AN: Here we are, another piece to this one.
I hope you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!
111
Daryl couldn't remember being happier to see anyone than he was to see Kathryn and Chakotay. For all he knew, the last time they'd actually seen each other was only hours before, but it felt like they'd spent months trapped here—and all of them had lost track of any concrete marker for the passage of time. Time was, at this point, practically assaulting them.
Daryl was not relieved to see that Kathryn was very evidently suffering—no matter how much she tried to hide it—from something similar to what plagued Carol, even though it appeared that Kathryn's symptoms were not quite as advanced as Carol's at this point.
Carol was finally sleeping, albeit fitfully, and Daryl was content to let her sleep as much as she could. She'd called him into the room earlier, concerned, because she'd woken up "swollen" from a nap. He'd pressed his hand over her hard belly, after she'd indicated it to him—immediately concerned because it did feel very, very hard to him—and he'd tried to convince her that it was just the baby growing, but she'd informed him, without any hesitation, that this was not at all how that worked. She shouldn't gain a small but still prominent bump while taking a nap, and her belly, if it were a baby belly, shouldn't feel so hard to the touch.
There was a spatial anomaly. Daryl knew those words, but they really meant very little to him. The power on the ship was being affected. Various controls were being affected, too, though Kathryn and Chakotay didn't really know what had been learned since they'd transported into the program and, like everyone else, they'd lost complete track of the passage of time.
It was, of course, entirely possible that the spatial anomaly that was doing what it wished with the ship was also altering the program that was running and, in some way, changing the time advancement program.
But B'Elanna had, in her possession, some PADDs loaded with direct access to the ship's controls and, as Chief Engineer, she could possibly override anything the spatial anomaly was inserting into their computer system.
Daryl put his energy, then, into keeping everyone away from B'Elanna and giving her the room to breathe—and the ability to ignore some of the pressure that was on her—that she might need to work.
Chakotay was glad to have Daryl's assistance in getting Kathryn to join Carol and lie down—despite the fact that Carol worried that they would need her and, Kathryn, likewise was sure that they couldn't keep things going without her. They could, Daryl reasoned, probably comfort each other better than any of them could—especially since they were clearly experiencing something similar, if not the exact same thing—so they'd put both women in the same room together for the time being.
Daryl, Chakotay, and Tom kept busy practically miming the actions they should go through during a day—or two, or three, since it was impossible to tell how many days they might experience in a jolt of rapidly passing time—because none of them knew what to do, or what to say, and all of them were practically overcome with worry and uncertainty about what might happen to all of them if they stayed much longer in the program.
Daryl had never thought that, in returning to the time in his life that they called the Millennium Plague, he would find that the passage of time was the most dangerous evil he could face.
111
When the arch appeared, they debated it at least for a few moments which, in their current world, could be hours. B'Elanna had succeeded in bringing it up, and it looked like an escape from the holodeck—a door like Daryl had never seen before, but it was explained to be something of a failsafe. Normally, Tom told him, they could bring one of those up at any time and at any point, but this anomaly had required some fancy programming by B'Elanna to outrun its attempts to undo her work.
And they didn't know how long it would last.
But they also weren't certain it would work.
"It might lead out of here," B'Elanna said, "or…"
"Or?" Daryl pressed.
"Nothing is behaving like we expect it to behave," B'Elanna said.
"We could step through that door into a world we aren't even prepared to enter," Chakotay finished when B'Elanna's words faded out slightly.
"Or we end up just outside the entrance to the holodeck," Tom said.
"So—it's go through the door," Daryl said, "and see where and…and fucking when…we end up, or we stay here and risk bein' killed by this fuckin' malfunctioning TAP thing y'all keep talking about?"
"We don't know what could be waiting to kill us on the other side of that door," Tom said.
"It's possible that they're finding out what the anomaly is right now," Chakotay said, "and that they'll shut down the program any time now."
"I can't get any communications through," B'Elanna said. "Whatever it is that's interrupting our systems—and, if it's organic like you said they believe it may be, then it's a little easier to explain—seems to want to allow me to bring this up, but nothing else. I had to work to get here, but it cut off my efforts every other way."
"Maybe you just slipped it," Daryl said. "Got around it this time."
"Or, maybe, it doesn't mean us any harm," Chakotay said. "Maybe it senses we're in danger, but it doesn't want to allow the holodeck to stop running for some reason, so it's giving us an out."
"Could be that whatever's on the other side of this is ten times worse," Tom said. "Like we're being herded into it."
Daryl stood, staring at the arch a moment. It was strange, there in the living room of the little house where they'd been holed up while the program ran around them. Or, rather, where they'd been holed up while the program malfunctioned around them. They'd gone out to try to do a run for supplies—something quick. They hadn't finished the program, and there were no towns to be found. They could find programmed checkpoints with small amounts of food and weapons, and those seemed to re-stock every now and again—but there was no way to get more. There was no way to acquire other supplies. There was no medicine. In addition, they'd found a glitch, it seemed, where some of the already dead Walkers seemed to reset every now and again—like someone hitting a restart button on the program—and they came back to life.
