back at her as she says it, because he knows what she means - and hell, he’s never wanted anything as much as he wanted to be hers, especially when she says it that way, with that fire in her eyes - but it makes him a little nervous, too. Because of course it’s not right to call your wife by her call-sign. She doesn’t call him Helo. She calls him Karl, and he likes it that way (most of the time - of course there are other moments, but those are just moments, and that’s a different thing altogether). And, anyway, he’s waited years to call her Sharon - he’s sure as hell not giving it up just because that name belongs to a few other people, too. But sometimes there’s a guilty sort of feeling to it, almost, like saying someone else’s name, because she’s right - “Athena” is the only name in the universe that’s hers alone.

There’s a thousand other women in the universe who, to his horror, all look just like her - exactly, as near as he can tell, and it scares the hell out of him to think that. He ought to be able to tell. There ought to be something... the pattern of freckles on her nose, or the way her hair hangs into her eyes, the dimples when she smiles or the way she bites her nails when she’s really nervous. There ought to be something, because it’s just not right that he can’t tell his wife apart from those other women. And then the real guilt settles in, in the dark corners of the night; if he could tell them apart, she wouldn’t be his wife. Because, as much as he loves her - and he does, with every fibre of his being - the Sharon sitting on the other side of the room folding his laundry and humming a lullaby to their daughter isn’t the Sharon he first fell in love with. He loves her best - gods, of course he does, he’d do anything for her - but he didn’t love her first, and if he’d known back when she first showed up on New Caprica that she wasn’t ‘his’ Sharon - the one from Galactica? He’d have shot her without a second thought, and not just in the shoulder. Not just a wound. He’d have killed her for trying to give him what he wanted, because it would have felt, backwards and crazy as it feels now, like a betrayal.

So yeah, sometimes, he wishes he could call her Athena just like everyone else. It would make it easier. Draw a stronger line. He belongs to her alone of all of them, she says, but sometimes he’ll say her name and think, without realizing the significance at first, of the other one, the one who didn’t love him. It makes him feel like an adulterer, and the worst part is, he’s not quite sure who his mind thinks he’s cheating on.



Boomer

When Boomer knew Helo, he was a different man. That’s fine - she was different back then, too. For one thing, she thought she was Human.

That sure as frak turned out to be a lie.

She’s caught sight of him only briefly since then, when she came aboard Galactica with the Six who called herself Natalie for the peace negotiations, and even that short moment made her wonder what might have been. Good old Helo. She remembered the happy days before the world went mad, before Troy and Caprica and all the other colonies were destroyed and her self-image crashed around her head with them, and remembered how she’d smiled to think that sweet, handsome, slightly dopey Helo had a crush on her. Of course she knew. He was her ECO, they spent more time together than with anybody else on the ship - how could she have missed it? But... well, he was Helo, wasn’t he? Nice guy, good guy to have with you in a fight, great guy to owe some money to because he’d never stoop to mentioning it, never think for a minute that you wouldn’t pay him back eventually, just as soon as you had the cash... He was an easy guy to like. And he was an easy guy to ignore, because he was just so damned polite about it. Maybe even take a little advantage of. Nothing serious - nothing like how Galen helped her, because Helo had such a stick up his ass about right and wrong that he wouldn’t do shit like that for anybody, even if he was frakking them. Even if he loved them. But if a few credits never got back to him and a few post-flight reports were a bit more kind to her than maybe they should have been... well, that was connections, wasn’t it? That was what friends did for each other. Especially if those friends had a crush on you. Everybody did it.

Turned out, she should have gone for him instead of the Chief. Could she have? Would her programming have let her, or would it have rerouted her to Galen again because of his job and how much she could get away with while she had him under her thumb?

Not that it mattered. He was in love with her now. The other one. The bitch who had everything. Mother of destiny. Frakking bullshit.

I could have been her. We’re the same, her and I, exactly the same in every frakking way - only she got luckier. Got pulled out of the resurrection pools later, and got the better assignment, the better job, the better frakking life. She gets a husband, a daughter - everybody loves Athena, even our Cylon brothers and sisters who she betrayed, because she frakked a guy and managed to have a kid off it. What’s so frakking special about that? I could have had him. Any day, back then - he would have whipped it out if I’d so much as looked at him right, anywhere and any minute...

