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TITLE: The Future Is What You Make It
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
PAIRING: ~Dayna/Soolin
LENGTH: ~2,500 words
SUMMARY: "...It also can't be long now before they count up the bodies and review their security footage and realise they're missing two important ones."
"Not as important as Blake," Dayna said bitterly.
NOTES: Written for Raspberryheaven in My Old Fandom exchange 2016.
The mention of post Gauda Prime in the request it made me realise it had never occured to me to think about these two post Gauda Prime; I'd always assumed that like most of the cast, they didn't make it, so it had never been a possibility. Hence this fic decided out of nowhere that it was going to be about Soolin and Dayna surviving and how they might begin anew.
---------
The Future Is What You Make It
Dayna awoke with a groan for the constant buzzing sound filling the air around her. She moved one arm to cover her head and wondered what the hell had broken on Scorpio this time that meant they had to bunk down with that din.
"Careful," said a measured, dry voice as she turned over too far and her side exploded in pain. The whimper that drew out of her was definitely undignified.
"...Ouch," Dayna murmured, and remembered everything, and wanted very much to curl up into a ball and just settle for whimpering, except that would probably hurt more.
She settled for staying very, very still.
"Do you know where you are?" Soolin asked; it was her face looming anxiously over Dayna. The lighting was strange, odd colours, too dim, bursts of unexpected coloured lights. "Do you remember what happened last?"
Dayna lifted her hand to her head and felt bandaging there. "Gauda Prime... Blake... fucking Avon..." She would rather not have remembered. "We got shot."
Soolin grimaced. "You got shot. I dropped. That situation was hopeless. The position was indefensible, too many of them coming at us from too many directions. I saw an energy weapon and took my chance. Fortunately, they were too busy freaking out over Blake and Avon to pay attention to the rest of the casualties in the aftermath. Also fortunately, you were still alive and I managed to get you out."
Dayna gasped. "Tarrant...? Vila?" Soolin shook her head. "Avon?"
"Definitely not Avon." Her mouth twisted in distaste, but Dayna could see the horror underneath, even through Soolin's removed coolness. "I've never seen so many holes in one corpse."
The tears in Dayna's eyes were mostly for Tarrant... Alright, maybe quite a few for Vila, hiding out in a corner there. She sighed.
Soolin touched her face and drew her own hand away from the head wound. "I don't know if you were grazed in the head by one of those antiquated percussion weapons they were waving around, or if this happened courtesy of the floor or someone's boot while you were on the floor. Do you think you can sit up?"
"Only very slowly."
Soolin helped her, slowly. "Easy..." She managed to stretch out with her shoulders tipped back against the wall and her legs on the floor, half off the ledge she seemed to have been lying on. There was thick padding under her burned clothing high on her rib cage. She clung to the ledge with both hands and Soolin held onto her quietly for what seemed a long while as everything seemed to reel and finally stabilize around her.
"I managed to sneak out and steal medical supplies, and a few ration bars," Soolin supplied, professionally, quietly, her voice providing an anchor to cling onto. "We will need more. It also can't be long now before they count up the bodies and review their security footage and realise they're missing two important ones."
"Not as important as Blake," Dayna said bitterly. All this effort to find a man -- a hero -- a leader -- and Avon had shot him.
"No. Not that important." Soolin's voice was particularly wry. "On balance, they probably got the ones they wanted. This was someone's trap. I'm still not sure whose. Not sure where Blake came into it, or how the Federation knew to be waiting here. I am however planning to find out. If you care to join me?"
Dayna huffed a painful short laugh. "I'll check my calendar... Wait. It looks like I'm not doing anything else, since all my friends were shot dead. You may have to wait a day or two, though," she added.
"I can wait. But not here."
Dayna blinked around. The lights and the buzzing weren't in fact a product of her splitting head. They were in a crawlspace amid wires, cables, flickering electricals and ventilation trips. Soolin had to crouch rather than stand at full height: it was maybe four feet high, rather narrower across. Dayna could see a disturbed panel on the wall, screws half out, where Soolin had gained access. The ledge was containment for humming live cables and, now that she thought about it, she could feel their live energy underneath her.
"Dumb luck..." Dayna marvelled. "This place is right next to...?"
"The shootout took place about a hundred yards that way." Soolin pointed. "I couldn't have carried you much further. The HealPad I managed to steal is woefully insufficient to tackle the extent of your injuries, but we do have to move." She pushed a gun -- not Dayna's, but still a gun -- onto the ledge at her side. Dayna curled her fingers over it and felt instantly ten times better.
