As Riker pushed the doors of Ten Forward open, he noticed the gathered crowd turn to him automatically. Seeing Deanna's distinctive hair from across the room, he went over to join her, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. He could really use some down time without drawing the unwanted and curious stares of the crew.

"Will, you look exhausted." She said, smiling. Teasing Will Riker was up there amongst her favourite hobbies.

"Gee, thanks…" he replied mock-offended. "Truthfully? I am Deanna. Completely worn out. At least it's all squared away now. The Admiral agrees it is best to leave them to figure it out between themselves we have his full permission to get as far away as we can. We just have to drop the ambassadorial delegates off and then we can get on our way. Back to Earth."

"To Earth? Will?!" she said, excitedly.

Before he had the chance to reply, a host came over to take his drink order, "An Alaskan ale for me please. Deanna, can I get you something else?" he asked. She shook her head and indicated toward the fresh drink she had acquired only moments ago.

A full grin broke out across his face, "I thought you'd enjoy that. I must admit, I can't wait for a little R and R myself."

"We've been granted shore leave?"

"Yes, some extended shore leave – we all get to take a break, get off the ship, and we get to see the captain. The ship is more or less due for a barion particle sweep, a few upgrades here and there. We've been working her hard over the last few months. I think Admiral Ito feels sorry for us. She's going to be docked at McKinley for five whole glorious weeks without her crew." His inflection illuminated the best part of the Admiral's update, they'd been granted a little downtime more likely than not in deference to the captain. But he hadn't delved to hard in the reason, he'd just agreed whole-heartedly, and quickly, before anyone could change their mind.

She smiled at the thought of three weeks off the ship, it had been a long while. "Have you heard from Beverly?" she asked as the host returned to deliver Riker's drink.

"Just the run of the mill updates, but it sounds like he might be ready for some visitors now. She says he is on the road to recovery." He said, sipping on the cool beer.

Deanna smiled, sometimes it was hard to differentiate the emotions of others from her own, but this time she was pretty sure that she and Will were feeling exactly the same way. They missed Beverly and the captain. It had been too long. They'd got through one of the toughest combination of problems they'd faced in a while, but they'd done so without two of their most important friends. She couldn't wait to take a break herself.

A week later, after a further surgery to replace both his damaged cochlea with the clones they had grown, found the hearing specialist working with Jean-Luc. Beverly watched from the visitor chair in the corner of his room as Dr Loom worked him patiently through a round of exercises designed to get him used to how the clones worked.

"Watch my mouth. Repeat after me. A. E. I. O. U."

Jean-Luc formed his mouth into the right shape and hesitantly repeated the vowel sounds he thought he had heard, "A…E…I…U…A"

"Okay, almost there. As the clones settle in…" He paused as he redirected the captain's attention to the screen, "As the clones settle, more and more neural pathways will connect, which means more and more sounds will become distinct. It can take a week or so before you feel like normal. Try not to worry. Some patients liken it to sound being muffled by a thick blanket but it is relatively short-lived. This will work Captain, the surgery was textbook. Do not worry."

The captain frowned, concentrating on hearing what the doctor was saying, as well as trying to retain what he was being told. He nodded, suddenly feeling very weary. "Thank you, doctor."

"Now, I'll see you tomorrow. Get some rest." Loom looked toward Beverly in the corner. "I'll leave you in the capable hands of Doctor Crusher here."

The captain turned toward her location, a look of surprise on his face, "Beverly, how long have you been there?"

They'd already had this conversation three times that morning, she pasted a passive smile on her face. "Just a little while, how do you feel?"

"What?"

She pointed to the display, "How do you feel?"

"Oh, a little fatigued… It appears I've been quite ill. I was on shore leave… somewhere in Paris… I think…"

He was starting to retain information but his brain had somehow added in a few extra factors in order to fill in the gaps. Beverly had to stop herself from laughing, some of the recounts he'd given her had had the most incredible 'additions', this one was quite tame in comparison.

"Are you feeling up to taking a shower?"

