AN: Hey, everyone, I'll leave my big note at the end, mostly because this is a pretty intense chapter, and I don't want to force any kind of opinions or anything on you all :)

Chakotay stepped methodically through the wobbly paving of the cemetery. Gravestones, some new, others old, decorated the mossy earth like a tragic mosaic, each and every one unique. It was one of the only places in San Francisco that hadn't been overhauled in the Technological Revolution of 2189, and its rustic beauty had always called out to him. Bustling down the broken road of dust and mud, Chakotay wondered if anybody else still came here. Every time he arrived there was a fresh bouquet of bright yellow daffodils in a green glass vase. He had no idea who left them there. The only person he'd known to love daffodils was Nevaeh, and she'd always seemed disinterested and avoidant of the topic of her mother during the years he'd raised her.

Despite having not seen his daughter in an active, parental way since leaving the hospital on that fateful night, Chakotay had secured himself windows of opportunity in which he witnessed how she had grown. Of course, he was anonymous; thanks to the shady dealings of a few people he'd known from his Maquis days 'Chakotay' did not exist, and he was free to assume any identity he so desired. He chose a name: Michael Nolet, a career: Tactical Officer, and had the tribal tattoo removed from his face. He still, from time to time, caught fleeting glimpses of the people he'd shared his Voyager career with, but these brief meetings of eyes had gone as quickly as they came; he never stayed around long enough for a person to wonder. He'd seen Nevaeh at least twice annually since leaving, each time a complete accident. The most memorable of these had been five years ago, when he'd seen her leaving the cinema with a Bajoran boy she'd known since her early school days, a boy he remembered only as Lewis. He took one look at her, and instantly knew that the sweet child he'd known was all but gone. Her face had lost its roundedness, a fact he attributed immediately to Seven; Nevaeh had taken on the features of her mother, bar the slightly warmer skin tone and eye colour. It was in that moment, as Lewis leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on Nevaeh's slightly parted lips that Chakotay realised that she was no longer his baby, and that she hadn't been for quite some time.

He'd left her to keep her safe, but safe from what exactly? The painful reality of living in a household where it was starkly obvious that something, someone was missing? No, plenty of other families had done the same and made it through. The cruel years of motherless adolescence, in which she would go through terrifying and confusing changes without the safe solace of a mother to talk it through with? No, she had plenty of female role models to turn to in the place of her mother. So what was it then...? Deep down inside of him, in a place he rarely visited, he knew that he'd left her to save her from himself. He hadn't been the same since Seven died, and had regressed to a time in his life in which he'd felt just as hopeless, just as utterly despondent: his first few years in the Maquis.

Slowly, he had reverted back into his cynical, self-oppressed, twenty-something self; even if only in private. His self-destruction was easier to hide on Earth, as he was afforded a lot more privacy than he'd grown accustomed to due to the twenty-plus years of life as a part of a crew. He'd always been careful around Nevaeh, and had hid all evidence, namely his growing collection of whiskey bottles and tobacco, away from her. It had, over the years gotten increasingly difficult to deceive his own kin, but it had been what he needed to cope. He began asking Tom and B'Elanna to have her for weeks at a time under the guise that he was going to be away on 'business'. He'd done everything he could to make the process as easy as he could for everyone, but he knew that they wouldn't see it like that. He knew that he would be seen as a terrible man who'd abandoned his daughter but, as far as he was concerned, it was the least painful path for everybody. Of course, he was well aware of the fact that, wherever she was now, Seven was looking at him with disappointment and anger. In fact, she probably held him in even more contempt than their daughter undoubtedly did, and deservedly so. But then, she wasn't the one who'd had to suffer the pain of helplessly watching their daughter fight for her life, and though he could never know how she would have reacted had she known about the sickness, he was sure that she would have taken it just as hard as he had, if not more so.

Sighing inwardly, Chakotay made the final few steps to his destination, and, as he always did, opened his eyes slowly. His eyelids were heavy, his temples throbbing with the sudden burden of grief. Though his vision was distorted from the tears that had appeared from nowhere, Chakotay could see the familiar vase of daffodils, and he reached out a tentative hand to stroke the cool granite of his wife's headstone. Many things angered him; the fact that she was dead was obviously one of the main ones, as was the harsh reality that her final resting place wasn't anywhere near her memorial stone.