"What's the plan?" she asked.
"Right now? Steal a spaceship, with Gauda Prime programmed permissions and spaceways codes. Get out. Regroup. Think about the rest later."
"I'm down with that plan," Dayna said. "But can you pilot any old ship just like that? Tarrant was teaching me, but..." She wasn't ready even if her concentration had been top-notch. And while she didn't know that Soolin couldn't fly like that, she'd never seen her do it.
Soolin tipped her head and said, "I know where Avon hid ORAC."
***
The escape through the corridors was pain-fueled and nightmarish. There were still guards around, though it was mostly overall-clad men and women on clean-up duty. Dayna felt sickened by what that implied, but didn't see them dragging out any bodies she recognised. That unpleasant distraction aside, she focused upon stumbling in Soolin's wake, keeping herself upright, and shooting anything that she needed to.
It was an unfortunately high body count. Soolin wasn't an expert in hand-to-hand and Dayna was in no condition to be, so they had no capacity to be merciful.
But they got out intact, and outside, they stood out less among the rest of Gauda Prime at large. Soolin retrieved ORAC from a gulley in the heavily polluted reservoir and water supply system and they were officiously lectured by it as they picked their way to the makeshift spaceport to steal themselves a ship.
"That one," ORAC intoned snottily, reeling off a number. "I can communicate the most effectively with its Tarial cells. And might I remind you that I am not a chauffeur, and it would be far more appropriate for one of you to learn how to perform this menial task, as swiftly as possible!"
"Teach us, and we will," Soolin replied. "Until then, may I remind you that most of the people on this planet would merely break you up to sell as parts."
"He means the red and white one," Dayna was squinting at registry numbers to pick the spaceship out. "With the fins and the feet. It looks like a more deluxe model than Scorpio, anyway. Even if it kind of looks like a big flying space crab."
"Anything is a more deluxe model than Scorpio," Soolin said. "A pity about the stardrive. As for a plan of attack... how's this?" She shook out her hair and raked her hands through it a few times, before lowering her face to let it fall sultry around her eyes, pouting invitingly with her lips and glancing at Dayna, who smirked back at her and gave a nod of approval. "Then, let me see if there's anyone aboard I can get to open up and invite me in."
Dayna clung to a beam of some refuelling and maintenance structure several yards distant. She watched Soolin talk her way aboard -- swiftly, and without any visible difficulty -- and watched the end results of the aggressive persuasion used to clear the previous owners out of the ship head-first. "Come on!" Soolin shouted down, blonde head appearing over the corner of the square hatch on the ship's underside, in the middle of all its crabby legs. Dayna painfully threw herself into the climb up the steep descended steps and through the hole. The steps rolled up and the hatch slammed closed the instant she crawled aboard, and she supposed that if the disgruntled fellows happened to survive the ship taking off directly over their heads, it wasn't as if Soolin and Dayna weren't already on the run.
She groaned and sagged into the plush control chair in time for the pressure increase of exiting Gaude Prime's atmosphere and gravity to hit. Seeing the damnable planet diminish in the viewer, she gave in to the promise of safety and the ability to rest at last.
She didn't know how much later it was -- hours, it could be, and far too late for such questions -- when she came back and stirred herself enough to ask, "Won't someone come after us?"
"We remain unpursued," ORAC snipped.
"On Gauda Prime? Not caring about other people's property is perfectly the norm," Soolin said with old bitterness. "If they wanted to keep it, they should have fought better for it. Strength is the only law."
"And the Federation?" Dayna couldn't really believe that was it, and they were so easily free and clear.
"Still gleeful in victory, with their narrow-minded focus upon Avon and Blake's heads on a plate, no doubt. Don't worry, I'm sure they'll remember us later, especially once the alert goes out for all the damage we did. Then again, they may actually have had enough looters in the confusion to cover our escape. Something else there's never any shortage of on Gauda Prime."
Dayna snorted, genuinely amused by the idea that they had slipped out right under the Federation's nose. Although... wasn't that a little bit offensive, to think that they just didn't care? That she and Soolin might not be noticed, next to Avon and Tarrant and... well, Blake she could understand. She frowned.
They would certainly start to care about ORAC, once word got back it was yet to be located. That was one advantage still in their possession. And target still drawn on their backs.
