AN: I thought this one would be a little longer, but that's before I really figured out how things would flow outside of my notes. As it turns out, this is the final chapter to wrap things up.
I do hope that anyone who has read the story has enjoyed, and I hope you enjoy the last chapter.
If you have enjoyed, please consider letting me know.
111
Three and a half months.
"The Enterprise has been Missing in Action for three and a half months, Captain."
Presumed dead.
"After extensive scans of the area, the captain, crew, and complement of the USS Enterprise was presumed dead. Scans of the area showed no life signs. Readings of the atmosphere surrounding the planet, following the explosion, showed the presence of numerous toxic chemicals, as predicted. It was determined that life could not be sustained on the planet, nor would it be prudent to send down an away team from any of the ships sent to perform a rescue mission. Scanning the area outside of the fall-out zone resulted only in locating debris confirmed to belong to the ship, and other rulings determined that the captain, crew, and complement had likely perished with the ship."
Beverly sat beside Jean-Luc while she heard her own death report. She listened to the death report of the people around her. She felt strangely numb and distant as the words rolled around her mind like the pieces of a kaleidoscope sliding into place.
The Nexus was gone. Rather, it wasn't gone, but it had moved far enough away that they were growing ever freer from its effects. There were a few residual effects, but Beverly assumed that those would recede, as well, as the Nexus continued its journey into deeper space. The other effects—particularly the health problems that had occurred thanks to their experiences under the Nexus—would heal with time and a return to a well-stocked sickbay or medical facility.
Finding out they'd been presumed dead was an odd sensation. Finding out "when" they were currently, and it would seem finally, located was an even stranger sensation. It had been like throwing dice, holding their breath, and waiting to see "when" they landed. As the Nexus slipped away, it seemed, it left them all in a time and place that was concrete and no longer given to movement.
The pieces slid into place and settled there.
Beverly found herself discreetly touching her stomach. She hadn't told Jean-Luc about the baby. She hadn't until this morning, felt certain that it was truly there. She hadn't scanned herself with a tricorder, or taken any test, but she believed, now, that it was there—though she had no way of knowing what its health was like.
Her comrades—those who knew or suspected— wouldn't give away her secret. They would respect her right to tell her news when and how she thought best. As the pieces settled into place, though, she realized that she was facing a sooner rather than later scenario.
"I assure you that we are not dead," Jean-Luc said. "Nor are we lost. The Nexus created a temporal disruption, from what we can tell. It's possible that it altered reality in this universe, even. We were unable to study the anomaly carefully."
"As were we," the voice over the speaker said. "It interfered too much with ships' sensors to gather much reliable information. We have people trying to clear up the readings we took even now."
"We are on Veridian III," Jean-Luc said. "Most of our people have survived, but many are in need of medical attention, proper nutrition, and rest. My Chief Engineer has managed to get our beacon working, and we are activating it now. Due to the fact that the explosion that once took place has no longer taken place…"
Jean-Luc paused and looked at Beverly. Beverly understood him without the need for words. Such a statement was an odd one at best. Still, it was the only thing that he could say for now. From here, they would be taken directly to Starfleet Medical. Part of the thorough physical that they would all undergo would be a psychiatric evaluation.
Jean-Luc cleared his throat and continued his message.
"Due to the fact that the explosion that once took place has no longer taken place, thanks to the temporal changes and some corrections made on our part, the atmosphere here appears to no longer be toxic. It should be safe for ships to enter the area and beam our people to safety."
"We have four ships in the area. They will begin arriving in the next few hours to begin beaming out survivors."
There was a sigh of relief from many who were gathered there to hear the transmission. Beverly, herself, felt like a great weight was lifted off of her.
"Thank you," Jean-Luc said. "We will be ready. Please have it recorded that the Alpha command team will be the last to beam out, with Doctor Crusher and myself being the final ones to beam aboard. We'll remain behind to ensure that there are no last-minute difficulties that need to be handled."
"We will begin contacting you as soon as ships are in orbit. Captain Picard—it's good to have you back."
Jean-Luc laughed quietly.
"We're all happy to be considered back," Jean-Luc said. "Picard out."
As soon as everything was done, and the news of rescue had spread to everyone, there was little to do except wait. Beverly made her rounds, checking over her patients—as she currently considered everyone to be—with the few pieces of medical equipment that seemed to be working now that the Nexus was gone, and noting that some of the subtle, negative effects that they'd all been suffering were starting to pass. They all seemed to be coming back to life, though all suffering a bit from malnutrition and the lack of very clean drinking water. Beverly was able to breathe easily, for the first time in a while, because she no longer believed that they might be doomed to simply sit and watch as time—constantly shifting time—ravaged those around them while their environment poisoned anyone who might survive the effects of the shifting time.