And she bet he still would, too.

Good old Helo. Never was the brightest bulb on the ship, but she’d bet he was a good frak.

And one of these days, Boomer told herself, maybe she’d find out for sure. It’d serve the other bitch right.



Kalos K'agathos

For hours, thank the gods, there was no time to think about what he had done. From the instant Sharon dragged herself into the pilots’ ready room they were in constant motion, the horror and panic in his veins blocking out every thought except Hera, Hera, where’s Hera? What’s Boomer done with her? How could I let this happen? After all they’d been through to get her back, all that his little girl had suffered and survived and just barely started to recover from, how could he let her be stolen away from them again?

And behind all of this, over and over, a drumming in his heart: My fault. My fault, my fault, my fault, my fault, my fault...

“In the locker room. It was Boomer. Did she get Hera?”

No words. He shouted for Six to get the med team for Sharon, called for someone else to notify C&C of what had happened, try to keep her from leaving, but already they both knew. She was gone. Boomer had Hera.

What kind of father allowed a woman who’d already threatened to kill his daughter once before to steal her away again? What kind of husband didn’t know his own wife from another woman, even if she was her genetic twin? Sharon screamed and beat his back with her fists, and he bent under it, almost wishing she would do more. He deserved it. When the medics arrived she pushed them away after the most cursory exam, growling about how she needed to go to the flight deck. She needed to talk to people, find out how the frak they’d missed this, and oh gods would they suffer if she found the ones who’d looked the other way. How the frak had they let a three year-old girl walk onto a raptor? Nobody on deck would admit to having seen her, though, and as much as they both screamed and yelled to the contrary, they both knew the deckhands weren’t stupid. Boomer must have done something, hidden her somehow... how, at this point, almost didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was gone.

Sharon wouldn’t look at him as they walked back, defeated and undone, toward their empty quarters. He hadn’t seen her face so hard and blank in years, not since just after Hera was taken from them the first time. “We’ll get her back,” he said. “We’ll go after her, I’ll talk to the admiral--”

“He won’t let us. Not now. There’s too much going wrong, too much else--”

“He will.” Helo reached out to her, and tried not to react when she flinched away from him, too angry and disappointed and sick with impotent fury to accept any kind of comfort. “Adama’s a father,” he insisted. “He’ll understand.”

But it turned out that he was wrong about that, too. Adama didn’t understand. He had too much to worry about, too many people under his protection, to risk it all for one little girl. After that conversation, it was just too much to think of going back to his quarters, where Sharon barely looked at him, and where every time he looked at her he was overwhelmed with guilt for the mistake he’d made. The pilot’s ready room, normally his second-choice refuge, was also out of the question - he didn’t know when he’d next be able to look at that door without seeing Sharon dragging herself through it in her underwear, blood all over her face.

So he went down to Joe’s, and found Kara sitting on the bench of the battered piano someone had dragged in there a few weeks before, in a mood of unaccustomed quiet. It reminded him of sitting in her apartment on ruined and occupied Caprica. She looked up as he approached, and raked a hand through her long hair like she was trying to wake herself out a dream.

“I heard about Hera,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” The single word started to clutch at his throat, so he stopped at that, and sat down next to her in silence.

“Drink?” she offered.

He shook his head, and she nodded. Her fingers moved across the chipped glass of her own tumbler, and she bit her lip, looking down for a moment before she started again.

“I, uh... I heard about the other bit, too. Racetrack, she said you, uh...”

“Boomer. I mistook Boomer for Sharon - for Athena.” Saying it just made it more real, and suddenly he wished he’d taken her up on that drink after all. But it wouldn’t help, not really. “I thought she was Sharon, and we had sex.”

For a horrible moment, he thought she might laugh. It would be like Starbuck to do that - as much as they were friends, as much as she was probably his best friend apart from Sharon, Starbuck had a sick sense of humor, especially when she was drunk, and she’d never precisely been the soul of sympathy when it came to other peoples’ problems. The number of times she taunted him for his crush on Sharon back in the old days... But instead, she flinched slightly, and shook her head, and took another sip of her drink. “Frakkin’ Cylons,” she said softly. “Make us all look like idiots.”

