(no subject)
Title: from the stories on their faces
Author: spamdilemma
Author's Contact Info: spamdilemma@livejournal.com
Rating: pg
Genre: character study
Pairings (if any): Sharon/Tyrol, minor Sharon/Helo
Summary: When Sharon was Sharon
When Sharon was Sharon she liked to fly.
She entered the academy only after another student dropped out and a slot opened; only after a scholarship somehow materialized for her. Only then did Sharon discover, climbing into her Raptor that first time (not a simulation, a real machine humming under her touch), that this was good. This was not some last ditch attempt at a future.
Her roommate was in the Raptor program as well, though she came from a military background, knew others not just in their division. Sharon knew no one and didn't make much attempt to rectify that.
Her roommate soon grew exasperated with her, one night demanding, "Sharon, you need to get out! It's never going to get any easier than our first year."
"I'm fine," Sharon said to her, eyes steady on the page of her flight manual.
Later, Sharon was hardly surprised when her roommate applied for a switch. When no one came to replace her, Sharon used the extra bed to pile her dirty laundry, shoes, and whatever else she wasn't in the mood to sort. She pushed the bed together with her own when she brought back a boy to frak. Lying there afterwards, not touching, he asked Sharon who used to room with her.
Sharon honestly couldn't remember the girl's name and said so. The boy then asked her, "What's my name?"
Sharon turned her body away more fully and told him the truth. She didn't care what he thought of her, and when she caught his face in the crowd the next day she averted her eyes. It wasn't in shame - she just didn't want to see the color patch he had stitched on his uniform.
First session came to a close and Sharon volunteered to work at the academy over the break. She had no reason not to.
Her parents had died on Troy years earlier, and she'd lived off the goodwill of a nearby temple until she came of age. Only once did Sharon visit the site of her parents' deaths, the old mining settlement. Sharon prayed for their souls at the temple, but she had wanted to see for herself where they had spent their last moments.
She made the trip a week after her eighteenth birthday in the heat of summer. There wasn't much there, not that there ever had been, not that she had expected there to be. Still.
A shabby memorial stood at a distance and Sharon went to it, ran a finger down the list of names of all who had died. She ran her finger down again, and then numbly headed back to her borrowed car. Her seat nearly blistered against her skin, but she hardly took notice. Sharon told herself that there must be a mistake, that people just didn't disappear like so much dust.
Yet her parents were gone, their names along with them. Was she all that remained of their existence? Was the name she bore all that was left of them and then -
Sharon had no answers, couldn't see how anyone could procure them for her, and so she drove off kicking up dirt in her wake.
When term began again, Sharon had a bit of pocket money to spend. She put half into an old tea tin to save, and then walked over to the street of shops close by. She found the one she wanted, wandered out half an hour later with something dearer to her than she cared to admit. She made a silent promise that she would put her parents names where they belonged. Until then, Sharon would keep the engravings in the old tea tin with her small store of cubits.
The second boy she brought to her room to frak commented on her choice of tea. "Troy brand, right? Haven't seen that in ages."
"They don't make it anymore," she told him, touching the label where the lettering broke off before turning out the light.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she got a shite posting. The Galactica wasn't a ship that her career-minded peers would have wanted; they would have wanted something - well, something not rumoured to become a museum if it didn't collapse into itself before then. But Sharon didn't mind. She'd never driven herself to want anything more than a ticket out into space.
Her first ECO went by a ridiculously long callsign that she promptly forgot the next day. Ripper laid into her how vital it was to remember not only everyone's callsigns, but their names as well. They worked as a unit, a team. How she had gotten this far with so lackadaisical an attitude, he couldn't imagine.
The ECO with the ridiculously long callsign took her aside afterwards. He told her that she was right - that everyone shortened his handle anyway. He said to call him 'Helo' from then on, not that she had ever referred to him as anything at all before. He wore a look of such earnestness that Sharon dismissed him on the spot - whatever deviation his name took.
"How'd you get your callsign, Boomer?" Helo asked her on an otherwise unremarkable CAP.
Sharon ignored him, didn't think him so daft as to not take the hint, but she'd apparently underestimated him there.
