{ split subject }

title: "Five Things That Never Happened to Sharon Valerii"
author: julie levin russo
beta: my iamsab signed off on it -- would that I could have written this while downloaded into her brain
pairings: Galactica!Boomer/Caprica!Boomer, Caprica!Boomer/Six/Seven of Nine [ST:Voyager] (*character death), Sharon/Galen/Cally, Starbuck/Roslin, Grace Park (*RPF, gratuitous lesbian moms)
rating: NC-17
challenge: frackufest #19 ~ A cylon copy meets its (literal) match.
archiving: not without asking, please.
disclaimer: Sharon "Boomer" Valerii and Battlestar Galactica are owned by a lot of people who aren't me (R&D TV, Sky TV and USA Cable Entertainment LLC, Ron Moore and Glen Larson). This is an original work of fiction that, in the author's understanding, abides by the principles of fair use. Grace Park, Katee Sackhoff, and Michael Rymer are real, and this story isn't.
A/N: this is based on Season 1. given that Boomer's cylon model number hasn't yet been stipulated in canon, I'm calling her Eight, for the sake of symmetry. eta: omg I'm PSYCHIC!!! either that or TPTB read this story ;P

*****

: four :

It's the first time you've seen Cally since the Galactica was decommissioned. She'd gotten a job crewing deep space freighters, and rarely turns up in Caprica City these days. Or so you'd heard; it had been so long that Galen was surprised to get her comm. As you tongue your way toward her nipple, you imagine you can taste the stale, acrid air of long voyages on her skin, like a dusting of ambrosia. You've been shuttling dignitaries around the colonies for years now as a military escort -- as if there's nothing left of your civilization but the decadent rituals of politics -- and the flavor of the stars is a memory blossoming in your mouth.

Cally's fingertips are tracing the distended swell of your belly, testing its shape.

"You know, when the baby comes," Galen had said, "we're going to be too tired to do this very often." You were sprawled in bed after a frak. "Isn't there anything you've always wanted to try?" He'd kissed your neck suggestively as he asked; this had never been your idea.

You met Cally for drinks, and she sparkled in the dim lighting of the bar. Her hair is shorter than on Galactica and falls stylishly across one eye, and she wears lipstick. You watched Galen slant toward her like a magnet to iron, and shifted from one hip to the other on the stool, trying to find your balance.

"I'm sorry I couldn't make it back to Caprica for the wedding," Cally said, with disarming sincerity. "I'm told it was stunning."

"Sharon was so lovely." Galen smiled indulgently, letting one hand rest on your bare forearm.

"That's not hard to imagine" -- and Cally blushed as she replied. Two hours later, Galen is pumping his cock as he watches you undress her, sliding your palms up her ribs to gather her slip.

Her pelvis undulates against your jaw as you suck her clit, but you know your technique is clumsy and uninspired. She's looking at Galen as you eat her, and you suspect her alluring sighs of pleasure are mostly for show. Sure enough Galen groans, and scrambles to straddle her head. She blows him enthusiastically, letting him work her throat until she gags. She slides her fingers into her own folds, then, and you stop licking and sit back, wiping her off your mouth with a corner of the sheet.

She really is beautiful like this, flush spreading over her chest as she strokes herself frantically. Galen's eyes are closed; one hand is supporting her neck, the other squeezing a breast rhythmically. Next he's going to frak Cally, while she goes down on you. He may think of this as an eleventh-hour effort to spice up your sex life, but his desires are numbingly predictable.

The baby kicks you as he somersaults, and these people who should be his family seem suddenly like strangers, extra terrestrials who materialized in your bed by hyperlight jump. Blanketed in empty spectacle and routine, you cradle your stomach and wish you had a different world to offer him.


: one :: remix by trascendenza :

The day of the disaster you're trudging to school, kicking up clouds of dun-colored dust as you shuffle your feet, when the sky goes blindingly white. You close your eyes. You open your eyes. You don't see the cragged turf, the haphazard tatter of buildings, the flinty, scudding sky of Troy. You see a bronzeish and shadowy arc, its surface scored by a tangle of wiring, which, after a moment, you identify as a ceiling. You turn your head. A bank of indecipherable electronics squats nearby, with two people (strangers) attending to its readouts. Standing next to them, all stillness and indifference to the machines, is you. Evidently you're lying here, horizontally, on what feels like a bed or table, and also standing over there next to them. You blink.

