(backdated - may)

[letitbetrue]

People have things written on them.

Demelza doesn't rightly understand and she's checked her own back repeatedly, but found it bare each time, whether her clothes or her skin. There's nothing written on her at all and she wonders if perhaps she should be grateful, as some of the things that have been written on the people she sees about town are not of a particularly positive nature. In Tintern Abbey just the night before there had been something of a scene, a woman with the words I'm in love with my best friend written on her back trying to tearfully explain to a man that she wasn't really in love with her best friend.

He'd wanted nothing to do with her, though, and had left her crying at a table. Demelza had heard her on the phone moments later, whispering the story, but leaving out a few important details. She'd walked away with a feeling the woman's best friend had been on the other side of that telephone call.

Thus far she's yet to run into anyone she knows and so Demelza does her best to mind her own business about the entire affair. It seems as though many lives are falling apart as a result and that hurts her heart, even if she doesn't know the people who are so affected. She keeps her head down, offers gentle comfort when necessary, but does her best not to get involved.

That is, of course, until the moment she catches sight of Galen. Upon his back is a word she doesn't know how to pronounce, let alone the definition of, and she squints at it for a moment before she crosses the street and falls into step beside him.

"Hello," she says, as cheerful as ever, though aware he may not be pleased himself. "What do it mean?"

Comments

[somewayout]

He'd known he would have to run into Demelza eventually. After finding out that there was anything on his back at all — something that took longer than it should have, but that makes sense, too, given some of the more obvious truths people have been stuck wearing — it's only made sense that he wouldn't be able to get away from this, that he'd have to confront it with everyone who knows him. Demelza, at least, isn't likely to pull a gun on him the way Kara did. He's still not sure why she didn't pull the trigger. That it might have been better for everyone if she had isn't a thought he wants to dwell on much.

When Demelza nears, he summons up a thin smile. This isn't going to be an easy conversation, and maybe he should have told her the truth a long time ago, but he hadn't known how. He still doesn't, not really, but he's dealt with this enough so far that he at least has an idea of where to start. "It means I'm not human."

[letitbetrue]

That doesn't make a bit of sense and Demelza peers at Galen for a long moment, trying to determine if he's having a bit of fun with her, but he looks sincere enough and so her searching look turns a little more curious instead. The library has become one of her favourite places in Darrow and she's read a great many books in recent weeks, some about what to expect with the baby on the way, others about space travel, and many fiction books, most of them written for people younger than she is, but they're the ones she finds easiest to understand. And she's read several books about wizards and elves and werewolves, so she supposes a cylon may be something along those lines and that it isn't impossible in a world with people like Dean and Simon and Baz.

"Alright," she accepts, having reasoned her way toward it in her head. "But what do it mean you are instead? Are 'ee a wizard?" She won't name any names, because she thinks a secret like that is one everyone should be allowed to share when and if they want to, but she makes it clear she isn't afraid of the answer. "I know a wizard. And a vampire."

[somewayout]

It isn't at all the response he's expecting, and under any other circumstances, Galen would smile for it, the idea of his being a wizard or a vampire more than a little amusing. This isn't any less strange, he supposes, but it all depends on context. For him, back home, things like wizards and vampires didn't exist. Maybe Darrow is different, but where he comes from, being a cylon carries a lot of weight. It almost got him frakking killed on more than one occasion, and understandably so; he was, in an indirect sort of way, responsible for the destruction of the Colonies and everything that happened after. How to begin to explain that to Demelza, he doesn't know, but it'll be better to stick with the basics first anyway.

"Nothing like that," he says, shaking his head. "I'm a machine." He may not have been created, like some of the others, the ones he helped design, but it's no less true for the fact of that. He's still just as much a cylon, still programmed to remember a life that never took place. "I think people here might say a robot."

[letitbetrue]

Machine is a word Demelza knows, but robot isn't. Her brow creases further when he says that and she steps a little closer, gazing intently into Galen's eyes and trying to see anything in him that might indicate a machine like the pumps and engines Ross had used in the mines. She understands, too, that machines are different now from how she knew them. Cars are machines and so are computers and even the portable telephone she admittedly doesn't use very often.

