AN: Here we are, another piece to this one. I recently published Chapters 7 and 8, so please make sure that you've read them before you read this one.
I hope that you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!
111
It hadn't been too difficult for Jean-Luc to find the Enterprise. The damage she left in her landing was significant, and she'd scraped a trail across the planet's surface—knocking everything out of the way that she could move—as she'd come to a final and complete stop. Jean-Luc could find it from practically any raised perch, and he sought a new one each time he needed to reorient his steps toward the right direction.
The Enterprise was deserted when he found her. She was, for all intents and purposes, dead in the proverbial water. The damage was thorough.
Jean-Luc stepped gingerly as he entered the shell of the ship through openings that never should have been there, and he walked carefully inside the dark hull. The light outside was leaving, it seemed. It wasn't quite night, but the planet had a single sun, and that sun was setting.
His crew wasn't here. His people weren't here. And, those that were still here, he was sure, hadn't survived.
Briefly, he considered digging through the wreckage to find sickbay—to see, with his own eyes, that Beverly wasn't there—but he decided against it. He needed to use what was left of the light to find his people.
Outside of the ruins of his ship, Jean-Luc had little trouble finding the path that everyone had taken. Though he wasn't much of a tracker, Jean-Luc had studied some of the survival skills required by the Academy, and he could, at the very least, tell that the tracks he was following were fresh. The dirt had been disturbed fairly recently. The crash must have only just happened.
As Jean-Luc followed the trail his people had left for him, he kept glancing back in the direction of the Nexus. The anomaly seemed to be moving away from him and away from the planet. It danced, still, within his vision, but it grew smaller and smaller as it went trailing off, taking with it everything that Jean-Luc knew it to contain.
The only thing that kept him able to combat a certain sorrow harboring in his chest was the belief that he had done the best thing he could for the planet, its people, the people of the surrounding planets, and his own people—he'd done his duty. In addition to that, he found personal comfort in the belief that one set of the footsteps he followed must belong to Beverly, and he was walking ever closer to the second chance that the universe—and James T. Kirk, perhaps—had granted him.
As night descended somewhat rapidly around him, Jean-Luc considered the fact that he might be forced to stop for the night. He had no clean water, no food, and no real knowledge of the planet, so stopping wasn't preferable to him, but he didn't know how long he could keep going when darkness enveloped him.
And then he saw the most welcomed sight he'd seen in a while. The orange glow of campfires flickered like homing beacons. As he followed them, his eyes as dazzled by them as they ever had been by any stars, he heard the sounds of voices. There was talking and, even, some laughter. Jean-Luc's steps naturally sped up as he neared them.
"Is this the crew and complement of the USS Enterprise?" Jean-Luc called out when bodies were visible against the glow of fires and the lighter and less dense dark of the darkness beyond them.
"Captain?"
It was Data's voice that called back, and Jean-Luc smiled to himself and kept walking. There came a chorus of "captains" from everyone gathered there, and Jean-Luc called back to confirm that he was there and fine—happy to find all of them at last.
Jean-Luc was met by a rush of people, and he accepted more affection from them than he would have normally deemed appropriate.
"Where is Doctor Crusher?" He asked, doing his best to move through the small sea of people.
"Are you hurt, Jean-Luc?" Beverly asked, breaking her way through the crowd to meet him.
Jean-Luc thought his heart might explode. This wasn't Beverly from the Nexus—clean and perfect, dressed in an impractical dress for the situation and heavy with his child. This was the real Beverly—the Beverly that he'd loved for so many years—slightly bedraggled, just like the rest of them, with obvious scrapes on her face. Her eyes glittered at him in the firelight.
Jean-Luc wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly against him. She was thinner than he recalled. He could feel bones that made him think of her as delicate—breakable—something he rarely thought when it came to Beverly.
It didn't matter—whatever they'd suffered until now, it would be set right, somehow.
"Beverly…I'm so much better now, Beverly," he said, enjoying the taste of her name on his tongue as he held her close to him and buried his face in the crook of her neck. She squeezed him back. Her fingers at the back of his neck seemed to be searching for something, even if it was only a way to hold him closer.
