I've been looking for you."
"I've been hiding."
"You don't have to hide from me, Beverly."
"If it makes you feel any better, I'm hiding from Deanna too."
"She told me you were here."
"Busted, eh?"
Beverly choked back a sob.
This was a bad idea, he thought, even as his body, betraying him, moved tentatively closer to Beverly, close enough to touch her.
God, she was lovely, her eyes thankfully restored to their natural blue hue were shimmering and her hair was falling just so across her face and...
...before the last stop on that train of thought was reached, Picard stopped himself from reaching out for her.
*Focus man*, he silently chided in self-admonishment.
Beverly appeared not to have noticed.
"I'll be alright, Jean-Luc. You don't have to worry about me."
"But I do worry, Beverly. I always have," his voice rumbled low in counterpoint.
Experience had taught him that Beverly would respond to this rare honest display of his feelings in one of two ways. She chose the one expected.
Backing away from his intimacy, her eyes flashed in sudden fury, clenched fists to the fore.
"Dammit, Jean-Luc. It was an anaphasic energy trapped in a candle! Just say what you're thinking, that I was a fool for falling for all that mumbo jumbo!"
Shouting now, breathless, arms akimbo.
"I'm a doctor! A scientist...at the top of my field!...I'm a rational, reasonable woman!"
"And Ronin gave you what you didn't even know you wanted," he whispered.
For a moment, Beverly Crusher stood frozen, staring at him, mouth agape.
And then suddenly she seemed to fall in upon herself.
He reached for her then and held her tight; her heart pounding against his chest, her tears wetly warming the crook of his neck.
He wanted this moment to last forever.
It had only been a couple of months since Beverly had refused his invitation to take the next step in their relationship. And then last week, bang, smack out of nowhere, she ups and leaves everything and everyone she knew and loved in pursuit of some mad fantasy.
Beverly had spoken harshly to Jean-Luc in the transport room when he'd tried to stop her from resigning her commission to be with her mysterious lover.
And later on Caldos she'd wounded him to the quick.
"Jealousy doesn't suit you, Jean-Luc," she'd accused, glaring at him with those unnaturally green eyes.
When he'd beamed down to Caldos two nights ago in that last ditch effort to reason with Beverly, the sight that had confronted him through her cottage window had frozen his blood.
Despite the gross impropriety of his unintended intrusion on the intimate scene, he could not take his eyes from her and from what she was experiencing; enraged and inflamed in equal measure, his fury at what Ronin had reduced her to waged for supremacy with a craving desire.
Picard determined then to destroy Ronin, utterly, completely.
It was the only way to rid Beverly of the entity's malevolence. That was how he had later justified himself to Guinan. He did what had to be done. Guinan had known better than to give voice to her knowledge of the true source of his motivation, but her silence had said everything.
"It's going to be alright, Beverly. It will take time, but it's going to be alright," he murmured, stroking her lovely hair, smoothing the mess that she had made of it.
For a moment she seemed to be willing to take all the comfort he was willing to give, but then she stiffened suddenly in his arms, remembering with a burning wave of shame what he had witnessed on Caldos.
Breaking contact she backed away towards the entrance without looking at him, pausing for just a moment before leaving and sadly said:
"I'm so sorry, Jean-Luc."
Alone in the arboretum, Picard grimaced.
One step forward, two back.
But at least the very real threat Ronin had posed had been despatched forever.
Beverly was back where she belonged and that meant that Jean-Luc's hope, unlike Ronin's candle, had not been extinguished.
There was that.
Picard sharply tugged his tunic, set his face into command mode and exited the arboretum in Crusher's wake.
For when it came to Beverly, Jean-Luc Picard had always been, and always would be, a jealous man.