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

Something groaned and shifted. Beverly heard the metallic screech cry out like something she might have expected to come from some kind of prehistoric animal. Something deep inside of her, too, responded to the screech with the same kind of purely ingrained instinct of fear that would have driven her in prehistoric times.

The wreckage shifted violently—something it shouldn't do after so much time. But the time…there was something different about time, now, even though Beverly hadn't quite been able fully explain it, despite the fact she'd had plenty of time to think about it.

She gathered up what she could from the little pile she'd made and ran with it. The almost animalistic death screams of the ever-collapsing hull of the Enterprise echoed loudly enough to almost deafen her and, yet, she could still hear her heart pounding as her blood rushed through her body. Piece by piece, parts folded and fell as they gave way to pressure from something—some tectonic movement, some atmospheric pressure, some decay caused by the ever-confusing passage of time in which they seemed to be swimming; forward, and backward, and oddly suspended like specimens in a jar.

Beverly didn't look back to see what was falling or how close it was coming to her. She kept her eyes on the light—the place where the sunlight streamed in through the wreckage. It was her escape, and as long as the thick metal beam held it open just as far as it had forever—or for only a few moments—she could escape back out the way she'd come in.

Had it been hours, days, months, or years since the crash? Beverly was entirely uncertain. Her answer to that question would have been different every time it was asked. Her scientific proof of each answer was as unreliable as her proof of another possible answer. She understood very little about her reality, and she wasn't alone.

Since the crash, whenever it had actually occurred, she'd mostly banned people from coming near the Enterprise. As soon as it had crashed, they'd taken what they could—important personal belongings, clothing, items from sickbay—but much had been unsalvageable, at least in a hurry. The destruction of the ship was extensive, and the entire thing was compromised. Cut off from the technology most of them had depended on for their entire lives, they'd had to focus on what was most important.

They had boiled and drank one pond dry before finding the one that was fed by something of an underground spring. Several of them had spent more time retching, thanks to tasting new potential food sources, than Beverly would have liked. They'd made homes in caves near their water supply, and some of them were now practicing their own notch-and-groove log building to see what they could teach themselves to do.

They had all seemed to be living this way for years and only hours.

And Beverly could swear that some of their people were dramatically older and miraculously younger—and nothing quite stayed as it was at any given moment.

The Enterprise, herself, was a good indication of the odd shifts in time. Beverly had almost immediately banned everyone from coming near the ship. It was dangerous, and a collapse could trap or kill people. Something falling could injure someone, and getting them out would be difficult, if not impossible—not to mention the fact that most of Beverly's medical practices had been reduced, at this point, to the best that she could do with local plants that she was still learning about, testing them all out on herself to keep from injuring anyone in the crew.

Still, doctors made the worst patients, and they were also some of the worst at following rules—or maybe that was just Beverly, herself. She returned to the Enterprise whenever she could slip away from the chores that needed to be done just to keep everyone surviving. Sometimes she found the ship in the same shape it had been in at the very moment of the crash. Sometimes she found it nearly looking as though it were in absolute ruins, being swallowed up by the nature around it. Each time, she found that it was dangerous.

The collapse around sickbay—no matter the time fluctuation at the moment—was severe. The safest way in and out was through a small hole that had been created, really, only because of a fortuitous positioning of a beam bent in the crash. Thanks to her flexibility and relatively thin frame, Beverly slid in and out of it with only a little difficulty—a move she would have never allowed anyone else to perform, since she would be killed if anything were to shift, even the slightest bit, while she was moving through the hole.

If she died there, she would be like the many others that had died on the Enterprise in the crash—a ghost haunting her permanent graveyard. They'd moved what bodies they could and burned them, unable to properly bury them in the hard soil nearby, but they'd had to leave many others because it was impossible or unsafe to try to move them. Their states of decay changed as the time seemed to shift, but Beverly was the only one who saw those changes as she slipped quietly through the ruins of what had once been their home. If the beam shifted, Beverly knew she would join them as just another trapped body, perhaps haunting the ship's hull for eternity as she shifted back and forth through time and states of decay and decomposition.

