A/N:
Major spoilers ahead for H.G. Welles' War of the Worlds, which have significant implications for this story from here on out. If you want to skip it, jump ahead on day 91 from the word "Martians" to "Mystified," and then again in 92, and be aware that you'll be missing a component of this chapter's plot. (Or go listen to the broadcast!)
As to the rest: I've done a fair bit of reading, but I'm not a biologist. Chalk it up to painstaking technobabble. Plus other implicit "science" references to Life Line, Nothing Human, The Swarm, and a line lifted from Shattered because we are playing merry hell with the canon.
Just one chapter to go, after this.
Day 90, continued
"This is new," Kathryn says drily when Tom returns to her quarters, ghosting her fingers across his swollen face. And because he knows she'll settle for nothing less, he gives her the blow-by-blow of his encounter with Doyle, her bemused expression darkening as he goes. He wonders if she will be angry with him, or disappointed; thinks she might have been, once. But from the look on her face it seems, instead, that above all she'd like to introduce Doyle to the dark side of an airlock.
"The difference between you and him," she scoffs, deriding the other man's words. But there's nothing she can do to punish him, not meaningfully. She knows it, Tom knows it. They don't bother to talk about it.
"And Sickbay?" she asks, a muscle jumping in her jaw.
"Five from Engineering. The heat," he admits.
She lets out a short, harsh laugh and drops her face into her hands.
"I've been giving the gel packs some thought," she says after a moment, looking up at him. "After what happened to that probe, I don't want us to touch them. But we should be able to rig a site-to-site transport to get one out."
"Now?" Tom asks.
"No time like the present," she confirms, her tone laden with irony.
In another universe, they would run a battery of simulations first, safety checks, go to yellow alert. It's reckless do it this way, just yanking the thing out and seeing what happens. But of the many resources they would need to run such a test, they are lacking constant and stable laws of physics, and a crew that wouldn't mutiny over the very idea.
Funny, the things we take for granted, he thinks.
The attempt is underwhelming, in the end. Tom isn't sure what he was expecting—that the gel pack would warp spacetime when it rematerialized, sparks flying from the wall panel, billowing smoke and high drama? Maybe it would melt the floor beneath it, or maybe breaking the circuit would breach the hull where the pack had been.
What would happen, anyway, if Tom died in the middle of a loop? Would he, too, be resurrected, tucked into his bed like nothing had happened?
But they lock on to the middle gel pack in a set of three and beam it to the coffee table, and as they watch, the bizarre silver threads forking through the component parts simply… bridge the gap.
Tom moves to examine the extracted gel pack, now laying harmlessly on the other side of the room. It looks inert, as one would expect from something without a power source. Yet something about this unsettles him more than all the other options he'd considered. The normalness of it. Their every quiet failure a stark contrast to the calamity they are trying to prevent.
"We could try removing more of them," he suggests, without much enthusiasm.
Kathryn shakes her head mutely.
Because he can't stand to look at this evidence of their captivity for one more second, he excuses himself to the bathroom and inspects his battered face in the mirror. He presses gingerly against a cut just above his eyebrow. It's not the first time he's been punched in the face, but it's been a while. He's a little surprised to find that it looks about as bad as it feels. Somehow he'd forgotten what great heights a bare fist could achieve.
Kathryn appears in the mirror next to him, frowning slightly. She leans tiredly against him.
"Why didn't you use a dermal regenerator while you were in Sickbay?" she asks, watching his reflection.
This is a complicated question. The easiest answer is that he didn't want to divert attention away from the people who needed it most, who don't know that now it's started it isn't going to stop, that no matter what he does to ease their immediate suffering they will be back in Sickbay in no time at all. And though they won't remember, Tom will, just as he bears the memory of every one of Kathryn's deaths, and the ship-wide grief of every aftermath, and the slow horror of Chakotay's mental decline, and the knowledge that Chaotic space itself writhes through the bowels of this ship while he does nothing after 1302 hours but wait for the day to reset.