Seven Of Nine

An honest heart that once was ours,

Now you rest amongst the stars.

Leader, fighter, mother, wife,

We'll see you in another life.

Nevaeh crouched behind the thick trunk of an aged sycamore, breathing shallowly. She watched furiously as her father, the man who'd abandoned her with no explanation, mourned greedily for the woman he'd loved. The passion with which he wept melted her heart none as she thought of all that had been denied her in her life so far: a mother who, instead of raising her with love and guidance had died before a bond could even be made and a father who had given up on her over something that had, by all accounts, not been her fault. Nevaeh found it hypocritical that a man who could break his heart so completely over his wife could not even bring himself to extend a final moment of tenderness to their daughter in his final goodbye to her. When he'd said his farewell, that day in hospital, there had been no extra words of encouragement, no lingering in the hug, anything that she might have been able to cling to as evidence that he regretted leaving her, that she meant anything more to him than a stack of Starfleet issue PADDs or a statistics report. In fact, there had been less than that. A solitary 'Goodbye' as he slipped out of the door, a word that had shot a lightning bolt of fear through the nine-year-old who had come out of a blood transfusion mere hours before. 'Goodbye' was simply not a word they said.

Nevaeh, now through a curtain of her own tears, looked down at the dried dirt beneath her feet. The recent heat wave had left the dirt pale and cracked, and an army of ants walked in a line, carrying pieces of grass and fruit to their queen. The irony of it did not escape her, and, however childishly, she wanted to tell the ants that they didn't have to serve their leader so faithfully, that there was no point in it because they'd die as soon as they outlived their usefulness anyway. She cursed her weak immune system, wavering slightly with light-headedness and grabbed onto a wayward tree root for support. Her legs began to cramp up, not used to prolonged periods of crouching and she could feel herself tipping over. "Damn it!" she barked, registering the reality that she'd have a bump on her head and a grazed knee, before cringing and remembering that she was supposed to be hiding.

Chakotay looked up, startled by the sudden cursing, and rose from his kneeling position slowly. The voice sounded familiar, but he couldn't place who it might be; a friend, colleague, someone else... "Who's there?" he questioned gruffly, his voice hoarse from lack of use and a peculiar pain he felt in the back of his throat.

No answer came.

Nevaeh held her breath in a state of panic. The rational part of her knew that, despite it all, she was in no danger and that although he'd not been there for her he wouldn't hurt her, but the voice screaming out to her in her head said 'Run, like he ran from you, run'. Realising that it was an impossibility, the trees behind her were too densely clustered to make escape a plausible option, she took the other extreme and ducked down under a nearby nettle, wincing as the inevitable happened and the stinging began. Chakotay made his way to the sycamore, certain that he had heard the voice come from there "Who's there?" he repeated, in a more gentle tone of voice; whoever had been there had been scared that they'd made themselves known and for all he knew it could have been a little kid playing in the woods, not meaning to pry on, or disturb, anyone. "Madison?" he called, and Nevaeh bristled, wiping away her remaining tears; had he moved on so wholly that he was with somebody else?

"Who the hell is Madison?" she demanded, forgetting in her fury that she didn't want to attract his attention any more so than she had done already. Chakotay, still not able to place the voice, replied that Madison was a colleague, which, whilst appeasing Nevaeh enough for her to allow herself to crawl out from the nettle and sit with her back to him, didn't instil within her the confidence to face her father. Ridiculous, she thought, he was the one who left, and I feel guilty about even being here.

Chakotay approached the nettle bush, careful to not move too quickly; he saw a girl with waist-length blonde hair sitting in a bed of moss. "Who are you?" he wondered aloud; her back was to him, and though he recognised the voice, a name just did not appear with it.

"Does it matter?"

"Samantha?" Chakotay tried, composing a list of all the blonde women he'd known who'd be able to remember Seven.

"No."

"Naomi?"

"Warmer" Nevaeh replied. What the hell?! she thought to herself, this is not a game! Chakotay felt the cogs turning in his tired brain, and he instinctively thought of happier, more innocent times: chasing an excited six year old through the back garden of their newly acquired home in the suburbs, reading her a bedtime story on her third birthday, brushing her hair dry after bath times. That hair...

