battlestar galactica au

just some more cylon!niall suffering from the bsg au. crossposted to tumblr.

*

Back when he worked on the flight deck, he’d sometimes have to retire an old Viper from the flight roster for good, take her offline and scrap her for parts. It was grunt work, the kind of task he could’ve passed off easily to one of the trainees. But he always liked to handle a decommissioning himself. He’d wait till the day crew had gone home and it was just him and the ship, alone in the bay. Louis used to tease him for it. They were only junkers, after all. Scrap metal.

But it had felt important, even then. It felt like he owed them this: some moment of dignity, some recognition, before he began the slow, laborious process of taking them apart. A quiet acknowledgment that they’d flown well, brought their pilots home safe time and time and time again, and now it was time to rest. He remembers their names, even now. Beautiful things: Lady Bird. Sparrow. Redwing. Niall’s loved machines all his life, not just the sleek elegance of their frames but the intricacies of their systems, whole complex universes beneath the skin. Never once had it occurred to him that this love, this quiet reverence for the so, might be something closer to kinship.

It won’t be much longer now. These days Fisk barely bothers with questions anymore. It’s the pain he relishes, Niall’s pain, and it goes on and on. Soon someone upstairs will realize the interrogation’s been a failure, and that there’s nothing left to do but scrap the Cylon for parts, see if there’s anything worth salvaging.

It won’t be like dying. To die you have to be alive, and Niall isn’t, not properly. He had felt like he was, once. Had sobbed and begged and fought for it – for the right to be alive, to be human. But Fisk was right. There’s no him, no Niall. He’s only a copy, a lump of metal and wires and synthetic skin, a chip where his memories should be. You don’t kill a machine. You just - power it down. Take it offline.

He wonders, sometimes, if anyone will do for him what he’d done for those old birds. If somewhere out there in the fleet, Louis will feel something, some flickering, and know – as that airlock opens onto the void, as the machine that was once called Niall is consigned to the crushing dark. He has to believe it. He sees it when he closes his eyes: Louis alone in the dark, in the cockpit of his Viper, offering up some half-forgotten prayer to the lords of Kobol. Some recognition of Niall’s years of service to the fleet, maybe. Or of what they had both mistaken, for a little while at least, as love.