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***Note: Alrighty then, I can't recall exactly what's been said about their home planet or the war so I embellished… a lot, plus I added my own little twist. Oh well, chalk it up to poetic license.

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History

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Renata stood in the pouring rain staring blankly up at the cave's entrance. It had only taken her twenty minutes to drive to the nondescript location, following the explicit directions she'd managed to get out of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque's geology department's leading professor. She had placed two horribly expensive phone calls to the man after Jordan had left the hotel room thinking she was asleep; the first to locate the man and the second to coerce the cave's location from him through his apparently ready supply of topographic maps of the state and much too through knowledge. She didn't care that geology was his profession, no one should have that much knowledge about an otherwise boring landscape.

Now that she was there she didn't know how to proceed. Jordan was waiting in the jeep, probably still wondering how she'd managed to find the place at all. As much as she loved him, she rarely ever told him the full truth about anything she did. Somehow it made her feel more in control, even if that feeling was just a ruse.

Climbing up the rocky side to the cave above, she tripped over loose stones and slid across slick surfaces. She didn't care, she didn't even care if she went careening over the edge and died on the rocks below. At least if she did that she wouldn't need to race across the continent in search of pointless artifacts of a alien race anymore.

Entering the cave through a pouring sheet of water, she whipped the hair from her eyes and tried to adjust to the dim light. She knew the place, knew the dimensions and feel of it as certainly as she knew her own skin. She'd been there countless times in her dreams and she knew where to go.

The granolith chamber was strangely silent as she entered it. Flashes of memory assaulted her and she knelt down to the floor with her head clutched tightly in her hands.

A woman stood before her, a woman with flowing golden hair and oddly sincere eyes.

"You must help them, darling, they cannot do what they are intended to do without your assistance. That's why we sent you, Kashir. You and Obrien are their key to return to their home. You are their key to fulfilling their destinies."

"Don't call me that!" Renata snarled at the woman. "My name is Renata, not Kashir. And I guess you cloned the wrong person if you think that I'm going to play a role in your little game. I'm not going to help you."

"You do not have a choice in the matter, Kashir. You will help them, it is your destiny."

Renata flung her arms away from her body, at a loss as to how to deal with the surging anger in her veins but needing desperately to do something. "Destiny is for shit. We made our own destinies here, even your precious children."

"We have allowed them to think that, yes. But in the end they will not turn from us. We need them, all of them, Vilandra, Khivar, my son and his queen… even you and Obrien. You are our very salvation."

"You placed the ultimate losing bet, lady, because I'm not playing the game. I don't care who those kids were before and I don't care who Kashir and Obrien were, all I know is that we are not those people. I will not be a part of an intergalactic holocaust."

The woman continued to plead her case, trying what she could to change the other's mind. "You were sent later, Kashir. You developed the technology that enabled us to send you so that you and Obrien would mature first although you arrived last. Your scientific discoveries altered the very course of the war and gave us the hope that we would triumph over our enemies."

"Kashir was a butcher. She was nothing better than a murderer, worse even because she delighted in her 'subjects' agony, dragging their lives out as long as she possibly could. I am not Kashir! Kashir abducted innocents, performed experiments on suffering subjects. She committed atrocities that, although I can 'remember' them, I don't understand their significance or even if they had any significance at all. Not only that, you awarded her for such. You regaled her as a great humanitarian, or whatever you would call it, of your race." Renata was disgusted with the argument, tired of fighting the same battle to no effect.

"You don't understand what we suffered at our enemies' hands, Kashir. Our actions, your actions, were wholly justifiable." The woman reached out as if to take her hand. "Do you remember when you were just a child? You would race through the halls until you had found me in the dead of night, suffering from nightmares of what you had seen. You watched as those who hated us destroyed your family, as they destroyed your parents, as both Khivar and Vilandra lay dying under your gaze. You didn't understand it even then, even as such a small child. After all, you knew your mother, my daughter, was a traitor to our people, you had thought that her actions would at least save her life. In the end they did not."