Still, she came back to the ship and weaseled through the opening as often as possible, each time leaving with whatever she could find when the current temporal shift—because she believed something like that was taking place—allowed her to find something previously undiscovered.

Beverly paused at the opening to quickly let her eyes glide over everything. The beam that had, until now, kept everything from falling down on top of her and sealing her into the constantly shifting wreckage or either crushing her as she moved through the hole, remained in its place. Satisfied that it was as safe as it would be, Beverly eased her findings through the hole and tossed them to the ground below before carefully easing herself up onto the foothold she'd found and starting to slide through the hole as carefully as possible.

She nearly reacted violently—something that could have caused the collapse of whatever was holding the beam in place—when she was grabbed by hard hands as she started to slide through.

"Shit! Worf!" Beverly spat as Worf pulled her out of the hole and put her feet on the ground. He held onto her for a moment, as though he recognized that her knees might need a moment to recover from the shock. "You scared me to death! And you could have killed me!"

"My apologies," Worf said. "But—you shouldn't be here. You said, yourself, that the ship is dangerous."

"I've been getting in and out of that hole for…" Beverly stopped.

"I am unsure, too, of how often you have made the trip here," Worf admitted, as though he could read her mind. "I do not know how many times I've followed you, but I know that it's getting more dangerous."

"Not always," Beverly said. "Sometimes, it's just like when we crashed. Others, it's as though the planet has nearly consumed the ship."

The prehistoric sounding howl of the ship echoed around them, and there was an obvious shift. The ground under them seemed to buckle slightly—like the warning of a coming earthquake—and something fell nearby. Debris stung as it hit Beverly's face. Worf wrapped himself around her protectively and held her, clearly meaning to shield her with his body. As soon as the collapse around them settled, having sounded much worse than it was, Beverly gathered what she'd saved from sickbay and allowed Worf to escort her outside.

He obviously checked her body for injuries as soon as they were in the orange glow of the sunlight. Worf touched her face more tenderly than one might have expected of a Klingon.

"You are bleeding," he said. Beverly reached her hand up and touched the spot. She saw the red blood on her fingers, already clotting thanks to the thick red dust that hung in the air of the planet.

The dust had come after the explosion of the star, Beverly assumed. It was thick, and they had no working tricorder to tell them what it might be. They had no choice but to breathe it in and, though it hadn't killed anyone yet, Beverly suspected it was the cause of some respiratory illnesses that seemed to ebb and flow with the odd temporal fluxes that took place. She imagined it might eventually kill them all. One thing it definitely seemed to do was shield them. At least, that's what they all believed, because they couldn't bring themselves to believe that Starfleet wouldn't come for them or look for them at all. It had to be the dust that, somehow, rendered them entirely undetectable as they worked to build their truly primitive home—at least until something killed them all, whether it was the dust, exposure, or malnutrition from eating things they only assumed were serving their bodies well.

"It's just a scratch," Beverly assured Worf. "I'll clean it back at the village. What's important, Worf, is that I found a case of antibiotics and a few other things for whoever may need them."

"Doctor—I have no authority to demand it of you," Worf said. "But—I have to ask you that you not go back in there."

Beverly didn't argue with him. She simply nodded, not saying anything else about it, and allowed Worf to carry what she'd found back toward their makeshift village as she followed at his heels.

111

"I brought you something for your meal," Guinan said. "I told Wesley I would bring it, and I would make sure you ate it. Please don't make a liar out of me."

Beverly jumped. She had been deep in thought, watching the reflection of the fire in the water and running back over the events of a day that, for some, seemed to have lasted a few years while, for others, seemed to have actually moved them back in time.

"I'm sorry to have startled you," Guinan said softly. "May I?"