"All right, how about I tell you about mine first?" He went on without any prompt. "My flight instructor, to pass my exit exams, she helped me out a bit. My callsign's one of those things - you know, to remember..."
"You were sleeping with her," Sharon said with her usual lack of tact. Helo didn't protest, Sharon sensed he wouldn't - wouldn't outright lie to her. But his shame dug into her, shamed her too.
"I'm not judging you because you were frakking your instructor," Sharon tried. "Happens more often than you think. I might've had mine not been old man Doherty." She kept going, softer. "Doherty - he thought he was being cute. I never talked in class unless I was specifically called on. 'Boomer' is supposed to be ironic, I guess."
At his continued silence, Sharon looked up from her console. She found Helo staring at her with something in his face that almost made her afraid. When she spoke, her voice was distant even to her own ears. "Coordinates?"
"We're good," Helo said, his eyes on her still. Sharon turned to hold her back to him, but his gaze remained, hot and strange on her skin.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she met Kara Thrace bent double over a latrine. The door hadn't been locked and Sharon spent one wordless moment staring at the back of Thrace's head. Sharon had never considered herself an especially decent person, but she summoned some decency up on occasion: moving forward to hold back Thrace's hair while she puked her heart out.
"Thanks," Thrace told her when she finished, as if inebriated retching was just one of those things.
Maybe it was, Sharon supposed. "No problem. Figure that's my good deed for the year. Better write it down lest I forget."
"Got a roll of paper right here," Kara said, giving the dispenser a spin. "Got a pen too." She dug one out from one of her many pockets and narrated as she wrote. "As Kara Thrace knelt heaving in the third stall in the head -"
"Fourth, actually," Sharon put in.
Kara turned to regard Sharon, a slow dawning coming over her. "Oh, right. Aren't you Helo's pilot?"
"He's my ECO," Sharon clarified.
"Whatever. You still clock some serious time in the cockpit with that fool."
Sharon groaned, "Tell me about it. If he recycles one more story about that stupid pet he had -"
"Atticus, the frakking bird!" Kara grimaced. "Gods, how awful is that? He's burned it into my brain."
"I'm already concerned about the overexposure," Sharon admitted.
Sharon pointed out Helo's face the next day when she and Kara were breakfasting. "No tolerance," Sharon said the same time Kara chided, "Frakking lightweight." They were suspiciously quiet when he stopped short at their table.
"I didn't know you two even knew each other," Helo got out.
"Me and Sharon?" Kara asked. "We go way back. To the third stall in the head."
"Fourth," Sharon amended, and they both cracked up.
He hedged, "Don't even tell me."
"Not to worry, we weren't going to," Kara informed him, and that was all it took to set them off again.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she never returned home.
Her childhood spent on Troy was a mixture of patchwork memories and long spans of time that fell blank in her mind. Too many details were either blurred or she was completely unable to recall. It frustrated Sharon, not able to remember further back than that first day wandering up the temple stairs. She had a small pack with her and the clothes she wore were ill-fitting; a flour sack, she would later realize, was what she was wearing. But at the time, it seemed a shapeless dress that caught her around her knees and itched at the seams.
The priestess who Sharon first stumbled onto stared at her with eyes that were neither kind nor unkind. They were just eyes taking her in, and when Sharon said something, with difficulty - pride squeezing her throat closed - the priestess nodded, her look unchanged. Sharon never learned this priestess's name, nor the names of any of the others. Soon, Sharon nearly forgot her own name until she had paperwork to do and the blank spaces before her had to be filled with in "Valerii" and "Sharon" and "yes" and "no."
Sharon had been a charity case all her life - all her life that she could draw from - and even on a battlestar further from home than she could imagine, she could still feel the burn of that request through thin, scratchy material. Sharon had been a charity case all her life and she was torn in different directions, how much to repay and to whom?
Sharon sent a marginal offering to the temple that took her in. She wrote to old man Doherty on Colonial Day, knowing full well that he hadn't a chance of remembering her. She took the engravings with her parents' names out of the old tea tin and kissed them twice. Sharon sat on her rack, she didn't know for how long, but when she fumbled opening her tin again, Sharon caught Helo there watching her in that way he sometimes (forever) did.
"What?" she demanded of him with shaking hands.
