BSG (crack)fic: Call; PG, Maggie "Racetrack" Edmondson
This is the long-mentioned, oft-avoided "Racetrack is a lycan" fic. I'm not sure how to classify it, because it's not meant to be comical, but... Maggie's a werewolf. *shrugs* By the way, I blame that Underworld movie that was advertised so frequently during the season 4.5 webisodes. "We can be slaves, or we can be... lycans!" That's what started this whole thing.
Feel free to write more of Racetrack's adventures in lycanthropy!
title: Call
fandom: Battlestar Galactica
rating and warnings: PG; family drama, people turning into wolves...
characters: Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson, Felix Gaeta
summary: Racetrack is a werewolf (yes, really)
spoilers: through the season two finale
beta-reader: daybreak777
word count: around 2200
It hurt--itched all over at first and then her bones ached like they were made of shards of glass. Her thoughts ran through her mind differently, like she was... she didn't know. Like the fever she'd had when she was six, only now she could see things and the smells... She couldn't process all of the new information. When she looked down, she didn't see her hands; she saw paws covered with black fur and that was when she curled up on the floor and whimpered and even that didn't sound right. Maggie wanted to call for her mama but she couldn't make the sounds form.
Then people were shrieking and when she stared frantically around, all she could see were legs and feet. When she tried to jump up and see faces, they herded her into the basement. That's where she woke up the next morning, naked and sore.
Grandpa came the next day.
* * *
Maggie hated it--who would want to be that different as teenager, even just once every thirty-seven days? Not that she told anyone anyway. Her family had quickly shipped her away to her grandfather, so she had to deal with losing her family and being the new kid at school as well as the change in who she was. Life was never the same again.
Grandpa taught her as much as he could during the rest of her adolescence. He growled and barked rules at her, no less when he was human than when he was a wolf. Rules to keep her and others safe; she tried to be grateful but all she could think of was her resentment, burning brightly, that she had this burden and could do nothing about it.
She learned apprehension. Letting people too close meant they were at risk from her. Maggie decided she never wanted to have children because they might inherit it--her curse.
Grandpa told her stories, though. The only time he didn't transform with the full moon was during the Cylon war, aboard a battlestar. That was when Maggie decided she would become a pilot. No planetary lunar cycle meant no change into a beast.
* * *
Leaving Tauron wasn't hard; the military replaced her broken family and the rules--well, after all the rules she'd learned for her life, the military's rules weren't that difficult. She trained hard and made her intentions clear to everyone who asked: she was bound for flight school. It was the best way of making sure she stayed in space rather than planetside.
Soon she grew to love flight for its own sake. She refused to analyze how familiar the adrenaline rush of flying felt. Maggie quickly learned to plan when and where she took shore leave; it had been years since she last transformed.
Maybe she missed it a little, but she would never admit that. She appreciated the freedom from it far more.
And then the cylons came to her home while she was far, far away. It all burned, and Maggie had nightmares about how it might have ended for her family. Grandpa had passed away a few years earlier, but everyone else... even though her mama had never looked at her the same way after her change, she was still Mama. Her brothers, her father--all gone.
Maggie kept flying and she fought. She wasn't scared. She knew she was already dead.
Only death didn't come find her. Instead she'd found another planet. It wasn't perfect--too cold, too damp--but it would be damn hard for the cylons to find. The civilians wanted a rest; hell, half the fleet wanted a rest, and they settled.
Maggie stayed with the fleet, because this planet had a moon. Of course. Life evolved into a easy, quiet pattern of quick flights planetside to help set up their new home and long slow recon flights just in case anything came looking for them. She was okay with this.
* * *
Frak. Frak frak frak. She'd been assigned the donut run from Galactica to New Caprica, but she hadn't thought to check the stage of the damn moon first. Too much comfort in her previous visits--she'd lost the habit.
No time to get off-planet, plus she was expected to ferry passengers back to the fleet the next morning. After checking with a bewildered civilian about the locations of livestock and settlements, she took off at run in the opposite direction, toward the hills.
I'm out of practice at this, she though, breathing hard as she approached the rocky slopes. She found a boulder with an unusual shape. Almost time, so after looking around, she removed her clothes and hid them under the edge of the rock.
