Author Note: Hey there, M'suganuts!

I swear, my greetings are getting worse :-/

Anyhoo, this is the second last chapter of this story.

This is where things might get a little trippy for all of you. Please bear with me, I hope it will be an interesting read.

I promise I wasn't on acid while writing...this time.

Happy writing!

Disclaimer: I do not own Victorious or any of the zany characters from this show. If I did, Jade would've done WAY more impressions of Cat. Like every episode and for no apparent reason except to amuse me endlessly. Liz Gillies is immensely talented at making my sides hurt from laughing too much. She deserves all the awards.

Cat came to with an almighty lurch.

She wasn't aware of who she was or what year it was, beeps and crashes sounding in her ears.

She gazed down at her hands which were young again and slightly tanned. She caught sight of her distorted reflection in a damaged computer monitor off to the right.

She was young again!

Not only that, but her hair was still long and a deep, velvety red like she remembered and pined for ever since. She was wearing a headset and a white jumpsuit with the American flag stitched on the chest.

Her surroundings were quite alien, and that wasn't an understatement in the least.

She appeared to be sitting in what looked like the cockpit of an airplane – no, a spaceship. Except that all the equipment surrounding her was either damaged or on fire. She gazed outside frantically and saw nothing but darkness tinged with bright stars shooting past the windows of the spaceship in a speeding blur.

What was going on? Where was she?

"Mayday, mayday! NASA, come in! This is a communication from Apollo 2052! We are hurtling towards Earth and our thrusters have stopped working! NASA, do you copy?!" Sinjin shouted through the communicator beside her.

He looked every bit as young and wiry from Cat's days at Hollywood Arts, his light brown curly hair standing on end from a heightened sense of hysteria. He too was wearing a white jumpsuit with the American flag stitched onto it.

Based on this, Cat assumed that they were…colleagues?

"Sinjin! What's going on? What are we doing?" Cat asked of her old friend.

"What does it look like we're doing?! We're about to burn up in Space! You're the captain – how can you ask such dumb questions?!" Sinjin snapped.

Cat gazed down at her chest and realized that beside the American flag, there were several golden badges stitched beside it.

"I'm captaining a spaceship about to crash? That's impossible, I must be dreaming-"

Cat stopped short as the realization hit her straight in the chest.

Of course.

Rat had warned her about the disorientation and bewilderment at her new surroundings upon her waking once he activated the device when she took her final breath.

But had she woken from a dream? Or was this a new and thrilling dream she'd entered?

Whatever the case, Cat knew what she needed to do first. And that involved finding –

"The escape pods are ready! We need to get the crew and abandon ship!"

It was Robbie.

His white jumpsuit was torn and blackened in parts where he had put out several fires threatening to destroy the engines.

But he was alive and young again, his thick glasses plastered to his pale face and his black, curly hair trimmed into a neat hairstyle.

"Robbie…" Cat gasped out, tears of happiness filling her eyes.

Robbie caught her eye and for the briefest moment, his eyes stared blankly back at hers.

Cat cried even more, willing the man she loved to understand what had happened, begging desperately with her mind for him to remember everything.

A few seconds later, Robbie's eyes cleared and she knew that he was finally there with her.

"Cat?" he asked, his breath catching in his throat as he gazed in recognition at his young wife.

Cat laughed, but nodded fervently, tears still streaming down her face.

Then it was Robbie who was crying and sprinting forward.

Sparks from exposed wires streamed all around them when Cat ran forward and met Robbie halfway. Then their arms were suddenly around each other and they were hugging each other in a death grip.

Despite dreams and even death, they had found their way back to each other somehow.

"My darling, is it really you?" Robbie questioned when they finally disentangled themselves.

"Yes, it's really me." Cat affirmed, laughing happily.

"But how is this possible? You died and now you're here. We're both here and, and you're…young again? I don't understand!" Robbie declared, cupping Cat's cheek with his hand.

