Fic: "and besides you breathe differently down here" (BSG)
For the femgenficathon.
Title: and besides you breathe differently down here
Author: inlovewithnight
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Prompt: 56) The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them. -- Queen Victoria. (Only vaguely used)
Summary: An investigation into the custom of telling lies in the dark.
Title from "Diving Into The Wreck," by Adrienne Rich. Thanks to romanticalgirl and likeadeuce for betaing.
She has one thing to investigate, a single human trait to analyze and report on.
She assumed it must be a flaw. It was too incomprehensible to be anything else. And it made sense, as a weakness: each human mind was alone, unable to ever connect to another, unable ever to truly know the feeling of certainty and unity and the sheer pressing weight of every soul in existence that God had granted the Cylons. And beyond that, the knowledge that each of them was temporary, unrepeatable, unsalvageable after death...well, she can't blame them for their weakness in the face of that.
A Cylon is never alone, never afraid of the dark. A Cylon can project a light into that darkness, and if the shadows do hide some danger, God will save His child and let it live again.
Humans huddle together and try to hide from the shadows, whispering senseless talismans against the dark. It could only be something to pity, she thought. Only one more error, one more mistake.
And the fact that they told stories in the dark, the trait she was sent to examine; that could only be an interesting aberration, no more.
**
There are two years left before the final stages, no time at all in God's eyes. Patience is a virtue and a gift of the Cylon, particularly in comparison to human frailty.
But her task will not even take as long as that. She enrolls as a student in one of their universities. It's a small school, in a rural part of Cancero, far from the major centers where others of her model are beginning their work.
Distance and obscurity are useful, but more extensive precautions are wise. She wears her hair short and dark, and dresses only in the drab brown and green uniforms required of scholars, abandoning all of the physical tools that her other selves use in pursuit of their missions. Her particular task is cerebral, intellectual; she remembers the speaker for the Eights on her base ship sneering that no Six was made for such things, and anger prickles inside of her, hot and sweet. But she sets that aside. God will punish them for their pride, given time and accomplishment of the greater goal. They cannot permit divisions now, not until they have victory.
For her part toward victory, she sits in endless lectures and bends her head over countless books. Certain classes are required, most of them pointless. The human grasp of history is rooted in perversions and lies. Their politics are incomprehensible, meaningless, or appalling, depending on the text she reads and the tone the instructor takes. Their science, their mathematics, both can be dismissed out of hand. And their religion--the falsehoods and absurdities there are simply too much to be borne, and she quickly stops attending. She doesn't actually require the degree, after all. And within a few years this will all be rendered equally meaningless, their false gods and cruel ideas all wiped clean from the universe.
The classes that she permits to hold her attention are those relevant to her assignment; the human culture, their stories, the things they tell one another to keep the dark back and pretend there is significance to their lives. Their literature, poetry, drama, art. These are puzzling things--lies that are called lies, unlike the history and politics shelved alongside them, and yet valued just as much.
Valued more, to some. She sits far in the back of one of the drafty classrooms, the collar of her uniform turned up high, and watches the instructor pace back and forth. "This is what we will be remembered for," he declares, raising a book high above his head. "Not our laws, not our buildings, not our military, not the frakking Pyramid scores. Use your minds! Open them! Open your eyes! In a dozen generations, this is what your descendents will think of when they think of our time! This! These words!"
She looks down at the text in her hands, a copy of the one he praises so highly. It is a slim volume, bound in blue, unremarkable. Poetry, and a few prose essays, the work of a woman from Tauron. An unremarkable woman, as far as she knows, born and died without fanfare, this book a posthumous legacy. The assignment is to read it for the subsequent class. She hasn't yet opened the cover. It must be remarkable indeed if it could last a dozen generations from now.
Except that there won't be a dozen more generations, she reminds herself, dropping the book to her lap again. There will not even be a single generation. There will be fiery death, and God's plan, only those. These words will be forgotten, whatever they are.