People gathered their few salvaged belongings and hugged close to their loved ones. They sat in shadows and sunlight—no longer covered with the red dust or breathing in the scarlet haze with each breath—and they waited for rescue.
Beverly followed Jean-Luc into the ship as he rifled through the remains of the Enterprise, her crash appearing somewhat freshly occurred, despite the fact that Starfleet believed it to have happened nearly four months in the past.
"Be careful, Beverly," Jean-Luc said as he turned his head slightly at the sound of her boots crunching the debris beneath them. "That area isn't entirely stable."
"I'll be careful, Jean-Luc," she assured him. "I spent more time wandering around in here, after the crash, than I probably should have, in search of anything that might help anyone survive."
"Even though I expect no less from you," Jean-Luc said, a hint of teasing in his tone, "I don't like the idea of you risking your life for any reason."
"I'll be honest," Beverly said, "there were times when I didn't really know if we really had a life ahead of us. It's not difficult to risk your life when you're really not confident in your survival."
She looked around the ruins of the space that had been Jean-Luc's ready room. Like everything else, it was in a state of absolute disrepair. They would have a salvage team remove the ruins of the Enterprise from the planet's surface—to put to rest those who had died there and to clear the planet for the return of the inhabitants—but she would never fly again.
There would, without a doubt, be a rebuild of the ship, but it would never be quite the same.
"What are you looking for, Jean-Luc?" Beverly asked, picking her way carefully toward him.
"A needle in a haystack," he said. "It's sentimental and foolish, I'm sure, but…my family photo album."
"It's not foolish," Beverly said. "I rescued one from our quarters. Wesley has it."
Beverly started the search, along with the Jean-Luc, for the lost item. Like most of them, Jean-Luc travelled light, and he kept very few things that were truly sentimental enough that he would hate to leave them behind. It was easier that way.
"A ha!" Beverly exclaimed, turning over a board and seeing the corner of the familiar cover. "Jean-Luc—help me get this off of it…"
Jean-Luc didn't need to be asked twice. He waded his way through the mess and helped Beverly move the debris that was blocking her from pulling up the album from its resting place. As soon as he lifted the mass for her, she pulled the album free and moved her feet so that he could drop his burden. He wiped his hands on his uniform—none of them were even attempting to pretend that they were in so-called ship-shape—and he accepted the album when she offered it to him.
He opened the large, heavy album and smiled as he flipped through the pages to discover that most of the pictures hadn't been damaged, even though the cover had certainly seen better days.
"Are they all intact, Jean-Luc?" Beverly asked.
"Oh—yes," he said. "A few are showing their age, but…aren't we all?"
Beverly laughed at his joke. She moved close to him. She hesitated a half a second before she put her arm around him.
He'd told her he loved her. He'd told her that he'd missed her. He'd told her, even, that it was her, at times, that he was sure he had been living for through all of this.
Still, it felt so hard to believe that he wasn't about to change his mind—that he hadn't already.
Beverly carefully leaned her head against his shoulder. He didn't flinch, and he didn't move away.
"Family is the most important thing…" Jean-Luc mused. "I realize it now more than I think I ever did before. Duty is important. Honor. But family? Love? You can't replace it. When it's gone, it's gone. We are so rarely given second chances."
Beverly smiled to herself as she watched him flip through the pages.
"The Nexus did all this, Jean-Luc?" Beverly teased.
When Jean-Luc looked at her, an involuntary shiver ran through Beverly at the sincerity behind his gaze. He touched her face, and he smiled at her softly. He turned enough to kiss her, and she closed her eyes to the sweet honesty of the kiss. It was enough to take her breath away, and to make her forget that she was standing in the ruins of the ship that had once been their home.
"Some men may say they've walked through hell for a woman, Beverly," Jean-Luc said with a smile, "but I left heaven for you."
Beverly didn't admit to Jean-Luc that his words, his tone of voice—all of it—made her knees feel a bit weak.
"What happened to you, Jean-Luc?" She asked. "In the Nexus?"
He smiled at her and laughed quietly to himself, still balancing his album on the one hand he wasn't using to touch her, every few seconds, as though she might simply cease to exist or fade from corporeal form in some way.
"I suppose you could say that—I left heaven for you," Jean-Luc said, "but I also had to choose to leave you in heaven…knowing that I could either choose a vision of you that was certain or the real you with a few risks involved—namely the risk that you wouldn't want what I wanted."
"What?" Beverly asked, trying to comprehend it all. Jean-Luc's smile soothed any genuine concern she had, and she found herself smiling back at him.
"I promise to fill you in on everything," Jean-Luc said. "There will be plenty of time during our leave—and I hope you'll spend it with me, Beverly."