She hated it when he said nothing, when all he did was look and she was almost certain he could see that lost child wearing only a flour sack and left on some stranger's doorstep, a prayer in her head and a name that sounded awkward on her own tongue.
"We're docking at Samo Saturday," Helo mentioned one day after weeks of drifting. "Troy's not too far off from there. I'm sure the CAG wouldn't mind if you -"
Sharon stilled her writing hand, covered her letter paper with the other. "What makes you think I'd want to go back there?"
Helo looked her over carefully. "I only figured it'd be nice for you... to go home again."
Sharon scoffed, "You obviously haven't been to that particular rock. You know what they say: get out while you can."
"I never heard that," Helo said softly. Sharon listened to him rummage through his locker, gathered up her own courage.
"Helo, there's one thing I'd go back for. But I can't do it, not yet."
He didn't push her, just nodded and made his way towards the hatch, sponge kit in hand.
"Wait," Sharon said. "How did you know I was from Troy, anyway? I never told you that."
"Didn't have to. With a podunk accent like that?"
Sharon threw her pen at him; he dodged it easily, laughing when it clattered to the floor. Sharon lay back on her bunk and thought about going home to Troy, why it didn't sit right with her. When the other pilots came in at the end of a shift, hearing their idle ribbing; when Helo returned with Starbuck, both of them sitting down right atop her until she cried mercy, Sharon suddenly knew.
Troy had stopped being her home for some time.
---
Sharon still worshipped, at a temple when she could. She wasn't picky about which one, they were never the open air places she was used to. She'd never owned any idols anyway, offered only herself, the scriptures she had etched in memory, and bowed down in memory of people she knew not.
Most in the military weren't particularly devout, and so it was unusual to catch that familiar gray in the dark cool building. Sharon almost thought to leave, not wanting to confront someone else - have that someone else confront her about things she kept so personal. But he stood and turned before she even moved, making her decision for her.
"Sir," he said in her direction and saluted. Sharon could feel herself frowning, though she returned his gesture unthinkingly.
"You don't have to address me by that," she told him. "We're off duty, Chief."
"It's still protocol." He had his idols laid in soft woven cloth, saw her looking. "Hephaestus and Aphrodite. You, sir?"
Sharon hesitated. "Hestia. And we're in a temple, so please just - drop the formalities."
The chief studied her for a moment. "Of course. If you don't mind my asking... Sharon," Tyrol tried. "Hestia's not a common deity -"
"And you're an expert on the religious order?" Sharon bit out.
He shrugged. "My mother's an oracle. My father's a priest."
"I was raised at a temple of Hestia," Sharon said quietly. "I - there was nowhere else for me to go. Charmed life, right?"
"Well, I wouldn't say that. But still a fortunate one."
Sharon bristled, at that. "You don't know me, how can you assume my life -"
"You're alive aren't you?" Tyrol cut in. "You've got two hands, two legs, and a head that works, don't you? You've an academy education, pilot training. You're an officer in the colonial fleet with a career ahead of you. I'd call that fortunate."
Sharon, for once, had no retort at hand. To her mortification, her eyes brightened with tears. "Does that sum it up?"
"Hey," he said softly. "Sharon, hey, I'm not condemning you here -"
"Does that sum it up?" Sharon repeated.
"There is the fact," Tyrol went on, "that you're a beautiful woman. And that's all I can assess for now."
She was too surprised to work up any scorn. "You're not supposed to test out lines in a place of worship."
"I pray to Aphrodite," Tyrol laughed. "She's a dubious influence." He resumed the wrapping of his idols, and didn't look at her again as he left.
Sharon shook her head, but it was too full of telling truths. She knelt at the altar and went through the same motions of prayer. When she finished she paused and then continued, this time beseeching Aphrodite's favor.
The next time Sharon met the chief, it wasn't in a temple built for the gods, but one closer to his heart. Her Raptor's engine gave out on her and she was grounded for her longest stretch of time.
Sharon wandered out onto the deck the first two days, touched her broken Raptor and left. The third day she bit back any of her former hindrance and asked the chief of the deck for his help.
His glance up at her from his clipboard was brief. "Wondered when you'd get around to asking, sir," he said. "About time you learned how to fix your own bird."