It was, Daryl thought, only a matter of time before something happened and the program glitched in a way that they couldn't survive.
"It's everybody's choice," he mused. "Go through the arch, or don't." Nobody seemed to argue with that in the slightest. They all had to make their choices. They could either stay in the program and hope for help to come, or they could step through the portal and risk either spilling into the corridors of Voyager or, in a worst-case scenario, dropping into some other world or time entirely.
Daryl laughed to himself. The nervous feeling gnawing a hole through his stomach didn't match the laughter, but it was all he had.
"Fuck it," he muttered, when he realized that Tom, B'Elanna, and Chakotay were all looking at him with question on their features—all of them waiting for him to tell them what the hell was so fucking funny. "One damn day I woke up and the fucking world was—was fucking—in chaos. The Dead were walking. People were dyin'. I didn't have a fuckin' clue how long I'd live or…if I'd live at all. I survived that shit. Not all of me, maybe. Maybe some of me didn't make it, but…most of me did. Found Carol. In all that shit, I found her. Learned to live with her in that. Got sucked up by the Araulians and—and transferred across how many years into the Delta Quadrant to a damn spaceship. Survived Kazons and…Klingons." He laughed and noticed the slight smile on B'Elanna's face. "Got stranded on some strange planet and ended up stuck in this godforsaken hell. But I've been OK. And now my choices are stay right here and wait for someone to rescue me—risk losin' my wife and my child in the process. Or—step through the damn portal with her and see where the hell we end up." He shook his head and went to bedroom.
Carol was easy enough to rouse. She slept, but not soundly.
"Come on," Daryl urged. "Let's get up." Carol got up without argument or complaint. Kathryn, who didn't seem to be at quite the same stage as Carol in whatever was happening to them, was sleeping pretty soundly. Carol eased around the woman's body on the bed they were currently sharing and followed Daryl. "Can you walk? You doin' OK? Alien doin' OK?"
Daryl got a tight-lipped smile and a hum of agreement. He believed neither one of them, but he knew Carol pretty well, and he knew that she was going to work with him as much as she could, especially when she thought she had no other option. He supported a good deal of her weight, even though she'd promised him that she could walk without his assistance.
"The pain's OK right now," she said. Daryl laughed quietly.
"Yeah—you look like it's OK," he said. "You look like it's just great. Just lean on me, OK? You won't hurt me. I got you."
Daryl led Carol into the living room. She hardly seemed to take notice of anyone around her in her current state. The arch that they had been afraid might disappear was still there. The anomaly, if it really was sentient and able to decide what it wanted and didn't want, didn't seem interested in removing it until they'd made use of it.
"What's that?" Carol breathed out.
"Our way out," Daryl said. "But there's a catch."
Carol laughed quietly and leaned her head against him.
"Of course there is," she said. "What's it want? A sacrifice?"
"Maybe," Daryl admitted. "There's somethin' that's invadin' the ship's systems. Let's us have what it wants us to have, and it takes away what it don't want us to have. Long story short and—at the risk of oversimplifyin'."
"Please…oversimplify," Carol said.
"I was able to bring this up," B'Elanna said. "Whatever it is, it's blocked every other effort I've made to turn off the program or alter it in any way."
"It's a door," Daryl said. "Could lead us outside of the program and outside the holodeck. Or—it could lead us to some other fuckin' world and time entirely."
"We have no way of knowing until we pass through it," B'Elanna said. "And there's no guarantee that, in passing through it, we'll be able to return back the way we came."
"Nobody is required to go through the portal," Chakotay said. "We can wait here until they figure things out on the ship and turn off power to the holodeck."
"But this damned program might be killin' us as we speak," Daryl said.
"The baby isn't OK, Daryl," Carol said. "I know it's not. Everything—isn't OK. And it's—this program. This place. The baby was OK when we got here."
Daryl nodded at her.
"You wanna go?" He asked.
"Do you?" Carol asked.
"Up to you," Daryl said. "I been in the Millennium Plague with you—twice, now. I was headed to New Mexico for whatever the hell was there, if there was a damned thing left at all. Been to space and across a couple hundred damn years. You wanna go through that door? I don't guess I give a damn what's on the other side."
Carol smiled at him. Her eyes looked tired, and that sincere exhaustion made Daryl's heart ache. He tightened his hold around her waist.
Carol glanced around at everyone else.
"Are you coming?" She asked. She looked at Chakotay. "Kathryn…" she said. She didn't seem to either want to finish or to be able to do so, so she simply shook her head. It was enough, really. Chakotay nodded in response.
"We're coming," he said. "We're right behind you."
Carol gave him her best reassuring smile left out of the reserves she had. She seemed to draw a little energy just from the promise of the door and the escape from her suffering here—whatever that escape may be.
"Can we go through together?" Carol asked.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"We weren't goin' any other damn way," he said. He glanced around. "Hope we see y'all on the other side. Good luck."
Someone might have said something. Carol was saying something, but he didn't hear it. Maybe he even cut her off. He simply tightened his hold on her so that nothing could possibly tear them apart—no matter where or when they might be going—and tugged her through the door.