"Jean-Luc…oh…Jean-Luc…you're alive."
He pushed her back, off of him, enough to see her face again. He brushed a finger close to some of the scrapes. They were minor injuries, but it appeared that much of what they'd come to depend on to make the healing of even minor injuries faster was now lost to them, at least temporarily.
Jean-Luc pressed his lips gently to Beverly's, not caring that the whole surviving crew and complement of the Enterprise-D was watching them. She responded by holding his face and deepening the kiss, and he obliged her request for further affection.
And nobody—not a single soul around them—seemed inclined to deny them a thing.
111
Jean-Luc woke to a strange staticky sound that he couldn't place as he drifted into consciousness.
His head pounded like he'd been drinking heavily, when all he'd drank was water, he was sure of it. His mouth felt dry. Around him—on him—he could smell the scent of dried sweat and body odor. He had been sleeping on the ground, on hard-packed dirt that was nearly as hard as stone.
And, yet, he was the most comfortable that he could recall being in his entire life.
Beverly's body was half on top of him, weighing him down, as she slept soundly—very soundly, in fact, as though she'd let go of all of her fears, inhibitions, worries, and anything else that might weigh her down. His presence, and the promise that he would remain there, seemed to be enough for her. She didn't need to stand guard and, with that permission, she had rested absolutely.
Jean-Luc felt the warmth of her body against his, and he realized that he no longer felt hot—not like he had before. He no longer felt the feverish heat that had been practically boiling inside of him for so long now that he couldn't recall when he'd last been without at least some sensation of roasting internally.
As he woke more, his ears become more attuned to the static hiss that had first stirred him. He opened his eyes and looked around the small cave area that he and Beverly had claimed as their own for passing the night.
Beverly stirred. Her first act was to push up, like she might pull away from him, and then to collapse back onto him with a clear show of not being committed to the movement of rising. She rubbed her face against his chest, where it had been resting, and then she sat up enough to look at him with sleepy eyes and the slightly disgruntled expression of someone who has been awakened before they wished to wake and is at least a little disconcerted.
Jean-Luc smiled at her and her expression softened.
"Good morning," he said.
Her softened expression morphed into a smile.
"Good morning," she said. Her voice was a bit hoarse. Maybe her mouth felt as dry as his did. She sighed and looked around. "Wet…" She breathed out. "We're wet."
"Sweat," Jean-Luc offered. "I think. Though—I don't recall it being particularly hot last night, and I don't remember any activities that should have caused such an excess of body heat between us."
"It's cool at night," Beverly said. "Fever." She pulled off of Jean-Luc and sat up. He could tell she was waking and shaking off the fog of the night. She touched her own skin. She touched his. She smiled. "You're cool to the touch. I'm cool to the touch. It's like a fever's broken."
"The Nexus was moving away from us," Jean-Luc said.
"It must be taking its effects with it," Beverly mused. She stretched.
Her uniform was wrinkled and a bit ragged, as though it had been worn for some time. Jean-Luc's own uniform was no better. On Beverly's face, the scrapes were scabbed, and there was dirt from the ever-dusty environment of the desert-like area in which his crew had decided to make their home. On Beverly's cheek, there were creases pressed into her skin from where she'd slept against Jean-Luc for most of the night.
"What?" She asked. "What is it, Jean-Luc? Why are you looking at me like that?" She touched her hair and, seeming to realize that it hadn't been groomed since the wreck and, possibly, since way before that, since Jean-Luc wasn't sure how time had worked for them in such close proximity to the Nexus, she ran her fingers through it in an attempt to comb it. "I must look awful…"
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life," Jean-Luc said without hesitation.
Beverly's cheeks very clearly colored, but she smiled at him.
"Now you're just trying to flatter me," she said.
"I assure you that I speak the absolute truth, Beverly," Jean-Luc responded.
They hadn't had much time to talk the night before. Either that or, really, they simply hadn't taken the time that they did have to talk. Everyone had been exhausted. The experiences that they'd been through had made them all tired. Some success in the latest crash which, apparently, had not been the first they'd experienced, made them all happy. Something in the atmosphere than none of them could name—though Jean-Luc now suspected it was the lifting of the effects of the Nexus—had made nearly everyone feel contented.