Soolin turned around and leaned back against the console, in front of Dayna's chair. ORAC at her feet hummed away. "I looked through the ship while you were out. It's probable its former owners were more notorious and dangerous than they seemed, in the moment." A smirk took over her features. When she'd turfed them out of the ship, one of the men hadn't been wearing trousers.
Dayna shifted in her chair, alert and interested despite her wounds. "What do you mean?"
"It's set up like a luxury cruiser... But it has some nifty extras, including some kind of speed-boost engine tacked onto the main drive. Now, I'm no expert -- but it looks like a high-concentration-fuel fast-injection system. Nothing like the stardrive on Scorpio, but clearly intended for fast escapes. As for the rest of the place...well, once you're up and moving around again, you'll see for yourself. But judging from the amount of loot, the group we stole it from were pirates and effective ones. I very much hope we scorched them beyond all possibility of pursuit when we left."
Dayna laughed. "Are there weapons on board, then?"
"Oh, yes."
ORAC snipped, "I hope I advised you adequately of the most exemplary choice."
Dayna pointed down at it. "You know, he'd never say it, but I think ORAC knows full well what's of greatest benefit to his survival and ours."
"Let's leave him his dignity and not push," Soolin said. She moved away from the console and lifted up something left on another padded flight chair. "In the meantime, I found a higher-spec HealPad. Let's fix you properly and then we can really get this show on the road."
Dayna struggled out of the top half of her suit and perched on the edge of the chair, leaning painfully to expose all of her injured side, though it grew quickly less painful as Soolin hovered the medical device over it. "Going back to Gauda Prime, do you mean?" she asked presently, half-grunting the words, once she was at a stage to muster words at all.
"If I never go back there, it'll be too soon." Soolin's eyes flickered up through her curtain of blonde hair, old memories of her family slaughtered on the planet added to now by new ones of her friends dying in droves. "I think we'll pursue this investigation from afar. The Federation were there. There will be a trail back to who gave the order: who sent them."
Dayna nodded, and wrapped her hand over Soolin's, halting the Pad. "I think that's good enough, now." It still hurt a little, but the burning and itching sensation was starting to irritate her more than the natural pain of the injury. "Thanks. Thanks for coming back for me. Staying for me."
Soolin nodded back, and moved away. Dayna tackled the journey to her feet, unsteady at first, but fast starting to feel a lot better. She poked at her weapons-fire ruined outfit. Well. She needed a change of clothes. All the pirates they'd thrown off had been male, so she could only hope there was something aboard somewhere, or a device that could synthesize it. She stretched.
Turned and saw Soolin watching, a smile warring with the sadness in her eyes. "Feeling better?"
Dayna ticked off the pluses on her fingers. "We have a new ship. We still have ORAC. We still have each other. But... What now?"
"I want to make them pay," Soolin said, slowly. Her manner was calm, but there was ice in it. Dayna understood: Soolin had always been removed, but she'd still lost her family all over again. In the same place, no less. The curse of Gauda Prime, twice over.
...Not all of her family, she corrected.
"I've always wanted to make them pay." Avon, in his last days, had been desperately unstable, but oh, Tarrant, bullish and annoying as he could be sometimes, and Vila, irritating but harmless... mostly harmless... a gentle conniving soul on the inside. And even Avon... Even Avon...
Dayna had always wanted the Federation to pay. She hadn't thought that lust for justice could burn any brighter.
"Weapons," she said. She hadn't been able to sit down and focus on designing or building anything for some time, but that was something she could do, and do well. "I can design new weapons that would use the most readily available materials. Have them manufactured, and we can supply them to other existing rebel groups. We might not have a political figurehead anymore, but we can still show them we can do damage." She hissed it through her grit teeth.
"Are you so sure, about our lack of figureheads?" Soolin laid her hand on Dayna's bare arm and leaned in. "I thought we had the daughter of Hal Mellanby."
Dayna smiled through moisture-blurred vision, and Soolin brushed her eyes dry with the pad of her thumb. "How about just Dayna and Soolin?" Dayna countered, catching Soolin's hand next to her face and pushing herself higher in the chair. "Maybe it's time we make a name for ourselves."
Soolin's head jerked in a tight nod. "That is also an option."
A pact sealed. The future waited -- beckoned with the fingers of war stroking Dayna's skin, scented by incendiary powder and blood.