And he himself ends each loop comparatively unscathed, just falls asleep in one place and wakes up in another, the world made new again. But this, this tangible pain that he can see and touch and worsen if he's not careful, if he doesn't want to be careful, this is something different, for a while. In Sickbay his hand had hovered over the dermal regenerator and a voice in some blackened corner of his mind had whispered, no, this is right, and he'd pulled back, selected a hypospray instead, and moved to the nearest patient.
"In a couple of hours I'll be good as new," he answers. And at his side, Kathryn closes her eyes against everything he does not say.
Day 91
Tom is summoned to Sickbay again, and it's the same five engineers but he knows it's only a matter of time before their numbers increase. He does what he can for them, as quickly as he can, pretends that it matters at all.
When he gets back to Kathryn's quarters he finds them empty, a PADD at his feet along with her combadge. Holodeck 1, it reads. His trick with the turbolift worked like a charm, before, but a part of him likes the idea of someone discovering this small evidence of their solidarity, so he drops his combadge next to hers and makes his way to deck six.
When the holodeck doors open onto his Borel Hill program, he smiles widely. It reminds him, a little foolishly, of his Academy girlfriend borrowing his shirts.
"I'm hiding out," Kathryn calls when she sees him, an explanation which is not strictly necessary, he thinks, since she's laying on a woolen blanket with his book open in front of her, her uniform jacket discarded. And she looks terrible, not just the enduring dark circles under her eyes and her too-pale skin but her entire demeanor, a dullness in her expression that worries him, more than usual.
"Well, considering our stunning lack of any other ideas…" he jokes, settling himself down next to her. He says it lightly, means to convey his support, but her face falls.
"Taking a day off is good," he assures her quickly. "We both need it. We've hit a dead end."
"That's what I've been telling myself. That it'll give my mind the opportunity to think of something new to try."
"But?"
She smiles wryly. "But taking the day off usually makes me feel worse."
"I have faith that you can achieve anything you set your mind to. Even this."
She rolls her eyes at him, but in a fond sort of way, so he has probably redeemed himself. She returns to the book—nearly finished, he notes; this is the way he's been marking time lately—and he rolls onto his back, watching the clouds overhead with his hands behind his head.
If he's being honest, it does surprise him that this would be her idea. It's traditionally much more his custom to disappear into a holoprogram when the going gets tough, and that was before the fates of the entire crew were unreasonably heaped upon their shoulders.
It's a relief, though, her coming here. Resting, however briefly. Every morning he wakes up and wonders if this will be the day her headache does not abate. If she'll even make it to 1302 hours. There's a part of him, a part he has found increasingly difficult to ignore, that wonders whether they shouldn't just be making the most of whatever time they have left.
Because the only thing he knows for sure, anymore, is that he cannot do this alone. And if one day—and this is his greatest fear, more than never getting out of here, more than the looming warp core breach—if one day he goes to wake her up and can't…
Kathryn gasps and sits bolt upright. "Jesus," Tom chokes, startled out of his reverie.
"Martians," she says, looking at Tom with wild eyes. "The difference between you and…. Damn, how much time do we have?"
"Uh," he says, alarmed.
"Read it," she demands, thrusting the book into his hands.
"'By the toll of a billion deaths man has brought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are.' What—"
"The Martians aren't adapted to Earth, Tom! The invasion fails because of harmless bacteria, harmless to humans; humans did adapt. 'To no germs do we succumb without a struggle'. Don't you see?"
"No," he says.
"What if we," she says, practically vibrating now, "have adapted to the neurogenic field?"
He tries very, very hard to follow this train of thought. "That would mean we were exposed to it before," he says slowly.
"Not necessarily, not specifically. Come on," she urges, pushing herself up and calling for the arch.
"Wait, where are we going?"
