A/N: Thanks for your patience again. Life got crazy.

February 3, 2387

Satellite 19, Galada IV

How ironic, Miral thought to herself as she moved across the rocky terrain. Her plan as she had approached the Federation ship commanded by her–by Captain Paris–had been to fein flight trouble–engine malfunctions, navigational distress, something that would attract their attention. To then have literally encountered the exact issues she was supposed to be pretending to have, well, that was the textbook definition of ironic. But now here she was, after crash landing on an unnamed moon orbiting the planet she had been spirited away to in the future by Daniels.

Her shuttle was damaged. Not severely, though, as the estimated time to repair the problems was less than four hours. But she wasn't flight worthy, which would have been ideal, considering she had broadcast a general mayday that she was certain had been picked up by the USS Yeager, the only ship in the vicinity at the time. Miral was also injured, a minor gash on her forehead that had bled profusely but was only superficial at best. Her goal after this hiccup in her plan had only been to move away from the shuttle itself.

Daniels had done his best to prepare her, but it was altogether strange and unfathomable. The people she was looking for were not the people she had known in her life at all. But they were also not different, not strangers. They were alternate versions of the people she had known…people who would end up the way the ones she would see had events been different. She had to keep forcibly reminding herself that the man she was looking for was not her father. Her father had been killed in an accident on the Starbase where they lived when she had been eight years old. She was searching for Captain Paris, not her father, simply the man her father could have turned into had he lived…and she had not.

The equipment she was using, tricorders, weapons, even the shuttle she was flying, were from her version of reality. She had transversed the border between those versions of reality using the device Daniels had given her. But a cursory examination by any Starfleet officer in this reality would be able to tell the radical differences…because her father had been instrumental in creating and designing all of the new models of craft to be used by the Federation. Reality where Tom Paris had lived…and where Tom Paris had died…had very different versions of shuttles and the like as a consequence. Moving away from the crashed vehicle that she could not disguise was the best way to keep them from studying it all too long…to keep them from detecting the phase variance that would tell them it was not from this version of reality.

She had moved away in a straight line, tracking her movements across the ground as it sloped and fell. Her goal was to draw the entire landing party towards her and away from the shuttle. However, the nucleonic particles in the atmosphere were proving more difficult than she had originally anticipated. Her tricorder was working better now, after she had moved a good kilometer away from the crash site, but it had been working spottily almost the entire time she had been moving. It appeared the landing party had split up in search of her, that same interference affecting their tricorders as well.

She had no way to know who was the closest to her location. She hoped it was Captain Paris. Her only point in coming to this place and time was to find him. He was the place where she needed to start, so she could then start searching for the others. Daniels had recruited her specifically because he had believed she was the only thing that could have persuaded her father to assist…Captain Paris to assist.

Her greatest fear, as she hunkered down beside a large outcrop of rock, was just that…the inability to separate Captain Paris from her father. She didn't know how she would react to seeing him again, looking the same way he appeared in her dreams, for he was the same age in this timeline give or take a few months as her father had been when he was killed. His daughter had died at eight years old…she was 26, much too old to be his daughter…but somehow, she would feel like she was. All of it was making her head hurt to just think about.

She not only had to convince him of who she was, and that she was telling the truth, but she also needed to convince him he needed to accompany her. Accompanying her meant leaving this time and place, this version of reality, and crossing into another. He was a Starfleet captain after all, even if he had the same personality as her father. His first duty was to his ship and his crew and leaving with her would feel like he was abandoning his crew, literally leaving his first officer and chief medical officer here on this barren satellite. She knew she would have to explain that the mission they were about to undertake was the most important.

If they succeeded with the mission, then all of time would have been reset. The focal point in time had been the damage to Starbase 47. Her father and T'Mira's mother were missing from all but one timeline, and not the same timeline. Daniels had believed those facts were significant, what the sphere builders had hoped to accomplish, their ultimate goal. Tom Paris and Dr. T'Lassa being alive in the same timeline meant the sphere builders would be defeated by the Federation in 2567. Getting them together again was her way to draw the sphere builders out and force their hand. Leaving his crew here would seem like abandonment, but again, if they succeeded, this timeline would disappear. None of this would ever have happened.