"Nevaeh." It was no longer a question. His voice held in it the weight of a thousand emotions: grief, guilt, even fear; they all made themselves known.

"Oh gee, how'd you guess?" Chakotay winced at Nevaeh's bitter laugh and bemused tone, though he knew he deserved it, and probably a whole lot more.

"Nevaeh." He repeated, in the same shell-shocked voice.

"That's my name, don't wear it out," she quipped, hugging her knees to her chest as she scanned around feverishly for a cluster of dock leaves. Whimpering slightly with the tingly pain, she scratched her arms and racked her brains as she tried to think of things to say. 'So what brings you here?' seemed a little too aloof, and she already knew the answer to that anyway. 'I hate you' was too harsh and, if she were completely honest with herself, it wasn't even true. "How did you know it was me?" she settled on, liking the neutral tone she'd managed to pull out of thin air. Twenty more seconds passed, and at his lack of reply Nevaeh became exasperated. Clearing her throat, she tried another, slightly more goading, tack; "For years, I kept this stupid belief that I would wake up one morning and that I'd come down for breakfast and you'd be there, and it would all be okay again. Ridiculous, right?" Chakotay still could not reply, though the pressure to do so was overwhelming; he knew that he would likely not see his daughter's face unless he said something, and soon. "Do you really not have anything to say to me?" she asked, "Anything at all? I mean, I don't want an apology, I know you probably had your reasons; but come on, really? Not a 'Hey there', 'How's your life been?', or even an 'I missed you'?" His silence confirmed her worst fears, and in that moment she was angry, knowing that she had every right to be and then some.

"I tried," he croaked, fighting through a seemingly impenetrable wall just to find the ability to string words together. "I tried not to go." This made no sense to Nevaeh, as it was both illogical and answered none of her questions, but she kept herself from saying so, aware that even after all that had happened, he was still her father and he deserved at least the opportunity to explain himself. "Real life isn't like what you see in the movies, Nevaeh; sometimes people are faced with things they can't cope with, that no amount of laughter and love can fix. And you're so much like her, your hair, the way you talked and acted back then. Every single time, seeing you in your hospital bed; it was like watching her die over and over again. I just couldn't..."

"But that's not my fault!" Nevaeh said forcefully, willing him to understand that it wasn't good enough; it was as if he were blaming her for his lack of personal strength. "And it wasn't exactly easy for me, either, you know, having to spend months at a time immobile and hurting. I get sick less often now," she told him, though he hadn't asked, "but when I do it's more painful and for longer."

"The Doctor hasn't been able to find a cure?" He couldn't believe it; but then, he hadn't been the only one who'd been sure that something would have come up by now.

"No, but he has been able to find a way to stop the nanoprobes in their tracks. It's sort of like an inoculation. Basically, I won't ever be free of this disease, but if I ever have children they won't have to suffer." Nevaeh said, referring to the breakthrough the Doctor and his colleagues had made a few days after her seventeenth birthday. After putting Nevaeh through some pretty heavy testing, they were able to conclude that the level of Nanoprobes in her blood was rapidly decreasing, and though they would never completely go their numbers would decrease enough so that there would be simply none left to pass on to any future children.

"And will you?" he asked. "Have children, I mean."

"Probably not." Nevaeh replied. "What with my illness and everything it'd be pretty hard to be consistently there for a child, and I always promised myself that if I couldn't be a proper parent to my children then I wouldn't have them."

"You sound so much like her, even now." He commented. How'd that happen? he pondered, wondering if Tom and B'Elanna had kept Seven's memory alive for Nevaeh, and possibly his too. "You have no idea how many times I wished she'd never died. Before her, I'd never really counted myself as one of the lucky people who got to fall in love; I'd resigned myself to a life of being lonely. I didn't even trust her at first, I wanted nothing to do with her. She seemed sub-human, hell, she was sub-human. She was never my rescue mission, but as I watched her over the years I began to feel like there was something there, and it was one of the happiest days of my life when I found out that she felt the same way. Our wedding, the day you were born... things I had never even wanted before Voyager, they were perfect. And then she died and it all fell apart."

