Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.
Setting/Spoilers: Season One through Dungeons and Dragons. Set sometime not long afterward.
Before, something about the idea of Sarah Connor had always gotten under Derek's skin and crawled unpleasantly. His brother had treated her photo like an icon or holy card, not-praying before a sad girl lost in contemplation. Nineteen, Kyle had told him. She was pregnant here. Kyle had told him, but the information was John Connor's, and Derek never wanted to talk about any of it. Some things were sacred, or should be. He tried to imagine giving another man a picture of his mother. He tried to imagine having a picture of his mother; and then he stopped.
This was something he learned about her immediately: she was not quite what Connor had described, and not quite what Kyle had imagined. Sarah was a single mother and a million other things all at once, snatching identities and roles shifting in the air all around her depending on the day and what she needed done, both in the house and outside of it.
It was taking some getting used to, reconciling the commander who'd sent Derek's kid brother to his death to this kid with floppy hair and an attitude; but in the moments that it clicked for him, that this wasn't John Connor and that wasn't Sarah Connor, names drifting around faceless legends forty feet tall, that the whole damn tableau in front of him was brought into sudden, sharp focus on just a kid and his mom, his whole chest clenched with something that wasn't quite nostalgia and wasn't quite anger either, but hurt like a bitch all the same.
Derek found himself watching her one night from the doorway to her room as she made up her bed, wondering how different Kyle would have found her from what he'd imagined. Derek hadn't lied: Sarah was prettier than her picture, even fifteen years later. She wore her experience better than she'd worn her youth. Her dark hair was falling into her eyes as she tucked the sheets in securely. She didn't look at him.
"If you've got something to say, say it," she told him. "Otherwise get out of my room."
Her voice was forbidding and almost gruff, as if she wanted nothing to do with him; but here he was, in her house, recovering from a bullet wound she'd done her damndest to save him from after she'd broken him out of prison. Something wasn't adding up, and he didn't like it. He thought about John, and Kyle at that age. He thought of Kyle holding a picture of a nineteen-year-old Sarah; and maybe things actually were adding up, but then maybe Derek didn't actually like that any better.
"Well?" Sarah prompted, stuffing a pillowcase and tossing it on the bed.
He wanted to ask her if she knew the legend she'd become, constructed from John Connor's scarce words about his past into a towering figure of impossible femininity. Soldier-strategist-fugitive-pariah-harder-than-nuclear-nails. Would drive you harder than you could stand and further than you could go. No one is ever safe. No fate but what we make. Creeds to live by.
Her personal weapons cache was peeking out from under the bed as she moved around it, and lay, for now, undisturbed. Derek couldn't decide if she were more or less now that he'd met her, now that he understood how much Connor had left out and kept for himself: her inconsistent softness, her maternal awkwardness, the discomfiting intensity with which she did everything. Pancakes.
Some things were sacred. It was clear where Sarah's devotion lay.
Silently, he stopped leaning against the doorjamb and walked away, feeling her eyes watching him as he did.