"She's awake," you say. That is, the other you. The adults turn -- a man and a woman.

"Hello Sharon," the woman says. "Don't be afraid. You are a child of God."

When you move, your muscles feel jellied and creaky, as if (like the girl in the fable) you'd slept for one hundred years. You look down at yourself; mirroring the others, you're wearing only a shapeless grey shift. Your feet, your hands, the legs, stomach, face that you can touch with them, all these are familiar -- your body. Your mind, your memories. Are they memories? The dinner table laid for an occasion, with real meat to eat and candles that make the faces ranged around them flicker; the spires of Aerelon City, its greenery and bustling market squares, and you holding tight to someone (father's?) hand; a history lesson, in the cinderblock schoolroom: a servant class of robots called Cylon Centurions, rebellion/untold slaughter/armistice, the value of humility before the Gods and respect for the limitations of technology -- all these seem to float and ripple, as if submerged.

"Who are you?" Yes, that's your voice, if froggier than usual.

One hour later, these are the things you know:
• your serial number is 08-0022P
• the "P" stands for "prototype"
• you'll now be addressed as "Twenty-Two"
• your double is named "Sixteen" (which, incidentally, is how old you are)
• this is a facility for production, research and training
• what it produces is you -- you're one of a new breed of cylon, which the Centurions were called by God (only one God?) to create
• your mission is to eradicate the human race
• your parents, your friends, your teachers are dead -- Troy mining colony has been completely annihilated

One hour later, you're locked in a bare metal room, after you screamed and kicked and bit and cursed these vile interlopers until the Centurions subdued you by force. Sixteen comes to visit you every day (you might as well call these indeterminate periods days) until you're raving and broken enough to talk to her.

You sleep in a featureless dormitory with 24 beds. When you're awake, you file along to classes and tests: engineering, tactics, protocol, athletics, of course the unrelenting monotheism, and more injections and electrodes and examinations than you can count.

When you're supposed to be sleeping, though, is when you get your real education. Flocks of you huddle on mattresses, whispering. Each of you is minutely distinct, and among only Model Eights these variations are magnified -- there's the romantic and the scientist, the gossip and the goody-two-shoes, the melancholic and the zealot. Nine, for example, is a scamp, and likes to hack into classified systems when the staff isn't looking. "I think," she reports, "that the main component they're trying to perfect is memory. For an infiltrator, you know, the fullness of human experience is an invaluable asset. Far more efficient to retain it through the cloning process than to attempt to manufacture and teach it." Sometimes the older ones know the most. "Four told me," Sixteen recounts gravely, "that they're going to select one of us to be a sleeper agent -- to go back to Sharon's life, without remembering any of this." Sixteen is still your inseparable companion, and often stretches out in bed with you after the rest have gone to sleep. Her iteration didn't take well, and she has only dreamlike shreds of life on Troy. She tends toward the sentimental, though, and always asks for your stories (which you enjoy chronicling because it's a way for you to keep them). "I took exams last season," you tell her, "six hours of writing in what they call the gymnasium -- it's really just a bigger room with lines painted on the concrete floor -- in high summer heat. Ugh, it was hell, and plus I studied nonstop for months beforehand. Right before all this," you wave your hand to indicate the identical girls, the ominously functional architecture, your new and ill-fitting identity, "I got the letter awarding me a scholarship to the military college in Aerelon City. Mom and Dad were so proud that they took me out to the pub and let me drink..." You pretend you're not crying (you're a cylon now), but Sixteen twines her arms around your neck anyway, and holds you close. She kisses your neck, your cheek, the corner of your lips, and before you know it you're smooching open-mouthed. "Did you ever do this with a boy?" she asks.