The chief was as good as his word. He went through the naming of parts, where those parts fit into the scheme of things. He taught her the insides of what she flew; what made her tick and what made her sing under Sharon's surer hand.
On the sixth day, her Raptor came to life. Sharon leaned back on her elbows in astonishment, and when she turned to the chief standing off to the side - there was unmistakeable pride there, in his face. Sharon ducked her head, in embarrassment, in something else.
She found herself making just a little more excuses, finding just a little more time out of her day to be on deck. The chief was always there, ready with a smile and something new to show her. Ready as always to build up from the inside out.
Sharon helped Tyrol out from under her Raptor after a check-up last shift. He faltered a bit, but Sharon held his weight strong. She never realized she'd been this strong.
"Getting old, Chief," she teased.
"Well, if you pilots quit making a mess of things, I might be faring better." He laughed, made to move off her, but Sharon kept him back.
"Chief, I -" she started. "I'd like there to be something more... here."
His face was smeared with grease and honest. "Sharon," he said. "I'd be lying if I said - if I didn't want there to be. But that doesn't mean we can."
"I don't care about regs," Sharon told him. "We'll watch ourselves. No one'll know."
He brushed the hair from her eyes very carefully. "Are you sure?"
"As sure as I am about anything."
They didn't redefine discretion and everyone knew, though no one cared to do a thing about it. Sharon didn't want to read anything into Helo's offhand "Late night, huh?" - but there was an underlying coolness in it that was so unlike him. She tried harder to be warm, to offer Helo something like what he gave her in the beginning, and she almost fooled herself into thinking that it worked. But then she would look at him - really look - and the hurt in his face never went far under the surface.
So Sharon tried not to look, not too deep. Not when the chief looked at her like he did, only for her. Not when he was so genuine, so gentle. Not when she finally gave herself up to the difference between a quick frak and falling hard over and over again. She couldn't help it.
When Sharon was Sharon she fell in love.
---
When Sharon was Sharon the world ended, though her world did not. But it started chipping away quickly, with fear talking, and then Helo talking, and then her fingers against the glass and his face.
"Are you sad because we left that man behind?" the little boy named Boxey asked her hours into space.
"Yeah," Sharon kept her voice careful. "He was - he is my partner."
"Maybe he'll take care of my mother." Boxey was thoughtful. "He looks like he could turn over about ten cylons and then some."
Sharon offered him a small smile. "He probably will. He put up with me all this time, and the gods know I'm worse than all that."
"Where are we going?" he asked after some pause.
"I'm going to show you my home. It's like another world."
Her second ECO had a ridiculous callsign period and Sharon didn't care to remember it. She started to pretend he didn't exist, because it was too hard to face him any other way. Sharon couldn't stop turning around in her seat expecting Helo to be there, reciting something or other she'd heard a thousand times over; laughing when she made a face, staring at her when he thought she wasn't paying attention.
The chief told her gently that Helo was gone, but he wasn't, not really, not to Sharon. She loved Tyrol, she did, but he couldn't understand her here. He couldn't understand that even with another ridiculous ECO sitting there with her, the empty space was almost too acute to bear. He couldn't understand that there would always be an emptiness, and it was hers to keep.
Sharon went to Helo's rack when everyone else was asleep. She sat there, and it was her first time; he had always come to her, before. She touched his cluttered shelf of things, took a pin that came with a silly story back with her. Added it to her old tea tin of memories that weighed down her heart.
At the pilot mess, Sharon sought out Kara, found her forever with the new CAG, sharing a history she had no part in. Sometimes Sharon sat with them and quietly ate. Most times she pulled away, took a sandwich with her on her way to the hangar bay.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she flew out alone. Helo gone, Kara gone, the chief lost to her.
She found herself laying bombs, and gaps in time were missing, like before, like before. When she finally had a handle on her gun and her suspicions, she tried to blow her head off. When Sharon could no longer trust herself that was when everyone put their trust in her. Sharon held a gun in her hand again and shot away at their standing faith.
When Sharon was Sharon she died knowing what she was. She threw that knowledge out and grasped at her false gods and memories. Thought of her parents, Abraham and Katherine. Prayed to Hestia, to Aphrodite. Sharon didn't believe in one god, nor in all; she believed in who she was when she was and then -
She let go.
