Some time later, in the heart of the night, she woke tangled in him, and took a moment to realise that the strange pounding beneath her ear was his heartbeat, sure and steady. Even in sleep he held her close, and though she knew their peace couldn't last forever, for a brief moment she allowed herself to revel in the closest she would ever come to pure heaven.

The clock read 0300. So they had a few hours, at least, before duty claimed them once more.

Completely content, she went back to sleep.


Waking with Barbara Havers in his arms was the single most incredible moment of Thomas Lynley's life.

She was curled tightly against him, her head pillowed on his shoulder, her arm draped over his chest. Her ginger hair fanned out around her, and her face... her face was almost childlike in its innocence, as all the lines and all the furrows on her face vanished in the absence of stress or worry.

It was, he thought, the happiest he had ever been. Because this wasn't a frantic confession on the way to almost certain death, or an even more frantic reunion after escaping the aforementioned almost certain death – this was real. She was really in his arms, his after a lifetime of looking, this incredible woman who was so perfect in her imperfections, and who was so perfect for him he could scarcely breathe for loving her.

Her eyelids fluttered open then, and she stretched, catlike, before turning those dreamy eyes on him. "Good morning, Cap – oh my God!" She sat bolt upright, eyes wild. "Are you – did we – what –"

"Barbara," he said simply. Command was in his voice, command that compelled absolute, instinctive obedience. Taking a deep breath, she relaxed, and he cupped her chin in his hand. "Barbara, I have never in my life seen a more beautiful sight than the one I saw this morning."

Impossible! Things like this didn't happen to Barbara Lynne Havers. She did not, under any circumstances whatsoever, sleep with her Captain of all people, her superior officer; she did not discover that he was as wildly in love with her own rather ordinary self as she was with the man who could have been the answer to every question she'd ever asked; and she did not wake up to find that same man telling her that here, in the light of day, against all the odds, against all the known laws of the Universe itself, he wanted to spend his forever with her, never mind any dreams she might have had about the cosmos singing as Destiny bound them across every reality to exist anywhere ever – or, rather, as they discovered that they were already bound across every reality to exist anywhere ever, and then claimed that bond for their own, because the choice, in the end, had to be theirs.

The realisation hit her full in the face.

The choice, in the end, had to be theirs.

Destiny could throw them in each others' lives time and again, in every world, in every reality – it could mandate that they find each other, even that they get to know each other well enough to see past whatever prejudices they might have had.

But not even Destiny itself could spin love out of nothing. No force that had ever existed could do that. If he had chosen her, the choice was his.

She had barely formulated the thought of But does it always end this way? before a familiar voice – the voice that had told her the instant she looked into his eyes that this man was her everything, even when she had loathed everything she thought she knew of him – had answered her with, Always. The choice is always yours, both of yours, and in the end, the choice is always the same, for both of you.

Never in her life would she have believed that she was hearing in her head a cosmic voice powerful enough to see across the multiverse, but there was no other explanation for the jolt of knowing that had coursed through her in a lightning strike the first moment she met his eyes with hers. Nothing in her life, nothing in her mind, could have produced that, not when it had taken meeting him, watching him, learning him, to bring them to this. Therefore, said the part of her that had been trained in the logic of science for over two decades, the realisation must be the work of an outside force. Therefore, the voice of Destiny really is talking in your head.

Which meant that they did find each other, and did choose each other, despite the astronomical odds against it, without fail.

Which led her back to the inescapable conclusion that she was not dreaming, and, therefore, that things like this did, in fact, happen to Barbara Lynne Havers.

"You still want this." Her voice was dizzy, disbelieving. "It's not just adrenalin, or..."

"Barbara," he said, in that same command steel. "You are not 'just' anything. I will say this, right now, and you will not question it again, understood? I want you, in my bed, on my bridge, in my life, as my partner in this and everything else, until the stars wink out, and longer even than that. I need you by my side, your strength behind me and beside me, your hand in mine, your heart with mine. That has not changed. That will not change. So unless you have decided you don't want me after all –"

"Never!"

