Day Eleven - The Best of Us (Star Trek XI)
Title: The Best of Us
Author: ConstanceTruggle
Fandom: Buffy/Star Trek:XI
Rating: FR7
Pairing: None
Summary: He knew her once. She found him again.
Disclaimer: Don't own Buffy or Star Trek.
Word Count: 588
Author's Note: Info taken from ST:TOS and applied to ST:XI.
'The revolution is successful. But survival depends on drastic measures.'
They'd first met on Tarsus IV. She was a part of a different group of survivors to outlast the famine and Kodos' execution order. His band of raggedy misfits made five, and hers made another four. In all, there were nine of them who had been there for Kodos' execution speech and had seen the man who gave it. She'd left with ten other people, getting them out of the slaughterhouse the man had herded them into like cattle. He'd left with fourteen others, all of whom had the will to live and the strength to help those with them less physically able. Like the children. Surprisingly, it was almost all children who had made it those ten and a half weeks between the order and the rescue.
'Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of a society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony.'
He had been there with family, but his records were open for anyone with the clearance or hacking ability. As governor of Tarsus IV, Kodos would have been cleared to see them. They were less than stellar, and his intelligence and usefulness were never put in them.
She worked at an institution type place, where children who were troubled came to be rehabilitated. She worked with the kids she would never have even looked twice at back before everything happened. But as she grew as a person, she learned that helping might just be in her after all. Then the spell happened and she became immortal. She and her counterpart both did.
'Therefore, I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered.'
He lost the majority of his group in the last weeks when starvation and disease took hold. She lost hers around the same time. They spent three nights together in one large group there at the very end. Then the rescue ships came. They were split up, but they'd exchanged names. Their real ones, not the ones that they used for the people they led to either death or freedom.
'Signed, Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.'
They met again years later. He had grown in the nearly twelve years since she'd left Tarsus on the Prometheus. She hadn't aged a day since he got back to Iowa. But she was there when he came home, triumphant over Nero. She saw the news feeds, but couldn't get close. Not until her friend Chris came through for her and assigned her as the new Security Chief, Ensign Giotto just under her at her request. She stepped onto the bridge just after the ship hit warp and he turned his chair to see the new arrival. He stared at her for nearly two minutes with her looking back at him, nervous yet happy.
“Buffy?” he asked. She took a stumbling step forward at seeing his blue eyes light up like Christmas bulbs and he covered the rest of the distance, enfolding her in a tight hug that would have had anyone else gasping.
“Jim!” she sighed. It was about time they'd gotten around to seeing each other again, both thought. And nice to have a friend who had been there in the worst moments of your life and was ready to be there again and again. She'd lost that when Faith was finally killed, but found it again in one young man who took the universe by storm.