startrek_diary | (no subject)

Title: Expectations
Fandom: ST_D HSAU mirror!verse
Characters: Galloway/Ling
Warnings: DEATH.
Summary: Five years after she first met David Galloway, she still thinks she has chicken legs.
Notes: Thank you to the very wonderful Sam and Bubbles for beta-ing this fic for me. You both are so awesome ♥

The world was ending.

The bright red of the phasers' beams that cut past her reminded her of the first cut that Danielle had ever made on her skin. Mr. G wouldn't approve of the distraction from her target, but she could still feel that first vivid cut upon her skin even though that scar had long since healed.

They had not anticipated the upheaval their revolution would cause. Pike's followers had seemed loyal, but they had quickly splintered. Not even their paranoid leader had been able to predict how quickly things had gone to hell. The Empire was now teetering, the few Admirals left alive scrambling to regain lost strands of power that were being snatched from their hands by the many splinter groups that had separated from what had once been only a few larger threatening ones.

Over the years her life had changed radically. She left her gang and never looked back. She still had no idea of what had happened to Lazarus and Weiss. Last she heard they had taken charge of her old gang--and were married. She was happy for them if it was true; she had always felt like a third wheel with them anyway.

She reached her first destination and quickly dropped her supplies. She aimed her phaser rifle--a gift from Mr. G for her last birthday--at her mark. Admiral Abrams was overlooking the violent uprising from several hundred feet above it, safe in his penthouse--or so he thought.

She made her shot and then quickly made herself scarce.

She didn't need to think as she made her way through the melee. She and Mr. G had run this same route together before their lives had been blown apart.

She hasn't slept in days, and she feels its toll on her body as her mind wanders back to the promise she had made to him as they had laid in bed a few days ago. Her thoughts drift and she doesn't notice the round-faced kid sitting on his front stoop, mostly oblivious to the war that is panning out in his own front yard. She doesn't see him raise the phaser he stole from his older brother and take aim, fancying himself to be Captain Proton. He doesn't know what the different settings knobs mean, and he's too young to understand how dangerous the piece of technology is that he holds in his hands.

It's not a killing blow, but it does stun her momentarily.

She tries to gather herself, to assess the situation properly as she's been taught, but there's only one thing on her mind

It's still there as a faceless hellion recognizers her as the infamous Ling girl who killed her sisters and parents.

Even as she falls for the last time, Galloway's name is on her lips.

#

Dave...

Something in his very existence jerks, like magnetic force pulling him somewhere. His instincts tell him something is horribly wrong.

He knocks his opponents out, not even bothering to kill them before sprinting off to the meeting place he and Sue had agreed upon.

#

Sometimes she reaches back to feel his mark on her skin. When they were still learning each other, he saw to it that she was healed after all of their intimate encounters.

One day she asked for permission to keep her scars.

He had always been possessive of his favorite toy, but after that there was an unspoken look but don't touch policy regarding her. One new recruit had made an unwanted advance toward her and the next time she saw him he was missing an eye and doing janitorial work. Caroline had told her that Mr. G had taken his eye out and fed it to him.

That night after tracing his usual mark into her back with Danielle, he tended to her wounds, bathing them and tracing them lightly with his fingers. When she asked him about it he grabed her roughly and growled that she belonged to him.

She realizes that somewhere along the way to this moment, she had stopped resenting that fact, stopped simply accepting it as her fate, and that she now relishes those words.

His.

#

She's not at the meeting place but he's early.

He traces their carefully planned route backward. Halfway through it, there is a young woman lying splayed on the ground. Her phaser rifle has already been stolen, and her clothes are dirty from her fall, but he sees a small hand, the curve of an ear, the rise of a hip.

If he makes a sound it's more animal than human.

He's seen so much death, caused some of it. He's had pets come and go out of his life. But now, as he cradles the small body, he feels pain. And that delicate dead thing in his arms, he realizes too late, was all he had left of his human-ness.

It would be too perfect if an enemy had simply rounded the corner and delivered themselves to him, and nothing can ever be that good again.

Instead he walks for just under a quarter of a mile until he encounters a group of vampires. It seems fitting, he thinks. Or rather, he doesn't think. He just knows. He feels keenly that it is some how suiting that the dead woman's body he left laying in the road be avenged with the deaths of vampires. He doesn't care who they work for; it's everyone's fault she's not exactly where he told her to be. Pike's for bringing her to him. Caroline's for breaking her heart. Her parents' for even bringing her into this damned world in the first place. His for all those reasons and more. It wasn't the sort of job she would have taken before she met him. Kill an admiral as a gang war rages around the building. Too many variables. But he had built up her confidence. He had made it so she couldn't say no. He had taught her everything he knew and it was still far from being enough.

Because he would never be the sort of man who could give her what she wanted.

There are so many techniques he's learned over the years to dull pain in the midst of battle. He doesn't use them. Instead he charges in with no plan.

He had told her that there were a number of humans who could best a vampire in combat. This time, he isn't one of them.

For some reason, they don't feed off of him. Instead they leave him to bleed out in the streets. In his fuzzy mind, he recalls the way her small body felt under his hands. His mouth won't move, but he thinks it so strongly, he feels it in his bones.

Sue...

#

His Sue. His little Sue.

She was curled up in his arms, humming an odd tune and tracing patterns on his shoulder with her quick fingers.

She glanced up at him. "Permission to speak, sir?"

"Go on."

"I--" she faltered.

"What is it little one?"

"I don't expect you to marry me, sir."

He fingered the scars on her back, as if he could read his own name written on her pale skin with just his fingertips.

"What brings this up?"

"McKenna. She wants things. She expects things. I don't. I just... I just wanted you to know."

He cupped her face in his large hands and forced her to look into his eyes. "Tomorrow you will kill Admiral Abrams and then you will make your way to the abandoned botanical gardens and you will wait there for me."

"And then what?"

"You will start having expectations."