END
Or read on AO3
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
PAIRING: ~Dayna/Soolin
LENGTH: ~2,500 words
SUMMARY: "...It also can't be long now before they count up the bodies and review their security footage and realise they're missing two important ones."
"Not as important as Blake," Dayna said bitterly.
NOTES: Written for Raspberryheaven in My Old Fandom exchange 2016.
The mention of post Gauda Prime in the request it made me realise it had never occured to me to think about these two post Gauda Prime; I'd always assumed that like most of the cast, they didn't make it, so it had never been a possibility. Hence this fic decided out of nowhere that it was going to be about Soolin and Dayna surviving and how they might begin anew.
---------
The Future Is What You Make It
Dayna awoke with a groan for the constant buzzing sound filling the air around her. She moved one arm to cover her head and wondered what the hell had broken on Scorpio this time that meant they had to bunk down with that din.
"Careful," said a measured, dry voice as she turned over too far and her side exploded in pain. The whimper that drew out of her was definitely undignified.
"...Ouch," Dayna murmured, and remembered everything, and wanted very much to curl up into a ball and just settle for whimpering, except that would probably hurt more.
She settled for staying very, very still.
"Do you know where you are?" Soolin asked; it was her face looming anxiously over Dayna. The lighting was strange, odd colours, too dim, bursts of unexpected coloured lights. "Do you remember what happened last?"
Dayna lifted her hand to her head and felt bandaging there. "Gauda Prime... Blake... fucking Avon..." She would rather not have remembered. "We got shot."
Soolin grimaced. "You got shot. I dropped. That situation was hopeless. The position was indefensible, too many of them coming at us from too many directions. I saw an energy weapon and took my chance. Fortunately, they were too busy freaking out over Blake and Avon to pay attention to the rest of the casualties in the aftermath. Also fortunately, you were still alive and I managed to get you out."
Dayna gasped. "Tarrant...? Vila?" Soolin shook her head. "Avon?"
"Definitely not Avon." Her mouth twisted in distaste, but Dayna could see the horror underneath, even through Soolin's removed coolness. "I've never seen so many holes in one corpse."
The tears in Dayna's eyes were mostly for Tarrant... Alright, maybe quite a few for Vila, hiding out in a corner there. She sighed.
Soolin touched her face and drew her own hand away from the head wound. "I don't know if you were grazed in the head by one of those antiquated percussion weapons they were waving around, or if this happened courtesy of the floor or someone's boot while you were on the floor. Do you think you can sit up?"
"Only very slowly."
Soolin helped her, slowly. "Easy..." She managed to stretch out with her shoulders tipped back against the wall and her legs on the floor, half off the ledge she seemed to have been lying on. There was thick padding under her burned clothing high on her rib cage. She clung to the ledge with both hands and Soolin held onto her quietly for what seemed a long while as everything seemed to reel and finally stabilize around her.
"I managed to sneak out and steal medical supplies, and a few ration bars," Soolin supplied, professionally, quietly, her voice providing an anchor to cling onto. "We will need more. It also can't be long now before they count up the bodies and review their security footage and realise they're missing two important ones."
"Not as important as Blake," Dayna said bitterly. All this effort to find a man -- a hero -- a leader -- and Avon had shot him.
"No. Not that important." Soolin's voice was particularly wry. "On balance, they probably got the ones they wanted. This was someone's trap. I'm still not sure whose. Not sure where Blake came into it, or how the Federation knew to be waiting here. I am however planning to find out. If you care to join me?"
Dayna huffed a painful short laugh. "I'll check my calendar... Wait. It looks like I'm not doing anything else, since all my friends were shot dead. You may have to wait a day or two, though," she added.
"I can wait. But not here."
Dayna blinked around. The lights and the buzzing weren't in fact a product of her splitting head. They were in a crawlspace amid wires, cables, flickering electricals and ventilation trips. Soolin had to crouch rather than stand at full height: it was maybe four feet high, rather narrower across. Dayna could see a disturbed panel on the wall, screws half out, where Soolin had gained access. The ledge was containment for humming live cables and, now that she thought about it, she could feel their live energy underneath her.
"Dumb luck..." Dayna marvelled. "This place is right next to...?"
"The shootout took place about a hundred yards that way." Soolin pointed. "I couldn't have carried you much further. The HealPad I managed to steal is woefully insufficient to tackle the extent of your injuries, but we do have to move." She pushed a gun -- not Dayna's, but still a gun -- onto the ledge at her side. Dayna curled her fingers over it and felt instantly ten times better.