"You loved her too much." Nevaeh concluded, using his anguished admittance as the final piece of the jigsaw. "And me not enough." She turned around to meet her father's eyes for the first time in ten years, and was surprised to see something she recognised. It haunted her that she remembered the torn look in his eye and the slight hunch in his back as if he'd been carrying the weight on the world on his shoulders. She realised that she had watched him sink slowly for the entire first half of her life, and hadn't even noticed it.

"No. It was never that. Of course I loved you; I wanted for you to be safe, for you to be okay. You were okay, weren't you?" Chakotay asked tentatively, "Tom and B'Elanna, they..."

"They've been amazing." Nevaeh stressed, wanting to show off her surrogate parents to her father. "And Icheb too. I honestly don't know where I'd be today without them. If there's one thing I can thank you for with regards to these past few years, it's choosing them to have me after you went."

"They were the only ones I trusted not to ruin you."

"Bit late for that though, wasn't it?"

"Don't say that. You're not ruined, not as much as you would have been if I had stayed, at least. I'm not trying to justify it, but believe me when I say that I never stopped loving you and I went because I didn't want you to have to hurt alongside me because I couldn't keep it inside. I would have been no good for you if I'd stayed, and if there was anything I could do, could say, to prove it to you, then I would. Short of going back in time and changing history there's nothing I can do to stop the pain, everybody's."

She felt weary suddenly, and instantly knew that she had to be alone; both planning for the, what she deemed bizarre, mission she and Cleo were about to embark on and this emotional reunion had tired her out. "Y'know, I really wanted you to be a hero," she confided, smiling wistfully as she remembered her 10-year-old self's daydreams of her father simply going away for a few months to build a time machine or a spaceship in which the two of them could explore the universe together. "I can't forgive you, but I can understand why you left." she said, refocusing her gaze on a hornets' nets above his head in a last-ditch attempt to combat the ever growing threat of tears. "Much the same as how I need you to understand why I need for you to leave now."

Chakotay didn't reply, but the weight of the world around him confirmed that no words were necessary. He cast another look at his daughter and saw that her face held no hate, just hints of tiredness and recovery; he supposed his face showed the same. He nodded, and once again felt unsure; should he wave, offer a smile of parting...? Nevaeh realised that he was struggling, and laughing inwardly, realised that she was going to have to be the one to offer either a gesture or words of valediction. She followed his gaze to her mother's grave, and saw the vase of daffodils. "Every year," she said "I'm the one who leaves them, just in case you were wondering."

"I have been," he replied, meeting Nevaeh's eyes for one last time. "I thought I was the only one who came here." He continued, in a lower, more sombre tone. Nevaeh smiled and raised her hand up in goodbye, and he did the same. He turned, and as he began to walk away he felt the pressure on his shoulders loosen, and he began to let go; Nevaeh didn't hate him, and because of that one fact he began to smile. He'd always wanted to feel like he'd done the right thing by leaving, and thanks to their meeting today, it was no longer something he wanted, it was something he knew.

Nevaeh watched her father walk away, and realised that she didn't feel angry, like she'd always assumed she would do if she ever saw him again. Making her way back to her mother's headstone, Nevaeh brushed the tree trunks lightly before sitting cross-legged and tracing the slightly worn epitaph with her fingertips. The afternoon had brought her something resembling, if not quite, closure, and as she finally allowed the first of her tears to fall, she knew that she had made the right decision by agreeing to go. What she and Cleo were about to do, if pulled off successfully, would change the lives of everybody she held dear, and then even the lives of people she didn't even know. She hadn't even thought about different her own life would be; her mother would be alive, her father would never have gone away. She'd never even know of this existence. Everything she knew and held familiar would disappear, and there was only one word in her mind...

"Goodbye."

AN: Okay, so that was pretty heavy. But, then, I did warn you. I recently read it through for the first time in ages and wondered if it were too much for one chapter, but, after a lot of reassurance and help from scifiromance who is the best beta ever (I swear this fic would be dead by now if it weren't for her), here we are now. I hope you enjoyed it, despite all the 'feels'. More chapters are in the works as we speak (well, I type, you read I guess), so my next update shouldn't be too far away :) And, maybe if you've got time, leave a review? :D