"Perhaps later… I thought I might just take a short nap… I'm feeling very tired. I haven't been getting much sleep, you know… the mission…" he had closed his eyes as he'd started to speak. By the time he'd decided he had been on some sort of mission, he was fast out. Again.

"Sleep well my friend, sleep well." she patted his chest tenderly, smoothed the blanket covering him. if she could just get him well...

The most insidious souvenir of his illness was, and would continue to be, for some time to come, a pretty intense version of post-viral chronic fatigue. Beverly, in consultation with Professor Esho, had figured he had been hit with an advanced mutation of the Rinzern-27 coding responsible for the uncontrolled exhaustion he had fallen under the spell of. Yet another unexpected aspect of the modifications to the original parasite.

She was worried. It was going to take him a long time to recover. He was looking at months of slow rehabilitation before he'd be anywhere near his old self. Knowing how impatient he was, she knew the greater challenge for him lay in what he had ahead, than what he had thus far managed to survive. She also knew that she would be there every step of the way. If he'd let her.

She'd already requested a temporary transfer. No way could she contemplate being out in space without him. They'd agreed, naturally. As soon as he was a little better and out of here, she would hand over his daily care and take up a post as Head of Surgical. She'd been assigned some quarters, she knew he was in for a lengthy period of being Earth bound but she knew equally that he would need a friend.

It took Riker and Troi mere seconds to make their way to the transporter room and beam down to Medical once the Enterprise had made orbit.

Beverly Crusher had met them in the transport terminal and warned them both that his mental state was still a little altered. Not to mention the lingering deafness as the cochlea clones bedded in.

"So it's been a real test of patience but he's starting to come out of that phase now, thankfully."

"I don't know how you coped Beverly – every time he woke?" said Troi, wondering how her friend had fought against her own personality.

"Every time. Thankfully the team on Starbase 3 came up with the idea to pre-program a padd to respond to variations on a theme. Every time he woke, we had to turn him to the screen. Then there was the French problem…" she paused as they entered the rehabilitation unit that was housing the captain. "He was really jumbled up there for a while, the language centre was all kinds of screwy."

"Is that a medical term Doctor? I don't think I'm familiar with that one…" said Riker, teasing her. He'd missed them both since he'd last seen the captain at the Starbase, and Beverly when she'd left Jedoken IV far behind and set out in a shuttle to return to Medical.

"How did that resolve?" asked Troi, ever intrigued by the workings of the brain.

"A lot of patience and the help of the padd again, we had everything translated into French as well. He was switching out about two thirds of everything he said, like he couldn't find the Standard. Slowly, it just dropped away. I think the neural pathways were re-forming after the damage caused by the fever. Once we got him under some intense regen, the Standard just came back." She finished as she reached the captain's door. "Just be warned, he has been hit incredibly hard by post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome. He lasts about a half hour before he drops right off again. And, you'll need to be patient."

In his private suite, the captain was propped up with a pile of pillows behind him, his head flopped to one side. He was asleep but Riker could already see that he looked a hell of a lot better than the last time he'd seen him. The flushed skin, rash and the pustules had gone, only feint pink stripes of freshly regenerated skin remained, and the device attached to his Borg implant had been removed and had been replaced by a dermaplastic patch. He looked pretty normal, if a little on the skinny side.

He paused by the door while Beverly went to wake him. She rubbed his arm and called his name gently. In a moment, his eyes started to flutter open. He looked around the room for a few seconds, trying to work out where he was before his gaze landed on his First Officer and Counsellor.

"Number 1, Counsellor!" he said, surprised. He looked to Beverly for a moment before continuing, "Am I on the Enterprise?" he asked, delighted and confused in equal measure.

He began trying to push himself up on visibly trembling arms before giving up and flopping back against the pillows. Beverly held him up for a moment as she plumped them into shape for him, then helped him lay back.

"Jean-Luc, you're still at Medical. Will and Deanna have come to visit while the ship is in orbit." She said carefully so he could hear what she was saying.

"Hello Captain, how are you?" said Deanna, feeling instantly comfortable. She took a seat beside him, opposite Beverly.

