Warnings: brief mentions of the fact some canon characters are no longer among the living.
A/N: Written for Hope for yuletide 2006. Thanks to kate98 and daisycm83 for betaing. I'm reposting below with two minor changes (one sentence altered, one word changed.)

Maia still had visions of the future, but like all senses, they were fading with age. She had a pretty good idea of when she was going to die, but sometimes the visions changed, and really, her time and manner of death was one thing she would prefer not to know.

During and after the war, she had found her ability to see snippets of the future to be both a blessing and a curse. She couldn't choose what she wanted to see and she couldn't stop herself from seeing what she didn't want to.

And she had seen a lot.

She hadn't foreseen her Aunt April taking the Promicin (which thankfully had worked), however she had no way to protect her Mom from the pain of April joining up with the Nova Group, or April's subsequent death fighting for a cause neither of them were sure she actually believed in.

She saw her mom and Ben get married, and she was so happy. She saw their divorce when the strain of the war and work got to be too much for them. She hadn't told her mom it was coming - she had learned over time that there were just some things people didn't want to know, no matter how many times they told her they did.

Even with the flashes and glimpses she got of the future, she could not have foretold what chaos would come. The cost of the war on humanity was more than just lives, it could also be counted in souls.

"The war for the future will be fought in the past," Jordan Collier had said over and over again. And here she was, in the future, and she didn't know if humanity was any better off then it would have been had 4400 people not been snatched out of time and dropped in 2004.

She wasn't even sure anymore that the future had had a plan at the time or if they were merely winging it, trying to fix the impossible, fiddling with the fabric of time and life in the process. She always wondered what her life would have been like if she hadn't been taken.

Sometimes she resented the future for taking her life away from her. There weren't many options for a 4400 returnee with the power to see the future. Oh, she had had plenty of offers from schools, corporations, individuals, but they had all wanted her power and not her. They had pretended to be interested in her but she knew the truth. Some of them had been innocent with their intentions to use her powers for "good," and others had not.

Everything had changed when the war started, and she had chosen her "side." It hadn't been easy, and there were still times where she thought she might have made the wrong choice.

Maia had always thought that the line between good and evil would be clear - Isabelle, and those with her were evil; Shawn, and those with him, were good - but looking back she realized just how naïve she had been at the time. She was just a kid.

She didn't include her mom or Tom on a side. They hadn't been sent back to change the future - their role as guardians of the present was almost more important.

She had never been able to figure out where Jordan fit in the grand scheme of things. The future had picked him up out of a privileged life, sent him back with no apparent powers, set him up to be killed, and then resurrected him as a god-like figure. Maia had always thought that the future's choice of a leader had been a mistake - but she couldn't say who would have been a better one. Or if a different leader would changed the eventual outcome.

Shawn had been to unwilling to do the things that had to be done in order to survive. She couldn't blame him though - she wouldn't have been able to do some of the things that both sides had been required to do.

It had come down to the fact Shawn was too good of a person to lead, and too good to survive. He had needed Jordan to guide him, not the Jordan who came back, but the Jordan who once was. She had seen Shawn die so many ways she almost hadn't believed the news that he really was dead. She hadn't had the time to mourn him when he died, but she mourned him now, who he was and who he could have been.

She liked think back to that last summer before the war, when they were traveling. She knew when they left that they wouldn't be gone for good. She knew Tom would need her mom, and the future would need her.

Sometimes she got so angry at the future, as if it was possible to get upset with an infinite point in time. The future wanted to save earth, but she was still unsure how taking an eight year old from 1946, sending her forward fifty-eight years, and giving her the ability to see the future changed anything.

After the war ended, they hadn't heard from the future, so Maia liked to think that they changed something and they had made a difference. She thought that if they hadn't, she or some of the others would have been plucked out again and sent back. Then again, the future could be on an infinite time loop, sending people back and changing history on a frequent basis in hopes of reaching their desired outcome.

There could be another battle going on at some other point in time and that scared her more than anything. Now that the war was over, she didn't want to think about anyone else going through what they had gone through. She liked to hope this was a product of her overactive imagination, but she had seen what both sides of the future were capable of, so she couldn't rule anything out.

The war they fought had been generations in the making, and she had known it was coming; she just wasn't fully prepared for what that would mean. She had always thought that she would be on the side of good, helping save the future, but at the time she hadn't considered that the people who had taken her might not have been good.

She didn't have a power that put her on the "front lines" of the war. She had stayed in the background, feeding her visions to those she thought she could trust. Sometimes she wished she had been able to do more, but most of the time she was grateful she hadn't.

To this day she doesn't fully understand what happened, and if the "right" side won, but humanity as she knows it would not exist but for the future's decision to take 4400 people from the timeline, change them, and drop them in 2004.