And her mission had to succeed. Sure, Daniels had explained all about the importance of everything, the very fate of the Federation in the future. It was why he had reached across time to contact her specifically. All of that was true…and yet, if she was being honest with herself, the only thing that mattered, the only thing in her mind that was driving her to succeed at all costs was the idea that she could prevent the worst thing that had ever happened to her, to her family, from ever taking place. Perhaps it was a bit humbling to accept that changing her life meant saving the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant, but it was just an added benefit, not her motivation.

Miral rarely got nervous, but she was nervous now. She wasn't sure how she would react to seeing him again–to seeing him, this man who could have been her father. She remembered what Daniels had told her about his life. His daughter was dead, his wife mentally disabled with almost no memory of him. Hadn't he told her Commander Michaels was dead in his timeline as well? This man would be a shell of the man she had known, her loving father who lived for his family.

Could he be any more of a shell than her own mother had become? Miral thought bitterly.

Strangely she noted how much contempt she held inside for her own mother, but not this man's counterpart in her life. Her mind started composing a bizarre essay, making comparisons and contrasts inside her thought progression. Her mother had crumbled to pieces after her father had died, blaming herself for letting him go to the reactor room when she should have gone, being the chief engineer. The onslaught of grief had caused premature labor, precipitating the death of her brother just as he'd been born, something her mother also blamed herself for. The loss had crushed the young eight year old, but her mother's guilt and anguish had created a wall between them that to this day was still there.

Miral had just needed her mother, more than she ever had in her life, and her mother had given up on life once her father had died. All of B'Elanna's peace of mind, everything that Miral had taken for granted in her young life, had evaporated. B'Elanna became bitter, withdrawn…an alcoholic, if Miral was being brutally honest. The tragic irony of it all was the most emotional and heart-felt conversations she had ever had with her mother after the accident had been when her mother was inebriated on Klingon bloodwine.

Starfleet was a family tradition as far as the Paris' were concerned. Her father's ancestors on both sides of his family had served in Starfleet as far back as its inception in the mid 2100s. When she was young, she had always just assumed she would join Starfleet when she was older. She had definitely inherited her mother's penchant for engineering. Her parents had believed she would have been raised her entire life on Voyager as it traveled back to the Alpha Quadrant. All of it just made sense, and it had never occurred to her to ever want anything else.

Miral's best friend, T'Mira, however, had made her think otherwise. The two girls had grown up together on Starbase 47. Both of T'Mira's parents had been Starfleet…and both of them were dead because of it. Her father had died before she had any memories of him at all. Her mother's mate, Commander Aaron Michaels, had raised the girl, and she thought of him as her father since almost the very beginning. For a human, Aaron was still quite Vulcan, a situation only made worse by the loss of T'Lassa, who had been the one to thaw the ice inside his heart, as ironic as that fact was. T'Mira was closer to Aaron than to any other person in the universe…and he had always told her to follow her heart, even if that meant walking a path that was different.

Miral and T'Mira were friends in part because each understood what it was like to be split between two worlds. Without her father, Miral had been forced farther into the Klingon part of her than she was comfortable with, something that in her early years she had felt the antithesis to. Her mother so often incorporated more of her human half into her life. The absence of her father had almost made her reject that part, as if it were too painful, too difficult to balance emotionally. Her anger was more easily explained by her Klingon half. Easier to give in to the excuse, it seemed. T'Mira was a poet, taught by her human step-father to not dismiss her human side simply because she looked Vulcan and thought that was what others expected her to be. With T'Lassa gone, Aaron's purpose in life had been raising her daughter. All he had were his human traits, but she was better off by learning from his example. The emotion there in her words that moved Miral to tears almost every time she read them would not have been possible if T'Mira had chosen to suppress those emotions in favor of her Vulcan half.