Author: spamdilemma
Author's Contact Info: spamdilemma@livejournal.com
Rating: pg
Genre: character study
Pairings (if any): Sharon/Tyrol, minor Sharon/Helo
Summary: When Sharon was Sharon
When Sharon was Sharon she liked to fly.
She entered the academy only after another student dropped out and a slot opened; only after a scholarship somehow materialized for her. Only then did Sharon discover, climbing into her Raptor that first time (not a simulation, a real machine humming under her touch), that this was good. This was not some last ditch attempt at a future.
Her roommate was in the Raptor program as well, though she came from a military background, knew others not just in their division. Sharon knew no one and didn't make much attempt to rectify that.
Her roommate soon grew exasperated with her, one night demanding, "Sharon, you need to get out! It's never going to get any easier than our first year."
"I'm fine," Sharon said to her, eyes steady on the page of her flight manual.
Later, Sharon was hardly surprised when her roommate applied for a switch. When no one came to replace her, Sharon used the extra bed to pile her dirty laundry, shoes, and whatever else she wasn't in the mood to sort. She pushed the bed together with her own when she brought back a boy to frak. Lying there afterwards, not touching, he asked Sharon who used to room with her.
Sharon honestly couldn't remember the girl's name and said so. The boy then asked her, "What's my name?"
Sharon turned her body away more fully and told him the truth. She didn't care what he thought of her, and when she caught his face in the crowd the next day she averted her eyes. It wasn't in shame - she just didn't want to see the color patch he had stitched on his uniform.
First session came to a close and Sharon volunteered to work at the academy over the break. She had no reason not to.
Her parents had died on Troy years earlier, and she'd lived off the goodwill of a nearby temple until she came of age. Only once did Sharon visit the site of her parents' deaths, the old mining settlement. Sharon prayed for their souls at the temple, but she had wanted to see for herself where they had spent their last moments.
She made the trip a week after her eighteenth birthday in the heat of summer. There wasn't much there, not that there ever had been, not that she had expected there to be. Still.
A shabby memorial stood at a distance and Sharon went to it, ran a finger down the list of names of all who had died. She ran her finger down again, and then numbly headed back to her borrowed car. Her seat nearly blistered against her skin, but she hardly took notice. Sharon told herself that there must be a mistake, that people just didn't disappear like so much dust.
Yet her parents were gone, their names along with them. Was she all that remained of their existence? Was the name she bore all that was left of them and then -
Sharon had no answers, couldn't see how anyone could procure them for her, and so she drove off kicking up dirt in her wake.
When term began again, Sharon had a bit of pocket money to spend. She put half into an old tea tin to save, and then walked over to the street of shops close by. She found the one she wanted, wandered out half an hour later with something dearer to her than she cared to admit. She made a silent promise that she would put her parents names where they belonged. Until then, Sharon would keep the engravings in the old tea tin with her small store of cubits.
The second boy she brought to her room to frak commented on her choice of tea. "Troy brand, right? Haven't seen that in ages."
"They don't make it anymore," she told him, touching the label where the lettering broke off before turning out the light.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she got a shite posting. The Galactica wasn't a ship that her career-minded peers would have wanted; they would have wanted something - well, something not rumoured to become a museum if it didn't collapse into itself before then. But Sharon didn't mind. She'd never driven herself to want anything more than a ticket out into space.
Her first ECO went by a ridiculously long callsign that she promptly forgot the next day. Ripper laid into her how vital it was to remember not only everyone's callsigns, but their names as well. They worked as a unit, a team. How she had gotten this far with so lackadaisical an attitude, he couldn't imagine.
The ECO with the ridiculously long callsign took her aside afterwards. He told her that she was right - that everyone shortened his handle anyway. He said to call him 'Helo' from then on, not that she had ever referred to him as anything at all before. He wore a look of such earnestness that Sharon dismissed him on the spot - whatever deviation his name took.
"How'd you get your callsign, Boomer?" Helo asked her on an otherwise unremarkable CAP.
Sharon ignored him, didn't think him so daft as to not take the hint, but she'd apparently underestimated him there.
"All right, how about I tell you about mine first?" He went on without any prompt. "My flight instructor, to pass my exit exams, she helped me out a bit. My callsign's one of those things - you know, to remember..."
