Summary: The mission is what is important, it is the only thing; everything else is negligible. Episode tag for Ourselves Alone. Jesse-centric. Jesse/Derek. Jesse/Riley. Originally posted to livejournal on 03.08.09
Could've Been Beautiful
Love and death go hand in hand, chasing each other with lovers' kisses and snapped necks. It's tears and hurt and pain but she doesn't feel any of that anymore. She's cold, cast in the fires of Judgment Day and cooled in the deep waters of the Pacific, gilded by the sun. The mission is what is important, it is the only thing; everything else is negligible. She says it over and over until she believes it.
So when Derek says I love you, she smiles and distracts him with her lips and hands. In the future, he was a companion, a kindred soul, a warm body when the base powered down at night. Here, he is more. A connection to Connor and the metal, a skilled accomplice, useful. So she smiles and teases, flicks her hair and deliberately bumps into him when they walk. On some level, she loves him too but she bites into the tart green apple and he doesn't hear.
And when Riley seeks her out after fucking up again, she relents and holds the sobbing girl close and strokes her hair. She cleaned her up, pulled her from the filthy depths of hell, and carried her to Eden; she can see the adoration in the younger girl's eyes. She needs this weepy teenager so she kisses damp eyelids and trembling lips and promises her the future. And when she attacks her, when she screams I loved you!, she knows exactly what's going to happen next. On some level, she loved her too, but it's drowned out by the silencer.
She stands over the body, breathing heavily and sore all over. Wouldn't be surprising if one of those blows cracked a rib somewhere. Funny how death always looked the same, the blank face and empty shell. Bit of a waste, she acknowledges, wiping the blood from her lip. But she can use this.
Bending down, she closes her eyes so she doesn't have to see that dead blue anymore. In life she might not have been much more than a prettied up sewer rat, but in death...
"Gonna make it mean something, sweetheart. Promise."