As they had grown, the idea of joining Starfleet soon began to mean leaving behind her best friend, her sister if she was honest with herself, and it was the most painful choice she had ever had to make. In the end, it was the need to get away from her mother that had overpowered her need to stay near her friend. T'Mira, gentle of heart, had understood of course, though Miral knew how heartbroken she had been when the decision was final. They talked every day, but it wasn't the same. She spent more time missing her friend than almost anything else.

What happens when this changes back? She found herself daydreaming. Daniels had told her when she asked, in this timeline, T'Mira was back on Vulcan with distant relatives of her mother's. Was that poet in her dead? Never brought to life in the first place? What would be different if T'Lassa and Aaron survived? They would have raised her together. The emptiness inside her friend would never have manifested itself.

In all of her desperation to put her family back together, she hadn't really thought about what it was she could lose by changing the timeline back. It seemed she had so little that was worth keeping…just her friendship.

Miral closed her eyes and concentrated, reaching in her mind. It was a tenuous thread, scrambled as she had crossed into a different version of reality, but the echo of her friend's presence in her mind, left behind after mind melds, was still there. It was like a whisper, a tickle, a presence that was always with her, the essence of who she was that was mirrored in her friend's mind as well, for such is the state of being after two minds had touched. A part, the tiniest part, remained when all else had been withdrawn.

T"Mira had understood why she had undertaken this mission. T'Mira always understood, fully aware of the pain Miral had lived with all her life. A memory of a conversation from long ago surfaced.

It's not fair! Your father and my mother lost the same thing…Why did she let it destroy her? He chose to live for you…not die with her even as he lived…

He did not blame himself for her loss…My mother died in his arms. She chose to shield him from the blast. She chose his life over her own…He understood that. He tried to honor her wish that he survive and…actually live. Sadly, your mother never understood what your father did…sacrificed himself so that you and she would live. I think if your mother let herself accept that, her life would have been very different.

She was angry at him for leaving her…for dying and leaving us alone…

More guilt, it seems. Over his death, your brother's death, her own anger at him. My father tried, for years, to help her. He understood, more than I think anyone realized. He was married before he met my mother. She died in the Dominion War. It almost destroyed him too…but my mother saved him. He never forgot that.

It's just not fair…

What, if anything at all in life, is?

Nothing was. Her friend was right, as always. All she could do was live her life the best way she knew how. She had this extraordinary chance now, a chance she would not let slip by. She had no idea what it entailed, what the final cost would be or the final price she would pay. Only that it was worth it, no matter what else was the fallout farther down the line.

The red light on her tricorder flashed, interrupting her reverie. Someone was approaching.

She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders tightly, draping it over her head. The air was colder than she found comfortable, but the blanket provided the extra warmth she needed. She wore it like a cloak as she stepped out from the rocky outcropping. She watched her breath spiral in milky streams away from her mouth as she breathed. The cowl of the blanket hid her face, but she had a perfect view of him as he stepped across her path with his tricorder poised out in front of him.

Daniels was right.

He had told her all the foreknowledge in the world would not prepare her to see him and accept the reality of the situation. Her legs felt weak, like she could hardly hold her own weight up. It was like she was becoming part of a dream, floating away with the tendrils of her breath as they escaped into the atmosphere.

"Captain Paris?" she asked, not sure of how else to address him. Her mouth was dry and sticky.

He was the same age as her father when he died. But my god, the man standing before her looked like a version of him ten years older than that. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes surrounded by ashy circles. He was so much thinner. His hair was less the sandy blond she remembered and much more peppered with gray, thickly concentrated at his temples and feathering out over his ears and around the back of his head.