They already knew that they would be put on mandated leave following their time at Starfleet Medical. They would be mandated to take R and R time for a while. For the first time in a long time, Beverly was looking forward to it.
Now, her stomach seemed to twist a little as she realized that Jean-Luc wanted to spend that time with her—and she could hardly imagine finding a better way to spend it.
"Of course," she said. "But…"
"Then—suffice it to say that…I learned that the Nexus shows you your greatest desires," Jean-Luc said. "It offers them to you, just as you dream they could be. They're yours for the taking. For the experiencing. For all eternity, it seems. As long as you remain in the Nexus and accept that, though they feel real, your dreams are just that—shadows of what could have been…visions of your desires."
"You dreamed of me?" Beverly asked, her stomach fluttering.
Jean-Luc smiled at her and nodded. He didn't drop his eyes away from hers for even a moment.
"You were my wife," he said. Beverly smiled in response, her heartbeat picking up speed at the thought—and the confession that these were Jean-Luc's deepest desires. "I'm almost afraid to say it out loud, Beverly. It feels as though, by saying it, it will never come true—like telling a birthday wish."
Beverly furrowed her brow at him and shook her head gently.
"I have a feeling, Jean-Luc, and…in fact…I have it on very good authority that this is not like a birthday wish. It's certainly possible that it could come true. But—I'd like to hear the rest. Tell me your wildest dreams, Jean-Luc."
He laughed quietly at her teasing and leaned to kiss her again. She closed her eyes, again, and tasted the tender kiss that he pressed to her lips. She nipped his lip and he returned to her, seeking more, hungrily. She would have been content to stay there for hours, simply exchanging kisses, but he pulled away and continued speaking.
"My wildest dreams, I'm afraid, aren't very wild…not as far as the dreams of some men go."
"I'm not interested in the dreams of other men," Beverly responded. "I was your wife…and?"
"We had a home," Jean-Luc said. "A beautiful home, but more important than its beauty was the fact that…that it was so…warm, Beverly."
Beverly laughed quietly.
"It was probably the fever from the Nexus," she offered.
"I don't mean that kind of warmth," Jean-Luc said. "It was pure happiness."
"It was heaven," Beverly said.
"I became quite certain—and I remain so—that wherever you were to make a home with me would be heaven," Jean-Luc said.
"Was there more?" Beverly asked.
"It was Christmas, and you were hosting a holiday dinner," Jean-Luc said.
"If you'd like Christmas dinner…I suppose that I could host a meal," Beverly said. "It might be nice to gather together family and friends."
"Robert and his family were coming."
"Second chances," Beverly said. Jean-Luc nodded. "I wish I could offer that to you…"
"I believe they were part of the dream because I wanted to see them again," Jean-Luc mused. "But—I also believe that they were part of it to make sure that I understood that I didn't want to feel like I had missed something again. I didn't want to continue to waste opportunities and to wake up, someday, realizing that I mourned the loss of so much that had simply slipped through my fingers. I saw everything, there, that I didn't want to miss someday."
"Christmas dinner, family…"
"A wife I love dearly," Jean-Luc said. Beverly felt a rush of warmth run through her body.
"I love you, too, Jean-Luc," Beverly said, sincerely enough that he couldn't doubt it for a moment or think that it was only said because she was caught up in the moment.
"There is something more," Jean-Luc said. Beverly only had to raise her eyebrows at him. "We—we had a family, Beverly. Of our own. Children. Beautiful…wonderful…little children. And I—we—loved them dearly."
Beverly's heart pounded in her chest with a sudden wave of unexpected exhilaration. She wondered if her body gave her away. She wondered if Jean-Luc could sense the change in her as her whole body practically floated at the simplest revelation of his feelings in light of the news she knew she had to tell him.
"Children?" She managed to say. Jean-Luc nodded.
"Six of them," he said. "Two boys—George and Paul. Three girls—Aurelie, Charlotte, and little Emilie."
Beverly's mind swam with the details of Jean-Luc's dream. She held it all back, though, except for her smile.
"That's five, Jean-Luc," Beverly said. His face blushed pink, even in the dim light of the space where they waited for his communicator to announce that they were either needed to oversee the earliest beam-outs due to some difficulty that Will couldn't handle, or it was time for them to beam out, themselves.
"You were carrying our sixth," Jean-Luc admitted. Beverly's stomach tightened in response.
"Six children is…quite a few," Beverly said.
Jean-Luc's face fell slightly, and he turned away, suddenly looking back at his album—one hand going back to supporting it while the other flipped through the pages.
"I wouldn't expect you to try to make any of the dream a reality, of course," Jean-Luc said. "Not unless—you wanted to, and I certainly wouldn't expect you to carry and deliver my children, Beverly. Certainly not six of them…I'm far more reasonable than that. It was merely a fantasy. Nothing more."
