Author's Note: It's mirrorverse fluff, I'm proud of myself. Enjoy!
TULABERRY POPCORN
by glenarvon
Philippa Georgiou and Gabriel Lorca don't fuck each other. It's quite a disconcerting observation and the court have not yet tired of speculation after decades of the two of them dancing around each other in a choreography that's far too complex for anyone else to even begin to comprehend.
The whispers go that something might be going on behind closed doors, where no one dares to intrude, but the rumour is easily brushed aside, because neither the emperor nor her favourite captain are known for discretion or a lack of lovers of any gender. There is no obvious explanation for this strange abstinence, so the court never quite tires of the gossip.
They did spent a night together once, though, when he was a first officer on the ISS Enyo and she was the head of the palace guard. When they just met and still needed to take each other's measure and when the sheer force of his charisma and her willpower whipped up into a storm and spent itself unseen and unheard inside the privacy of Georgiou's rooms.
The whispers are pointedly silent on the details, but one might assume nothing more complicated than a simple incompatibility. They both have an inherent claim to power, an intelligence that cuts like a blade, two-sided and jagged, ambitions far beyond the mundane games of these around them. Within just a year of meeting each other, Georgiou takes the throne for herself and he is the most deadly weapon in her arsenal. Such a woman will not take kindly to any lover thinking they can command her responses in the bedroom. And such a man will not bow to such demands, either.
Their bond is made of many different strands and the mutual understanding that they cannot break each other's will, regardless of how artful or pleasurable the attempt might be, is one of them.
He likes being the power behind the throne, Lorca is a weapon like no other and everything he touches becomes a weapon. In retrospect, perhaps, she isn't sure what she's expected to happen when she hands him a child. But that's later, nearly two decades down the road.
Michael grows up under Georgiou's and Lorca's personal tutelage. She's smart, frighteningly so, if one thinks of her as a potential enemy, a contender coming into her own. Tough mentally and physically, endlessly inquisitive. She has the run of the palace, chasing the satiation of a boundless curiosity as she finds every nook and cranny and hiding spot. She doesn't quite play hide and seek with the guards, she plays at stalking them like a predator from the shadows only to pounce. Georgiou watches it and takes it into account as she appoints and dismisses her personal bodyguard. Even the best of them barely seem able to keep up with a ten-year-old child. But Georgiou doesn't mind, when Michael relishes these victories so much and Georgiou doesn't really need her guard to protect her.
Lorca takes Michael along on his ship a few times, lets her get the feel of it. The artificial gravity is new and the ship shakes under her feet in a fight. She's not afraid when the lights dim as the Buran suffers damage, her face pressed close to the window in Lorca's ready room, watching the light-show as he inevitably tears through the cluster of rebel ships who have tried to take control of the orbital weapons' platform. With success, they could have taken over that planet, but instead, the remnants of their ships rain over the sweep of the horizon in a million tiny stars, for the sole purpose of delighting the emperor's daughter.
Michael is fifteen when she takes her first lover. He's a young ensign, freshly promoted with too many ambitions written over his handsome face. Everything about him seems hand-crafted to please, from his dark eyes to the sweep of his hair and the sound of his voice. Even his name is pretty. Alessandro. It just rolls off the tongue with a moan. He walks like a man who knows he's meant for great things so Michael's interest in him must seem natural and inevitable.
Michael sees through him easily enough, but to her, it doesn't matter. She likes him and she wants him, so she takes him, nothing else would have made sense in the world she inhabits.
The shift in Michael's attention away from childhood concerns to these of an adult both amuse Georgiou and leave her with a strange sense of concern. Michael is growing up and she doesn't quite know what she's growing into. They've drifted apart, Michael and her Mother, in the same way that an invisible divide has been spreading between the emperor and her captain.
He still performs his duties with the same admirable, ruthless efficiency. Failure doesn't exist in his vocabulary and the galaxy rightfully trembles at his name. He's yet to reach the prime of his power, it seems, and he's been more successful at keeping Michael close and thus away from Georgiou. At some point, their silent accord has been lost. His mind is closed to her, all they have left is the tedious momentum of habit.
For a few months or so, Alessandro and Michael are inseparable. Her insatiable curiosity having found new areas to explore and discover. To everyone — except possibly Alessandro — it's clear she is in charge of their encounters and everyone knows she'll grow bored of him eventually, when that first surge of hormones fades and someone else catches her attention. But to him, it's time to start whispering in her ear, sharing all his ambitions and plans, his dreams of grandeur. He points at Georgiou and Lorca, the way they complement each other's power, how impossible it is to break them up while they work in tandem.
