This will be a series of stand-alone stories which deal with the choices that the characters on Battlestar Galactica have made throughout the first half of the second season (I'll be posting in as much of the order of the season as I can). I want to explore what would have happened/changed if things had gone differently. Some of the stories will be angst, some will be shippy, some will be funny. There will be different pairings throughout. Don't feel like you have to check out each one to understand the others. All I ask is that if it intrigues you, then give it a try. Hope you enjoy reading the stories as much as I enjoyed writing them!

There are pivotal moments in one's life where if you take the wrong path everything may change. Those changes may be for the good or for the bad. The possibilities are endless.

Boomer's fingers traveled down her body to rest on the small patch of gauze fixed to her right side. She hissed in pain as the pressure pulled at the raw skin underneath. Even though she had an advanced healing ability, the wound wasn't mending itself fast enough. It was funny how easy it was to accept that she was a machine now that Dr. Baltar had forced her to face her true nature.

"Lieutenant Valerii." The gruff voice made Sharon jump to her feet, and her hand came up in a sharp salute out of habit. "You requested to see me."

"I asked to be allowed to see you, sir," Sharon corrected. She did not want the Commander to think she had summoned him. "There's something I wanted to tell you."

"In exchange for what?"

"Excuse me?"

"You obviously think you know something important. In my experience, information always comes at a price," Adama said.

"All I want is a little bit of safety before I start talking." The Commander narrowed his eyes, and Sharon groaned and shook her head. "Gods."

Her casual exclamation of the colonial belief didn't go unnoticed by Adama. It was odd how this woman had accepted her role as Cylon infiltrator and yet she stubbornly clung to a lot of humanity's beliefs.

Sharon sighed and started speaking again. "Everything I say comes out wrong! I'm not asking for my freedom or forgiveness for what I did. I don't want anything quite so dramatic as that."

"Then what do you want?"

"I just want to know that the next time I get moved to a new location, it won't be an airlock, sir."

"I cannot promise that."

"I didn't expect you to agree immediately. I just felt you should know that I want to live." Sharon stood up off the bed in her cell, trying not to wince at the pain caused by the movement. "Sir, I know you're aware of the unethical method Dr. Baltar used to extract information from me."

Adama shook his head. "Ethics only applies to humanity. Dr. Baltar can do whatever he deems necessary to get you to talk. You are not human."

Sharon glared at her former commanding officer. "He tried to kill Chief Tyrol!"

"He didn't succeed," Adama reminded her.

Sharon nodded, trying to keep her anger in check. Memories of what happened in the holding cell flashed through her mind every second of every day. Things she hadn't picked up on at first became clearer as she replayed it in her head for the hundredth time. She wasn't sure if this photographic memory was a product of being a machine, but she knew that it was useful.

"You might not have known he was a human, but Dr. Baltar did," she whispered after a moment of tense silence.

"Excuse me?"

Sharon met his eyes again. "Sir, Dr. Baltar said something to me right after he injected the Chief with the drug that could have killed him. I didn't even comprehend what he was saying until after my transfer. He must have been nervous about what he was doing…"

"Get to the relevant part," Adama hissed, crossing his arms.

"Dr. Baltar admitted that he purposefully covered up my true nature during that trial testing of the Cylon detection system. He kept the fact that I was a machine hidden from the Fleet, and me, for his own purposes."

"I'm supposed to believe the word of a Cylon without any sort of proof?" Adama snarled.

Sharon nodded. "Everyone knows there's something a little off with Gaius Baltar, the great genius of Caprica. He talks to himself. He shows up to meetings with unexplained bruises and cuts. He has that slimy, vacant grin on his face all the fraking time. One minute, he's socializing with the pilots as if he was one of them. The next, he's holed up in his lab for days at a time."

"Dr. Baltar's… eccentricities do not make him a Cylon co-conspirator."

"No, they don't point to that outright." Sharon agreed, "but sir, had you ever spoken to Dr. Baltar before the Cylons attacked?"

"No. I did not have the pleasure of meeting him before the holocaust." The sarcasm was thick even in Adama's stern tone. Obviously the Commander was not a fan of Baltar and the rumors that had surrounded him when the Twelve Colonies still existed.

"You had to have seen him on TV or in some symposium, then. Gaius Baltar was a ladies' man. He was smooth, cool, if not a little slimy. He was a genius who only needed to be in the lab for an hour to make a world-changing discovery, but it never affected his sanity. He was effortlessly intelligent. He barely had to push himself to make these amazing developments occur. In short, Gaius Baltar, pre-attack, was not the man he is today."