"To test a hypothesis!" she says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Mystified, Tom follows in her wake all the way to Sickbay. She strides through the doors with purpose and seizes a medical tricorder, remodulating its settings as the Doctor comes around the corner.
"Excuse me," he says, irritated. "Would you mind telling me—"
"Scan me," Kathryn says, handing the device to Tom.
"Give me that," the Doctor snaps, snatching it out of her hands. He scrutinizes her work. "You're scanning your extracellular vesicles? That's oddly specific."
"Bear with me," Kathryn says, rolling her eyes. "Look for temporal variants."
The Doctor scans Kathryn first, and then Tom, and then, seeming to doubt the data, he scans Kathryn again.
"Doctor," Kathryn says, warningly.
"I'm sorry, Captain, I'm just… surprised. And frankly a little annoyed. Your EVs are indeed carrying clear markers of temporal transposition. I assume we travelled through time and no one thought to inform me?"
"But he scanned us for signs of temporal flux weeks ago," Tom protests.
"I did no such—"
"And he didn't find any, because we're not in flux. We're not displaced. It's like… tree rings. We must have gone 'there' and back, and recently, I think, or we wouldn't still be carrying the evidence."
"Adaptation," he says, finally getting it. She beams at him.
"What are you talking about?" the Doctor explodes.
"You've been an enormous help, Doctor," Kathryn says. "Computer, deactivate the EMH and seal the doors."
"We don't have much time left," Tom cautions. "You're sure you want to stay here?"
"I'm sure I don't want to die in the corridor," she corrects him. "Tom, I think I know what's going on. The aliens who live here were responsible for the neurogenic field, right? But their information was clearly limited."
"Chakotay's gene."
"And us. I think the time loop was an accident, and so were we. Bio-neural circuitry is extremely unusual. Only the Intrepid-class ships can support it, and Voyager was one of the first. 'You're too strange for us', Chakotay said. We thought that meant that we're too strange for Chaotic space, but what if it's the other way around? They know they are too strange for us."
"You think the aliens were trying to help," he realizes.
"That nucleotide frequency is no coincidence. We can't survive here, the graviton shears should have caused the hull to buckle long ago. What if they were trying to put us into a kind of stasis, buy us time? But because Chaotic space is fundamentally incompatible with our technology, our physiology…"
"Their chat with you didn't go as planned."
"But once we got locked into these loops," she snaps her fingers, "that's it. And now the neurogenic field that's protecting everyone is also preventing the aliens from telling me how to get us the hell out of here."
Tom pauses a moment, trying to wrap his mind around what she's suggesting. "I don't remember—" he starts, but Kathryn winces before he can finish the question, her hands gripping either side of her head, and he knows their time is up.
"Computer, dim the lights," he orders automatically. She slides down the wall and he joins her on the floor, drawing her to him.
"I told you," he says, forcing a smile.
"What?" she pants.
"That I had faith you would figure it out. Of course, I'm taking some credit for the holoprogram. And the book you stole."
Somehow, she just manages an exasperated huff of a laugh.
Day 92
Tom ignores three calls from Sickbay before he grudgingly drags himself out of bed, walks back to his quarters, and deposits both his combadge and Kathryn's into a desk drawer. By the time he gets back to Kathryn's quarters she is just emerging from the bedroom, sleep-tousled and bleary-eyed.
"I'd like to double back to the whole we travelled through time part of the conversation," Tom says immediately, having waited rather heroically for some time now for her to be coherent enough to talk.
"Coffee," she rasps.
He points to the table on her left, where he'd left a thermos in anticipation of this request. She drinks deeply, her eyes fluttering closed, and he has to suppress a smile. She slumps down on her couch and he joins her, elbows propped on his knees.
She scowls at his alertness.
"In your own time," he laughs.
"It was a lucky guess," she says tiredly. "I don't remember any time travel. Do you?"
"No," he confirms. "What does that mean?"