"It's difficult to explain, my love; I'm not even sure of all the algorithms that we used or how time and space even works now. But Rat and I made a device years ago and he activated it when I took my last breath in my last life. The idea was that whenever you died in reality, the machine captures the essence of your old life and all your memories. Then it transports your essence onto another plane of existence, a dream state or an alternate reality if you will. The situation is always different; you may be young, or you may be old. But you can keep living somehow! Rat and I never tried to use the machine before, but we kept tweaking it and ran multiple simulations when I was first diagnosed with cancer. And now it's finally worked and it brought us both here somehow: on a damaged spacecraft…" Cat concluded dubiously on the last part.

"I'm still not sure I'm following your train of thought, but I don't care! I'm just so happy to have you back! I missed you so much…" Robbie trailed off painstakingly.

"I missed you too, Robbie. If this machine really worked the way Rat and I meant it to, then we never have to be apart ever again." Cat said with sudden fervor.

They were still holding each other and smiling as Sinjin slid past them, grabbing onto the edge of a chair to steady himself.

"I'm so glad the two of you are having a 'moment'. But we are going to die in the next few minutes!" he roared indignantly at the two lovebirds.

"What's his problem?" Cat asked, jerking her thumb towards Sinjin's irate features.

"Besides the fact that our ship is crashing, I'm not sure. Then again, he's gotten a bit of an ego since you promoted him to 'Chief Engineer' of Apollo 2052."

"I promoted him?!"

"Of course. You're the captain."

"I am? Then what are you?"

"Your most trusted Science Officer, of course," Robbie announced with pride.

"And you failed in your duties because we're still crashing!" Sinjin fumed, yet another alarm for the engine failure sounding in their ears.

"I failed? You're the mechanic!" Robbie shot back angrily.

"Boys, settle down. We need to get the crew off this ship right now. Set the countdown for releasing the escape pods," Cat commanded.

"There's only one problem, Captain: the explosion short-circuited the autopilot functions. So someone has to stay behind and manually override the systems so that the escape pods can leave the ship and escape the blast range in the next 5 minutes…" Sinjin trailed off in despair.

Cat's eyes widened in horror at the grave responsibility which had suddenly been thrust on her shoulders.

But she was the captain after all, and wasn't it a good captain's duty to sacrifice their life for their crew?

Just when she was about to give Sinjin the order, Robbie squared his shoulders and sat down in the captain's chair instead.

"Sinjin, get the captain to the escape pod. I'll stay behind and control the manual override…" Robbie declared, pressing several buttons on the keypad in front of him.

"No!" Cat screamed.

"Sir…" Sinjin trailed off in dismay.

"Officer Van Cleef, you were every bit of an irritating gank, but you're still the best goddamn mechanic the American Intergalactic fleet has ever seen! Now get to safety and may God have mercy on your soul." Robbie said with the utmost seriousness.

"Yes, Sir! God speed!" Sinjin proclaimed.

He saluted clumsily and didn't look back as he sprinted towards the nearest escape pod.

"There isn't enough time to argue about it now. Go with him, Cat." Robbie urged, not looking at his wife as he put in several more codes to override the system.

"No," Cat answered with simplicity.

"No?" Robbie asked quizzically.

"You're going to get in that escape pod right now with Sinjin and let me do my damn job as the Captain of this spacecraft!" Cat fumed.

"Negative, Captain," Robbie answered with a defiant smile on his face. "You were dead minutes ago and you're miraculously alive. I'm not going to lose you again."

"And I'm not going to lose you either! You already died once of cancer too, remember?"

"Honey, that was just a dream! It wasn't real!"

"Even the imagined pain of losing you is always real for me," Cat sobbed, clutching at her chest in agony as she gazed at her husband. "I told you already: the device that Rat and I made…it's powerful. It connects every memory, including real life experiences and the dreams we've had before this. The device helped me find a way to envision and remember the anguish I must've felt when you collapsed in Northridge Abbey during Tug's recital in the Christmas Nativity…"

"It's not possible," Robbie muttered in awe, staring at Cat in a completely new light.

Cat moved forward and gripped her husband's hand tightly in hers. "Anything is possible, my love. That's why I can't let you die again."

"Well, it seems that we are at an impasse. How are we going to fix this?" Robbie asked seriously of his wife.

