AN: This is a roughly 15/16 chapter story (the whole thing is planned out, but sometimes those plans slightly change while writing). It's very loosely based on Star Trek Generations, but it's primarily my take on a Picard/Crusher relationship within some of the realm of what happened there. I will be taking very big liberties with canon here, so I hope you don't mind.

I own nothing from the Star Trek franchise, and this is just for entertainment value.

I hope you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!

111

A captain's duty is to his ship and his crew. A captain's family is comprised of those who are under his command. He cares for them. He protects them. He is willing to lay down his life for them. His duty is to them first and, then, if he has time, he may entertain his own wants and desires.

A captain, however, seldom makes time for such things.

Jean-Luc Picard knew the expectations and sacrifices of a Starfleet captain well. He had heard about them from the moment that he first started to chase command. They were passed down like lore from other Starfleet captains. Few were those who escaped the lonely life of a Starfleet captain. Jean-Luc Picard could have waxed poetic those expectations and sacrifices for days and, maybe, even weeks. In many ways, he'd been waxing poetic about the whole thing for most of his life—at least according to Beverly Crusher.

If Jean-Luc were going to devote himself entirely to a woman, it would be Beverly. If he were going to give himself over to the dream of home and family, he would want her to be the woman through whom all the most cherished things of life came to him. If he were to die, old in someone's arms, he would hope that Beverly's was the last face that he saw, and that he spent his final breath reminding her that he loved her completely and endlessly.

The life of a Starfleet captain was very often short, however, and it was almost always lonely.

111

Jean-Luc felt nearly numb. It wasn't the numbness of not feeling at all. Rather, the feeling that had settled over him like a blanket was the sensation that he was so overwhelmed with everything he'd felt that he couldn't possibly process anything more.

He sat in his quarters and stared at the photo album. He touched his fingertips gingerly to the pages. He would never touch the faces there again—not in this world, at least.

His chest ached. To say the news was a shock would have been to understate it entirely. The priority message that had come through to him had taken his breath away and had nearly taken his knees out from under him. His brother and his nephew had been killed in a fire. Jean-Luc had barely had moments to digest his personal tragedy before learning that Starfleet had a new mission for his ship. Duty called, and he answered. Jean-Luc had put off his reaction to his own news long enough to set the Enterprise en-route to an unusual space anomaly that needed to be explored in conjunction with the destruction of several stars in a system. Now that the ship was safely en-route, and Will Riker could be trusted to handle the progress of the mission until there was something more to report than what they already knew, Jean-Luc had retreated to his personal quarters to attempt to somehow process such a great, personal loss.

When Jean-Luc's doorbell rang, he felt himself tense. He had already sent Counselor Troi away once. He didn't want to do it again, but he wasn't ready to talk to her just yet.

"Who is it?" He asked with reluctance and annoyance that he didn't try to disguise.

"It's me. Beverly."

"Come in," Jean-Luc said, before he even thought about the response. He couldn't send her away. In fact, in all the many years that he'd known her, he'd found that he could hardly ever bring himself to tell her no to anything at all. He took comfort in her presence, too, and he was sorely in need of comfort.

When Beverly entered the room, Jean-Luc smiled at her. The smile felt difficult to produce, given the profound ache in his chest, but she always seemed to make the expression come more easily to his face.

"I see that you're warm and dry," Jean-Luc said, referencing an incident that had happened earlier in the day where, thanks to Data's misunderstanding of what constituted humor, Beverly had ended up being plunged into frigid water. She smiled at Jean-Luc's teasing.

"I'll survive," she teased.

"I'm very happy for it," Jean-Luc said. "I'm assuming there was no lasting damage done?"

"I didn't come here to talk about me, Jean-Luc," Beverly said. "I came here because I'm worried about you. I know something's wrong. What's happened?"

"Is it that obvious?" Jean-Luc asked.

Beverly hummed and nodded.

"Would you like some tea?" Jean-Luc asked. He put his album to the side and stood up from where he was sitting. Beverly tracked him with her eyes, but she didn't leave the couch. "You must still be chilled. You don't want to catch cold, Beverly. It would sincerely pain me to see you unwell."

"Jean-Luc—I know you. You're only this worried about me when there's something about you that you'd rather we not discuss."

Jean-Luc ignored her a moment and brought her the tea. He brought himself a cup of tea, as well, so that they could at least enjoy the beverage together. Often, sharing tea with Beverly was one of his greatest comforts. He looked forward to it every morning—and that was true even of the mornings when she came from her own quarters instead of hoping that nobody noticed she'd never Jean-Luc's after they'd shared dinner together the night before.