"Truthfully, I went out of my way to avoid the Temporal Mechanics department at the Academy. My best guess is instead of coming back to our own time, time just... reset itself. Or we reset it. Like it never happened."
"Except it did happen, because here we are."
She holds up a wary hand. "I have no idea, Tom. There's probably no way to know. But whatever happened, it onlyhappened to the two of us. Otherwise someone else would be aware of our present situation."
"Lucky us," he says. "It's strange, thinking there's a piece of our lives we don't know anything about…"
"Tell me about it," she groans miserably, leaning back and throwing an arm over her face, and it's funny, really, how much this woman truly loathes time travel and yet cannot seem to avoid it.
"But maybe it is…" he says suddenly, a thought occurring to him. "Maybe it is lucky. You know what the triumph of human evolution is?"
"Opposable thumbs," she mumbles, without opening her eyes.
"Vaccines. Antidotes. Inoculations. The Martians…" he laughs, because he's starting to think a five hundred year old novel is going to save their lives. "The sequel to War of the Worlds could've been that the Martians just inoculate themselves against our germs and wipe us out."
Now he has her attention. She sits up and gapes at him, her eyes like saucers.
"It's in our blood," she says. "Oh my god, the answer is in our blood."
They're going to have to bring the Doctor in on this, somehow, because Tom sure doesn't know how to synthesize a temporal antidote. He's not sure such a thing has ever even been needed before, let alone attempted. Their best hope is that because the Doctor isn't biological, he won't be as resistant to this conversation as the others have been. Tom isn't exactly optimistic, even so. The Doctor's program, like every other system, is maintained by the same gel packs they need him to fix.
But when they get to Sickbay, the thing they've been expecting for a while now threatens to halt their progress. Chakotay lies on the far biobed, apparently unconscious.
"I was just about to call you, Captain. I had to sedate him," the Doctor explains. "I relieved him of duty, and… let's just say he didn't take it well."
"What exactly does that mean, Doctor?" Kathryn asks guardedly.
"He seemed to think that he alone stood between this ship and certain doom. He was hallucinating rather… energetically. I discovered that he has—"
"A 'crazy' gene, yes, I know. Doctor, we're here on a related matter. We need your help to develop an experimental inoculation for the gel packs. Can you do that?"
"But how could you know? Wait—what kind of inoculation?"
Carefully, methodically, they try to explain. They leave out all but the essentials, but even so it sounds absurd, even to Tom, and he's been living in this reality for so long he has lost track of the days. The deeper they get into their tale the more skeptical the Doctor looks, and Tom realizes that if they ever had a chance of convincing him they're not insane, it went out the airlock when Chakotay's hallucinations came to light.
"Scan us," he says, holding his arms wide, recognizing way too late that they should have lead with this. "Scan us for temporal variants."
"We might be looking at some kind of epidemic," the Doctor says cautiously, reaching behind himself for a hypospray. "If all three of you are delusional…"
"Look," Tom snaps, striding over to a panel in the wall. He pulls it open and stands back so the Doctor can see for himself that they're telling the truth, see how strange, how unreal the gel packs look.
This, it turns out, is the wrong thing to do.
"What have you done?" the Doctor asks hoarsely. "Sickbay to security!"
"Computer, deactivate the EMH!" Tom says hurriedly, but he looks over at Kathryn, and they both know the damage is done.
"Can I interest you in a lovely little junction room I know from the last time I had to hide from Tuvok?"
Kathryn sighs.
Day 93
The Doctor will be lucky, Tom thinks, if Kathryn ever forgives him.
"Imagine jumping to the conclusion that the captain has sabotaged the ship," she grouses.
She knows as well as Tom does that it's not the Doctor's fault. Tom is not sure this knowledge will keep her from decompiling the Doctor's program, if they try to talk to him again.
What they need is a matrix. Tom's no engineer but he can design the hell out of a holoprogram, and the Doctor is way too complex to duplicate but if they had some kind of a head start, they might be able to get that hologram, a fresh, non-sentient hologram, to do what they need.