"Everyone has changed."

"We all have to pick sides, sir," Sharon said, letting the weight of her words sink into him. "I believe that was something you told us pilots once."

"I wasn't referring to whether or not to join the Cylons."

"And yet people made that choice."

Adama stared at her blankly, and Sharon knew he was wondering why they had gotten on to this topic. Frankly, Sharon couldn't figure out why it hadn't come up before. Of course there were going to be humans who chose to help the Cylons. People like to be friendly with the side that, in all probability, is going to win the war.

"What is your point?" Adama finally asked.

"Dr. Baltar had chosen a side, sir. It's just not the one you thought." Sharon sighed and tried her best to explain. "He's changed a lot since the attacks. All his odd behavior, it reminds me of when I was little on Troy. It was lonely out on the mining station so I had to make up friends. I talked to them a lot so my parents thought I was talking to only myself. Sometimes when I got mad at my imaginary friends, I would even pretend to get into a fist fight like the big kids did when they were angry. I ended up with quite a few bruises that I couldn't explain to my mother." Boomer rested her head against the bars and let out a sigh. "Dr. Baltar reminds me of myself when I was five, sir."

"You think Dr. Baltar has an imaginary friend?"

She took a step back and shook her head. "I think he has an imaginary Cylon influence. He said he had a purpose for hiding his discovery of my true nature. What kind of purpose would make him put the remnants of humanity in danger like that?"

Adama stared at her a moment before shaking his head. "It's clear that you are grappling for anything to keep yourself alive, and you obviously haven't thought out this theory of yours."

"Commander, I know there are holes in my theory, but you have to trust me. Dr. Baltar told me he intentionally covered up the fact that I was a Cylon. That was the only reason why he went to such lengths to get me to talk! He needed me to give him the information so he could fix the mistake he made that day. Gaius Baltar knew who I really was, which means he could have kept you from being shot. He chose not to." Boomer reached out her hands out towards the Commander in a gesture of vulnerability and surrender. "Sir, I don't stand to benefit from telling you any of this because no matter what I do, you're going to kill me. I just want to have a little time to set things right before I die."

"You are a Cylon. I didn't think the desire for forgiveness was in your programming."

She stuck her chin out in defiance. "Then maybe they made me a little too human, sir, because for now, forgiveness is all I want." They stared at one another for what felt like an eternity before Sharon continued, "I can't erase the memories I have of my first twenty-four years even if they're fake, and I wouldn't want to."

Sharon ran her hands over her face as she blinked back the tears. She was tired of crying for the life she would never be able to have. "But those memories are not the problem, sir. The memories of the past two years, serving on Galactica, those are the ones that haunt me. The things I experienced on board are real. I lived on Galactica and served with people I consider friends, and keeping those people safe from harm is the only thing that matters to me anymore. If there's nothing else I can do, there's still that."

Adama stared at her a second before bowing his head and turning to leave.

Sharon felt relief flood through her at the acceptance that had flashed briefly across the Commander's face. Commander Adama was going to trust her as much as he could afford to, and honestly, she had never thought she could convince him she was telling the truth. It had cost her some pride, but Sharon knew the only way Adama would believe her was if she spoke her heart.

Her tears finally fell free as Sharon sat down on the cot again. She looked up to see one of the few men in her life that she respected pause at the hatchway door. She rubbed away the tears and let out a sniffle. "Why don't you ask me?"

Adama turned to look at the Cylon traitor sitting in the cell. "Excuse me?"

"You didn't come here because I asked you to. You came because you want to know why."

Adama showed no reaction to her words, but Sharon noticed that he did take a half step back into her prison.

"I wish I could answer that, but I don't know. All I can say was that an opportunity arose and I lost control of myself. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, you were bleeding in the middle of the CIC, and people were screaming at one another to take me into custody. Like all the other blackouts, I knew that something had happened, but I couldn't connect it to myself." She shook her head. "I still don't remember pulling the trigger."

"But you acknowledge that it was you who did this and not some Cylon force inside you?"

"I am a machine, sir. I don't want to accept it, but I can't deny it either." She lay back on the bed. "The reason you were shot is easier to explain. You have the respect of the last of humanity. Not even President Roslin has that kind of power."

"Will your Cylon programming keep taking over when it decides it would be useful to the cause?" Adama demanded.

"I don't know." Sharon twisted her head to look at him.

"I'll look into what you've said," Adama told her, holding her eyes for a second before leaving the brig.

Boomer stared at the empty space where he'd stood and whispered, "And I'll try to come up with something else that will buy me a few more days."