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Battlestar Galactica: Fic: Germs and Steel

Feb. 4th, 2016 at 2:28 PM

godsdaisiechain.livejournal.com

Title: Flesh, Germs and Steel
Author: godsdaisiechain
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Challenges: Metal, teamwork, borrowed title
Type: Fic
Characters/Pairing: Baltar, Kara Thrace, Sharon (Boomer)
Rating: G
Note: Title is actually borrowed
Summary: Baltar, Boomer, and Starbuck ponder the limits between substances, Cylons, and the fleet.

Gaius Baltar lurched awake from another dream of the basestar, the Cylons riddled by disease. He was surrounded by hard, cold steel. Metal. Galactica. Odd, how comforting it seemed, this stark, cold place, isolated and alone in a barren universe. How different those battered interiors from the Cylon ships, gleaming, punctuated by velvet redder than blood, embedded with the flesh of the hybrids. The Cylons had mastered, somehow, the combination of flesh and machine, metal and flesh, flesh as machine. They had no planets, only ships, had somehow mastered flesh and yet they yearned for something else. God. Love. Humanity. If he had not been so busy staying alive, he could have laughed at the irony of it all.

Boomer pressed down the memories, but they rose up in her dreams. The almost fleshy interior of the resurrection ship. The dozens of sister copies. A team, sharing minds and thoughts and feelings. Flesh of her flesh. Bone of her bone. The germ of an idea tickled the back of her mind. The raider, the pet, animal and flesh inside, even with its brain removed. Shouldn’t machines be metal? How could she be a machine and still flesh? What was she?

Starbuck had once breathed in a Raider’s reek, warm metal, fleshy sacs and fluids. Nothing like the stark, cold interior of a viper, a raptor, of a battlestar. The thin skin of metal was all that separated a person from an unforgiving universe, eager to suck away life and light and hope. Later, when she returned from earth, Starbuck would remember those scents, reeking in her nostrils days later, with a certain bitter nostalgia. Recalling the days when she knew what she was, where the lines were.