**
They are nonsense.
She reads the book twice, then a third time, ignoring her other assignments for the classes she despises anyway. They are irrelevant. This. This infuriating blue book that seems to be in the common tongue but that refuses to read clearly. This requires her attention.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?1
She has read the preliminary, preparatory text for the class. She can identify all of the types of figurative language in use, all of the forms taken by lies. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allusion; she circles each line in her text, labels it, reads again, and still has nothing.
Turning a life into words--keeping a record, a confession, perhaps, as the next line speaks of "atonement" and so there must have been a crime. Creating someone in words--a fictional account, or another record, preserving a memory? Using a river--this must be some sort of reference to a boat, except that has no relation to the lines before it. And how could anyone "use" a war? And the idea that failing to want freedom is somehow worse than death, the permanent and terrifying human death that does not lead to God...
This is supposed to last a dozen generations? It's meaningless now.
The instructor disagrees, but surely not all of the students do. She sits in the next class and waits expectantly for someone to declare it a bad poem, a baffling poem, a nonsensical gathering of words that strips them of their clear and proper meanings.
Instead, one after another praises it for articulation of feeling, for evocative language, for quiet power. She stares at them, baffled, then notes it for her work. Her report. Feeling, emotion, reluctance or refusal to express their emotions concisely or directly. Perhaps there is significance there, although the analysis of emotion is another model's task, somewhere else, far away.
She blinks down at the page, where she has written that without thinking. Somewhere else, far away.
The words make her feel very alone.
**
Another poem, a novel, a play. A week spent on popular songs transcribed from the radio. Her personal notes grow and expand, become muddled and dense, and she finds herself staring at them blankly, seated cross-legged on the bed and tugging at her shorn hair with both hands, unable to summarize, distill, cut to the heart. And aren't those themselves concepts that she's taken from these pages?
Love, that was an overwhelming theme; going by their words in books, every human life revolves around it. Sexual and romantic urges rule them entirely--except no, because this text, and this one, and from what she can understand of this snippet of song, they also desire to be set free from the chains of love, to cut it from their hearts, to run into the wilderness in sweet solitude. And what is she to do with that, how can each be equally true?
Love me, not as the ruffling pigeon
The tops of trees, nor as the legion
Of the gulls the lip of waves.
Love me and lift your mask.
Love me, as loves the mole his darkness
And the timid deer the tigress:
Hate and fear be your two loves.
Love me and lift your mask.2
Claiming the idea of love for simple mechanics of nature, the biologically determined behavior of birds and beasts. Tying together love with hate and fear, the one an antonym and the other at least an opposite; finding love in destruction, termination, consumption. And at the same time, claiming this violence lifts a mask, exposes truth. All under this idea of love, which cannot seem to decide if it is an unmitigated positive or a hopelessly tangled thing.
Contradictions within contradictions, layers of meaning that she cannot seem to dissect. She can call it nothing but incomprehensible, and she sits still and silent in the back of the classroom as the other students fight only about the degree of correctness in the writing, speaking a level above or below her and discussing things she cannot see. She feels as if she is falling.
That itself is something she never would have thought before she came here, or a week ago, or perhaps even a day. It's creeping into me like a disease, these words, she writes, and then crosses it out before those words can burn too deeply into her mind.
**
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life3
The glorification of a sin against God should not be beautiful. A description of hopelessness and despair, of the slow slide of entropy and the potential for termination without possibility for reprieve, or desire for such--it should not be seductive. It should not read as a lure or a call, it should be abhorrent. No Cylon would or could ever fathom such a thing, ever feel it, ever produce it.
She suspects, looking from book to book, tracing her fingers over the pages, that no Cylon could produce any of these things. None of her kind could ever feel such things, write such words. God did not intend them to.
