The young voice hailed Picard just as he was drifting off to sleep, finally, now that Gamma shift had begun.

"Yes, Ensign?"

"We've detected a shuttlecraft, sir."

Picard sighed, eyes open fully now. "And?" He sounded irritated even to himself and he didn't care, laying there in bed, knowing that sleep had eluded him and it would not be an option for some time, especially since so much of the crew was still injured or recovering.

"There's only one life form on it. A child. A very small child. Sir. Human. Sir." The young woman's voice was tight with tension, choppy. He sat up in surprise. This was new. A small child? Someone had put that child on a shuttle and sent it through the rift.

"Bring the shuttle in. Carefully. I'll meet it in the shuttle bay. And contact Doctor Crusher, have her meet me there. Out."

Distantly, he realized that he could have just told them to contact Sickbay instead of specifically asking for Beverly.

He walked into the shuttle bay as the shuttle was being brought in. The security team scanned, then opened the door as Beverly walked in briskly, not even in uniform, but in some long black dress, in a soft material that hugged her curves. He watched as she pushed through the security team, ducked inside...then silence. After a few moments, curiosity got the better of him and he peered inside.

She was sitting on the floor, holding a baby. A baby wrapped in a blue blanket. No, a lab coat - the smock was covered in blood. He froze.

Beverly looked up at him, turning. The tiny bundle in her arms had a shock of red hair peeking out of the makeshift swaddling blanket, in vivid contrast with the blue of the blood-stained lab coat.

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The baby was asleep on a biobed made for children, but the baby looked so small and so very, very fragile. Beverly had barely spoken, outside of neutral diagnostics. Finally, she looked over him, where he had been hovering by the wall in an attempt to stay away from the medical staff as they worked, and she looked haggard, worn. He let her pull him into her office as two other nurses continued to monitor the baby.

She swallowed, looked at him after the doors closed, giving them privacy. "Someone put her on the shuttle and sedated her. It was all perfectly safe, but someone was preparing her for a journey. There's no other identifying information included. But she was wrapped in a lab coat. A lab coat with DNA that matches mine, to be exact."

She blinked, and he knew that he looked frozen, neutral. A baby? A daughter? On another side of the rift, a Beverly had a daughter, and a Beverly had given up her daughter and put that tiny infant on a shuttle into the unknown.

"She's brand new, Jean-Luc. Maybe two days old." Beverly's gaze hardened, no, it became that steely, focused look he had seen in battle and in a crisis. "She has a father. Her father's DNA matches yours."

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An hour later, standing in the Sickbay nursery, he watched Beverly and the baby. Why does this unsettle me? Is this a glimmer of something I may have wanted at another time? So very dangerous to even allow himself to think the words, let alone consider what "this" encompassed - a child with a shock of red hair, a small one with a tiny profile similar to the curve of Wesley's tiny nose (remembering when he held her son, hours after birth, so tiny, and the perfect blend of Jack and Beverly) or a child of his own?

She stood all alone with the baby, looking at the bundle in her arms.

But the kiss they had shared just days ago, after dinner, before this crisis all began to unfold...the kiss that was more than a kiss between friends, the kiss that had opened a door to something more. Something that could end (begin?) in what she was currently holding in her arms? No. Better to push the intrusive thoughts away, maintain the professional distance, the distance he had so carefully cultivated all of these years. Even as he saw her with a child in her arms, as she stood in the Sickbay nursery, the child with her profile. He turned to leave-

"I know you're there, Jean-Luc." Her quiet whisper carried across the empty room, but she did not look up from the baby in her arms.