Jean-Luc gathered up his album and moved to sit beside Beverly. She waited, her tea cup in hand, for him to settle next to her with their knees touching.

"Drink your tea, Beverly," Jean-Luc said. "I was sincere—I don't want you to catch cold. I—need you well. For my own peace of mind."

She smiled at him, but she didn't lecture him on old wives' tales or anything of the sort. She could have given him a lesson on colds and how they're caught, fought, and avoided, but she simply sipped the tea to make him happy, instead. He felt a hint of a smile tugging at his lips, the way it always did when Beverly humored him and he knew that she was choosing to do so.

He often wondered what exactly he'd done in life to make this remarkable woman want to humor him—but such thoughts often turned heavy and suffocating when he lamented the fact that he wasn't able to offer her more than, at times, what he believed to be the very dregs of his life.

Jean-Luc opened his album across his lap.

"You remember my brother," he said.

"Robert," Beverly said. She smiled at the picture. "As I recall, Jean-Luc, he asked you when you were going to marry me."

Jean-Luc laughed to himself, and the laugh bumped up against the pain that suffocated him. Beverly had met Robert a few times, most of those times had been when they had all been much younger.

"As I recall, you were married to Jack at the time," Jean-Luc said.

"So I was," Beverly mused. "The first time. The second time, I wasn't…and he asked the same question, again, as I recall." Jean-Luc felt his face grow warm. "You told him what you always say. A Starfleet captain doesn't have the time for such things. Do you remember what he told you?"

"No," Jean-Luc admitted. Some part of him did remember, and he could feel the words burning somewhere inside of him. He had actively tried to bury them, though, along with the rest of the conversations that Robert had insisted upon having about Beverly.

"He said that…we make time for what we feel is important, captain or not."

Beverly's words ached in Jean-Luc's stomach like they had when he'd heard them from Robert. He ignored them, just as he had when it had been his brother who had said them.

"Robert was always opinionated…pompous…arrogant," Jean-Luc said.

"He has a strong personality," Beverly said, laughing quietly. "All the Picard men have strong personalities. It's part of what makes them so attractive."

"He started to mellow with age," Jean-Luc said.

"The Picard men have many facets," Beverly offered. "Like a good French bread, once you get through the crusty exterior, the inside is soft, tender, and something to be savored."

Jean-Luc's face grew warm again, and he smiled to himself. She was smiling softly at him. She was giving him time to handle this however he wanted—and she was completely unaware of what had driven him to seek the sanctity of his private quarters for a while. He chewed on what he had to tell her. He chewed on the reality of the moment, and the desire to stay here—right where they were—in a time outside of time. For this moment, they were talking about Robert as if he were alive. In this moment, Robert still existed. He still lived, at least, in Beverly's mind. It wouldn't be until Jean-Luc told her the truth that she would enter his reality and the deaths would be, somehow, more real.

"René," Jean-Luc said, touching the picture of his nephew. Beverly smiled at it.

"That's René?" She asked. It was purely rhetorical. "I haven't seen him since…"

"He was five months old," Jean-Luc interrupted. He turned the pages and found the photograph he'd taken. There had been no reason for Jean-Luc to take a picture of Beverly holding his nephew—no reason at all, except that he'd been overwhelmed by her beauty. His love for his nephew and his love for Beverly had seemed to come together, at that moment, and he remembered whispering to himself, the first time he'd place the photograph in the album, that the moment felt oddly reminiscent of some sort of Madonna and child moment for him.

Jean-Luc swallowed. He turned the pages back to the most recent photograph of René.

"Robert was going to take René to see Starfleet Academy," Jean-Luc said. "I was going to visit in a few months when I took my vacation. I was thinking of asking you to come."

"I can come," Beverly said. "If that's what you want, Jean-Luc."

"It won't happen now," Jean-Luc said. "None of it will happen now." He leaned and put down his tea cup. He tried to hold it together a moment more—an hour longer—however long was necessary to no longer feel the pain. Beverly's hands curled around his arm and she leaned into him. Her cool fingers touched his face.

"Jean-Luc? Tell me what's wrong…"

"There was a fire," Jean-Luc said, his own voice sounding hollow, distant, and foreign. The words he was saying didn't sound quite like English and, yet, he couldn't muster them in French, either. "Robert and René were killed."