He says, "That could be us, you and me."
And his voice is too sweet not to listen to and his lips do such incredible things to her body.
He says, "It's going to be us."
It ends as it must, of course. With Alessandro lying in a spreading puddle of blood on the floor in Gabriel Lorca's private quarters. Lorca has broken one of the younger man's arms and a leg, both lying at a deeply unnatural angle, unsettling to behold for everyone but the most hardened of soldiers. His other shoulder is dislodged, useless limp next to him. His functioning leg rises and slides in the blood pathetically, with no hope of ever getting up again.
Lorca steps around him and watches him struggle and suffer so uselessly, then opens a com channel.
"Michael, sweetheart, come over here for a moment, I got something for you to see."
With the energy of a teenager in love, Michael bounds into his rooms soon after and stops dead in the doorway, dark eyes going wide at the sight. Alessandro can just about shift his head enough to see her and he opens his mouth, but he's not capable of saying anything coherent with a fractured throat.
Michael's gaze skitters upward and connects with Gabriel's. She says, "He's not dead."
Gabriel smiles and shrugs. "He's yours."
The pointer gets her to look Alessandro over again, the shock in her gaze cools into calculation and she bites her lip in thought.
"Why was he here?" she asks.
"He wanted to bully me into giving him a promotion," Lorca explains. He paces around the body, gives him a little nudge with the tip of his boot at the side of his broken leg. Alessandro makes a wailing sound and a shiver runs the length of his body.
"Thought he was entitled to a ship," Gabriel adds. "Threatened to take the Buran if I didn't give him another."
Michael's attention snaps back to him, now that he's standing next to her. The cold calculation is still there, measuring him against the man on the floor. She reaches out and puts a finger to the side of his mouth where there's a tiny fissure of red. She presses down, looking for the right angle to make him flinch and not finding it.
"He got you," she observes, withholding judgment for the time being.
Gabriel darts his tongue out tracing the tiny wound, touches the tip of her finger and quirks his mouth into another smile.
"I went easy on him," he says. "I didn't want to break your plaything."
She snorts with laughter, taking her finger away, because she's not quite sure where she was going with it, touching his mouth, but she does catch herself thinking of some of the things Alessandro did. She looks back down, the laughter never quite fading and Alessandro's pained face distorts into utter hopelessness as he sees her expression. In a fleeting second of clarity, he realises exactly what it means.
"I guess he's more brittle than I thought," Michael concludes.
Gabriel puts an arm around her shoulder and she lets herself be nudged into motion.
"Let me make it up to you," Gabriel says. "You're not too old for a movie and popcorn, are you?"
"Only if it's tulaberry," Michael says and lets herself be guided out of the room.
"What else?"
Behind them, discarded and broken, Alessandro makes a whimpering sound that's not nearly loud enough to bring Michael back to him. He never hears Lorca calling for a kelpien and by the time he's picked up and looked over by a disinterested medic, Alessandro's consciousness, like his dream of the future, is long gone.
The Defeated is a recent classic holo-movie, a history action extravaganza around the last battle in the Eugenics Wars when the last remnants of the lab-bred super-soldiers were brought to their knees by natural terran superiority. The battles play out around Gabriel's living room in hyper-realistic detail while Michael curls up next to him and a huge bowl of the popcorn he promised. He's not exactly built for comfort, she's stuffed a cushion against his shoulder to lean into, but as the movie progresses, his living warmth seeps through anyway. The tulaberry flavour leaves a lingering sweetness on her tongue, as delicious as in her childhood. Her tongue and lips would be tinted a deep red by now.
His arm rests over her waist, heavy and casual and in the slower parts of the story, she catches herself wondering if maybe he could be made to move it a little, slide his hand over her hip and ass, or just maybe caress her stomach. Maybe slipping a little lower, too. She wonders if he wants to, too, she almost convinces herself of it — though not to the point of daring herself to make a move. She won't risk him laughing at her and calling her a child.
