Thread of Awesome: THIS! IS!! QUOTEFILE!!!

[LilFluff]

Two bits from a newish fic on Spacebattles, Playing Catch Up (nBSG/Battletech) by evilauthor

"Oh, this again," the One said, disgusted. "Fine, you don't want to come with us. You can stay. It'd be too much trouble to make you come with us anyway. BUT!" He raised a finger and wagged it at Sharon. "If you stay, you're not going to be able to rejoin us if you change your mind. Because we are taking EVERYTHING when we leave, including the local extension of the resurrection network. We're not leaving so much as a Raider behind to watch the border. You still want to stay?"

"Yes, I do," Sharon said firmly.

One threw up his hands in disgust and started muttering to himself. The other Six turned to Gina.

"And you, sister?" the Six asked. "Are you coming with us, or have you decided to stay as well?"

Gina furrowed her brow and thought hard. She wasn't a sleeper like Sharon, and the mystery of what the Cylons had found tugged at her curiosity. Yet, still she hesitated, and she wasn't sure why except that Helena's face - and her touch - kept looming large in her thoughts.

"Oh you've gotta be kidding me," One grumped, reading Gina's hesitancy correctly. "Am I the only model Cylon left who remembers that humans are our enemy?"

Present Day

"Am I the only one who remembers that humans are supposed to be our enemy?" One complained, a complaint the others had heard endlessly repeated over the past decades.

"But we are fighting humans," the representative Eight pointed out reasonably.

"We're fighting humans," One agreed acidly, "on behalf of other humans. We fought a whole bloody war so we wouldn't have to do that!"

"The difference here is that we chose to fight this conflict," Five argued back. "We chose to fight on behalf of these humans for our own reasons, not because they forced us to serve them."

"And that makes all the difference in the universe," the Centurion among them finished. "Deploying Raiders now."

So, one of the departures from the show (besides the cylons just up and leaving instead of attacking the Colonies) is that the Model Ones didn't have the Model Sevens destroyed. And one of the stay behind cylons was a Model Seven who took the name Ron and used his position in the entertainment industry to make a science fiction drama. A What-If that asked, "What if the cylons returned and attacked The Colonies on the day the Battlestar Galactica was retired and turned into a museum ship...

"Hey, Sharon, have you watched the latest seasons?" Simon, a Four, asked.

"No, I don't watch that show anymore," Sharon replied. "It makes everyone I know into unlikable assholes." She looked around at every Cylon present, and realization dawned on her. "What happened?"

"Seems your husband has been outed as a Cylon," Simon told her with laugh.

"What? That's ridiculous!" Sharon exclaimed. She turned back to Ron, still angry. "Galen's not a Cylon! You should know better!"

"I am so so sorry," Ron replied apologetically. "But I'm not the only one making the show. The suits just want more grim darkness piled on, the other writers do their own thing. And honestly? I kinda ran out of story ideas around the Pegasus arc and now my people are just putting in whatever random crap comes to mind. They actually have a dart board with the cast's faces on it titled, 'Who are we making a Cylon today?'" He sighed. "All I wanted to do was make a show about how humans and Cylons weren't so different from each other."