Jean-Luc let a burst of his sadness roll forth. In Beverly's arms, he felt safe to weep, and so he did. He heard her soothing words. He felt her touch. He felt the comfort of her body as she pressed close to him to give him physical support. He felt her nuzzle him, like she was absorbing his pain in every way possible—and she did, it seemed, absorb some of it.

Jean-Luc felt more in control of himself when he accepted the handkerchief she brought him from the replicator, only leaving him once she was sure he could withstand the separation. She sat, immediately, close enough for their bodies to touch at nearly every point while they leaned together on the sofa.

"René was…a dreamer. He was so imaginative. So gentle."

"Very much like his uncle," Beverly said. "As I recall—he always was."

Jean-Luc swallowed against the aching in his throat.

"I keep thinking about all the experiences that he's not going to have, Beverly. I think about the fact that he'll never go to the Academy. He'll never know life on a starship. He'll never read so many wonderful books or listen to so much beautiful music." Jean-Luc turned his body more toward Beverly. He took her hands. He leaned into her. Instinctively, as though she knew what he needed, she nuzzled his face again. She kissed him, and she let him taste her lips for as long as he wanted. "Beverly—he'll never know the…beauty of falling in love. He'll never have the experience of building a life, Beverly. A home. A family. None of it's going to happen now. There's no time for any of it." He breathed out a breath, feeling like he was breathing out his pain. "So much like his uncle," he mused, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

She might have offered him a thousand platitudes for the situation, but Beverly wasn't the type. She soothed him, instead, by loving him—as she had for so many years—and by allowing him space to feel his grief in her company, rather than suffering alone and in silence.

"I had come to feel that René was as close as I would get to having a child of my own," Jean-Luc mused. "Now—that's something I'll never know. And René is gone. His whole life—everything he was and everything he would have ever become has been wiped away."

"His memory remains, Jean-Luc, and we have to cherish that," Beverly said. "When memories are all we have, we cherish them. It's all we can do to keep our loved ones alive."

Jean-Luc nodded his agreement and, for a long moment, he shared silence with Beverly as tea grew cold and she replaced the tea with warm, fresh cups and urged him to drink—soaking in the warmth of the beverage and the warmth of her presence.

"He was truly the closest thing I'll ever know to my own child," Jean-Luc said. "And now, I don't even have that…how incredibly selfish is that thought?"

"We're human," Beverly said. "And we're allowed to have selfish thoughts, Jean-Luc. You're allowed to think anything you like. And, as you grieve, you may find that you think a great deal of things that make you uncomfortable. I'm willing to listen to all of them, if you want to share them with me."

"Thank you," Jean-Luc said sincerely, knowing as well as she did that he would take her up on that offer.

"But—Jean-Luc…" Beverly said, letting her words trail off.

"Yes, Beverly?" Jean-Luc pressed to get her to continue.

"I can't help thinking that maybe it's wrong of me to say this, and maybe it's the wrong time entirely, but…René doesn't have to be the closest you'll ever come to having a child. That's a decision that you've made, Jean-Luc. Time and time again. We've had this conversation before—a dozen times, it seems. If it were up to me?" She shrugged her shoulders. "There would be a great deal more Picards in the world."

Jean-Luc swallowed against the almost agonizing lump in his throat.

"You know, Beverly, the obligations of a Starfleet captain," Jean-Luc said.

"And the risks," Beverly said, interrupting him. "I know about the long hours, the dangerous missions, the chance of being made a widow again. I know about the distractions, and the times I'll spend tending our children on our own and promising them that their father will see them when he can, and he loves them always." She smiled at him, and he saw the pain behind her smile. "I know about the life of Starfleet, Jean-Luc. All of it. But—it's you who has decided to use that as an excuse not to have any life outside of it. If that's what you wanted…the life and the home that you lament that René will never know? I would go into things with my eyes wide open, as I've told you before, but…I won't beg anyone to make a life with me. Not even you, Jean-Luc."

"Is that an ultimatum, Beverly?" Jean-Luc asked, holding her hand tightly in his. He kissed her hand, and she turned her fingers to squeeze his. "Because—I don't think my heart could take losing you."

Beverly caught his face. She leaned toward him. She kissed him, softly, before nuzzling her cheek against his once more.

"I've never given you an ultimatum, Jean-Luc," Beverly said. "And—I never will. But…forever is a long time to want more, Jean-Luc…a very long time."