Carbonite

By Minim Calibre

Notes: PG, spoilers through 3×01. This is a story about a secondary character. For once, I left the boys alone. ~375 words forĀ [livejournal.com profile] spn_xx. Sanity check thanks to the usual suspects.


Tamara met Isaac on holiday, not hers but his.

She remembers this clearly: she was not, initially, impressed.

***

“You’ll have to excuse him,” Matthew laughed. “He is, after all, American.” They had gone to university together, he and Isaac. It was in Matthew’s house they met.

***

Handsome, she thought. And worse still, knows it.

***

“Han Solo,” Isaac informed her, several pints of cider later and three sheets to the wind, “should have been played by Lando Calrissian. Can’t you just imagine?”

She had smiled then. “Swap out Harrison Ford for Billy Dee Williams?”

And his smile, blazing in return. “Just think of the effect that would have had on our whole generation.”

***

It was never supposed to be what it became.

Long distance phone calls and trans-Atlantic flights. Barely making it back to her flat or his with their clothing still in place.

***

Their daughter was not planned. Nor, however, was she in any way a mistake.

Tamara remembers her panic the day she realized she was late. She remembers ringing Isaac, fear spilling out of her like water. Remembers Isaac’s voice as he told her that everything was going to be okay.

***

Nineteen weeks gone, she boarded a flight at Heathrow, this time travelling one way.

Isaac met her with a ring and an embrace. “Marry me?”

“Why don’t we see if we can live together, first? There’s no sense in rushing things.”

***

Tamara was raised to believe in God’s mercy and God’s wrath.

Her child and Isaac’s. Stolen. Slaughtered. No merciful God would allow such a thing.

God had punished her for losing faith.

***

A civil ceremony, their daughter not yet cold in her grave. Joined by death, until death do they part.

In God’s eyes. she thinks, it was too little, too late.

It was never supposed to be what it became.

Slipping into their shadow life, leaving behind everything but their love and grief and rage. She has brothers, sisters, a mother and a father, half a world away.

***

They are animals, the demon said. To be slaughtered like animals by an evil that merely wants to play.

It was never supposed to be this way.

Tamara huddles, frozen within herself, as Isaac’s body is consumed by flames.

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