The change was almost as painful as Maggie's first transformation; it had been too long since the last time. Finally it passed and her thoughts compressed down to the instincts she had honed during the long nights with her grandfather. She started following a scent, something unfamiliar but definitely edible. She ran across the rocky slopes, feeling a familiar, long-repressed glee.
Then she heard it--the call. Grandpa, she thought for a moment. Even her wolf-mind recognized that couldn't be right. Some part of her, the human part, said not to call back, but she couldn't resist.
He found her after that--male, smaller than Grandpa had been when transformed, with hardly any silver to lighten his fur yet. They ran together across empty fields, playing chase with each other until they found prey. Working as a team, they ran and chased down their kill. After bringing it down they growled over who would eat first. It came with such ease, the desire for dominance, the rules to this game, even though she was with someone unknown.
Then she felt it--the current tingling across her skin. Morning, she thought, and turned back toward the rock-strewn hill. Running, she started changing mid-stride, stumbling and then scraping her knee.
* * *
She'd already put on most of her uniform, carefully pulling trousers past the abraded skin on her leg. She was pulling on one of her socks when Felix Gaeta came into view. Maggie felt it click into place--it was him. She smiled derisively at herself for never noticing it before, the feeling of something familiar about him.
He was wearing civilian clothes and carrying his socks and shoes. "So, Racetrack," he drawled as he approached.
"Mister Gaeta," she replied. She wasn't sure what to say next and the moment of silence went on long enough that it felt uncomfortable.
Grandpa never said anything about this, she thought. "Maybe I should call you Felix now, don't you think?"
He smiled. "We've hunted together. I think that means we can be on a first-name basis."
She looked at him curiously. "So how old were you when it happened?"
"I was twenty-two. Though I didn't know I'd been infected until later."
"Infected?" she echoed. "I thought--" she stopped mid-phrase. Passed along via some kind of person-to-person transmission, presumably... that meant she wasn't the only one. "I thought it was just a family thing. That we were the only ones with the curse." As soon as she said the last word she knew it would sound stupid.
He didn't ignore it. "The curse?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.
"Imagine you're a fourteen-year-old girl and suddenly you're sprouting a tail every thirty-seven days."
"Thirty-seven. That's..."
"The Tauron lunar cycle," she finished for him. "Plus my mom freaked out and I got sent to live with my grandfather and--" she shrugged. "At the time it felt like the world had ended. Little did I know," she said with a twist of her mouth. Worlds ended. They'd both seen the real version of that now.
"Why your grandfather?"
"It skipped a generation." She deliberately didn't use the word curse this time. "My grandfather had the experience dealing with it. No one else in the family knew what to do. He taught me the rules."
"The rules?"
"You know... Stay away from hunters. Don't eat people. Dogs aren't friends or food."
"Don't eat people," he repeated, amused.
"It was never a struggle for you?"
"Gods, no." He looked at her with a small smile on his face. "Of course, I wasn't a hormonal teen the first time I changed."
"So it doesn't bother you? Being different?" Obviously it didn't, or at least not like it bothered her. He'd mustered out of the service willingly months ago, to work for President Baltar. He had to know in advance that this planet had a moon.
He shrugged. "I think it's interesting."
She stared at him, mouth open. Interesting. That was not the word she would have chosen. Before she could think of a smart comeback, he said, "I have a meeting to get to. Maybe I'll see you next month?"
"Probably not," she answered.
He shrugged. "Okay, then." Maggie watched him walk away. He'd just turned everything upside-down with a few simple words.
* * *
Her thoughts ran across unfamiliar trails during the flight back to Galactica. She was by herself; Hamish was on shore leave and this was a routine flight anyway. One of the passengers tried to make casual conversation, which she stopped with a quickly-muttered, "Can't talk, I'm working." That was true but these donut runs were easy.
For the next few days she was distracted, thinking about what had changed. If she didn't see it as a curse, maybe it was something to be valued rather than avoided.
She remembered the transformations with her grandfather, how the colors looked different--less bright, and some colors existed only as shades of grey. Night vision meant that even without some colors, the world was full of surprising details. More of the information she received came through her enhanced olfactory senses. Something about the wolf brain meant that she didn't find the smells unpleasant; they simply were.
Looking back, they had a strange, inhuman beauty, those nights lit by the full moon. Even near the end of his life, Grandpa's long stride as a wolf had outpaced hers. They would drive the afternoon before to an isolated area. As night drew close they'd both feel it--like an electric pulse through the skin. Grandpa's fur was silver and black when he changed.