"- then believe me when I tell you that I will never leave you, and I will never regret this. That is over, understood? No more fear. No more sorrow. No more pain. You will never endure that alone, not ever again. I will stand by you with everything I am. I will go anywhere so long as you will follow me, because I trust you even when I cannot trust myself. And I will fight for you with every breath I have, because you deserve no less. You are mine, Barbara-lynne, and so help me God I will never let you go."

Her whole body shuddered in relief as he finished, and she bowed her head and surrendered without a fight. She knew, without a doubt, that one word from her would have ended their newfound romance, had she wanted to; the absolute certainty that she didn't want that, and never would, gave her the strength to surrender her burden to him at long last, and watch as he tossed it aside. The years of teasing and torment would leave their scars, she knew, but it didn't matter. Tommy needed her. Tommy wanted her – Tommy trusted her. Nothing else mattered.

And though she didn't know it, that sweet surrender gave him everything – the strength he needed to make it through this war, and to make decisions that would otherwise have left him crippled with guilt and doubt. If she believed in him – if she trusted him – that faith would see him through, because his faith in her was unshakable. In that moment, years of loneliness, of isolation, of the burden of command, vanished as if they had never been. Barbara needed him. Barbara wanted him – Barbara trusted him.

Nothing else mattered.

Boneless, she melted into his arms, head pillowed on his shoulder as it had been when he woke, and he kissed her hair. "Now, our Chief Medical Officer has given strict orders that nothing short of a red alert should have us so much as poking our noses onto the bridge for the next two days."

Beaming, she rolled onto her elbow in the curve of his arm. "Yeah?"

"Indeed," he said, his smile blinding.

"Well," she said then, "I wonder what we ought to do with that?"

Quite seriously, he looked at her. "I personally believe we should go back to sleep, because I could spend a lifetime and more with you in my arms. And after that, Barbara, I am going to make love to you again, because I can't get enough of you. How does that sound?"

"It sounds," she said breathlessly, "like a very good start."


It was an excellent start, to be precise. They slept, curled together, for quite a long time; and when they woke, he rolled over and kissed her, so, so sweetly, and they both discovered that they could make each other sing, body and soul, with their own kind of music, different from the first time but no less ecstatic, because it was theirs and theirs alone,and they could do it without any help from Destiny or any other cosmic meddlers who might care to take an interest, thank you very much, and do have a nice day.

And when he was drowsing in her arms – apparently, a month-long covert operation with the best black-ops in Starfleet allows for very little in the way of anything resembling rest – she stroked his short, silky black hair, and traced the rugged, not-quite-handsome planes and curves and lines of his beloved face, and she whispered, soft and heartfelt and half disbelieving – it couldn't be real that she was permitted to say this aloud, and by some miracle she was – "I love you, Thomas Lynley. Oh, God, how I love you!"


She woke to the wail of the red alert siren. Before she could so much as think, she had snatched her robe and skidded into the turbolift, Lynley mere inches behind her. She wrapped the faded heather cotton around her, tying the knot just as the 'lift door opened.

The sight that met her eyes had her awake instantly.

The gamma shift crew were fighting tooth and nail with seven Jem'Hadar soldiers, using everything they had on them and then some to subdue the Dominion forces.

A dozen security officers joined the fight, some taking the back passage through the ready room, and others taking the turbolift directly behind them. Lynley, next to her, had bellowed, "Report!" almost immediately, needing to ascertain ship's status, and had been informed that the Dominion soldiers seemed to be concentrated on the bridge, obviously choosing to beam straight to the command centre instead of fighting their way through the halls of the ship. She knew Woodrow was probably already commanding the battle bridge with the rest of beta shift; alpha shift should be here right – about – now!

A furious Shannon burst through the ready room door after taking the passage, followed by a handful of her tactical officers. Someone tossed Barbara a phaser, and, with the instinct born of over a decade of service, she took aim and fired – again, and again, and again.

It was just barely enough – more Jem'Hadar were materialising every moment, and although Providence's crew was holding its own, their time was running out.

That's when a torpedo hit rocked the ship and sent them all staggering.

"Barbara," barked Lynley, who had caught his own phaser from Shannon's tac crew, as he took aim and fired at yet another Jem'Hadar, "go take command on the battle bridge. I want saucer separation. We have to keep these bastards away from the warp core. They've got to be coming from somewhere. Find their ship, and take it out of commission. Now."