"You were sleeping with her," Sharon said with her usual lack of tact. Helo didn't protest, Sharon sensed he wouldn't - wouldn't outright lie to her. But his shame dug into her, shamed her too.
"I'm not judging you because you were frakking your instructor," Sharon tried. "Happens more often than you think. I might've had mine not been old man Doherty." She kept going, softer. "Doherty - he thought he was being cute. I never talked in class unless I was specifically called on. 'Boomer' is supposed to be ironic, I guess."
At his continued silence, Sharon looked up from her console. She found Helo staring at her with something in his face that almost made her afraid. When she spoke, her voice was distant even to her own ears. "Coordinates?"
"We're good," Helo said, his eyes on her still. Sharon turned to hold her back to him, but his gaze remained, hot and strange on her skin.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she met Kara Thrace bent double over a latrine. The door hadn't been locked and Sharon spent one wordless moment staring at the back of Thrace's head. Sharon had never considered herself an especially decent person, but she summoned some decency up on occasion: moving forward to hold back Thrace's hair while she puked her heart out.
"Thanks," Thrace told her when she finished, as if inebriated retching was just one of those things.
Maybe it was, Sharon supposed. "No problem. Figure that's my good deed for the year. Better write it down lest I forget."
"Got a roll of paper right here," Kara said, giving the dispenser a spin. "Got a pen too." She dug one out from one of her many pockets and narrated as she wrote. "As Kara Thrace knelt heaving in the third stall in the head -"
"Fourth, actually," Sharon put in.
Kara turned to regard Sharon, a slow dawning coming over her. "Oh, right. Aren't you Helo's pilot?"
"He's my ECO," Sharon clarified.
"Whatever. You still clock some serious time in the cockpit with that fool."
Sharon groaned, "Tell me about it. If he recycles one more story about that stupid pet he had -"
"Atticus, the frakking bird!" Kara grimaced. "Gods, how awful is that? He's burned it into my brain."
"I'm already concerned about the overexposure," Sharon admitted.
Sharon pointed out Helo's face the next day when she and Kara were breakfasting. "No tolerance," Sharon said the same time Kara chided, "Frakking lightweight." They were suspiciously quiet when he stopped short at their table.
"I didn't know you two even knew each other," Helo got out.
"Me and Sharon?" Kara asked. "We go way back. To the third stall in the head."
"Fourth," Sharon amended, and they both cracked up.
He hedged, "Don't even tell me."
"Not to worry, we weren't going to," Kara informed him, and that was all it took to set them off again.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she never returned home.
Her childhood spent on Troy was a mixture of patchwork memories and long spans of time that fell blank in her mind. Too many details were either blurred or she was completely unable to recall. It frustrated Sharon, not able to remember further back than that first day wandering up the temple stairs. She had a small pack with her and the clothes she wore were ill-fitting; a flour sack, she would later realize, was what she was wearing. But at the time, it seemed a shapeless dress that caught her around her knees and itched at the seams.
The priestess who Sharon first stumbled onto stared at her with eyes that were neither kind nor unkind. They were just eyes taking her in, and when Sharon said something, with difficulty - pride squeezing her throat closed - the priestess nodded, her look unchanged. Sharon never learned this priestess's name, nor the names of any of the others. Soon, Sharon nearly forgot her own name until she had paperwork to do and the blank spaces before her had to be filled with in "Valerii" and "Sharon" and "yes" and "no."
Sharon had been a charity case all her life - all her life that she could draw from - and even on a battlestar further from home than she could imagine, she could still feel the burn of that request through thin, scratchy material. Sharon had been a charity case all her life and she was torn in different directions, how much to repay and to whom?
Sharon sent a marginal offering to the temple that took her in. She wrote to old man Doherty on Colonial Day, knowing full well that he hadn't a chance of remembering her. She took the engravings with her parents' names out of the old tea tin and kissed them twice. Sharon sat on her rack, she didn't know for how long, but when she fumbled opening her tin again, Sharon caught Helo there watching her in that way he sometimes (forever) did.
"What?" she demanded of him with shaking hands.