How would it be, then, to try and purposely experience that? To enjoy it?
A week later she was sent on another supply run to New Caprica. Maggie had never been a fan of waiting or hesitation. She decided not to second-guess herself any more.
On Colonial One, a scantily-dressed bottle blonde told her that Felix Gaeta was busy doing errands for President Baltar. Maggie rolled her eyes at the title, then asked where she could find Gaeta later. The woman shrugged one shoulder, making her dress strap slide down in an obviously practiced move. "At Ricks," she said finally, when Maggie didn't bother looking impressed. "It's the bar in the first row of tents."
After finishing her own commissions, Maggie found the tent. The smoke rolling past the tent flaps was her sign that this was the place. It felt like old times in Galactica's ready room, before they ran out of cigarettes.
Walking over to the table where Felix was sitting, she noticed a couple of the officers--former officers, probably--from the Pegasus CIC were talking to him. She had no problem with interrupting them, though.
"Hey Felix," she said, doing her best to sound as intimate as possible. One of the Pegasus men checked her out, and she grinned at him. "So, last time we saw each other, I think we left things on a bad note. I'd like to change that."
Felix looked amused rather than annoyed at her deliberate wording, a hopeful sign. "I don't think you're his type," said the other Pegasus officer.
"Oh, you'd be surprised at how things change," she told him. "I think I'm exactly his type, given the right circumstances." She turned back to Felix. "I was thinking we should try again. Maybe meet up in three weeks?"
By now they were both half-smiling at the attention and reactions of the others nearby. "It's a date," he told her.
Maggie then played a few rounds of triad and flirted with everyone at the table. She walked back to her raptor early in the morning, a low buzz from the alcohol running through her veins. For the first time ever, she was actually curious, excited even, about what she might experience in three weeks. She had questions for Felix; the most important was are there any others like us?
The questions could wait for the next full moon. Maggie waited for the moment to arrive, for the spark to run through her veins. Twenty more days and then she would see how this new choice might transform her.
It's gray, but the richness of the night's textures dazzles her. The sparkling of frost on the dead leaves, the dark trees looming and forming long shadows under the bright moonlight. She calls and hears an answer, a cry that leads her across the frozen ground.
She's free to roam in the wild darkness.
Feel free to write more of Racetrack's adventures in lycanthropy!
title: Call
fandom: Battlestar Galactica
rating and warnings: PG; family drama, people turning into wolves...
characters: Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson, Felix Gaeta
summary: Racetrack is a werewolf (yes, really)
spoilers: through the season two finale
beta-reader: daybreak777
word count: around 2200
It hurt--itched all over at first and then her bones ached like they were made of shards of glass. Her thoughts ran through her mind differently, like she was... she didn't know. Like the fever she'd had when she was six, only now she could see things and the smells... She couldn't process all of the new information. When she looked down, she didn't see her hands; she saw paws covered with black fur and that was when she curled up on the floor and whimpered and even that didn't sound right. Maggie wanted to call for her mama but she couldn't make the sounds form.
Then people were shrieking and when she stared frantically around, all she could see were legs and feet. When she tried to jump up and see faces, they herded her into the basement. That's where she woke up the next morning, naked and sore.
Grandpa came the next day.
* * *
Maggie hated it--who would want to be that different as teenager, even just once every thirty-seven days? Not that she told anyone anyway. Her family had quickly shipped her away to her grandfather, so she had to deal with losing her family and being the new kid at school as well as the change in who she was. Life was never the same again.
Grandpa taught her as much as he could during the rest of her adolescence. He growled and barked rules at her, no less when he was human than when he was a wolf. Rules to keep her and others safe; she tried to be grateful but all she could think of was her resentment, burning brightly, that she had this burden and could do nothing about it.
She learned apprehension. Letting people too close meant they were at risk from her. Maggie decided she never wanted to have children because they might inherit it--her curse.
Grandpa told her stories, though. The only time he didn't transform with the full moon was during the Cylon war, aboard a battlestar. That was when Maggie decided she would become a pilot. No planetary lunar cycle meant no change into a beast.