Wait, what?

"All due respect, sir, but Woodrow can handle that as well as I can. My place is at your side." And she took aim and fired.

"All due respect, Commander, but your place is somewhere safe!" he bit out, and she recoiled in shock and hurt. Her eyes flew wide open, and a blind man couldn't have missed the wounded look on her face as she stared at him.

Oh, Christ.

"Barbara, I..."

"Let me know when the stardrive can rejoin the primary hull," she snapped, and walked away.

It took her three well-placed torpedoes to blow the Dominion vessel to bits; the Jem'Hadar attack ships were no match for a Nebula-class cruiser.

And then... all she could do was wait.

She got the call half an hour later. Lynley immediately ordered alpha and gamma shifts to take thirty-six hours off, then told beta that they'd be working four nine-hour shifts in two rotations before getting twenty-four hours off themselves, as they'd been away from the main fighting.

Nobody argued.

As soon as the bridge crew had been debriefed and she'd given her account of the destruction of the Jem'Hadar vessel, she went to her quarters, locked the door, and curled up on her bed, all the anger and hurt knotted up into a tight ball of pain in her chest.

She didn't cry.

Why, she asked herself in despair, did I ever start to believe I could find a happy ending?

She curled in on herself some more, she had her knees up to her chin and her arms wrapped around them, and felt the knot pull even tighter.

She'd never known anything could hurt this much.

She'd half-fallen into an uneasy slumber when her door slid open. She could feel him ease himself down on the side of her bed, and she wanted more than anything else in the whole wide universe to roll over and wrap her arms around his waist and bury her face against his stomach and pretend it never happened, but she couldn't.

He touched her hair, and she flinched; his soft gasp of pain shouldn't have made her feel better, but it did.

"I am so sorry," he whispered in the dark, and she squeezed her eyes shut tight.

She wished she could cry.

"After all this time," she said hoarsely, amazed she could force words out at all, "you don't trust me to have your back. Why? Because we've – slept together, I'm less of an officer now?"

"No!" he shouted, shocked and loud in the quiet, before his voice gentled to a fervent murmur. "No. God, Barbara, is that what you thought? No. No. It wasn't you, I swear, it wasn't. It was me, me and my foolish – God, I was so scared. I've just found you, and now – I couldn't lose you, don't you see? Not after what we – God, Barbara." And this time, when he reached out to stroke her hair, she let him.

His first touch undid her. The smooth, firm slide of his hand down the back of her head, the way he stroked just a little firmer at the nape of her neck, as though he'd shield that most vulnerable part of her from anything and everything – somehow it untied that knot in her chest, and then she did roll over and wrap her arms around his waist and bury her face against his stomach, and she cried hot, bitter tears as he stroked her hair and swore over and over again that she was the finest officer he knew, that he'd always, always want her beside him guarding his back because he trusted her more than anyone and anything, that he was such an idiot, that he didn't deserve her and never would, but could they please talk this out because there wasn't a thing he wouldn't do to keep her if she'd let him.

When she'd cried herself out and taken a painkiller for the headache, they talked, sitting on opposite ends of the sofa, like they knew that they can't have each other until they sort this thing out. They'd thought they'd had a good handle on the whole thing, thought that it would be just the same but with sex, and it is so very much not that she's half shocked to realise that she was more angry about not being allowed to protect him than she was about him protecting her.

"You can't do that any more," she said, quiet and calm. "I mean it. You can't. We're going to be scared for each other. We're going to be scared for each other a lot. But think about it, Tommy. I was scared for you, too."

"You..."

"You were up there on the bridge, and our ship wasn't connected any more, and I didn't know anything, couldn't see anything, and... I just found you, too. And you can't... I'm your first officer, and we have seven hundred and fifty people depending on us to make the decisions that keep us all alive. You can't send me somewhere because it's safer. We'd be split up. You know they'd split us up. The only way we can keep each other is to not... not do that. I want to protect you, too, I want to lock you up in here and make sure you never get hurt. But I've already made that mistake once, and it's a mistake neither of us can afford to make again. Besides, that's asking you to be something different than what you are. Someone besides the man I fell in love with. And as much as I want to keep you safe, even more I want you to be that man. It wouldn't be fair of me to ask you to stay safe, and it's not fair of you to ask me to."