And yet she can't put them aside. She reads them again and again, leans in close to breathe in the pages, plays the songs over and over and closes her eyes until the words ring too loud inside her head to bear. She thinks--suspects--feels that she is beginning to fathom them, after all, that the weight of the words is sinking down through her skin and into her core.
They have broken me, she writes, in notes that have grown expansive and messy, the margins jagged with errata. Broken my surface and let all of these other things get in.
"We shouldn't be reading this garbage," mutters the boy seated beside her, and she glances at him, hoping against hope for a contradiction, a line back to reason that she can report as well as all of this infinite madness.
"We should be reading Tom Zarek's book," he goes on, smacking his hand against the table. His voice is hot with rage and she closes her eyes, choking despite herself, wondering how he can bear to read one more thing.
**
She begins to see it less as a flaw and more as a sort of strange and vicious defensive mechanism, teeth or claws or razor spines made of words.
There's too much of it, too many sharp-edged feelings and hidden contradictions. There is no order here, no lines, no walls. It is less and more than can be held by the rules that Cylons live by, the rules that God gave. And so it must be evil, and grounds for destruction alone even if humanity's other crimes hadn't signed its warrant a dozen times over.
Some of it makes her hurt, in her chest and in her mind. And the texts themselves give her the words for this--heartache, it makes her heart ache. That cannot be less than a wrong. It can't.
But she reads the passages that hurt the most a dozen times or more.
**
She has to renounce it all, of course, when she returns to the base ship.
She stands before the station that links them to the Hybrid and each other, seven cold faces watching her, the speakers for each of the models on the ship. She avoids their eyes as she speaks, and then projects a wall before her, one of the ancient walls of the school, stones and mortar gone soft with time and all grown over with ivy. She had hated the walls, when she began her studies, hated feeling all of that age wrapped around her, the weight of years and lives and thoughts pressing in.
She wouldn't have said that then, of course. She wouldn't have had the words for what the walls made her feel, only that she disliked it and so they should be destroyed, wiped away with those who made and maintained them.
She can't tell the speakers what has changed. They will box her in an instant if her report isn't what they want to hear, what they expect from an obedient child of God, and for all that the seductive call for innocent sleep given in the play haunts her, she only wants to live.
So her report is that the humans lie to themselves and to each other, that they confuse and manipulate, that their stories are dangerous and their songs can harm. And that all of it must go. Every word. Everywhere.
**
She can't leave it at that.
She thought she could; she wants to. She doesn't want the endless silent dark of a black box, but she does want the comfort of quiet shadows, inside her head and her heart, relief from the words that follow her like ghosts even before they have been destroyed.
She is one among thousands. There is nothing that a single voice can do. Power comes from strength and purpose collected, not scattered. Arguing with this is as meaningless as arguing about the creation and the form of her skin or her bones or her hair. They are as they are. They are part of being Cylon.
And yet...and yet.
She can't seem to help herself. When it is her turn to kneel beside the vats as a new consciousness rises, when she finds an unattended panel to press her palm against and touch the minds of the Hybrid and all of the others listening to the ship, when she is the one taking intelligence from the mind of an operative, sleeper or aware, before sending them back again...she can't help it.
She whispers words, piece and fragments that have caught in her heart and her memory like thorns. She breathes questions that don't have answers, and answers to questions that cannot be articulated by her kind. Not yet. Perhaps never. She doesn't know.
She pictures the words spreading as they did in her, a delicate run of cracks in a smooth, glossy surface. Cracks that fill with water and swell and grow, out and down, letting things in.
If it isn't stopped, sealed over, she knows that someday a point of reckoning will come. No, a point of impact, something coming back with another operative, carrying another human flaw or gift like a heavy, featureless stone. It will be unexpected. It will be terrifying. Whatever it might be, it will open up the cracks and shatter the surface, splintering the Cylon unity, scattering them like bits of glass.
And everything will change.