* * *
Leaving Tauron wasn't hard; the military replaced her broken family and the rules--well, after all the rules she'd learned for her life, the military's rules weren't that difficult. She trained hard and made her intentions clear to everyone who asked: she was bound for flight school. It was the best way of making sure she stayed in space rather than planetside.
Soon she grew to love flight for its own sake. She refused to analyze how familiar the adrenaline rush of flying felt. Maggie quickly learned to plan when and where she took shore leave; it had been years since she last transformed.
Maybe she missed it a little, but she would never admit that. She appreciated the freedom from it far more.
And then the cylons came to her home while she was far, far away. It all burned, and Maggie had nightmares about how it might have ended for her family. Grandpa had passed away a few years earlier, but everyone else... even though her mama had never looked at her the same way after her change, she was still Mama. Her brothers, her father--all gone.
Maggie kept flying and she fought. She wasn't scared. She knew she was already dead.
Only death didn't come find her. Instead she'd found another planet. It wasn't perfect--too cold, too damp--but it would be damn hard for the cylons to find. The civilians wanted a rest; hell, half the fleet wanted a rest, and they settled.
Maggie stayed with the fleet, because this planet had a moon. Of course. Life evolved into a easy, quiet pattern of quick flights planetside to help set up their new home and long slow recon flights just in case anything came looking for them. She was okay with this.
* * *
Frak. Frak frak frak. She'd been assigned the donut run from Galactica to New Caprica, but she hadn't thought to check the stage of the damn moon first. Too much comfort in her previous visits--she'd lost the habit.
No time to get off-planet, plus she was expected to ferry passengers back to the fleet the next morning. After checking with a bewildered civilian about the locations of livestock and settlements, she took off at run in the opposite direction, toward the hills.
I'm out of practice at this, she though, breathing hard as she approached the rocky slopes. She found a boulder with an unusual shape. Almost time, so after looking around, she removed her clothes and hid them under the edge of the rock.
The change was almost as painful as Maggie's first transformation; it had been too long since the last time. Finally it passed and her thoughts compressed down to the instincts she had honed during the long nights with her grandfather. She started following a scent, something unfamiliar but definitely edible. She ran across the rocky slopes, feeling a familiar, long-repressed glee.
Then she heard it--the call. Grandpa, she thought for a moment. Even her wolf-mind recognized that couldn't be right. Some part of her, the human part, said not to call back, but she couldn't resist.
He found her after that--male, smaller than Grandpa had been when transformed, with hardly any silver to lighten his fur yet. They ran together across empty fields, playing chase with each other until they found prey. Working as a team, they ran and chased down their kill. After bringing it down they growled over who would eat first. It came with such ease, the desire for dominance, the rules to this game, even though she was with someone unknown.
Then she felt it--the current tingling across her skin. Morning, she thought, and turned back toward the rock-strewn hill. Running, she started changing mid-stride, stumbling and then scraping her knee.
* * *
She'd already put on most of her uniform, carefully pulling trousers past the abraded skin on her leg. She was pulling on one of her socks when Felix Gaeta came into view. Maggie felt it click into place--it was him. She smiled derisively at herself for never noticing it before, the feeling of something familiar about him.
He was wearing civilian clothes and carrying his socks and shoes. "So, Racetrack," he drawled as he approached.
"Mister Gaeta," she replied. She wasn't sure what to say next and the moment of silence went on long enough that it felt uncomfortable.
Grandpa never said anything about this, she thought. "Maybe I should call you Felix now, don't you think?"
He smiled. "We've hunted together. I think that means we can be on a first-name basis."
She looked at him curiously. "So how old were you when it happened?"
"I was twenty-two. Though I didn't know I'd been infected until later."
"Infected?" she echoed. "I thought--" she stopped mid-phrase. Passed along via some kind of person-to-person transmission, presumably... that meant she wasn't the only one. "I thought it was just a family thing. That we were the only ones with the curse." As soon as she said the last word she knew it would sound stupid.
He didn't ignore it. "The curse?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.
"Imagine you're a fourteen-year-old girl and suddenly you're sprouting a tail every thirty-seven days."
"Thirty-seven. That's..."
"The Tauron lunar cycle," she finished for him. "Plus my mom freaked out and I got sent to live with my grandfather and--" she shrugged. "At the time it felt like the world had ended. Little did I know," she said with a twist of her mouth. Worlds ended. They'd both seen the real version of that now.