At some point, close to the end of the movie, she realises she's not going to get Alessandro back. She's not sure why the thought suddenly sits itself to the forefront of his mind, but once it's there, she can't get rid of it. Even if the medics patch him up at all instead of just putting him out of his misery, his time of serving in the emperor's palace is over. She could probably get him back if she asked Mother, but where would be the point? What is she going to do, play his nurse for the rest of his crippled life? What sort of soldier would she be if she let herself be tied down to the first loser who got her off? It's not like she was unable to do that on her own before him, though she'll admit it was much more fun with him.
She struggles to fit the two images into her head at the same time, her gorgeous, cocksure lover and the broken wreck on the floor. They cannot possibly be the same man, can they? How would that pain-distorted face ever show that lovely smile? How should the desperate helplessness in his eyes ever allow for a mischievous spark? The pieces don't fit, the edges all the wrong shape.
"Sweetheart," Gabriel says. "You're crying."
Her first instinctual thought is no way but then she leans back and sees the damp spot on the cushion. She blinks and her lashes stick and her visions blurs. She blinks more and it only gets worse and she realises he's right. She rubs at her eyes instantly, not sure what else to do. For the first time that she can recall, she wants to run and hide away where no one can ever see her again. It feels like there's never going to be any coming back from this.
"I don't know why," she admits.
Gabriel puts the cushion aside and turns in his seat a little to face her better. The movie continues to play and the lights dance across his face, but she sees no mockery there, so she curbs her flight instinct and sucks in a shaky breath, tries and fails to steady herself. She doesn't even know what her thoughts are in that moment, they come and go too quickly.
"It's just heartbreak," he says in a soothing voice that takes her back to when she was barely seven.
She'd managed to scare herself by pretending to hunt cardassians right before bedtime. So he's sat her down and explained that fear was normal and that she should pay attention to it, in case it has something important to say. "It helps keep us alive," he says and then gives her the dagger from his belt to keep by her side that night. "It's already killed many cardassians," he explains. "It'll know what to do."
"It'll pass," he says after a while. He shifts his arm to her shoulder and tucks her into his side. He's still not comfortable to lean against, but she snuggles in anyway. He's bigger than Alessandro and much more solid, unyielding in ways Alessandro could never hope to be. It consoles her a little, to realise who she has not lost tonight.
"When are you leaving?" she asks.
"A few days, I'm still waiting on some intel."
The credits roll over the sprawl of a deserted battlefield. Bodies wither into bones and fade into dust, the music plays on the desolate wind, wistful remembrances of glories past.
"Gabriel?" she asks, a singsong tinge slips into her tone unbidden, her intentions completely obvious. She already feels his amusement but presses on, "Can I come along?"
He chuckles and shifts, casts a glance down at her. "You said you wanted to join Starfleet and make your own way. What happened to that?"
She sighs. Her tears have dried, but there is still an odd, open sensation in her eyes, like a wound exposed to the air, but she feels calmer now. The world slowly begins to shift back into making sense.
"Yes, but…"
"No more joy-rides," he interrupts, a little sterner. "You'll earn your own captaincy. Nothing beats that feeling of triumph, trust me."
She's disdainful of the concept of trust and the way its bandied about by people who are undeserving of it. She's never called what she feels for Gabriel and her Mother trust. It's not the right word. Trust can be betrayed. It's a playing card. It's nothing like what they have. She's going to let it slide, though, she gets what he means.
"All right," she relents. "But can I have a bourbon?"
She feels him tense and the rumble of a laugh transfers through his body into hers. He sighs, resigned, and she knows he's going to humour her.
He extricates himself from her and she sits up, folding her legs under her and watches him cross the empty battlefield to the bar, where he pours two glasses. Ice clinks invitingly and the cold lights of the movie turn into golden streaks as they filter through the bourbon.
He walks back and hands her a glass.
"Pippa would have my head if she knew," he says and drops back next to her, the upholstery tilts her towards him.
The scent of the bourbon climbs into her nose and stings her eyes, making them water again just slightly. It doesn't feel the same way it has before. She inhales deeply and already feels the alcohol at the back of her head, spreading a new kind of warmth. She thinks she wants to watch another movie and fall asleep on the couch, curled up against Gabriel while the kelpiens remove every trace of Alessandro from existence. When she gets to her own rooms, there'll be nothing of his left, either.
Gabriel taps his glass against her's and says, "But she doesn't need to know, does she?"
Giggling, Michael says. "Nope, it's just you and me."
He winks at her, grinning and they drink. She manages not to cough, just barely. He laughs a little anyway, but that's okay because he's not laughing at her.
End of Tulaberry Popcorn