Entry tags:

bsg, cavil, fic, sharon

Title: Some Way Out
Author: beatrice_otter
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Characters: Boomer, Cavil
Word Count: 592
Summary: If all this has happened before and will happen again, what does that say about God?


Cylons don’t have religious services in the same way that humans do. Boomer likes that, when she thinks about it, because it makes it less obvious how different she is. There are already enough signs of that.

She didn’t think about it much when she first resurrected and found herself back on Caprica. She had never been very religious, but this whole idea that there’s only one God—that was freaky and weird. But at least no one was pressuring her to do anything with it, like they wanted her to leave behind her human apartment and possessions and memories.

On New Caprica, during those endless dark days when everything went wrong, wrong, wrong, she thought about it a little more, and prayed to any God she could think of—the Colonial gods, the Cylon god, the universe, whatever—to make everything turn out right. It didn’t help. If anyone’s listening, they’re not paying attention.

The sixes and the twos and even sometimes the threes go on and on about God’s plan, and the other eights follow obediently along. The closest Cylons get to worship services is groups of Cylons talking about God, about God’s plan. They’re informal and irregular and repetitive. Boomer doesn’t say anything, blends into the background, concentrates on not drawing attention. She’s becoming quite good at that. Everyone just assumes that all Cylons, and particularly all copies of the same model, are one big happy family, of one mind in everything. After New Caprica, after everyone saw what her idealism led to, she’s something of an embarrassment, ignored as much as possible. She slips away when the subject of God comes up, and no one notices.

Well, no one except the spokesman for the Ones, the one who calls himself Cavil.

She often sits in a corner by herself, projecting blank walls. Not space—that would remind her of Galactica. Not a house—that would remind her of the Chief. Not wilderness—that would remind her of New Caprica. Not anything from her past—that would remind her that none of it ever existed. And the walls of the basestars remind her that she’s here. She spends a lot of time trying not to remember anything.

Cavil sits next to her, one day while others talk about God. She doesn’t like his model, never has—they dismiss her and mock her. But they do that to everyone; there’s nothing personal in it, and so she prefers them to all the other models. Cavil doesn’t intrude on her projection, doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t disturb her at all. She ignores him.

Finally, the discussion in the other room breaks up. Little groups wander off to their duties, some still talking about religion.

“‘All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again,’” Cavil says, quoting the closest thing Cylons have to a creed. “Dunno if it works in real life, but it sure describes those little chats to a ‘t.’”

Boomer snorts. He has a point. She thinks back over her own life, how every time she thought she had no more to lose, every time she thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, she was horribly wrong. And every time things went well, it was only a setup for another fall. “If there really is a god out there who makes it happen, I hope I never meet Him.”

“You said it, sister,” Cavil says. For the first time in her memory, he’s not being sarcastic. They sit and watch the others walk by in their smug certainties.