There's kissing every night after that, and tentative explorations of hands underneath the baggy shifts (which offer little in the way of barriers). "Sixteen, that sleeper agent?" You're on top of her, the pressure of her thigh between yours making you buzz maddeningly, her face framed by the black curtain of your hair. "I'm going to be her. I mean, I'd give anything to be Sharon again and go to school in Aerelon City and have all these memories wiped. I can do the best on all the evaluations, I know I can. But listen, if I am picked, and I go off to live as human while you're still a cylon, you have to come and find me. When I'm activated, and everything comes crashing down around me, I want you to be there when I wake up. Like you were the first time."

Sixteen traces your cheekbones with her fingertips and says, "OK, I will be -- I promise."


: three :: remix by amathela :

Bent double, your palms pressed against your throbbing temples, you realize it was a moan that awakened you. Grille decking; a slimy trail of calcified residue down the wall, where a pipe has been trickling; a perimeter of minimum-energy yellow tube lights: you're backed up to the bulkhead of a remote corridor in the lower decks, halfway between deep storage and waste processing, and you have no idea how you got there. You hear the moan again (choked and urgent), wet suckling sounds, panting and rustling. Beside you is a strut, one of the wide steel ribs of the ship, and some of the rivets have rusted loose over the years, leaving coin-sized holes. You peer through one, in the direction of the noise; what you see is President Roslin, arching away from the wall at her shoulder blades like a bird in flight, as Lieutenant Kara Thrace fumbles recklessly with the fastenings of her blouse. You're dizzy and disoriented -- it's possible that this is merely a surreal, feverish hallucination. Unfortunately, when you look again for verification, the view is similar: Starbuck has pinned both of Roslin's wrists, chuckling at the president's breathless squirming as she nips along her collarbone.

You're evidently either insane, neurologically damaged, or an unwitting cylon agent -- but you've learned, of necessity, to suppress the vortex of panic that seizes you when you contemplate your ever-more-frequent blackouts. For the moment, you have more immediate problems: if you're discovered here, everyone will doubtless assume the worst, so you'd better start thinking like a cylon, at least. Options for escape: the corridor behind you runs under the hangar bays, and it would be possible to make your way upstairs by that route. But you don't know what time it is, and thus what passages are likely to be manned. You assume you're off duty. Less suspicious to turn up somewhere in the warren of lounges and bunks that serves for living quarters -- but the lovebirds are blocking the way. If Starbuck is escorting the president on one of her official walkthroughs (albeit one with unscheduled stops), they'll be heading back in that direction, toward the bridge.

You know that the wisest and most appropriate course of action until then is to focus only on keeping absolutely still and silent until the tryst is finished. You manage that for a minute or so, through a "Please," three "There"s, and innumerable "Yes"s, after which you decide that if you're going to have to listen to frakking Starbuck frak the president of what's left of the colonies while your mind as you know it slowly disintegrates, you're sure as hell going to enjoy the show.

Starbuck has always been golden, if given to tarnishing herself, and her skin appears burnished in the low light, glimmering as it plays over flexing muscles. She seems no different to you than when she's flying -- it's the same abandon in her body, the same total concentration in her touch as when she handles the controls of a raptor. President Roslin -- rumpled and gasping -- strikes you, by contrast, as obscenely at odds with her sober public persona (who knew she had any other?). She has Starbuck topless, nose buried in the unexpected fullness of her breasts. Despite yourself, you slip your hand clandestinely into your pants.

"I want to have your baby," Starbuck says, bunching up Roslin's skirt until a thrilling scandal of black lace and garters peeks out.

Roslin laughs, a short and strangled whimper, as Starbuck lifts one of her elegant legs around her waist and strokes the secret flesh above her stocking-tops.

"What?" Starbuck's teasing is shockingly tender. "You've said our primary objective right now is to reproduce, perpetuate the species. I can't imagine making a baby with anyone but you. Little Lauras who would grow up to save us all."

Roslin just cups the back of her neck and pulls her into a desperate kiss. When she comes, it's silently, holding her breath and trembling in Starbuck's arms. Tears well up under her eyelids and Starbuck catches them on her tongue.

They leave before you can get yourself off -- add that to the list of things that were easier before the world ended. You count ten minutes out in your head, then attempt to steal inconspicuously back to crew quarters. It's rancorously unfair, you muse, that you're being persecuted as a suspected cylon, when nobody is who they seem to be.