She hated it when he said nothing, when all he did was look and she was almost certain he could see that lost child wearing only a flour sack and left on some stranger's doorstep, a prayer in her head and a name that sounded awkward on her own tongue.
"We're docking at Samo Saturday," Helo mentioned one day after weeks of drifting. "Troy's not too far off from there. I'm sure the CAG wouldn't mind if you -"
Sharon stilled her writing hand, covered her letter paper with the other. "What makes you think I'd want to go back there?"
Helo looked her over carefully. "I only figured it'd be nice for you... to go home again."
Sharon scoffed, "You obviously haven't been to that particular rock. You know what they say: get out while you can."
"I never heard that," Helo said softly. Sharon listened to him rummage through his locker, gathered up her own courage.
"Helo, there's one thing I'd go back for. But I can't do it, not yet."
He didn't push her, just nodded and made his way towards the hatch, sponge kit in hand.
"Wait," Sharon said. "How did you know I was from Troy, anyway? I never told you that."
"Didn't have to. With a podunk accent like that?"
Sharon threw her pen at him; he dodged it easily, laughing when it clattered to the floor. Sharon lay back on her bunk and thought about going home to Troy, why it didn't sit right with her. When the other pilots came in at the end of a shift, hearing their idle ribbing; when Helo returned with Starbuck, both of them sitting down right atop her until she cried mercy, Sharon suddenly knew.
Troy had stopped being her home for some time.
---
Sharon still worshipped, at a temple when she could. She wasn't picky about which one, they were never the open air places she was used to. She'd never owned any idols anyway, offered only herself, the scriptures she had etched in memory, and bowed down in memory of people she knew not.
Most in the military weren't particularly devout, and so it was unusual to catch that familiar gray in the dark cool building. Sharon almost thought to leave, not wanting to confront someone else - have that someone else confront her about things she kept so personal. But he stood and turned before she even moved, making her decision for her.
"Sir," he said in her direction and saluted. Sharon could feel herself frowning, though she returned his gesture unthinkingly.
"You don't have to address me by that," she told him. "We're off duty, Chief."
"It's still protocol." He had his idols laid in soft woven cloth, saw her looking. "Hephaestus and Aphrodite. You, sir?"
Sharon hesitated. "Hestia. And we're in a temple, so please just - drop the formalities."
The chief studied her for a moment. "Of course. If you don't mind my asking... Sharon," Tyrol tried. "Hestia's not a common deity -"
"And you're an expert on the religious order?" Sharon bit out.
He shrugged. "My mother's an oracle. My father's a priest."
"I was raised at a temple of Hestia," Sharon said quietly. "I - there was nowhere else for me to go. Charmed life, right?"
"Well, I wouldn't say that. But still a fortunate one."
Sharon bristled, at that. "You don't know me, how can you assume my life -"
"You're alive aren't you?" Tyrol cut in. "You've got two hands, two legs, and a head that works, don't you? You've an academy education, pilot training. You're an officer in the colonial fleet with a career ahead of you. I'd call that fortunate."
Sharon, for once, had no retort at hand. To her mortification, her eyes brightened with tears. "Does that sum it up?"
"Hey," he said softly. "Sharon, hey, I'm not condemning you here -"
"Does that sum it up?" Sharon repeated.
"There is the fact," Tyrol went on, "that you're a beautiful woman. And that's all I can assess for now."
She was too surprised to work up any scorn. "You're not supposed to test out lines in a place of worship."
"I pray to Aphrodite," Tyrol laughed. "She's a dubious influence." He resumed the wrapping of his idols, and didn't look at her again as he left.
Sharon shook her head, but it was too full of telling truths. She knelt at the altar and went through the same motions of prayer. When she finished she paused and then continued, this time beseeching Aphrodite's favor.
The next time Sharon met the chief, it wasn't in a temple built for the gods, but one closer to his heart. Her Raptor's engine gave out on her and she was grounded for her longest stretch of time.
Sharon wandered out onto the deck the first two days, touched her broken Raptor and left. The third day she bit back any of her former hindrance and asked the chief of the deck for his help.
His glance up at her from his clipboard was brief. "Wondered when you'd get around to asking, sir," he said. "About time you learned how to fix your own bird."
The chief was as good as his word. He went through the naming of parts, where those parts fit into the scheme of things. He taught her the insides of what she flew; what made her tick and what made her sing under Sharon's surer hand.
