Kara once knew a girl called Sharon.
She can't forget the moment when she had looked across the debris of her ruined world, into a friend's face only to find a complete stranger. For a second, she had thought that the blonde cylon – that bitch – had ripped her from the rubble of the museum in Delphi straight down into hell. She wondered, very briefly, if among other things, the Toasters had power over such matters.
The way the Sharon-copy had looked at Helo, all large eyes and liquid emotion, made her feel queasy. It was all just part of the Cylon's programming, she knew - illusions of affection and friendship nothing but complicated serials of ones and zeros, spat out through a central processing unit within an empty shell.
Kara stood over the body of the Cylon in the morgue, and looked with fascination at the rotten hole in the corpse's cheek. The starched uniform itched against her skin, and did nothing to block out the coldness enveloping her.
She almost reached out to touch the blackened wound, but checked her movement. Despite all her efforts however, she couldn't quite keep herself from remembering when they had last shared a drink together, during one not so special shore leave (when there were shores to speak of). It was more than a year before the attack on the colonies, and in another lifetime now.
Kara recalled the way the other woman…no, not woman, thing…had flushed as Chief Tyrol happened to pass the patio they were occupying. Shooting them a broad grin as he disappeared into the streets of Caprica city, a dark set of eyes had followed him with shy fascination long after he was out of sight.
"White picket fences, two point five kids in…wait, don't tell me," she mocked (not jealously, because how can she, in any lifetime, be the jealous kind?). "….in a nice suburb on Picon. Preferably, near schools that make little girls wear sexy uniforms, inspiring the wet dreams of pedophiles everywhere,"
"Shut up!" Sharon smacked her playfully, but the blush deepened and a sweet giggle slipped out. Kara leaned in closer, meeting the other pilot halfway, whose lips were parted in breathless excitement. The world smelled like roses then.
Lying in each other's arms later, naked and (almost) content, Sharon asked if her if she had ever considered settling down herself, and it was with some regret that Kara realized it was the beginning of an end, one way or another.
In the cold hallways of Galactica leading her farther away from the dead, Starbuck hated herself for missing a soft set of lips against her own, and the brush of long, smooth hair against her face.
Starbuck once had a friend named Sharon who, like so many before her, was destroyed by the Cylons.
It was only one more reason to hate the whole lot of them, as far as Starbuck was concerned.