Summary: OC's abound in a mixed genre attempt at Star Trek fanfiction. Included feats: teleportation, time travel, Cardassian/Human miscegenation, Romulan plots, salsa dancing, Irish ballads, etc. Please suspend your disbelief. Eventual cross-over with DS9.
Disclaimer: Star Trek and its subsidiaries ain't mine, don't own em'. Any name you don't recognize from the series=all mine. All the rest are borrowed from their respective owners (Paramount & Co., etc.).
Rating: You kids and your ratings. Whatever happened to PG? (You have to be loyal readers and wait for the NC-17 goodies, which I just found out can't be read on . We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
Chapter One: Timelines
The soft murmuring of voices woke her.
There was the voice of a man nearest her, his speech deep and gravelly, though he spoke softly. There were two others speaking farther away, murmuring, arguing; one was a man, but the other was female, and her tone was insistent. All this the woman gathered from listening, though she found she could not open her eyes. She stared into the squiggly blackness against her eyelids. Her head was foggy and her thoughts came slowly, as if awakening from a long dream. She could not distinguish what the people were saying, their words muted and garbled. There was a steady beeping in the background.
The man nearest her began to touch her head, his hands gently moving across her scalp and down her forehead. His palm was cool against her skin, which she quickly realized ached considerably. A spasm wracked her body and she realized that it was not only her skin that hurt; her body ached with a greater pain than she had ever experienced. It was worse than her broken arm in primary school when she had fallen off a rock trestle along the river; it was worse than her car wreck at twenty-five, when she had totaled her Volvo into the side of Matt Malloy's pub, the shiesty, two-timing bastard. Six weeks in the hospital had not been as excruciating as this.
The man's hand continued, oblivious of her discomfort, moving, probing down her neck and chest. She tried to open her eyes, raise her head and cry out against the pain, but her breath rushed out of her in agony. It hurt too badly to scream.
The man removed his hand. "I believe the patient is regaining consciousness," he said. The beeping increased its tempo. The other two ceased their argument.
Breathing deeply, she focused on her eyelids, willing them to open. Her head throbbed as light seeped through the cracks, brilliant and blinding. She hissed in pain but forced them further apart, wincing as the light came into focus. The light hanged from the low ceiling; three bulbs arranged triangularly glared down at her. She was displayed on a table, she discovered, a hard one, staring up at operating lights as in a surgery room.
She shifted her eyes to the man who hovered over her, the one who had touched her. She looked up into his eyes, breath caught briefly in her throat.
Then she saw his face and finally screamed.