"There's an interactive diagnostic program for the EMH," Kathryn suggests. "I don't know if it's sophisticated enough…"
He shoves the rest of his toast into his mouth and bolts out the door. By the time Kathryn catches up with him he's in an uncanny replica of a lab on Jupiter Station, pouring over a systems directory.
"You might have waited," she teases.
"Sorry," he says absently. "I'm just not sure how to initiate…"
"Don't touch that," someone barks at Tom, and he spins around to see… not the Doctor, exactly, but a messier, crankier twin.
"Zimmerman," Kathryn says, and she does not sound thrilled.
"You know him?"
"I met him at a conference once. Went out of his way to get on my nerves all week."
"Do you have a reason for activating my program, or are you just here for idle chit-chat?" Dr. Zimmerman asks, and Kathryn gives Tom a knowing look.
"Doctor, don't take this personally, but we need to know how, uh, complex you are. Compared to our EMH, for example," Tom says.
"I have the same matrix, the same holo-array, and the same neural pathways that it does," Zimmerman answers, sounding deeply offended by the question.
"And your matrix, it's adaptive? Heuristic?"
The hologram rolls his eyes. "Of course it is."
"It'll work," Tom tells Kathryn. "I think."
"Doctor," Kathryn says, "what if I told you that this ship is currently trapped in temporal loop, and that to escape we need to synthesize an inoculation using our own blood?"
"I'd tell you that I'm a diagnostic matrix, not a doctor."
"Do we have enough time to start now?" she asks Tom, her face full of hope for the first time in longer than he cares to remember.
Zimmerman warns against overloading his matrix with what he deems 'nonessential data', but the best Tom can do is separate the Doctor's elective and personality subroutines from the rest of the reference medical files. The memory load is massive, way beyond anything Tom has tried to work with before, and the transfer takes what feels like an eternity. As it progresses the hologram flickers ominously, dies, and Tom has to start over. On the second attempt he scrambles to install a recursive algorithm at the key moment, holding his breath all the while.
"Doctor?" Kathryn asks tentatively, when he seems to be stabilized.
"I… seem to suddenly possess a great deal of medical information," Zimmerman says, sounding surprised.
Kathryn's smile is a brilliant, luminous thing.
They waste no time filling Zimmerman in on what they need him to do, and he accepts the situation with none of the suspicion or fear they have seen from the rest of the crew. He begins at once, recruiting both Tom and Kathryn as lab assistants. It is a grueling process of trial and error, which doesn't surprise Tom so much as it frustrates him unreasonably, conscious, as he always is, of the passage of time.
Just after 1230 hours, he pulls Kathryn aside.
"I can stay here all day," he tells her under his breath, "but they're going to come looking for you."
"I'm surprised they haven't already," she admits. "I could go…"
"No," he says quickly. "Stay. Can you hide us?"
There are many benefits to having level ten clearance, it turns out. She secures the doors so even Tuvok shouldn't be able to override her lockout. They'd already abandoned their combadges but now she also masks their life signs, hiding her trail rather elaborately. He lets out a low whistle, and she grins.
"High praise, from you," she says.
"You better believe it," he agrees. "If we don't finish this in time, I'll come straight back here in the morning."
"I'll catch up," she promises.
When the aneurysm begins, Zimmerman rushes over in alarm. "Don't," Tom says, cradling Kathryn against his chest. "This is why we need that serum."
Zimmerman looks agitated, but nods. Still, he stays close by until the end, watching as Kathryn wraps herself around Tom, her face pressed into his neck. Tom grips her through her convulsions, holds her as steady as he can. He does not look away. He can almost time it now, how long they will stay like this. How long it will take.
"You must… care for her a great deal," Zimmerman says, after she stills.
"We need that serum," Tom repeats.