1 From "Twenty-One Love Poems," Adrienne Rich
2 From "Song," Dylan Thomas
3 Hamlet, 3.1.62-71
Title: and besides you breathe differently down here
Author: inlovewithnight
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Prompt: 56) The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them. -- Queen Victoria. (Only vaguely used)
Summary: An investigation into the custom of telling lies in the dark.
Title from "Diving Into The Wreck," by Adrienne Rich. Thanks to romanticalgirl and likeadeuce for betaing.
She has one thing to investigate, a single human trait to analyze and report on.
She assumed it must be a flaw. It was too incomprehensible to be anything else. And it made sense, as a weakness: each human mind was alone, unable to ever connect to another, unable ever to truly know the feeling of certainty and unity and the sheer pressing weight of every soul in existence that God had granted the Cylons. And beyond that, the knowledge that each of them was temporary, unrepeatable, unsalvageable after death...well, she can't blame them for their weakness in the face of that.
A Cylon is never alone, never afraid of the dark. A Cylon can project a light into that darkness, and if the shadows do hide some danger, God will save His child and let it live again.
Humans huddle together and try to hide from the shadows, whispering senseless talismans against the dark. It could only be something to pity, she thought. Only one more error, one more mistake.
And the fact that they told stories in the dark, the trait she was sent to examine; that could only be an interesting aberration, no more.
**
There are two years left before the final stages, no time at all in God's eyes. Patience is a virtue and a gift of the Cylon, particularly in comparison to human frailty.
But her task will not even take as long as that. She enrolls as a student in one of their universities. It's a small school, in a rural part of Cancero, far from the major centers where others of her model are beginning their work.
Distance and obscurity are useful, but more extensive precautions are wise. She wears her hair short and dark, and dresses only in the drab brown and green uniforms required of scholars, abandoning all of the physical tools that her other selves use in pursuit of their missions. Her particular task is cerebral, intellectual; she remembers the speaker for the Eights on her base ship sneering that no Six was made for such things, and anger prickles inside of her, hot and sweet. But she sets that aside. God will punish them for their pride, given time and accomplishment of the greater goal. They cannot permit divisions now, not until they have victory.
For her part toward victory, she sits in endless lectures and bends her head over countless books. Certain classes are required, most of them pointless. The human grasp of history is rooted in perversions and lies. Their politics are incomprehensible, meaningless, or appalling, depending on the text she reads and the tone the instructor takes. Their science, their mathematics, both can be dismissed out of hand. And their religion--the falsehoods and absurdities there are simply too much to be borne, and she quickly stops attending. She doesn't actually require the degree, after all. And within a few years this will all be rendered equally meaningless, their false gods and cruel ideas all wiped clean from the universe.
The classes that she permits to hold her attention are those relevant to her assignment; the human culture, their stories, the things they tell one another to keep the dark back and pretend there is significance to their lives. Their literature, poetry, drama, art. These are puzzling things--lies that are called lies, unlike the history and politics shelved alongside them, and yet valued just as much.
Valued more, to some. She sits far in the back of one of the drafty classrooms, the collar of her uniform turned up high, and watches the instructor pace back and forth. "This is what we will be remembered for," he declares, raising a book high above his head. "Not our laws, not our buildings, not our military, not the frakking Pyramid scores. Use your minds! Open them! Open your eyes! In a dozen generations, this is what your descendents will think of when they think of our time! This! These words!"
She looks down at the text in her hands, a copy of the one he praises so highly. It is a slim volume, bound in blue, unremarkable. Poetry, and a few prose essays, the work of a woman from Tauron. An unremarkable woman, as far as she knows, born and died without fanfare, this book a posthumous legacy. The assignment is to read it for the subsequent class. She hasn't yet opened the cover. It must be remarkable indeed if it could last a dozen generations from now.
Except that there won't be a dozen more generations, she reminds herself, dropping the book to her lap again. There will not even be a single generation. There will be fiery death, and God's plan, only those. These words will be forgotten, whatever they are.