"Please," Beverly said. She reached her hands up to relieve Guinan of her burden. They'd salvaged very little from the Enterprise in the way of creature comforts, but they had a few containers that they used for their clean water. One such container was currently a cup that came into Beverly's hands. In lieu of plates, they used fibrous leaves from plants that grew at the outer edge of the rather desert-like area of the planet in which their village was currently located—an area that seemed to grow at times and shrink at others. The leaves were terrible for eating, and had made Beverly quite ill when she'd tried them, but they were good for weaving and carrying things. On the makeshift plate was meat from an animal that had been killed to try to feed them all and some of a vegetable that had to be at least some relation to a potato, though they were much more fibrous and, if eaten in excess, caused extreme digestive distress to most of them.

"You need to eat," Guinan said. "You're looking thin—far too thin, really. You ought to be heavier by now, I suppose."

Beverly's stomach tightened. She could have easily explained the discomfort away as part of the attempt to digest the food she was eating slowly, chewing each mouthful excessively as though her teeth could make it that much easier for her stomach to break down what her body didn't want to digest. She knew, though, that there was a great deal more behind the feeling.

She knew, too, that Guinan knew. She could see something in her eyes in the hazy red light of dusk on their new planet.

"When is now, Guinan?" Beverly asked, laughing to herself because the question felt and sounded so ridiculous.

"All anyone has ever been able to do is live in the present moment," Guinan offered. It was a bottled response, and Beverly could tell that Guinan didn't mean it.

"Guinan—do you know what's happening?" Beverly asked. Guinan made eye contact with her, but she didn't speak for a moment. "Guinan—please—tell me…if you know."

Guinan sighed after a long moment. She nudged Beverly to prompt her to keep eating the undesirable food, and Beverly humored her in hopes that giving her what she asked for would earn her a response.

"It's the Nexus," Guinan said. "It's moving away from us, but…"

"Slowly?" Beverly asked when Guinan hesitated.

"It's impossible to tell," Guinan said. "This close to it, we're lucky that it didn't destroy us."

"What's happening to us?" Beverly asked.

Guinan shrugged.

"It's impossible to explain, really," she said.

"Try," Beverly said with a laugh. "I've got all night. At least, I think I do."

Guinan laughed quietly.

"The time is out of joint," Guinan said.

"Hamlet," Beverly said.

"And our reality," Guinan said. "The Nexus confuses things. Time. Reality."

"Are you saying—this isn't real?" Beverly asked.

"It's very real," Guinan said. "We're outside the Nexus. Our reality is real, but our perception is just that…perception."

"I don't understand," Beverly said, her stomach twisting like it did understand, but her mind feeling almost dizzy with confusion.

"Neither do I," Guinan said. "Not entirely. Nobody does."

"Is there anything we can do?" Beverly asked. "I don't know how to treat people when—they're sick today, but not tomorrow, and then they show up with something that's…advanced…and yet it just started."

"All we can do is wait," Guinan said. "The same thing we've done since the dawn of time; we can face our reality as it comes. I suspect that, as the Nexus moves away from us, things should…settle."

"And in the meantime?" Beverly asked.

"We keep doing what we're doing," Guinan said. "Looking toward the future."

"And sometimes the past?" Beverly asked with a laugh.

Guinan hummed and nodded.

"But mostly the future," she said.

"What does the future hold for us here?" Beverly asked sincerely.

"I told you that I can't predict the future," Guinan said. "It isn't a straight line. As you can see, now that you're living it, it isn't even the same as it was a second ago. The past is all that's certain. The future is constantly changing. But—I can predict some things with more certainty than others."

"Such as?" Beverly prompted.

Guinan smiled at her.

"Such as the coming of a young Picard," Guinan said with a smile, "whose mother should consider not taking it on too many more dangerous adventures, and should eat the meal provided for her."

There was no need to try to hide it. Beverly knew that Guinan wasn't the only one who was aware of the pregnancy—Deanna knew, too, and Beverly had told Wesley, just in case something was to happen to her and he needed to understand what it was.

"How does one even carry a child in this madness?" Beverly asked, wishing for something to eat that wouldn't leave her stomach aching for the next few hours.

"I suppose you'll be the first to tell us," Guinan said.

Beverly glanced toward the sky. Through the red dust haze that colored their world, she couldn't see the Nexus as it danced around, but she knew it was there. She hoped that it was moving away from them—and quickly would be best.