: five :

Six surveys the paltry selection of hors d'oeuvres, arches an eyebrow to register her derision. "Look," you say, "the wine's quite good." And you hand her a glass. It's white, so she takes it daintily by the stem.

"Tell me Sharon," (she doesn't approve of your decision to keep the name, so she always says it with the hint of a sneer), "was that little heart-to-heart comforting?"

By now, you know better than to let her provoke you. You refrain from pointing out that coming to the meeting had been her idea; she'd taken her exile on Earth rather hard. The government of the 13th Colony and its 'Federation' had stipulated that amnesty for cylon prisoners was a condition of resettlement, and Sharon was happy to blend in with the humans. Six, on the other hand, just prayed, and waited for a sign. She'd probably hoped to find a band of disgruntled proto-revolutionaries at the cyborg support group, instead of this outpouring of earnest emotional turmoil and assimilationist doctrine.

"Isn't there anyone you want to talk to?" Six snorts delicately in disdain, but frankly, you wish she'd take up with some other comrades. You're sizing up a striking blonde standing against the wall behind her, equally svelte and haughty. She's alone and holding a napkin with one wilting canapé, but manages to appear only slightly awkward. When she catches you staring, she glides across the floor toward you.

"One would think," she says, setting her napkin and its charge down on the buffet table, "that with the collective processing power in this room we could come up with a more impressive array of refreshments."

Charmed, you grin at her. Six, apparently, is less impressed. "Perhaps some of us prefer to serve a higher cause," she quips, icily. Undeterred, the woman extends her hand.

"My name is Seven."

Six laughs, throaty and rich, and Seven does look affronted then, guardedness furrowing into her brow.

"No, please, my apologies," Six says, warming into her charisma at last, "I'm Six." She takes Seven's hand before she can finish withdrawing it.

"What a remarkable coincidence." When Seven smiles, the device ringing her eye tilts enchantingly.

"I'm Sharon," you interject, "but you could call me Eight." Seven shakes your hand, but seems perplexed by the overeager joke.

"If you're not too human to countenance model numbers," Six elaborates, ribbing you.

"Some people," Seven says, "call me Annika." It's possible that you fall in love with her at that moment.

By the bottom of your second glass of wine, Seven is describing the biofeedback mechanisms of her remaining Borg implants. Even from your limited experience, it's clear that this is the sort of thing people discuss at cyborg support groups. Six is interested in the technology for her own reasons, and she's angled her shoulders invitingly toward her new acquaintance, a calculated intimacy that Seven responds to in kind. Already the third wheel, you're just nodding politely at appropriate points. But when Seven finishes, "I can never procreate, though," her voice roughens, thinning into an unexpected silence.

"I bore a child, once," you add, without being quite sure why you're confessing.

"What happened?" Seven's query is innocent, as if she's wholly unaware that a more tactful response might be called for.

"He's not mine anymore." Six eyes you warily. This is not something you talk about.

Seven continues, openly, in a tone that's quiet and grey. "My... ex-girlfriend, she had a baby. Who I suppose is no longer mine either." She pronounces "ex" like it's the capital letter, unwieldy in her mouth.

Six is perhaps only anxious to change the subject, but she picks up keenly on the most salacious aspect of the revelation. "You had a female lover?"

The thing about Six is that she actually adores sex, though she'd never admit she does it for any reason outside divine will or personal gain (which tend to conveniently align). She supports herself by seducing wealthy men who appreciate a woman who controls them. You're not sure whether Six sees the current situation as an opportunity to double her odds in the future, or as a novel and exotic sexcapade. But Seven is captivating and strangely brittle, and you'll be frakked if you're going to let Six chew her up and spit her out like she does her male lovers. So when Six is addressed with, "if you'd like to return with me to my apartment, I could further explicate my regeneration alcove," you invite yourself along. Six just smirks and says, "the more the merrier."