"Why your grandfather?"
"It skipped a generation." She deliberately didn't use the word curse this time. "My grandfather had the experience dealing with it. No one else in the family knew what to do. He taught me the rules."
"The rules?"
"You know... Stay away from hunters. Don't eat people. Dogs aren't friends or food."
"Don't eat people," he repeated, amused.
"It was never a struggle for you?"
"Gods, no." He looked at her with a small smile on his face. "Of course, I wasn't a hormonal teen the first time I changed."
"So it doesn't bother you? Being different?" Obviously it didn't, or at least not like it bothered her. He'd mustered out of the service willingly months ago, to work for President Baltar. He had to know in advance that this planet had a moon.
He shrugged. "I think it's interesting."
She stared at him, mouth open. Interesting. That was not the word she would have chosen. Before she could think of a smart comeback, he said, "I have a meeting to get to. Maybe I'll see you next month?"
"Probably not," she answered.
He shrugged. "Okay, then." Maggie watched him walk away. He'd just turned everything upside-down with a few simple words.
* * *
Her thoughts ran across unfamiliar trails during the flight back to Galactica. She was by herself; Hamish was on shore leave and this was a routine flight anyway. One of the passengers tried to make casual conversation, which she stopped with a quickly-muttered, "Can't talk, I'm working." That was true but these donut runs were easy.
For the next few days she was distracted, thinking about what had changed. If she didn't see it as a curse, maybe it was something to be valued rather than avoided.
She remembered the transformations with her grandfather, how the colors looked different--less bright, and some colors existed only as shades of grey. Night vision meant that even without some colors, the world was full of surprising details. More of the information she received came through her enhanced olfactory senses. Something about the wolf brain meant that she didn't find the smells unpleasant; they simply were.
Looking back, they had a strange, inhuman beauty, those nights lit by the full moon. Even near the end of his life, Grandpa's long stride as a wolf had outpaced hers. They would drive the afternoon before to an isolated area. As night drew close they'd both feel it--like an electric pulse through the skin. Grandpa's fur was silver and black when he changed.
How would it be, then, to try and purposely experience that? To enjoy it?
A week later she was sent on another supply run to New Caprica. Maggie had never been a fan of waiting or hesitation. She decided not to second-guess herself any more.
On Colonial One, a scantily-dressed bottle blonde told her that Felix Gaeta was busy doing errands for President Baltar. Maggie rolled her eyes at the title, then asked where she could find Gaeta later. The woman shrugged one shoulder, making her dress strap slide down in an obviously practiced move. "At Ricks," she said finally, when Maggie didn't bother looking impressed. "It's the bar in the first row of tents."
After finishing her own commissions, Maggie found the tent. The smoke rolling past the tent flaps was her sign that this was the place. It felt like old times in Galactica's ready room, before they ran out of cigarettes.
Walking over to the table where Felix was sitting, she noticed a couple of the officers--former officers, probably--from the Pegasus CIC were talking to him. She had no problem with interrupting them, though.
"Hey Felix," she said, doing her best to sound as intimate as possible. One of the Pegasus men checked her out, and she grinned at him. "So, last time we saw each other, I think we left things on a bad note. I'd like to change that."
Felix looked amused rather than annoyed at her deliberate wording, a hopeful sign. "I don't think you're his type," said the other Pegasus officer.
"Oh, you'd be surprised at how things change," she told him. "I think I'm exactly his type, given the right circumstances." She turned back to Felix. "I was thinking we should try again. Maybe meet up in three weeks?"
By now they were both half-smiling at the attention and reactions of the others nearby. "It's a date," he told her.
Maggie then played a few rounds of triad and flirted with everyone at the table. She walked back to her raptor early in the morning, a low buzz from the alcohol running through her veins. For the first time ever, she was actually curious, excited even, about what she might experience in three weeks. She had questions for Felix; the most important was are there any others like us?
The questions could wait for the next full moon. Maggie waited for the moment to arrive, for the spark to run through her veins. Twenty more days and then she would see how this new choice might transform her.
It's gray, but the richness of the night's textures dazzles her. The sparkling of frost on the dead leaves, the dark trees looming and forming long shadows under the bright moonlight. She calls and hears an answer, a cry that leads her across the frozen ground.
She's free to roam in the wild darkness.