Molly watched herself putter around her old lab. She sighed.

"Oh, lord, I used to like that outfit," she muttered as she gazed at herself dressed in overly large khakis and a floral blouse.

Truth be told, she much preferred her Starfleet uniform and shorter red hair. This style held no more appeal. She had always thought the patterns and colours she wore made her a cute, quirky stand-out but she looked smaller, more fragile than she remembered. She almost got lost in the layers.

Of course, the Molly under observation didn't react to her utterance. She couldn't. After all, none of what Q-Molly observed was taking place in the traditional sense; it was a replay of a particular point in time similar to the moments when Jim had shown her their lovemaking. Q-Molly shook her head. She kept jumping into snippets from her life blindly like she was flipping the pages of a historical text. She had hoped to find answers for when and why her life had suddenly changed so she could figure out her place in the universe. All she had determined thus far, however, was that her former self had been very much alone most of the time. Molly felt oddly disconnected from this past, as if it had happened to someone else. She wasn't even sure she would be able to step comfortably back into it if given the chance. She swallowed and spun away towards the lab entrance. Almost at the same moment, the door swung open. The shock of seeing a familiar face seized her airways. She stumbled back and clutched her chest as the specter approached. Tall, dark, imposing-

"Khan!" she gasped.

The phantom man dressed in a long, tailored coat was oblivious to her presence. He continued forward as her heart slammed in her chest. She threw her hands up and shrieked but the figure ghosted through her then he went straight towards the other Molly.

"Oh, hello, Sherlock," Molly from the past said cheerfully at her back.

Q-Molly spun shakily with her mouth agape. Sherlock? Sherlock? Pain lanced through her skull like brain freeze. She gaped at the familiar man. He was the spitting image of Khan but . . . he was not Khan. This fellow was dressed in a striking, long Belstaff over top a fine grey blazer, matched trousers and a cobalt blue, button-up shirt. His hair was thick and curly in a longish mass atop his head. Sherlock? She hissed as a lobe in her brain throbbed like it had ruptured. She knew him . . . she knew him. Why didn't she remember him? Then, suddenly a million images swirled through her mind and she was hurtled drunkenly through time to a scene of devastation.

"Sherlock!" a woman screamed.

No, not just any woman, Molly realized, the person who screamed was herself.

"Sherlock! Sherlock! No!"

In an instant, Molly's memories returned with a vengeance. The man she had just seen, Sherlock . . . her Sherlock, lay sprawled out on the floor of 221B Baker Street's kitchen. His head, a mass of damp, tangled curls with a stark-white, almost blue pallor of flesh, was cradled in her former self's hands atop her lap.

"Oh, Sh-Sherlock, oh god, oh no-o-o . . ."

Q-Molly went numb. The pain of that moment returned like a fist to the gut. She remembered discovering the man she had loved and loved for years lifeless in his flat from an apparent overdose. It had been the single most earth-shattering, painful thing she had ever experienced. Her soul had fractured and burst like an explosive detonated somewhere deep inside.

Molly rubbed her chest.

That was exactly what had happened, she contemplated with a sick roll to her stomach. The red matter must have bubbled to life to answer her desperate prayers to take the pain away. Molly watched herself blink out of existence. The newspaper report of her disappearance had been wrong. She hadn't gone missing during a walk home from Bart's, she hadn't been kidnapped by aliens as she had imagined at all. She grimaced down at Sherlock miserably; a lonely vessel of death stretched out in his rumbled tan dressing gown. She fell to her knees and sobbed in the very place her former self had occupied.

"Oh, oh, god, I am so sorry," she cried, "I am so sorry."

Molly reached out to touch his pale face but her hand went through his forehead. Her chest wracked with a fresh burst of sobs. She couldn't even touch him!

"Mmmm . . ."

He moved.

"Sherlock?" she whispered.

"Mmmm . . . "

The large man heaved over onto his side. She hastily wiped her tears away. He hadn't died! A flare of elation gave way to a sickening lurch. Her guts plunged out from beneath her again. A different misery swamped her as she reconciled the whiplash of new information. He hadn't died but she had flung herself away from him. She had jumped through time into the future and left him behind.