**
They are nonsense.
She reads the book twice, then a third time, ignoring her other assignments for the classes she despises anyway. They are irrelevant. This. This infuriating blue book that seems to be in the common tongue but that refuses to read clearly. This requires her attention.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?1
She has read the preliminary, preparatory text for the class. She can identify all of the types of figurative language in use, all of the forms taken by lies. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allusion; she circles each line in her text, labels it, reads again, and still has nothing.
Turning a life into words--keeping a record, a confession, perhaps, as the next line speaks of "atonement" and so there must have been a crime. Creating someone in words--a fictional account, or another record, preserving a memory? Using a river--this must be some sort of reference to a boat, except that has no relation to the lines before it. And how could anyone "use" a war? And the idea that failing to want freedom is somehow worse than death, the permanent and terrifying human death that does not lead to God...
This is supposed to last a dozen generations? It's meaningless now.
The instructor disagrees, but surely not all of the students do. She sits in the next class and waits expectantly for someone to declare it a bad poem, a baffling poem, a nonsensical gathering of words that strips them of their clear and proper meanings.
Instead, one after another praises it for articulation of feeling, for evocative language, for quiet power. She stares at them, baffled, then notes it for her work. Her report. Feeling, emotion, reluctance or refusal to express their emotions concisely or directly. Perhaps there is significance there, although the analysis of emotion is another model's task, somewhere else, far away.
She blinks down at the page, where she has written that without thinking. Somewhere else, far away.
The words make her feel very alone.
**
Another poem, a novel, a play. A week spent on popular songs transcribed from the radio. Her personal notes grow and expand, become muddled and dense, and she finds herself staring at them blankly, seated cross-legged on the bed and tugging at her shorn hair with both hands, unable to summarize, distill, cut to the heart. And aren't those themselves concepts that she's taken from these pages?
Love, that was an overwhelming theme; going by their words in books, every human life revolves around it. Sexual and romantic urges rule them entirely--except no, because this text, and this one, and from what she can understand of this snippet of song, they also desire to be set free from the chains of love, to cut it from their hearts, to run into the wilderness in sweet solitude. And what is she to do with that, how can each be equally true?
Love me, not as the ruffling pigeon
The tops of trees, nor as the legion
Of the gulls the lip of waves.
Love me and lift your mask.
Love me, as loves the mole his darkness
And the timid deer the tigress:
Hate and fear be your two loves.
Love me and lift your mask.2
Claiming the idea of love for simple mechanics of nature, the biologically determined behavior of birds and beasts. Tying together love with hate and fear, the one an antonym and the other at least an opposite; finding love in destruction, termination, consumption. And at the same time, claiming this violence lifts a mask, exposes truth. All under this idea of love, which cannot seem to decide if it is an unmitigated positive or a hopelessly tangled thing.
Contradictions within contradictions, layers of meaning that she cannot seem to dissect. She can call it nothing but incomprehensible, and she sits still and silent in the back of the classroom as the other students fight only about the degree of correctness in the writing, speaking a level above or below her and discussing things she cannot see. She feels as if she is falling.
That itself is something she never would have thought before she came here, or a week ago, or perhaps even a day. It's creeping into me like a disease, these words, she writes, and then crosses it out before those words can burn too deeply into her mind.
**
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life3
The glorification of a sin against God should not be beautiful. A description of hopelessness and despair, of the slow slide of entropy and the potential for termination without possibility for reprieve, or desire for such--it should not be seductive. It should not read as a lure or a call, it should be abhorrent. No Cylon would or could ever fathom such a thing, ever feel it, ever produce it.
She suspects, looking from book to book, tracing her fingers over the pages, that no Cylon could produce any of these things. None of her kind could ever feel such things, write such words. God did not intend them to.
And yet she can't put them aside. She reads them again and again, leans in close to breathe in the pages, plays the songs over and over and closes her eyes until the words ring too loud inside her head to bear. She thinks--suspects--feels that she is beginning to fathom them, after all, that the weight of the words is sinking down through her skin and into her core.