"I've been ill Deanna. It turns out… Not sure of the details, but I think it happened in Paris."

"Is that right?" she replied gently, taking one of his hands in her own. She could sense his familiar presence but it was clouded by a fuzzy confusion making her feel fatigued herself as she tried to sift through what he was projecting.

Will stood back. He had never been comfortable visiting anyone in hospital, and he'd always been thrown whenever the captain had been anything less than his best. Still, he was very glad to see him looking a little less close to death.

"How are you sir?"

"Will! When did you get here?" He'd forgotten almost instantly that he'd already greeted his First Officer only moments before.

Beverly put her arm around Riker's shoulder, a gesture of reassurance that was gratefully received, "A few moments ago Captain…" he paused, uncertain of what to say next. "The Enterprise is in good shape. The crew send their regards."

All in, the captain lasted about twenty minutes as Will and Deanna filled him in on the latest ship scuttlebutt before falling asleep again. Riker watched him closely as his eyes grew heavier and his head started to drop awkwardly.

"Sir, can I help you lay back there a little?" he asked tentatively standing and going to the head of the bed.

"Hmmm? Will? Why are you here?" he asked sleepily, his words running into each other.

"Beverly?" Riker asked, worried.

"Don't worry Will, perfectly normal." She said as she lowered the head rest and made sure he was comfortable. She lowered the room lights then steered Will and Deanna out into the corridor. "He'll sleep for a few hours now. At least you got some sense from him."

"How is he? Really" He asked, his face tightening with concern.

"He's really much improved – he is returning to us now. I realise it might not look like that but trust me, he is a lot better. We have this fatigue to reckon with but thankfully, the delirium and most of the language problems have been resolved."

"But he went so fast…"

"I know… I guess I must be used to it. But he'll be fine Will, I promise. You know what though, I've been thinking this whole thing through and I still don't quite get the link between Jendoken IV and the nannites. I must have missed a step on my way back to Earth."

Deanna interjected, a broad grin on her face, "This is the good part, you're not going to believe this!"

Happy to return to the kind of conversation he was much more comfortable with, Riker brought her up to speed. "It would appear that both the Jendo and the Kloz had employed the services of the same external militia group to bring down the other government. The militia infiltrated the arkoner bud crop and modified them with nannites. The nannites then got to work genetically modifiying the arkonar to cause the illness then deleted their coding and became utterly undetectable. Pretty clever really, to take advantage like that."

"They were poisoning each other? With the same poison?" she replied, not liking where this was going.

"It gets better… tell her Will."

"Once you'd developed the antidote, they agreed for us to host a meeting down on the planet. We finally got our bargaining chip."

Deanna took over, unwilling to miss out on telling the story, "That's when you left of course. Pretty much as soon as we got in there, they confessed but then it took another step. It turns out that they were trying to bring each other down in order to secure supplies of the renewable fuels they were each completely reliant on."

"I don't get it?"

"Both Jendo and Kloz societies had become entirely dependent on the buying and selling of raw materials found in the other community – they had built their entire civilisations around products that could be found only in their counterpart, and made most of their money from the selling their own product back across too. Because they've been so stubborn for centuries, neither faction realised they had both been supplying the raw materials for fuel that they could easily have supplied for themselves. Can you believe it?" she continued.

"Let me get this straight, they were both supplying fuel to each other? Both charging a fortune and paying a fortune?"

"That's about the sum of it." Said Riker.

"So if they'd realised?

"They would have had their own renewables without ever worrying about it running out." Said Deanna, a huge smile on her face.

"Wow! I mean, stubborn doesn't even come close!"

"Tell me about it." He said. He turned and headed for the exit, ready to make the journey back to their hotel. Now he'd seen the captain, saw that he was so much better than when he'd last seen him, the weight he'd been unconsciously carrying on his shoulders seemed to lift away. "Can you make it to dinner this evening? Maybe a little hand of poker after?"

"I'll be there Will. See you later."

Beverly watched as Will and Deanna headed off down the road. Will put his arm around Deanna's shoulder. When would those two just make it official, she thought, content in the warmth of her friends.