DISCLAIMER: I do not own Star Trek: Enterprise or any of its characters. I make no money off this story, only a tremendous sense of self worth.
AUTHORESS' NOTE: This story takes place during the forth season of Enterprise, after 'Observer Effect' but before 'Babel One'.
Living Beyond
Part 1
By Arianwen P.F. Everett
Matayara finished setting her table, then changed her mind about the china pattern and reset it again. She was a nervous wreck, and the busywork helped her calm herself. On the surface her situation appeared commonplace, occurring throughout the galaxy for as long as women had lovers, who had parents. However, her situation wasn't so simple, when one considered that her lover of 84 years had supposedly never been born, and neither had his parents at the time her relationship with Lorian had began.
Before she could employ any of the Vulcan techniques which Lorian had taught her, she was already coughing up a storm, as her people did in times of sadness or pain. Both his parents had come from cultures that released salt water from the eyes, but sodium was rare on her home world, so crying never evolved as her body held no salt to expel. Funny, her considering Aplacian III her 'home world'. She'd been 7 months old when her parents had moved to Kotook station, and Aplacians didn't start laying down retrievable memories within their brains till 16 months of age. Kotook had always been her home. Kotook would likely be where her life ended, and she was perfectly fine with that.
Matayara remembered the first time she'd seen saltwater tears. It was the day she'd met Lorian. Those tears had been from a friend and fellow crewmember of his who had lost a parent several days before in a Kovalan raid. Her beloved had asked her for a napkin, or some sort of clean, water absorbing item, and she had handed him a tissue and watched as he'd compassionately talked his friend into calm, encouraging the saddened young man to live without sorrow, as his parents would have wanted. Several months later she would come to learn it was a lesson he'd been forced to accept at a mere 14 years of age, and for Aplacians, where lifespan often exceeded two and a half centuries, the idea of loosing a parent that young was staggering. Even the shorter lived human species his father had been a member of, believed a 14-year-old to still be a child.
Matayara's mind drifted to her youngest daughter, Jomala, who was only three years older than her father had been when he lost his father, and Matayara's coughing resumed. Jomala's worried her much these days. Her brilliance for engineering was making her a valuable asset on the station, but instead of assisting in repairing reputable vessels, she was working on ships owned by the Orion syndicate, for nearly twenty times the pay of a normal repair tech. She wanted to build her own starship, to fly away from Kotook station, and the necessary parts for completing her vessel were expensive. She had nearly been captured by the Orions for sale as a highly-skilled slave, twice, but with the exceptional physical strength she had inherited from her father, she had escaped in both instances. Matayara could only hope there wasn't a next time, or that her baby daughter would be equally lucky then, if there was.
Still, despite Jomala's troubles, at least her 4 daughters were still around. They could be shadows, lost to time as their father now was. She still had yet to figure out why they hadn't been, but no matter what, she was immensely grateful for their survival.
But she had always known that had been a possibility. Lorian had told her about how his ship had traversed time and was now starting a new mission to stop the very event that had brought them to the expanse in the first place, and ultimately brought him and their daughters, to her. While not traveled like he was, Matayara had been well educated via subspace correspondence, and she had inherited a passion for philosophical contemplation from her own mother. She'd studied time travel theory, and had known that once this time line reconnected with the first one, and events were altered from that point on, he and any offspring he'd have produced in the past could possibly disappear from existence. However, Matayara had known the moment she'd first seen Lorian comforting his friend, that he was the only man she wanted to spend her life with, she had reasoned that if this disappearance did one day take place, that the Matayara that had known and loved Lorian, along with anyone else who had been affected, even in the slightest, by the temporally misplaced Star Fleet vessel or her crews, would join them in the peaceful oblivion of nonexistence. A different Matayara might exist in her place, one who would never know Lorian, and thus would never feel his loss. Despite the uncertainty of existence for them, she had always known that not taking him as her mate, choosing not to live her life with him out of fear, would have been the only certain way for them both to end up miserable. And, in every way, Matayara had had a splendid life with Lorian, and had never questioned her initial decision to choose him, even now that he no longer existed, but by some factor she'd not accounted for in her studies of temporal theory, his daughters and all the memories she and her children carried, still did.
Matayara had been grieving for nearly a year, coughing almost nonstop since she had heard the news that one Enterprise, the one under Jonathan Archer's command, had survived the passage, while her beloved's had simply vanished, no trace of any debris or anomaly to give proof it had ever existed.
Then, just this morning, the Enterprise, commanded by Jonathan Archer had arrived at Kotook, seeking supplies the Engineering crew, needed. With the expanse no longer in existence, business on the station had increased over ten fold in the past six months. Enterprise was one of the new vessels to 'dock and restock', as she'd heard Jomala once name it. Matayara had quickly dressed, rushing to the trading levels to find the Enterprise's representative.
The minute she'd seen Jonathan Archer, part of her had known everything would be alright. She had known the other Archer for the last thirty years of his life and his knack for fixing problems had impressed her then, and gave her hope now. She had overheard her cousin, Dadocleese trying to charge Archer and his crewmen almost twice what the couplers at his stand were worth. She had publicly chastised Dadocleese, forcing him to sell the engineering tools at cost, with the argument that these people were 'family' and that the Aplacians people as a whole, owed them a lot for vanquishing the Spherebuilders whose infernal expanse had decimated Aplacian III's ecosystem, forcing the majority of her race from their planet to places like Kotook station. That had gotten Archer's attention, as Matayara had known it would. She then invited Archer to dinner, and requested he bring his first officer and chief engineer with him, which he agreed to, if she would assist him in purchasing the rest of his supplies, being 'family' and all. The man had thought the reference a private joke between them; he might have even believed she was flirting with him, but Matayara didn't care what he thought. What mattered was that Jonathan Archer was a miracle worker, as was his crew, and if anyone could help her poor Jomala, it would be him. After all, they had been Lorian's family. It was their duty to help.