“Yeah, you told me so.”

“Yeah, well...” She shrugged. “I’m always right. It frakkin’ sucks.”

“Yeah.” He stared ahead for a long moment. “Thing is... it’s not like I didn’t know there were others around, you know? There’s been a dozen of them on the ship lately, all kinds, and I just... walked in, saw her, and it never entered my mind. I should’ve seen the signs. I should’ve... She smelled different. Said she’d traded for some oil soap. And I believed her. She was... different, and I still believed it was her. Because I wanted to.”

“She’s your frakkin’ wife, Helo, it’s not like you’re supposed to play twenty questions or have some kind of password exchange before you frak her.”

“Maybe we should’ve. I mean, gods, Kara, this could’ve been happening for weeks!”

She squinted at him, her eyebrows drawn together. “Boomer only just got here, and the old man put her in the brig straight away. Unless you’ve been going down there, in which case I’ve gotta say you’ve got bigger problems going on than not being able to tell the two of them apart.”

“But the others have been here for weeks. What if this wasn’t the first time?” He hung his head, elbows on his knees and stared at his hands hanging in front of him. “There was another one. On the base-star, an Eight, she said she’d downloaded all of Athena’s memories from the last time she resurrected over there. She was curious, she said. She...” He trailed off, unsure of how to explain. “She rubbed my shoulders just the way Sharon does, talked to me about... She acted like I ought to treat her just like Sharon. My Sharon, Athena. When she touched me, if I hadn’t known she wasn’t Sharon... And it was exactly the same today. I didn’t know, so I just...”

“Helo.”

“What?”

“You can’t keep beating yourself up over this.”

He snorted. “Why the frak not? In one day I had sex with another woman right in front of my wife, who the other woman had just beaten within an inch of her life, and let that other woman run off with our daughter. And now the admiral won’t let us go look for her. I can’t do anything else.”

“Fine, okay, so do, then. But don’t do it at me. Go talk to her. Sharon. Just... go talk to her, tell her all this, and...” she laughed softly, “for the love of all the gods, don’t tell anybody I’m passing out marriage advice, because that irony is just too ripe for me to live down, okay? But go. Before it’s too late.”

Helo’s heart sank. “Sam’s still...?”

“Cottle says I need to get used to it. That he’s a vegetable. Start living my life again. I didn’t even tell him to frak off. I think I’m losing my edge.” She shook her head, and downed the last of her drink, started to set it on top of the piano... and then seemed to think better of it and sat with her fingers wrapped around the glass as if it was the only thing keeping her warm.

“Is there something else you want to...?”

“No, no. Just... just go. Talk to Athena. I’m good, I just... you know me and an empty glass.”

“Nature abhors a vacuum, and Kara Thrace abhors an empty glass of moonshine, yeah.” Helo stood up and reached his hand out for it. “Want me to buy you another?”

“Nah. I didn’t give good enough advice for that. Go on. I’m just gonna... sit here for a while. See if somebody comes to play this thing, maybe.”

There was something about the way she said that, something about the way her eyes seemed to linger on the old instrument as she spoke, that pulled at the strings of Helo’s thoughts. Something about Caprica, about the time in her apartment. But before he could track it down it was gone, and Kara was hauling herself to her feet with her usual half-wild, loose grace, headed for the bar to order another drink for herself. And Helo had nowhere else to go but back to his quarters.

When he got there he heard voices, and for a brief, wonderful, terrible moment he thought that there had been a mix-up - that Boomer hadn’t stolen Hera at all, she’d only said that to the admiral to bluff him, and his little girl had been found safe and sound somewhere on the ship. This time of night, Sharon would be washing Hera’s face, brushing out her soft curls, putting her into her pyjamas...

The door opened. Sharon was there. So was one of the other Eights. And one of the Sixes, too. Judging by her clothes, he thought it might be the one they all called Caprica, the one who’d just lost her baby.