But machines aren't people.

"I don't know what a robot is," she admits. "But if 'ee are one, then I think I like robots."

Galen had been nothing but good to her, after all, and having a word on his back that she doesn't understand won't change that in the slightest. Of all the people she's met here -- and she's met many -- he's become her closest friend. Not in the manner of Verity or Dwight, but something else entirely, something special and important.

[somewayout]

She wouldn't if she knew the whole story. There's so much history there, things that cylons are responsible for, that he, by extension, is also responsible for, however unintentionally, that would make it perfectly reasonable for her not to like them, or for finding this out to change her opinion of him. Hell, he hated the cylons himself for a long time, just as much as anything else. Sometimes it's still impossible to reconcile some of the things he's seen and done with the truth of what he is. He thinks maybe that was the point, part of the whole sick reasoning behind what was done to him and the others. That doesn't make it any easier to come to terms with now.

"It was... a lot more complicated, back home," he explains. "I didn't know what I was yet, but the humans were at war with other cylons. It didn't exactly go over well when people found out." Even if the truth of what he is has followed him here, at least that history hasn't. Maybe it would make things like this easier, but at the same time, there'd really be no getting away from it then.

[letitbetrue]

"But you just said you didn't know what you was," she points out with a frown. "And if you were living with humans and were helping them, then what do it matter? Sides are chosen, not assigned."

By that logic, she should have gone home with her father when he'd come from her. Gone back to Illugan and stayed there to be beaten, probably eventually to death, or married off to some miner who took over the beating and forced her to bear him children in a home that leaked with barely any food to eat.

If Galen lived where he wanted to live, if he was existing as he wanted to exist, she doesn't understand why anyone would think they could say a word against him.

[somewayout]

"Yeah, most of them didn't think so," Galen says, a wry exhaustion in his voice. He knows, at least on some level, that Demelza is right about that. It's like what Tigh said about being the man he wanted to be until the day he died: whatever they are, wherever they came from, however much of their lives may be entirely unknown, the choices they made are theirs. At least, he hopes that's the case. Trying to discern what's real and what's programmed is all but impossible. Cavil's resentments ran deep, though, and he has to believe that something would have gone frakking wrong by now if everything about him were false. "Just the fact of being... what I am... was enough to get people killed."

[letitbetrue]

That's awful and Demelza reaches out to take Galen's hand, to squeeze gently and let him know no matter what happened there, no matter what people thought, he has a friend in her and always will. It speaks volumes to her that Ross likes him as well, for she trusts her husband's judgment more than anyone at all, except her own.

"It shouldn't be that way," she says. "You didn't choose this. No one chooses who or what they are, they simply are. And it shouldn't matter here at all. There ent no war."

[somewayout]

"No, it probably shouldn't," Galen admits, knowing she's right about that, however surprising her kindness may be in the face of something like this. With Demelza, that probably shouldn't be the case, but he's too used to the way things were back home to wrap his head around the possibility of his being a cylon genuinely not mattering to someone. "But I think it's hard for them to let go of. You get an idea in your head of what something is, what that means, it's... not always easy to realize that it might not be that."

[letitbetrue]

"It do seem to me that if they're not willing to try for you, as someone they call a friend, they're perhaps no better'n those who wouldn't give me a chance because I came from poverty," she says honestly and she doesn't care if she's insulting someone Galen cares for, she believes it entirely. He is a good man, anyone who knows him can see that, must see it, and for those who have called him friend to be unwilling to try and talk things through is a hurtful stance to take. One Demelza can't understand.

Ross has told her before she's too forgiving, that her heart is so good, that she sees the best in everyone, but that isn't always the truth. She tries, but sometimes her heart gets all stopped up, just like everyone else, and she feels the sort of anger she knows some would consider unladylike. She feels it now, on Galen's behalf.