"What's the plan?" she asked.
"Right now? Steal a spaceship, with Gauda Prime programmed permissions and spaceways codes. Get out. Regroup. Think about the rest later."
"I'm down with that plan," Dayna said. "But can you pilot any old ship just like that? Tarrant was teaching me, but..." She wasn't ready even if her concentration had been top-notch. And while she didn't know that Soolin couldn't fly like that, she'd never seen her do it.
Soolin tipped her head and said, "I know where Avon hid ORAC."
***
The escape through the corridors was pain-fueled and nightmarish. There were still guards around, though it was mostly overall-clad men and women on clean-up duty. Dayna felt sickened by what that implied, but didn't see them dragging out any bodies she recognised. That unpleasant distraction aside, she focused upon stumbling in Soolin's wake, keeping herself upright, and shooting anything that she needed to.
It was an unfortunately high body count. Soolin wasn't an expert in hand-to-hand and Dayna was in no condition to be, so they had no capacity to be merciful.
But they got out intact, and outside, they stood out less among the rest of Gauda Prime at large. Soolin retrieved ORAC from a gulley in the heavily polluted reservoir and water supply system and they were officiously lectured by it as they picked their way to the makeshift spaceport to steal themselves a ship.
"That one," ORAC intoned snottily, reeling off a number. "I can communicate the most effectively with its Tarial cells. And might I remind you that I am not a chauffeur, and it would be far more appropriate for one of you to learn how to perform this menial task, as swiftly as possible!"
"Teach us, and we will," Soolin replied. "Until then, may I remind you that most of the people on this planet would merely break you up to sell as parts."
"He means the red and white one," Dayna was squinting at registry numbers to pick the spaceship out. "With the fins and the feet. It looks like a more deluxe model than Scorpio, anyway. Even if it kind of looks like a big flying space crab."
"Anything is a more deluxe model than Scorpio," Soolin said. "A pity about the stardrive. As for a plan of attack... how's this?" She shook out her hair and raked her hands through it a few times, before lowering her face to let it fall sultry around her eyes, pouting invitingly with her lips and glancing at Dayna, who smirked back at her and gave a nod of approval. "Then, let me see if there's anyone aboard I can get to open up and invite me in."
Dayna clung to a beam of some refuelling and maintenance structure several yards distant. She watched Soolin talk her way aboard -- swiftly, and without any visible difficulty -- and watched the end results of the aggressive persuasion used to clear the previous owners out of the ship head-first. "Come on!" Soolin shouted down, blonde head appearing over the corner of the square hatch on the ship's underside, in the middle of all its crabby legs. Dayna painfully threw herself into the climb up the steep descended steps and through the hole. The steps rolled up and the hatch slammed closed the instant she crawled aboard, and she supposed that if the disgruntled fellows happened to survive the ship taking off directly over their heads, it wasn't as if Soolin and Dayna weren't already on the run.
She groaned and sagged into the plush control chair in time for the pressure increase of exiting Gaude Prime's atmosphere and gravity to hit. Seeing the damnable planet diminish in the viewer, she gave in to the promise of safety and the ability to rest at last.
She didn't know how much later it was -- hours, it could be, and far too late for such questions -- when she came back and stirred herself enough to ask, "Won't someone come after us?"
"We remain unpursued," ORAC snipped.
"On Gauda Prime? Not caring about other people's property is perfectly the norm," Soolin said with old bitterness. "If they wanted to keep it, they should have fought better for it. Strength is the only law."
"And the Federation?" Dayna couldn't really believe that was it, and they were so easily free and clear.
"Still gleeful in victory, with their narrow-minded focus upon Avon and Blake's heads on a plate, no doubt. Don't worry, I'm sure they'll remember us later, especially once the alert goes out for all the damage we did. Then again, they may actually have had enough looters in the confusion to cover our escape. Something else there's never any shortage of on Gauda Prime."
Dayna snorted, genuinely amused by the idea that they had slipped out right under the Federation's nose. Although... wasn't that a little bit offensive, to think that they just didn't care? That she and Soolin might not be noticed, next to Avon and Tarrant and... well, Blake she could understand. She frowned.
They would certainly start to care about ORAC, once word got back it was yet to be located. That was one advantage still in their possession. And target still drawn on their backs.