Lost her baby just like they’d just lost theirs. Again. For a second he thought he should turn around and go to the head, because he was sure he’d puke. “I’ll come back later,” he muttered to the three women, and started to shut the door again.

“No.” Caprica stood up quickly, and the Eight just after her. “We’ll go. We were just... I wanted...” She pressed her lips together, and looked at him with lost dark eyes framed in deep shadows. “We just stopped by to talk. We’ll go.” Glancing back to Sharon, she continued in a low tone, “If you want to talk again...”

“I know where to find you both. Thank you.” Sharon nodded, and waited in silence while the two women left, and then sighed. “That was Caprica,” she said. “And the Eight calls herself Iris. They found her in the brig, where Boomer should’ve been, with a great big goose egg sticking out of her forehead. One minute she was working on the ship, she said, and the next... The chief turned himself in, said he took out the power and knocked her out with a wrench. Carried her to the brig, and left her in Boomer’s place. She’d told him she still loved him.”

For all the fretful mixture of jealousy and sympathy that he’d felt for the chief since meeting him, all of it surrounding Boomer and Sharon, Helo felt weirdly numbed to hearing this. At least, he found himself thinking, I wasn’t the only one she fooled.

“He’s going to be in the cells for a while,” Sharon continued.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. He was worse than stupid, doing that. He knew everything Boomer had done, everything--”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant... in the locker room.”

Silence.

“I didn’t know--”

“I know you didn’t.” She wouldn’t look at him again, and, like before, Helo was pretty sure he knew why.

“I should have.”

Sharon snorted. “How? Helo, I’m not blind or crazy. I know we all look the same. On some levels... Genetically, at least, we are the same. Her, and me, and... Iris, and all of us. Just like Caprica and Natalie and... whatever her name is, the one who’s representing the Cylons on the quorum now. Sonya. To you, to everybody else, they’re all the same; I know that, and that was kind of the point of us. I can’t blame you for that. I understand.”

“You don’t. I want... I want to be able to tell. I want to know... I don’t ever want this to happen again. Hera’s gone, and it’s all my fault--”

“It’s not your damned fault, all right? It’s mine. I should have known that with Boomer around, something was bound to happen. She’s always frakking things up for me, one way or another. If I’m not getting the blame for what she’s done...” Sharon shook her head fiercely. “I swear to the gods, if I can find her, I’ll kill her. It won’t be quick, either. I’ll rip her throat out, I... oh gods...”

“Shhh.” Helo closed the space between them and thank the gods she didn’t pull away as he folded her up in his arms. She tensed for a moment, and then broke in sobs against his chest. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair. “I’m so sorry. I wish I’d known... If I had, you know I wouldn’t ever--”

“I know.”

Helo took a deep breath to steady himself. Guilt wouldn’t do Hera any good, and it wouldn’t help Sharon, either. If he stayed focused on them, if he could fix what had gone wrong, there would be time to deal with the guilt later. “We’ll find her,” he said. “We’ll get Hera back. I don’t know how yet, but we’ll get her back. If I have to steal a Raptor--”

“And then what?” Sharon shook her head, pushing away from his chest. “Where would we go, Karl? Even if we found her, even then, where would we go? The three of us alone, away from the fleet - how long do you really think we’d last? And there’s no way Adama would take us back if we stole one of the Raptors, not even for Hera.”

“I’ll talk to him. Starbuck will talk to him, too, he’ll listen to her--”

“Oh, frak Starbuck,” Sharon muttered. “Frak her, and frak everybody on this frakking ship. I don’t want to hear about how the great frakking Starbuck will fix everything, Karl - I want my frakking daughter back!”

“I know. And we’ll get her back, we will, we just...” Helo’s voice caught in his throat. “You’re right. We can’t do anything right now. Not until Adama gives us a ship. Or maybe Roslin--”

“That bitch took her away the first time,” Sharon growled.

“I know. But things are different now - Roslin is different now. I think she might be able to help us. We’ll talk to her, we’ll talk to Sonya--”

“Iris said she’d talk to her for us. I wanted to, but...” She shook her head. “I wasn’t sure they’d let me, or that Galactica would take me back if I went over there. I can’t risk losing what little bits of trust they have in me.”

