[personal profile] chanter1944
I swear, with all the reading I've been doing lately, I have three very similar characters all clamouring for fic space in my head; Cally, Kaylee and Cally. BSG's sister won out, for now. I swear I need to make/find an icon with those three standing side-by-side or something, strange as that may sound. The serene one, the innocent one, and the little girl one. I know, I'm weird. :)

Title: Truly Human
Author: chanter
Series: Battlestar Galactica 2003
Characters/pairings: Cally-centric, with mention of the rest of Galactica’s crew
Rating: PG13
Summary: Cally contemplates life and colors.
Spoilers up through early season 2, you have been warned.
Exactly 500 words yay!


Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t bleed silver, what with the engines and the ships and the tools and everything. I get rust under my fingernails and grease down my sleeves and somewhere between one fighter and the next it probably all seeps in. I can drink, and cook without burning a hole in the bulkhead, and untangle wires in my sleep and fight my way out of a bad situation if I have to. But only if I have to.

Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t bleed silver. I’m man enough to.

So in the end I’m this girl deckhand all caught up between the oil and the metal and the flour and only feminine in the little ways I can handle being, somewhere between sneaking down to the galley and baking cookies at midnight and helping get the wing of a stealth ship up in half the time any other deck crew could manage and doing better than they could besides. Some days I brush my hair out and come over all covered in iron dust for my trouble. And some nights I step out of the shower and just breathe the scent of lavender on my skin, just to remind myself I like it.

Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t bleed silver. I’m woman enough to.

And maybe I should bleed silver, if that sort of thing works as penance for what I did. The old man said you can’t love a machine, can’t care about a machine. And part of me knows he’s right but I killed, I fired and it doesn’t matter that I was hearing voices while I did it. I think about it and I still want to throw up. That woman wasn’t Sharon, that woman wasn’t even a woman but still, even killing a computer makes me sick inside. The lines are blurry. Blurrier than I like them.

Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t bleed silver. I’m flawed enough to.

I look around this place, and everybody from the chief to Lee to the colonel and everyone else in between is different than me, really different than me, more than just the way a human is from another human. It’s so military around here sometimes it makes my head hurt and never mind there’s civilians in the fleet - I’m on a battlestar. It’s kind of inevitable. Most of them can pick up a gun without batting an eye and talk about missions without seeing the after-effects behind their eyes before they see the rest.

I can’t.

And I never could.

And I don’t want to. I don’t know if it’s me being naïve or refusing to grow up or what the frak it is, but I never want to be like that. Not actively, not for more than a few seconds at a time. Not for more than the time it takes to keep me alive.

Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t bleed silver.

But surprise or not, I’m glad I don’t. I’m too human to.

Date: 2006-06-12 02:58 pm (UTC)
ext_2888: (Default)
From: [identity profile] kitrona.livejournal.com
Yay! I love Cally... she's so cute and innocent... *must watch season 2....*

Date: 2006-06-13 09:15 pm (UTC)
ext_2888: (Default)
From: [identity profile] kitrona.livejournal.com
In a little-kid, awkward kind of way, yeah. :) She's one of those you just feel protective of. :)

Date: 2006-06-13 12:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] leesm19.livejournal.com
Carlie,
Are you still at school? If so, would you be opposed to Brian McGee and I kidnapping you on either Wednesday or Thursday night? Let me know!

Love ya!
~Shauna
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