The spacecraft was becoming even more difficult to control with the erratic turbulence and cabin pressure destabilizing all around them.

"Together," she finally murmured.

"What?"

"Neither of us can conceive an existence without the other, so we should die together."

"Cat, that doesn't even make sense! And in any case, how could it matter?! I thought it was alright for only one of us to die so that we both wake up again!"

"I don't know that for sure – neither did Rat! Just because it's happened twice so far, doesn't mean it's guaranteed."

"Cat, this is insane. What if this isn't a dream, but another reality we've slipped into? If there's no guarantee that one of us will come back, how will we both come back?!" Robbie demanded of his wife.

Cat was stumped for a minute until she felt a lump in her pants pocket. She slipped her hand inside its cotton confines and retrieved what looked like a thin, silver flashlight with an array of glowing lights on it.

She couldn't believe she'd forgotten all about it!

"What is that?!"

"It's a receptor for the machine! Regardless of what dream or reality you're in, it works like a psychic connection with your brain as well! All you have to do is press the big red button on top and you'll wake up in a different place!" Cat explained happily.

Robbie smiled, but his was a sad smile in comparison to Cat's.

"Well, you have the receptor…" he trailed off.

With a minute left on the timer, the calculations were complete. Robbie pressed the final sequence, sending the escape pods off to safety and far away from the blasts which would soon consume the either ship.

"It's too late to follow Sinjin now because the pods have left. But you can still press the button and live again in another reality."

"Robbie…"

"It's alright, my love. I don't mind dying a second time, especially if it's for you." Robbie declared without hesitation.

"Robbie-"

"It's kind of poetic when you think about it: a man laying down his life for the woman he loves. Some might say it's romantic and manly…"

"Robbie! Check your pockets!"

Robbie stared quizzically at his wife, but did just as she asked. He was even more confused when he retrieved an identical receptor to the one in Cat's hand.

"I have one too!"

"Rat remembered to give you the receptor!" Cat breathed out in relief.

And that's when Robbie remembered something to that effect the day of Cat's funeral. Rat had cornered him while he stood beside Cat's coffin and shoved the strange device into his wrinkled hands, mumbling something about 'getting ready for space monkeys and clowns'.

"So that means…" Robbie trailed off.

"Yes! We only have a few seconds to press it!"

They got to their feet, the spacecraft continuing to hurtle towards Earth.

"Will this even work?" Robbie asked desperately, looking scared for the first time since he and Cat had come to on this godforsaken space ship.

"I don't know," Cat answered truthfully. "But I know that I love you and even if it doesn't work, I will never regret a single second of loving you in this timeline or any other."

"I love you too and I have no regrets either." Robbie said with more certainly.

"Then let's do it together."

"Yes, together. On the count of three."

Cat nodded vigorously, taking a deep breath and bracing herself.

"One…two…three!"

Their limbs wrapped around each other and they kissed feverishly as the ship began breaking up around them, debris ripping from the compartment and flying all around them. An explosion sounded in alarming proximity to them, causing live wires to thrash and spark like a seething, fiery creature.

And right before the flames leapt towards them and they were thrown from the spacecraft into the perils of Deep Space, Cat and Robbie pressed the buttons on their receptors with their mouths still melded together.

A bright, blue light from their identical devices shot out and enveloped them before everything went black.

Author Note: As weird as it sounds, this was one of my favourite chapters to write. Mainly because it was soooo different from all the previous chapters and took a leap into something pretty strange and out of left field.

I'm sure you all will have lots of questions and/or criticisms about what happened in this chapter. Like I said, I wanted to do something different and possibly open up the door to write an original Sci-Fi story based off the ideas in this story. This chapter definitely encompassed some Star Trek and Doctor Who.

Plus, I'm just a sucker for epic near-death kisses. For some reason, I had 'Another Lifetime' by Nao playing in my head while writing the Cabbie kiss scene in this chapter.

Next up, the epilogue of sorts to conclude this whacky story.

Can I get a 'Damn, Cat makes a sexy space captain - what what?'

Nope, just me?

Fiiiiiine, I'll just chant it by myself. Spoil sports.

Tootles!