Six is more or less irresistible, and she's well aware of it. She reclines lissomely on the spartan sofa in Seven's living room, the slit in her skirt riding dangerously up one thigh, and allows Seven to offer her a drink. You know you're dim and frumpy in comparison, but you're not about to let her make the first move. You follow Seven to the replicator, ostensibly to help carry the beverages, and daringly (if casually) touch the small of her back. You imagine she leans very slightly toward you. When she passes you your cocktail, your fingers brush.

But Six has claimed the seat next to her, and, before you can so much as refresh your syntheholic buzz, she's got her hands around Seven's midriff, tracing the tantalizing ridges under her fitted blouse.

"These are Borg implants?"

Seven's breath hitches, and she nods.

"May I?" Six asks. Seven steals a glance at you as Six, ever debonair, bunches up the gauzy fabric, reaching exploratorily underneath.

You'll play Six's game, if that's what it takes. You get up, move to the edge of the couch behind Seven. You stroke her back again, on exposed skin and metal, mumbling a feigned scientific interest in the cybernetics. Soon enough you can drop the pretense, because Six is kissing her, pressing her backward against your chest. Seven pulls away, turns her head to kiss you too. The sharp, liquid taste of her explodes on your tongue.

Entwined, Six and Seven look like classical statuary, flawless and alabaster. On the bed, you've ended up behind them again, Seven's pale hair feathering over your sternum as Six trails caresses down her stomach. Seven's labia are bare, delicate as the paired halves of a fruit -- and, judging from the way Six devours them, equally as delectable. Six reads the movements of Seven's hipbones with her fingertips and watches her face as she writhes; she knows how to satisfy a lover, regardless of their equipment. One of Seven's hands is guiding Six's head, but with the other -- the one augmented with a filigree of machinery -- she takes yours, slides your finger and hers into her mouth (tongue against circuitry against flesh). Then she folds your palm around her impossibly ripe breast. Its weight is molten, like new life. You'd get yourself off, but Seven's body between your legs blocks your access.

After she comes, Seven flips Six onto her back. She runs her fingernails over the perfectly-proportioned lines of Six's torso, as if fascinated by the unbroken suppleness of her skin.

"The illusion is impeccable," she murmurs, squeezing a pert nipple.

"All the enhancements are microscopic, like your nanoprobes." Six is stretching luxuriously under her ministrations, like a cat. "Fuck me," she purrs (apparently there's some Earth slang she's had occasion to learn). Seven reaches to open the drawer of her bedside table, and you catch a glimpse of a holopic: an auburn-haired woman with a toddler at her hip. What she takes out is a dildo attachment, which she seats at her center with an audible click. Six laughs and spreads her knees brazenly, staring into Seven's eyes as she's impaled. You're inching toward the edge of the bed, thinking you were a fool to imagine you could keep them from getting lost in each other, when Seven deftly tugs you back. You tumble awkwardly over their splayed bodies, and find yourself straddling Six as Seven kisses you. Her Borg hand slides into your folds, surprisingly seamless and smooth, and hums against your clit. You float in a haze of pleasure. Six, who is panting as she meets Seven's vigorous thrusts, pushes two fingers into you from behind. "God has a plan for us, Sharon," you hear her say. And while normally this sort of talk isn't a turn-on, you figure that if God's plan involves frakking like this, perhaps you should be having religious experiences more often. Six twists her hand cruelly, but you're so high that the pain ignites you, and you come, as Seven swallows your cries.

Reeling and spent, you recognize only gropingly that Six has stopped moving. Seven is calmly removing the dildo, setting it on the nightstand. It appears suddenly ominious, with its intricate array of dials and indicators near the base. "Six," you say. There's no reaction. Her eyes are open, staring blankly. You press your palms to her belly, her chest, her cheeks, shaking her, but she's gone. The most primitive mechanisms of your body grind and sputter, and by the time the blood has rushed from your sex to your head and your ears are ringing with adrenaline, Seven has you in the sights of an energy weapon.

"What... Why are you doing this?" You've had the opportunity to notice that, when you're staring down death, the scale of achievement is magnified. Under the circumstances, this sputtering, outraged sentence, which could be your last, feels like a feat of heroism.