Even the desire for celebration had shown itself only in the want to rest.
They had eaten food that Jean-Luc assumed he would grow accustomed to eating, if they were to remain marooned here, and he'd drank water that had tasted only a little stagnant after boiling. Then, he'd said goodnight to faces that were thin, and weather-beaten, and, in some cases, older or younger than they'd seemed before, and he'd followed Beverly to the cave she'd chosen, and he'd done so without explanation or a grand show of things.
And, then, he'd simply slept with her in his arms.
"What's that noise?" Beverly asked, her brow furrowing.
She drew Jean-Luc out of the reverie in which he'd been contemplating her face and the fact that, even if this was home, he intended to be open enough with Beverly, and everyone else, to make it clear that he wished, from this moment forward, to build a home with Beverly.
Jean-Luc's ears tuned back into the staticky sound they'd heard earlier. Beverly crawled around on the hard floor of the little cave into which they'd withdrawn for the night and, among the few things she'd brought with her from the wreckage of the Enterprise, she came up with Jean-Luc's combadge.
"Why is it making that noise?" She asked, rhetorically, as she passed it to Jean-Luc.
"Has any of the technology been working?" Jean-Luc asked. Beverly shook her head.
"Nothing," she said, "no matter when the time has shifted, that's one thing that's remained constant. We're cut off, Jean-Luc. Entirely."
"Captain?" Geordi's voice came over the crackling combadge. Jean-Luc activated it in his hand.
"Commander LaForge?" Jean-Luc responded.
"Captain! I managed to get the portable communicator working," Geordi said. "I don't really understand what happened. I didn't really try anything I haven't tried a dozen times before, but it seems to be handling communications now. Should I attempt to hail someone at Starfleet now?"
"Absolutely," Jean-Luc responded. "Consider it an order. Where are you?"
"What do you mean?" Geordi asked. "I'm at the shelter with Wesley…"
"Geordi," Beverly said, before Jean-Luc could ask what he meant by that, "we're on our way." She grabbed Jean-Luc's hand with a smile and tugged at it. He got up, his body complaining about the hard bed that he'd shared with her the night before.
"We may be able to reach Starfleet," Jean-Luc said.
"We may not be marooned after all," Beverly said.
Jean-Luc helped her to stand up, and he brushed her hair back where some had fallen in her face.
"If we're to be rescued, then—why do you look so sad, Beverly?" Jean-Luc asked.
"Being marooned here, with you, last night, wasn't so bad," Beverly said, laughing to herself.
Jean-Luc felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. It was his body's response to her response, and nothing more. He understood, instinctively, what she was feeling.
For one moment, marooned on a planet and virtually invisible, they were outside of Starfleet and the demands of duty. For one moment—one night—they'd simply slept in each other's arms as nothing more than a man and a woman who loved each other and wanted to spend a night holding one another after surviving a trying experience.
Beverly was, in her own way, trying to say goodbye to the Jean-Luc who had held her the night before—the Jean-Luc she believed was returning to captaincy and duty and, therefore, distancing himself from her as he'd believed that all good captains should distance themselves from others.
Jean-Luc brushed her hair back again, and trailed his fingertips down her face. He pulled her to him for a kiss, and he took his time with it, despite the urgent feeling inside of him that wanted to contact Starfleet after everything that had happened to all of them. He held her eyes when the kiss broke.
"If last night wasn't so bad," he said, "then just imagine how wonderful tonight will be, Beverly—lying in a comfortable bed after a hot shower."
Beverly smiled at him.
"But—you're the captain," she said. "You don't have time for lounging in bed with me."
Jean-Luc laughed to himself.
"We make time for what's important to us," he said. "Shall we go, Beverly, and see if we can get these people back to civilization?"
"Come on," Beverly said, catching his hand and tugging it. "I'll show you where Geordi's shelter is. It's nice. It's in the shade. Not too far from the water."