"You're right. I know you're right. But Barbara..."

"Listen to me. This is the life we chose. This is what brought us together. And this is us. If I tried to keep you safe, what would you tell me?"

"That you can forget it, because that's not who I... oh."

"Yes, oh. The only reason I went today was because I didn't have the time to yell at you and I couldn't be a distraction to anyone on that bridge. Would you be any less afraid for me if I were on a different ship?"

"No, of course not."

"Would you be any less afraid for me if we broke up?"

"No. Absolutely not."

"Then my point is made. We're just going to have to live with this. And I can tell you this right now; if you ever treat me differently because I'm your lover, I will take you to school, and if you do it again, I will ask for a transfer no matter how much I love you. And I fully expect you to do the same. We have to look out for each other on this. But Tommy, I will promise you this, right now. I will fight with everything I have to come back to you. And sweetheart, I will come back, because I have something so, so worth living for, and so worth fighting for. And it's not going to be easy, but loving you – I'd sacrifice a thousand times as much, because I want to be your exec, and I want to be your friend, and I want to be your lover, and I..." She stopped for a minute, overcome, and cupped his face in her hands and touched her forehead to his, and it was bright and painful and real and just fucking everything that stops her breath and lets her breathe all at once.

"You are." He leaned in, breath shuddering. "Oh, Barbara, you are. You are. And I can do no less in return. I will fight with everything I have to come back to you, and I will – I will never treat you differently. You deserve so much more than that. So very much more. The woman I fell in love with is the finest officer I've ever known, and... I wouldn't want her to be anything else. Ever. I think you know, Barbara, how sorry I am."

"I do. But there's only – I can't say I don't know why you did it. And we can't do it again, but – I know, now. And I love you so much, for so many reasons, but one of them is how much you love me, and I – I love you, too, and I'll never stop – not even death can break this. For whatever time we have, remember?"

"For whatever time we have, Barbara," he echoed softly. She reached out, ran a hand through his hair, and he shuddered under her touch; his voice was unsteady and wrecked as he whispered, "I'm going to make love to you now," mouthing the words low and intent against the soft skin of her belly, and she shivered in delight and let him roll on top of her.

This was as much apology and affirmation as it was anything else. His tender, caressing touch between her thighs left her molten and liquid from the inside out, and when she reached for him with a murmur, he quietened her gently, telling her without words to lie back and let him take care of her. So she obeyed, needing this as badly as he did. He apologised with murmured words, soft kisses, and gentle caresses as he stoked the flames higher and higher, and then, when she could take it no longer, when she needed him too badly to breathe, he slipped inside her at last, and she arched into him and let the pleasure flood them both. His open adoration was just this side of too much to bear, and when release finally came, it was edged with a sharp, sweet pain that faded into profound, desperate relief. She couldn't help the tears that flowed from her eyes as she came undone under his hands at last, and the realisation that he, too, was crying as he shattered left her weak and shaking and so, so in love she could barely comprehend it. And he – he was just as overwhelmed as she was, trembling and breathless, as he gathered her into his arms.

"Don't ever leave me," he whispered into her hair. "Don't let me screw this up. Don't let me lose you."

She shook her head, fiercely, and pressed closer into the circle of his arm where her face was buried against his chest. "No. I promise. Nothing you could do could lose me, as long as you still loved me. I love you too much for that. But you – don't let me lose you. Please."

"To do so would be to part with my very heart," he answered her, voice tight with emotion. "So long as you love me, you could never lose me. Oh, Barbara – 'doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the Sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love!'"

Something inside her melted at the timeless phrases half a millennium old, and she reeled with a feeling that might have been absolute trust."And I, you," she murmured hoarsely as she pressed a kiss to his bare shoulder, a kiss that lacked any passion but held almost more tenderness than he could bear. "Tha gaol agam ort, Tommy, gràdh geal mo chridhe."

I love you, Tommy, bright love of my heart.

Clinging tight, they slipped into sleep.