"It's true what they say, isn't it?" came a sardonic voice at her rear. "You can't go back!"

Molly sucked in a sharp breath and swiveled her head to glower at Jim. Her eyes felt raw; her cheeks were wet from her tears.

"I could come here if I wanted to," she whispered, "I could step right back into this life-"

Jim wiggled his fingers and the moment ground to a halt. He skipped forward and crouched next to Molly. His lips turned down as he gazed at Sherlock.

"Could you?"

Molly felt a quiver in her belly. Her tongue grew thick and heavy in her mouth. Jim smirked sadly as if he could read her thoughts. His lips twitched.

"I came back a thousand times, a hundred-thousand times, I don't know," he murmured, "but they're never the same, you know?"

His nose wrinkled. His lips pulled down.

"The truth is, every moment of time is unique. They don't repeat. Something changes. Well, that something is you, to put a point on it. You could loop back here, certainly, but it's like putting on an ill-fitting pair of drawers. You would never be comfortable again."

Fresh tears stung her eyes. She balled her hands into fists.

"My God, I-I don't belong anywhere," she shook her head, "anywhere."

Jim looked sideways at Molly. "You belong with me. You belong in the Q."

She glanced at him with a what she felt was her lip curled and her brows twisted. He laughed and held up his hands.

"Alright, alright. Well, yeah, maybe that's a load of tripe but hey, if you ever come to the Q, will you tell them I tried?"

Molly sniffled and glanced down to Sherlock with lips weighted at the corners. Her heart squeezed in her chest. She had loved him with her entire being but that love, like herself, had changed. Not only that, it had been pushed off to the side and someone else had supplanted her beloved consulting detective; someone so like him but so different. Why had all this happened, she lamented? Why her?

Still more unanswered questions niggled at her the longer she regarded the prone detective. Why were Sherlock and Khan nearly identical in every way, shape and form? It was uncanny.

"Khan was genetically engineered," she mumbled as she recalled what the captain had told her

Jim nodded. "Yup!"

"F-From Sherlock," she glanced down at her former obsession, "of course, they must have used his DNA. They used him to make Khan. Why?"

"Ah, erm, well . . . the people who-" he swirled his hand around as if searching for the words, "-engineered Khan collected countless unique human specimens like Sherlock. They were obsessed with creating the perfect soldiers."

"That's sick," Molly spit.

Jim sighed. "Khan isn't him though, you know. He is the perfection of Holmes; more cunning . . . more ruthless."

Molly pressed her lips together. She stared down at Sherlock. His face burned into her psyche and suddenly, she was having trouble envisioning Khan. Their pale faces merged in her mind. She stumbled back when the scene seemed to bleed and the visuals ran together. She closed her eyes and shook her head to clear the unsettling disassociation, When she reopened them, she stood in front of Khan in the same frozen instant she had left. How much time had passed, she wondered? It felt like lifetimes but she knew it was just a blink of an eye.

"I don't know why you bother with him, doll. You know he intends to kill you, right?" Jim's voice repeated mockingly in her mind.

Her heart began to thud painfully in her chest as she studied Khan. She couldn't get the image of Sherlock out of her brain. His visage kept pulsing and changing before her eyes. One second he was Khan, the next Sherlock.

"Doll-"

Molly wheezed a cry and glanced to Moriarty standing next to her in existence's longest moment. "Oh, god, leave me be, will you?"

"But, you understand why you cannot be together-"

Molly wiped away tears. "I understand what I am."

She looked at Khan again.

"Maybe I should just give him what he wants."

Jim grimaced. "Ah, babe, that will end you."

She swallowed and nodded. "Yes, but I am no more alive than Sherlock. I'm a specter haunting a future I have no business to be in. I can help this man find peace at least. I . . . I couldn't help Sherlock but maybe I can help him."

"Uhg, but why? Why would you do that?"

Molly wiped away a tear. "Because I love him."