“They trust you.”

“Bullshit. They trust me as far as they can throw me, Karl, and you know it. But we don’t have any other choices right now. Sonya can’t protect us if we steal a ship, or even give us assistance - their resources are limited, and she’s sworn to uphold Adama’s military rule in exchange for her place on the quorum. We’re trapped here, and that bitch...” She shook her head as tears finally thickened her voice beyond her power to speak through them. “That bitch has Hera.”

“I know. I just wish...” No, no point in that. He swallowed the wish and started over. “There’s nothing else we can do right now.”

For a long moment, Sharon was silent. Then she took a deep breath and straightened, pushed out of his arms, and he thought That’s it, it’s over, she’s going to leave me. I can’t lose both of them in one day. But Sharon didn’t even look at him. She walked over to their bed and pulled out her footlocker out from underneath, and began rifling through their few possessions, removing a series of lumps wrapped in bundles of fabric. As Sharon unwrapped them, one by one, Helo saw that they were her statues of the Lords of Kobol. Bright-eyed Athena, goddess of wisdom and war and victory. Artemis of the wild-lands with her bow, and Zeus, the father of Gods and men, the cloud-gatherer. And Hera.

“After they took her, the first time, I swore I wouldn’t talk to any god - any of them, Cylon or Human - again. Especially not these. They weren’t ever mine, even if I remembered them - they were hers, Boomer’s,” Sharon told him. “But I remembered them giving her comfort, and I couldn’t just throw them away. Then, after...” She touched the statue of Hera as tenderly as he’d ever seen her caress their daughter. “It didn’t seem important anymore,” she admitted in a low tone. “We had her back. I thought... but I think maybe I was wrong. Do you have...?”

He nodded. Tucked away in the footlocker, wrapped in neat layers of clean linen, were the votary statues. Zeus, of course, Ares the leader of righteous warriors, and Poseidon the Earth-shaker. “There’s, uh, more...” He stood up. “I knew you didn’t want them out, but...”

In the closet, hidden behind a small stack of uniform shirts and a box of random junk, aegis-bearing Athena and cow-eyed Hera in her youthful maiden aspect stood together beside Helios, the light of the sun. A candle stub and low bowl with the faintly sticky residue of moonshine ambrosia lingering in it stood before them in silent testament to his uncertainty. “I couldn’t put them away like that. The others, maybe, but... for you and...” He trailed off, and picked up the two statues, bringing them back over to the bed where Sharon waited.

“All this time...?”

“You said you didn’t want the gods in our home. I... I couldn’t do that.”

“You should have told me.” Sharon shook her head. “No. Forget that. I should’ve known. Karl...”

“We will get Hera back, Sharon. One way or another, or I’ll die trying. I swear it--”

“Not just you.” Sharon’s fingers tightened around the statue of Athena with her spear and shield, and he saw her jaw clench, grim and sure. “We both will, if we need to. I’d rather die trying to get her back than live a thousand years without her.”

“Me too.” He bent forward and kissed her forehead. “But for now...”

“You don’t have to. Kalos k’agathos.” She snorted. “You’ve done everything good and proper, just like always. But I have some apologies to be making.”

“I do, too.” Helo reached out tentatively and took her hand. “We’ll do it together. That’s how it should be.”



* * * *

Notes:

The tradition of the groom’s best friend staying outside the marital bedroom after the wedding, standing guard and singing bawdy songs, is a practice from Ancient Greece, as are a few other little details from that section. For a fun and accessible resource with more detail on ancient Greek wedding traditions than I could squish in here, check out this essay on the subject. I hope you’ll indulge me for tweaking the slightly uncertain timeline of the skipped year in order to make it work here.

Kalos kagathos (Wikipedia link here) is an idiomatic phrase in ancient Greek, indicating the best of mankind - ‘handsome and brave’ essentially, with the connotations of both a gentleman and a knight or war hero. Agathos in particular meant excellence of character, particularly adherence to ethics and the duties of citizenship. Nothing at all like anybody whose name might have been based on the phrase, of course. ;)