They have broken me, she writes, in notes that have grown expansive and messy, the margins jagged with errata. Broken my surface and let all of these other things get in.
"We shouldn't be reading this garbage," mutters the boy seated beside her, and she glances at him, hoping against hope for a contradiction, a line back to reason that she can report as well as all of this infinite madness.
"We should be reading Tom Zarek's book," he goes on, smacking his hand against the table. His voice is hot with rage and she closes her eyes, choking despite herself, wondering how he can bear to read one more thing.
**
She begins to see it less as a flaw and more as a sort of strange and vicious defensive mechanism, teeth or claws or razor spines made of words.
There's too much of it, too many sharp-edged feelings and hidden contradictions. There is no order here, no lines, no walls. It is less and more than can be held by the rules that Cylons live by, the rules that God gave. And so it must be evil, and grounds for destruction alone even if humanity's other crimes hadn't signed its warrant a dozen times over.
Some of it makes her hurt, in her chest and in her mind. And the texts themselves give her the words for this--heartache, it makes her heart ache. That cannot be less than a wrong. It can't.
But she reads the passages that hurt the most a dozen times or more.
**
She has to renounce it all, of course, when she returns to the base ship.
She stands before the station that links them to the Hybrid and each other, seven cold faces watching her, the speakers for each of the models on the ship. She avoids their eyes as she speaks, and then projects a wall before her, one of the ancient walls of the school, stones and mortar gone soft with time and all grown over with ivy. She had hated the walls, when she began her studies, hated feeling all of that age wrapped around her, the weight of years and lives and thoughts pressing in.
She wouldn't have said that then, of course. She wouldn't have had the words for what the walls made her feel, only that she disliked it and so they should be destroyed, wiped away with those who made and maintained them.
She can't tell the speakers what has changed. They will box her in an instant if her report isn't what they want to hear, what they expect from an obedient child of God, and for all that the seductive call for innocent sleep given in the play haunts her, she only wants to live.
So her report is that the humans lie to themselves and to each other, that they confuse and manipulate, that their stories are dangerous and their songs can harm. And that all of it must go. Every word. Everywhere.
**
She can't leave it at that.
She thought she could; she wants to. She doesn't want the endless silent dark of a black box, but she does want the comfort of quiet shadows, inside her head and her heart, relief from the words that follow her like ghosts even before they have been destroyed.
She is one among thousands. There is nothing that a single voice can do. Power comes from strength and purpose collected, not scattered. Arguing with this is as meaningless as arguing about the creation and the form of her skin or her bones or her hair. They are as they are. They are part of being Cylon.
And yet...and yet.
She can't seem to help herself. When it is her turn to kneel beside the vats as a new consciousness rises, when she finds an unattended panel to press her palm against and touch the minds of the Hybrid and all of the others listening to the ship, when she is the one taking intelligence from the mind of an operative, sleeper or aware, before sending them back again...she can't help it.
She whispers words, piece and fragments that have caught in her heart and her memory like thorns. She breathes questions that don't have answers, and answers to questions that cannot be articulated by her kind. Not yet. Perhaps never. She doesn't know.
She pictures the words spreading as they did in her, a delicate run of cracks in a smooth, glossy surface. Cracks that fill with water and swell and grow, out and down, letting things in.
If it isn't stopped, sealed over, she knows that someday a point of reckoning will come. No, a point of impact, something coming back with another operative, carrying another human flaw or gift like a heavy, featureless stone. It will be unexpected. It will be terrifying. Whatever it might be, it will open up the cracks and shatter the surface, splintering the Cylon unity, scattering them like bits of glass.
And everything will change.
1 From "Twenty-One Love Poems," Adrienne Rich
2 From "Song," Dylan Thomas
3 Hamlet, 3.1.62-71