Title: Singular
Author: upsidedownbutterfly
Summary: Like them or not, people deserve to be mourned. Missing scene from "Islanded in a Steam of Stars".
Rating: G
Spoilers: "Islanded in a Steam of Stars"
Disclaimer: They're not mine, people.
Author's Note: In case you don't know, Dealino is the name of the crewman who argues with the dark blonde Six in the beginning of "Islanded in a Steam of Stars." She dies saving his life a few scenes later.
He'd almost thrown it away. The series of photographs Tyrol had taken documenting the locations of the countless minor fractures running through Galactica's aged hull had been rendered instantly useless the moment that segment of hull had been blown out into space, and Dealino had seen no reason not to recycle them all. It wasn't until his third and final leaf-though, checking one last time to make sure that nothing important had insinuated itself into the photo pile, that he'd even notice it. There in the background of one of the shots, backlit and badly out of focus, was a Six with dark blonde hair.
From the moment he found the photograph, Dealino had known what he would do with it. Over the past few months since the tentative alliance with the basestar arose, the cylons assigned to work on Galactica had begun adopting the Colonial tradition of placing the pictures of their dead on the wall of the Memorial Hallway. There were probably at least two dozen there now, mostly pilots, many of them carefully re-pinned five or six times after having been torn off the wall by some of their more bitter human crewmates.
Dealino had never been one of those. If and how the cylons chose to remember their dead wasn't something that particularly concerned him one way or the other. Still, something about the practice had always struck him as strange. When each of the cylon dead was just one of literally thousands of identical iterations of their model, Dealino didn't quite understand the need to mourn them at all. It was their model that defined them, all of them programmed to look, think, and act exactly the same. Hell, most of them didn't even have their own names. They might be dead, but as long as there were still other Twos and Sixes and Eights, it wasn't as though anything had truly been lost.
And yet now here he was, alone in the rapidly-emerging cylon corner of the Memorial Hallway, searching for an empty space among to the photographs in which to add his picture of the Six. The feeling of obligation driving him to add her photo to the wall was as overwhelming as it was inexplicable. She was just another cylon, after all. Another Six. With the exception of her slightly darker hair – the only reason Dealino could even tell her apart to begin with – she was perfectly interchangeable with any of her so-called sisters. It didn't matter that she was dead now. It didn't even matter that she had died to save his life. She was replaceable. Nothing had been lost.
Except Dealino knew something had. Every day for the past two weeks, someone had stormed across the deck at least three times an hour to loudly and intensely express her dissatisfaction with his salvage plans. Had taken every opportunity to second-guess his welding technique and insult his personal hygiene. Had caused Dealino to seriously entertain spending an afternoon in the brig if only to experience the sheer satisfaction of landing just one solid punch on her jaw.
That someone hadn't been all, or even some, of the Sixes; it had been her. Only her. Her insistence on criticizing Dealino's every thought, decision, and action had been both unique and singularly infuriating. No other cylon, Six or otherwise, had ever displayed half her talent for – not to mention apparent enjoyment of – getting under his skin. Even without the distinctive hair, he would have known her. Maybe not on sight, but the moment she opened her mouth, Dealino would have recognized her. She'd been abrasive, domineering, defensive, and completely unable to admit to a mistake, and Dealino had disliked her intensely.
As he stood there in the Memorial Hallway, studying the cylon photographs, the same three faces repeated over and over with only the subtlest variations between them, it finally struck him how significant that was. It wasn't that he didn't like cylons, although he was certainly no toaster apologist. It wasn't even that he didn't like Sixes; he tolerated most of them well enough. No, Dealino hadn't liked her. Specifically and individually.
And in order to hate someone individually, you first had to think of them as an individual.
That was why he was here. Here, in a corridor that held the photographs and memories of more friends than he cared to count, memorializing this Six, this cylon, he'd barely been able to stand. Because just like each and every one of those friends, she'd been a person.
And in the end, people deserve to be mourned.