There's plenty that could still go wrong. He has never tried to hide her for the entire day, before. Gently, he lifts Kathryn off of the floor and moves her to a low bench, makes sure her eyes are closed. Orders the computer to generate a blanket, which he drapes over her himself.
Then he turns away, and he and Zimmerman resume their work.
Day 97
Four interminable days in the lab. He's faster now, gets Zimmerman augmented and up to speed by the time Kathryn is able to join them. But it's harder and harder for Tom to keep all the failures in his mind, what to tell Zimmerman they've tried before. Some of their work is probably redundant.
There is nothing Tom wouldn't give for a PADD to carry with him from loop to loop.
"We're never going to be able to get this done in time," he says over his shoulder when he hears the doors open.
"And good morning to you," Kathryn replies.
He runs a rough hand through his hair, frustrated. He's been ignoring the obvious for days, telling himself it was better to focus on one crisis at a time. But as they draw closer to a solution, the problem of distribution looms ever larger.
"Even if—when—he figures it out, we can't update his matrix, synthesize the serum, and distribute it by 1300 hours," Tom says. "We just don't have enough time."
"You have all day, afterwards," she points out mildly.
He stares at her. "It seems ridiculous to have to remind you of this, but if I break the loop after you die…"
"I'd die for good. I know," she says.
Of course she does. Of course she would be willing to make that sacrifice, has been expecting it for all this time when it hadn't even crossed his mind. Fuck. Something deep inside Tom, whatever it is that's been holding him together, snaps clean in two.
"You can't possibly expect me to do this. If you think I'm going to go to all this trouble just to set your death in stone—"
"I always knew that might be the trade," she interrupts. "Remember?"
"I won't do it. I will not do it."
"Then you'll be condemning one hundred and fifty-two people to their deaths. And their families will never know what happened..."
"I didn't cause this!" he shouts, throwing his hands up. "This is not our fault!"
"But it will be our fault if we do nothing, Tom," she says. "I can't live with that. Can you?"
He laughs darkly, turns away from her. Can he live with it? They're already damned as far as he can tell. No one else knows what's happening. They aren't suffering—most of them aren't suffering. The ones who are don't remember. And then one day, soon, they'll just be… gone. But to lose her, like this, after everything?
"I can't live—"
"I've got it!" Zimmerman cries, and Tom spins around so fast he knocks his mug off of his work station.
"It's so simple, so elegant, I can't believe I didn't see it immediately. In fact, its simplicity is the reason I didn't see it immediately! Someone is going to want to write a paper about this, I—"
"Can you teach us?" Tom demands.
"Teach you?" Zimmerman answers blankly.
"If you can show us how it works, we can make it ourselves." He looks desperately at Kathryn. "We'd save a lot of time if we could skip straight to the serum. If we split up… hit the junctions… we can get it done."
She hesitates.
"Please, Kathryn," Tom pleads.
"Can you do it, Doctor?" Kathryn asks.
"I can show you how," Zimmerman confirms. "The rest, of course, is up to you. How's your biochemistry?"
"Two whole semesters under my belt," Tom says, and the ghost of a smile crosses Kathryn's wan features.
Day 99
They allow themselves two more days to prepare. They each memorize sections of the sequence so that neither of them has to remember it all. In Sickbay, the number of casualties from Engineering has risen to nine, and even in the corridors they can feel the temperature rising. Chakotay is relieved of duty every day, now.
It's time.
They've retreated to his quarters to plan the rest of it. She doesn't like to die here but they need a break from the holodeck, the irreality of Jupiter Station or anywhere else, and he supposes its better than her own quarters. He hands her a fresh coffee and joins her on the couch, unable to defer any longer the question that has been bothering him since they discovered the neurogenic field.
"We're assuming a lot," he says, hoping he sounds calmer than he feels, more confident. "We're assuming that dropping the field will mean the aliens can reach you without hurting you."