Soolin turned around and leaned back against the console, in front of Dayna's chair. ORAC at her feet hummed away. "I looked through the ship while you were out. It's probable its former owners were more notorious and dangerous than they seemed, in the moment." A smirk took over her features. When she'd turfed them out of the ship, one of the men hadn't been wearing trousers.
Dayna shifted in her chair, alert and interested despite her wounds. "What do you mean?"
"It's set up like a luxury cruiser... But it has some nifty extras, including some kind of speed-boost engine tacked onto the main drive. Now, I'm no expert -- but it looks like a high-concentration-fuel fast-injection system. Nothing like the stardrive on Scorpio, but clearly intended for fast escapes. As for the rest of the place...well, once you're up and moving around again, you'll see for yourself. But judging from the amount of loot, the group we stole it from were pirates and effective ones. I very much hope we scorched them beyond all possibility of pursuit when we left."
Dayna laughed. "Are there weapons on board, then?"
"Oh, yes."
ORAC snipped, "I hope I advised you adequately of the most exemplary choice."
Dayna pointed down at it. "You know, he'd never say it, but I think ORAC knows full well what's of greatest benefit to his survival and ours."
"Let's leave him his dignity and not push," Soolin said. She moved away from the console and lifted up something left on another padded flight chair. "In the meantime, I found a higher-spec HealPad. Let's fix you properly and then we can really get this show on the road."
Dayna struggled out of the top half of her suit and perched on the edge of the chair, leaning painfully to expose all of her injured side, though it grew quickly less painful as Soolin hovered the medical device over it. "Going back to Gauda Prime, do you mean?" she asked presently, half-grunting the words, once she was at a stage to muster words at all.
"If I never go back there, it'll be too soon." Soolin's eyes flickered up through her curtain of blonde hair, old memories of her family slaughtered on the planet added to now by new ones of her friends dying in droves. "I think we'll pursue this investigation from afar. The Federation were there. There will be a trail back to who gave the order: who sent them."
Dayna nodded, and wrapped her hand over Soolin's, halting the Pad. "I think that's good enough, now." It still hurt a little, but the burning and itching sensation was starting to irritate her more than the natural pain of the injury. "Thanks. Thanks for coming back for me. Staying for me."
Soolin nodded back, and moved away. Dayna tackled the journey to her feet, unsteady at first, but fast starting to feel a lot better. She poked at her weapons-fire ruined outfit. Well. She needed a change of clothes. All the pirates they'd thrown off had been male, so she could only hope there was something aboard somewhere, or a device that could synthesize it. She stretched.
Turned and saw Soolin watching, a smile warring with the sadness in her eyes. "Feeling better?"
Dayna ticked off the pluses on her fingers. "We have a new ship. We still have ORAC. We still have each other. But... What now?"
"I want to make them pay," Soolin said, slowly. Her manner was calm, but there was ice in it. Dayna understood: Soolin had always been removed, but she'd still lost her family all over again. In the same place, no less. The curse of Gauda Prime, twice over.
...Not all of her family, she corrected.
"I've always wanted to make them pay." Avon, in his last days, had been desperately unstable, but oh, Tarrant, bullish and annoying as he could be sometimes, and Vila, irritating but harmless... mostly harmless... a gentle conniving soul on the inside. And even Avon... Even Avon...
Dayna had always wanted the Federation to pay. She hadn't thought that lust for justice could burn any brighter.
"Weapons," she said. She hadn't been able to sit down and focus on designing or building anything for some time, but that was something she could do, and do well. "I can design new weapons that would use the most readily available materials. Have them manufactured, and we can supply them to other existing rebel groups. We might not have a political figurehead anymore, but we can still show them we can do damage." She hissed it through her grit teeth.
"Are you so sure, about our lack of figureheads?" Soolin laid her hand on Dayna's bare arm and leaned in. "I thought we had the daughter of Hal Mellanby."
Dayna smiled through moisture-blurred vision, and Soolin brushed her eyes dry with the pad of her thumb. "How about just Dayna and Soolin?" Dayna countered, catching Soolin's hand next to her face and pushing herself higher in the chair. "Maybe it's time we make a name for ourselves."
Soolin's head jerked in a tight nod. "That is also an option."
A pact sealed. The future waited -- beckoned with the fingers of war stroking Dayna's skin, scented by incendiary powder and blood.
END
Or read on AO3
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