She saw the shock register on his face. There was no reason she would know how to call him. It wasn't only a shock, though. He tilted his head to the side, like he was listening to music and trying to remember where he had heard it. Deep, confused concentration…mixed with disbelief. "We picked up your distress call," he murmured as an answer, not thinking to question how she knew who he was. "I'm Captain Thomas Paris–"

"Of the USS Yeager. I know," she answered, listening to her own voice echo in her ears like she was hearing someone else speak.

"How?" he asked in a hushed voice. "I don't–"

His voice stopped abruptly and his tricorder clattered to the ground at his feet. All the color drained from his face as she pulled back the cowl of the blanket to reveal her face to him. His jaw dropped, his eyes wide and unblinking as he regarded her…wondering why she seemed so familiar…his rational mind not connecting the dots because of the impossibility of it all. Her voice, her face, her eyes…they were familiar…because he knew her.

Miral watched him, watched as his eyes swept up rapidly to her forehead. He was studying her brow ridges, so extremely delicate, since she was only one quarter Klingon. Brow ridges were unique to each family, passed down with the father's genes. B'Elanna's mother, Miral, had inherited her brow ridges from her own father, then passed them down in a less pronounced way to B'Elanna. No two patterns were the same. Miral and B'Elanna's brow ridges were identical, only Miral's were more superficial.

Suddenly he was gasping for air, like he had been suddenly placed in a vacuum, wheezing and choking. He fell onto his knees, clutching at his chest. Without thinking, she lunged forward and grabbed him by his upper arms. She didn't know what was happening. Was he having a heart attack? What was wrong? "Are you alright?" she asked, her face just inches from his.

The scent of him almost knocked her back on her haunches. It reached deep into her memory, her subconscious, eliciting memory after memory of being close to him, being in his arms, hugged and kissed goodnight. He still wore the same cologne, the same aftershave. Her eyes filled with tears and no more words would come out of her throat.

He looked up, his eyes locking with hers. The most beautiful azure blue…the only place she had ever seen that color, had been her father's eyes. It took her breath away. She felt like gasping for air.

"You're…you're…Miral," he said, her name the hint of a whisper on his breath. "How? I don't understand…" She watched as he seemed unaware as the tears overflowed from his eyes down his cheeks.

"I'm from the future," she told him. At his furrowed brow she added, "From a different reality than this one."

"How old are you?" he whispered in awe.

"Twenty-six," she answered.

His eyes darted back and forth. "The same age Admiral Janeway said you were when you helped her counterpart travel back in time to the Delta Quadrant…" he rambled, mostly to himself.

She didn't know what he was referring to. But she explained nonetheless. "That is another reality, it seems. I was born on Voyager three seconds after the ship arrived back in the Alpha Quadrant in 2378." She was ready to explain more, for there was so much she needed to tell him before the rest of the search party came to find them.

She felt his hands on her cheeks, holding her face with such tenderness it took her breath away. "I knew it when you were little…but you look so much like your mother…" he gushed. With a fierceness she didn't expect, he crushed her against him in a tight embrace.

Everything she needed to say, all the information she had limited time to relay to him, all just disappeared from her mind. He may not have been her father…but his arms around her felt the same, exactly the same as she remembered, as she had ached for every day of her life that she had lived without him. She sunk into his arms, buried her face in his chest, the tough Klingon melted to the eight year old girl who had kissed her father after breakfast on the last day of his life and then never saw him again.

The rest of it could wait, it seemed. The perpetually open wound that had been bleeding inside her for 16 years, suddenly poulticed this way, could not. She indulged her relief, weeping in his arms as he held onto her for dear life.

The hardest part is always convincing the people we contact that we are who we say we are…and that we're telling the truth. Captain Paris will believe the message…because it will come from your mouth. It's why you were chosen. Daniels' words.

The hardest part was over, she told herself. She knew he believed her. She felt it inside her, wrapped tightly in his arms. He wasn't her father…but he could have been. Should have been. She had to succeed here. She had to save his life.

It was vital to the survival of the Federation. She needed to know why.