Renata raised her head in defiance of all the woman had said. "And like I said, I don't give a damn who Kashir was, I only know that I am not her."

~~~

Maria sat next to a fully recovered Michael on her mother's couch. Liz had been right, she hadn't been happy about having a grand total of six, possibly more, aliens taking up even very temporary residence in her house, but she hadn't thrown too loud of a fit and had, in the end, relented. She knew that Michael and the others needed answers that these others might be able to provide.

Neither one of them had explained the situation Maria had come home to. She felt it was Michael's decision and Michael felt it was no one's business.

Maria jumped when the doorbell rang.

"I'll get it," Liz offered, rising and walking softly to the front door. Pulling the door open she was faced with a thoroughly soaked and raging Renata and an equally angry Jordan. Her eyes widened at the venomous tones that dripped from Renata's words as well as the icy retorts Jordan interspersed her rant with.

"I can't believe you're going through with this!"

Renata's eyes filled with disbelief and ire. "Do you want me to lie? They wanted answers, I'm simply providing them. One day they'll figure out that some things are best left alone!" She strode into the room, Jordan trailing her slightly.

Resigned to listen to the tale Renata was obviously determined to relay, Jordan sunk down into a chair and rested his head in his hands.

Renata stood at the edge of the room. She was tired of this, tired of everything. She had found those who she was intended to 'bring home', and she was going to more than likely destroy any beliefs they might have created about that home. It saddened her to realize that she didn't even care.

"Would you like something to-"

"No. I just want to get this over with. You," she pointed at Michael, "you were so eager to ask me questions this morning when you broke into my hotel room? Well, this is how it works. I tell you a little story and when I'm done, if you still have questions, you can ask away and I'll answer them. After that Jordan and I will leave and we will never lay eyes on you again. Do you understand?"

All heads nodded.

"I guess I'll start at the beginning then. As they say in the movies: long ago in a galaxy far, far away there lived a king, his queen, his second in command and his sister who was, in fact, married to the second in command." She pointed at each of them as she listed their origins. "Now the planet on which they lived was perfect, beautiful, pure. Their society had at last come into its own and had created a veritable paradise." Renata paused to take a deep breath. "Then they decided to play God."

Everyone sat in stunned silence as Renata described the events of an interplanetary racial war that lasted decades, leaving both sides so devastated that neither would ever be able to regain even a fraction of what that they had lost. She described the traitorous actions of Vilandra and Khivar's reaction to her disloyalty. She described the massive destruction caused by Khivar and perpetrated on innocent victims: bombings of infant sanctuaries and religious buildings where mothers and children had gathered for protection, the destruction of the homes of elders, artists, and scholars, the decimation of another planet that had not even been involved in the war but was receiving food and other supplies from the enemy.

She spoke of the actions of the royal couple who had not only openly supported their second in command but urged him on to do even more, demanding what they claimed was their due; of governmental actions they enforced that were enacted against anyone who was suspected to have reason to carry out treason; of mass executions sanctioned by the crown against people who were innocent of any true wrongdoing. She described the torture and subsequent deaths of those poor women who had, at one time, professed to be friends with Vilandra, merely because they had unwittingly consorted with a traitor, she also spoke of the deaths of their husbands and children, they had all died at the hands of their own king.

She finally paused when she came to her own part in the war, or rather, Kashir's part. She hated the woman more than she thought was possible, hated her even more because she, Renata Birdsong, carried some genetic part of her in the hybrid body she found herself in.

"Khivar finally found Vilandra and brought her back to their world. I guess she was something like Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships… He loved her, at least I think he did. It had been years that she had been away, years that he had been enacting his own vengeance on the galaxy. Maybe he was tired of the fighting, maybe he was just somehow forewarned of his own end. The ship with all of you on it had already been launched; you were their hope for the future, not them."

Renata shook her head, showing the first glimmer of emotion since launching into the story. "When Vilandra had left, she left behind more than just her husband and brother, she and Khivar had a child, a daughter named they had Kashir. It's humorous to think of it now, but 'Kashir' means something like 'the hope and love that transcends even antiquity'. Kashir had been no more than an infant when her mother abandoned her, but the next time they met she was something akin to five or six years old. She had no memory of her mother and was not particularly interested in getting to know her, not that she was given the opportunity. Soldiers broke into their home the first night she was back; they killed both Vilandra and Khivar while the child Kashir watched."

"That night proved to be Kashir's downfall. She never forgot the images of her parents as they lay dying in agony. She did grow up to see the sight many more times, under the guise of her own experimentations. The war created a perfect torturer in the girl. She committed havoc and mayhem and I will not go into the specifics. Her crimes were no more excusable that those of her parents, of her aunt and uncle."

She lowered her head, knowing she would have to eventually admit all of it. "She became increasingly concerned about the hybrids that had been sent out of the royal four. She worried that even with their protector, the shapeshifter, they would not be able to return to their home without help. She began to consult with her consort about how to remedy her growing concern. Together they improved the hybridization process as well as the incubation pods. They devised a better, faster methodology. When they had tested it thoroughly, they created another ship to travel to the same place they had sent the first one more than three decades before, this one with only two pods, not eight. It crashed in 1970 in the Blue Ridge Mountains; five years later two very young human looking children emerged."

She stopped speaking. They could figure out the rest without her gory explanations. She stood in the thick silence of the room for long minutes before it was broken.

"You're here to take us back?" Max was finally able to speak. His hand was clutched so tightly in Liz's that he doubted her fingers had any more feeling in them than his did.

It was Jordan and not Renata who answered. "No, we're not. Perhaps that was what Kashir and Obrien had intended but we're not them and we won't take part in any of their plans."

"How do you know all of this? I mean, Max, Michael, and Isabel, they don't have solid memories of any of what you've just described." Alex tried vainly to reason through the incredible tale and discover where his friends fit into it.

"The hybridization and cloning processes Kashir and Obrien invented and perfected enabled their clones to retain the memories of their origins. We remember everything Kashir and Obrien experienced; generally it reasserts itself in dreams and nightmares but it's there nonetheless. The dreams started when we were about thirteen. But their plans backfired, instead of urging us on to fulfilling our own destinies, they repelled us."

Renata remained standing, slightly removed from the group, as she surveyed the framed pictures on the wall. Smiling faces that didn't have to worry about their destinies or alien holocausts. Well, maybe one of them did; Maria, the girl who had sat motionless and silent next to Michael throughout the entire telling did have some clue as to those concerns. Renata wondered if the girl's mother had noticed the change in her daughter. There was something different about her eyes in the more recent pictures, or perhaps it was in the set of her mouth. She had been affected by all of this too, even so far removed from the actuality of it.

"What about the tattoo?" Max asked.

"I had it done years ago when I still believed in destinies and the good of our people. I believed it all then, thank God I couldn't find you until now…"

"Then why are you here?"

Renata turned and looked squarely into Michael's eyes. "Because this is where it ends."