On the sixth day, her Raptor came to life. Sharon leaned back on her elbows in astonishment, and when she turned to the chief standing off to the side - there was unmistakeable pride there, in his face. Sharon ducked her head, in embarrassment, in something else.
She found herself making just a little more excuses, finding just a little more time out of her day to be on deck. The chief was always there, ready with a smile and something new to show her. Ready as always to build up from the inside out.
Sharon helped Tyrol out from under her Raptor after a check-up last shift. He faltered a bit, but Sharon held his weight strong. She never realized she'd been this strong.
"Getting old, Chief," she teased.
"Well, if you pilots quit making a mess of things, I might be faring better." He laughed, made to move off her, but Sharon kept him back.
"Chief, I -" she started. "I'd like there to be something more... here."
His face was smeared with grease and honest. "Sharon," he said. "I'd be lying if I said - if I didn't want there to be. But that doesn't mean we can."
"I don't care about regs," Sharon told him. "We'll watch ourselves. No one'll know."
He brushed the hair from her eyes very carefully. "Are you sure?"
"As sure as I am about anything."
They didn't redefine discretion and everyone knew, though no one cared to do a thing about it. Sharon didn't want to read anything into Helo's offhand "Late night, huh?" - but there was an underlying coolness in it that was so unlike him. She tried harder to be warm, to offer Helo something like what he gave her in the beginning, and she almost fooled herself into thinking that it worked. But then she would look at him - really look - and the hurt in his face never went far under the surface.
So Sharon tried not to look, not too deep. Not when the chief looked at her like he did, only for her. Not when he was so genuine, so gentle. Not when she finally gave herself up to the difference between a quick frak and falling hard over and over again. She couldn't help it.
When Sharon was Sharon she fell in love.
---
When Sharon was Sharon the world ended, though her world did not. But it started chipping away quickly, with fear talking, and then Helo talking, and then her fingers against the glass and his face.
"Are you sad because we left that man behind?" the little boy named Boxey asked her hours into space.
"Yeah," Sharon kept her voice careful. "He was - he is my partner."
"Maybe he'll take care of my mother." Boxey was thoughtful. "He looks like he could turn over about ten cylons and then some."
Sharon offered him a small smile. "He probably will. He put up with me all this time, and the gods know I'm worse than all that."
"Where are we going?" he asked after some pause.
"I'm going to show you my home. It's like another world."
Her second ECO had a ridiculous callsign period and Sharon didn't care to remember it. She started to pretend he didn't exist, because it was too hard to face him any other way. Sharon couldn't stop turning around in her seat expecting Helo to be there, reciting something or other she'd heard a thousand times over; laughing when she made a face, staring at her when he thought she wasn't paying attention.
The chief told her gently that Helo was gone, but he wasn't, not really, not to Sharon. She loved Tyrol, she did, but he couldn't understand her here. He couldn't understand that even with another ridiculous ECO sitting there with her, the empty space was almost too acute to bear. He couldn't understand that there would always be an emptiness, and it was hers to keep.
Sharon went to Helo's rack when everyone else was asleep. She sat there, and it was her first time; he had always come to her, before. She touched his cluttered shelf of things, took a pin that came with a silly story back with her. Added it to her old tea tin of memories that weighed down her heart.
At the pilot mess, Sharon sought out Kara, found her forever with the new CAG, sharing a history she had no part in. Sometimes Sharon sat with them and quietly ate. Most times she pulled away, took a sandwich with her on her way to the hangar bay.
---
When Sharon was Sharon she flew out alone. Helo gone, Kara gone, the chief lost to her.
She found herself laying bombs, and gaps in time were missing, like before, like before. When she finally had a handle on her gun and her suspicions, she tried to blow her head off. When Sharon could no longer trust herself that was when everyone put their trust in her. Sharon held a gun in her hand again and shot away at their standing faith.
When Sharon was Sharon she died knowing what she was. She threw that knowledge out and grasped at her false gods and memories. Thought of her parents, Abraham and Katherine. Prayed to Hestia, to Aphrodite. Sharon didn't believe in one god, nor in all; she believed in who she was when she was and then -
She let go.