"I'm not assuming that," she disagrees. And he must look stricken, because she quickly adds, "I'm assuming that everything will progress as it usually does, but that lifting the field will allow the Doctor to intervene. For a nice change of pace."
"Christ," Tom says, before he can stop himself. "That's gonna give us about thirty seconds."
"It'll work," she insists.
But the truth is, she can't know that. They won't know until they've gone so far there is no turning back, and if their timing is off, if any of their theories are wrong, that's it. Game over. Except…
"There's something else," Tom says cautiously, sincerely hoping that she will prove him wrong. "I've been thinking about what you said, that we don't remember our last jaunt through time because it reset itself."
"Or we did," she says.
"Right. So we've… been taking for granted that when we break the loop, time will pick up where it left off. But isn't it possible we'll just snap back to the beginning? Before we started to remember? Kathryn, what if that's what happened before?"
All at once, her face is a mask of horror. "I don't…" she starts, but her voice catches. "That hadn't occurred to me."
"But you do think it's possible?"
He can tell that she does not want to answer him, or wants to come up with something hopeful first.
"Skip the recruiting speech," he advises.
She swallows hard.
"I don't think that's how it will work," she says unsteadily. "But you're right. We don't know."
Which is, of course, not at all what he was hoping to hear.
"Is there any way to… warn ourselves? In case we forget?"
She laughs, and it's a sharp, desolate sound he immediately regrets causing. "You know there's not," she says.
And if they did start over, their memories erased because they make it so none of this ever happened except that it did and will again, it wouldn't just mean repeating all their painstaking work to escape once more. It would mean that there is no escape, that they can break the loops only to reset them, again and again, eternal damnation unless, or until, entropy finally beats them to the punch.
"I don't want to forget," she says softly. And he knows she is not only talking about Chaotic space, now.
There's nothing he can do about the godforsaken temporal mechanics of it all. But this, he has an answer for. He cups her face lightly, tracing her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb.
"Listen to me," he says. "I have loved you for all this time. For as long as I can remember. If the worst happens, I have to believe we will come together again."
"Selfish," she whispers, shaking her head. "To be worried about this, with so much on the line."
"Not selfish. Human," he corrects.
She rests her forehead against his, and the weariness of her is a palpable thing, the weariness of planning contingencies for unknowable timelines, and all the lives that hang in the balance. And then the near-certain stretch of isolation to come, and the pain of it all, the unrelenting agony in her skull, the unspeakable burden of memory.
But she never does die alone. Not ever.
"We'll find each other," he says. "I promise."
"You can't promise that," she laughs wetly.
He pulls back, waits for her to meet his eyes. "I promise," he says again.
And after a moment, she nods.
Then he stands, and resolutely he offers his hand. She takes it without hesitation and rises quietly, allows him to lead her into his bedroom.
"Is this okay?" he murmurs, searching her face.
Instead of answering, she pulls him to her and kisses him, soft at first and then bruising, desperate, panting, pressing her body against his, slipping both of her hands under his shirt to drag her nails down his back. Groaning into her mouth, he breaks away long enough to tug her tunic over her head and then she crashes into him again, shimmying out of her pants as he backs them up to his bed. He guides her down, runs his hand up the length of her body from her hip to the hollow of her throat. And then, drawing back to remove his own clothing, he sucks in a ragged breath at the sight of her beneath him, bared for him, trusting him. Wanting him.
"Please," she breathes, arching upward.
And whatever happens in the morning, at least they will have had this. He has to believe—he has to believe—that no force in the universe could compel him to forget this, this desire, his and hers, that has outlasted all others. As he settles himself over her finally, finally, as she gasps and throws her head back with absolute abandon, it would not surprise him if they managed to rend this loathsome region of space all on their own, their togetherness like a supernova; and if this is indeed their own personal apocalypse, all their hopeless efforts will have been worthwhile just to be with her like this, to love her, to be loved by her.
A/N:
Their forgotten trip back through time, of course, is as seen in 1x04, "Time and Again."