"I work for the Starfleet intelligence group Section 31, and we've determined that the cylon immigrants present an unacceptable security risk." Seven's voice is measured, even sad. "I'm sorry," she says, and puts her hand on your thigh, almost consolingly. Two tubules snake out and puncture your skin like fangs. Before the world blinks out, you have a moment to marvel that she actually sounds like she means it.


: two :

"Bet you've never played opposite yourself before, eh?" Mike goads you gleefully, but you're already as excited about the scene as he is -- it's just that you have to slacken your face as makeup fabricates cuts and bruises, matching them to the continuity polaroids. "Let's go over this one more time: today we're running it with you as Caprica Boomer; tomorrow, Galactica Boomer. So we'll do the establishing shots that feature both of them now, and get you in with the green screen later on for the other half. Then everything goes along as normal, only with your body double standing in -- ah, here she is."

The woman who's just walked into wardrobe looks nothing like you. She's of a similar height and build, with spiky peroxided hair and an easy, freckled smile.

"Hey, thanks for being a part of the show," Mike says, shaking her hand. "Meet Grace."

When you greet her -- Mary, her name is -- she's just another professional acquaintance, like any one of the innumerable crew. There's a flurry of costume, and an hour later she's decked out in a carefully-disheveled black wig and flight suit, looking every bit your echo -- at least from the back. You're sitting around drinking coffee with Katee, watching Mike and the cinematographer run roughshod over the set, when her cell phone rings.

"Hi baby," she says. You can't hear the other half of the conversation. "No, we haven't started yet... Yeah, it's fantastic... Uh huh... Oh, really -- so you can't pick him up?... Well, it seemed fine... I guess we don't have a choice... I'm sure he'll be OK... K, hang in there -- bye babe."

"My partner," she explains, when she catches your inquisitive glance. "She was supposed to be out of work by dinnertime, so she could take our son home. He's at studio childcare. But the producer she's working for is psycho, and just switched the shooting schedule all around last-minute, so he's going to have to stay till one of us is done later tonight. But they were really nice there, so."

"Aw, how old is he?" Katee is, like, obsessed with babies.

"Twenty-two months," Mary answers. She's beaming.

You're trying to envision what Mary's 'partner' would look like -- a work-booted carpenter or a high-heeled hairdresser? The only image you can conjure is a double of Mary's face, tanned and open, before it was framed by the accouterments of your character. When you're rolling -- and Katee marches you into the brig with a penetrating affectation of weariness, and you lean against her restraining arm as if wounded (which this Boomer is) and speak to the other Boomer into the empty air -- you conjure the presence of your own double in the cell in the same way, refracted as in a prismatic lens. When it's Mary's turn to stand in for the reverse shots, she sparks like tinder, giving back your lines with a thrum of invigorating energy; you can almost see your next day's performance superimposed on her body.

By the time Mike calls a wrap, you're laughing and linking arms like twins. There's a flash of skin and the knobby arc of spine as she strips off her uniform jacket and undershirt. Then she turns (half-naked, all slenderness and natural athleticism) to catch you before you head back to your trailer. "Hey, want to come down to childcare on your way out and meet David?"

The baby's sleeping when you get there, and Mary peels him gently off the naptime cot. "Here, can you hold him while I organize his stuff?" Your grip is tentative and awkward, but he settles against your shoulder with a child's unconscious innocence, life-warm and endearingly powder-smelling.

As you adapt to his weight, another woman creeps in the doorway, broad-shouldered and sleek. "Oh hi," she says, sotto voce, "I'm Emily -- it's a thrill to meet you. We're big fans of the show." She croons "Hey Davie," and leans close to kiss him on the forehead.

Mary has reappeared. "Stop it with the fangirling, you're embarrassing me." But she kisses Emily nevertheless. Witnessing that moment of casual tenderness, you imagine you could split, sci-fi-like, into two branches: who's to say this couldn't have been you, cradling a son, loving a woman, in a parallel lifetime?

"I just got off," Emily explains, "so I thought I'd come by here to meet you." She gathers up David, and you part ways at the entrance to the parking lot. "See you tomorrow, bright and early," Mary says.

You reply, "I'm looking forward to swapping places with you."

::