Title: Ghosts
Author: upsidedownbutterfly
Summary: There are ghosts on Galactica, and she is one of them. Boomer's homecoming during "The Eye of Jupiter".
Rating: G
Spoilers: Set during "The Eye of Jupiter" but makes reference to one of the "Daybreak" flashbacks.
Author's Note: This fic was heavily inspired by the line "There are ghosts in Winterfell. And I am one of them" from George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons. I've always seen a lot of parallels between the characters of Boomer and Theon Greyjoy, and that line in particular reminded me of Boomer.
The corridor is dingier than she remembers it, more worn by years and warfare, yet familiar all the same. Boomer has walked it a thousand times before.
It's been more than a year now since she last passed this way. Long enough to fade, but not erase, the memories she has accumulated here. With each step, they flow back to her. Half-formed images of friends and crewmates long-dead linger in the corners of her vision. Crashdown and Flattop, Socinus and Jammer, and countless other crewmen whose names she has long since forgotten pass her once again in this corridor as they did years before. Their voices mingle with the echoes of her footsteps, calling out to her again across time like so many ghosts.
She's reminded of the first time she almost lost this place, a lifetime ago after another of the botched landings that would earn her her callsign, and of Commander Adama's warning to her then. "A lot of people have died on this ship," he'd said. "There's a lot of ghosts running around here."
I died here too, she realizes, bleeding out on the floor of an identical corridor two decks down – and not all of her had awoken in that resurrection tub on Caprica. She'd lost the best parts of herself that day. The parts of her that truly had been Sharon Valerii had succumbed to that bullet as surely as if they had been human after all. Boomer had thought them gone forever, dissipated with her dying breath, but maybe they've been here ever since. Another memory haunting Galactica's halls.
Or maybe it's the other way around, she thinks as the memories press closer, crowding her mind and flooding her senses until she isn't certain where the memories end and she begins. For a moment there is no difference; for a moment she's never left. Maybe she didn't. Maybe Boomer herself is the ghost, the shattered remnants of the woman named Sharon Valerii, wretched and incomplete. Lingering on here this place she had loved long after the vital, living parts of her had gone.
Either way, the Old Man was right. There are ghosts on Galactica.
And I am one of them.