Beverly could hear the touch of coldness in his tone—not coldness, exactly, as much as something like hurt. She could sense the hurt, and she could sense his desire to distance himself from it. It was the same kind of air that surrounded a child when something they'd dreamed about was snatched away from them by the icy hands of reality.
All Jean-Luc had heard, perhaps, was that he wasn't getting his dream—and, maybe, for a brief moment, at least, he regretted leaving it behind in the Nexus.
Beverly touched his face and turned it toward her. She saw the hurt in his eyes that he would try to hide from her.
"We build a dream one piece at a time," she said. She smiled at him when his expression changed and a bit of hope filtered back in. "You haven't even asked me to marry you, you know?"
"I would wish to ask you somewhere better than this," Jean-Luc said, his mood clearly lifting as he realized that he wasn't being denied his dream entirely.
"And I would wish to accept your proposal somewhere better than this," Beverly said with a laugh.
"You deserve so much better…" Jean-Luc mused. Beverly hummed at him.
"But—for now, we'll just pretend that I've accepted very privately…and we'll make it better later." She kissed him again, and he responded. She looked over his shoulder at the album he was holding. "There are a lot of empty pages there."
"I meant to fill them with photos of beautiful life events," Jean-Luc said. "As you can see—the pages for my life remain, on the whole, blank. Empty. Still—if I'm a lucky man, perhaps there will be an engagement photo and maybe even a wedding photo here?"
Beverly smiled.
"I imagine there may be," she said. "I think—I know just the perfect picture for that page, Jean-Luc," she said, reaching and tapping her finger on a blank page. He looked at her with a furrowed brow, and she held a finger up to ask him to give her a moment. He obliged her, though his expression proved that the kiss hadn't soothed his curiosity at all.
Beverly pulled the tricorder from the shoulder bag that she was wearing now that the piece of medical equipment was returning readings instead of simply appearing to be another dead piece of technology. She turned the tricorder on herself and scanned herself. She'd done it three times since the tricorder had started working. Each time she almost believed that the results would be different—some strange result of the Nexus which, now, had made her accept the uncanny as the practically expected. Each time, though, the readings were the same.
Beverly checked the reading again, once more half-suspecting that this reading would be different from the rest.
She smiled softly at the results before turning the tricorder to face Jean-Luc. He stared at it, and then he looked to her for some kind of explanation or reassurance.
"What do you see there, Jean-Luc?" She asked.
"It's set to record vitals," Jean-Luc said. Beverly hummed and nodded.
"How many sets of vitals are recording?" Beverly asked.
Jean-Luc glanced at the screen again.
"Two," he said. "You and I?"
"I have it set to scan only one person at a time," Beverly offered. "It's not set on wide scan, and I only scanned myself."
"It's malfunctioning," he said.
Beverly smiled and shook her head.
"I believe it's working perfectly," she said. "Though—I never expected nearly four months to seem like so long and, at the same time, like the blink of an eye. Of course—I guess that's what's to be expected when you decide to conceive while the time is out of joint."
Beverly watched as realization washed slowly over Jean-Luc's features. He brought his eyes to hers, and they were full of questions—though not the panic that she might have once believe she'd see there. There was, perhaps, a touch of hope in his eyes. Beverly smiled at him. Her heart drummed in her chest, but she didn't feel fear or even anxiety this time. She laughed quietly.
"Six children is…quite a lot, Jean-Luc," Beverly said. "But—I suppose we'll have to start somewhere."
"Beverly—are you serious?" Jean-Luc asked.
"I would never joke about the future of the Picard family line," Beverly teased. "Are you—happy?" Jean-Luc didn't answer her, at first, with words. He simply placed the album under one arm and pulled her to him for a kiss. "Should I take that as a yes?" She asked, laughing as the kiss broke.
"You're making my dreams come true," he said simply.
"This is Captain Warren with the USS Farrangut."
The combadge interrupted the moment, but there would be other moments. Jean-Luc tapped his combadge.
"This is Captain Picard."
"The transfers have been finished," he said. "Everyone is aboard a Starfleet vessel, including your First Officer. All other ships have already started the return voyage to Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Medical."
"Very good," Jean-Luc said.
"We're ready to beam you and Doctor Crusher aboard now, if you're ready."
"Can you lock onto our current location without interference?" Jean-Luc asked.
"We can."
"Very good," Jean-Luc said. "When you're ready, make sure you've got a lock on three life signs and beam at will."
"Three life signs, sir?"
"Are you reading three?" Jean-Luc asked. Beverly's stomach flipped, concerned, suddenly, that her own instincts and the tricorder were somehow wrong. Maybe this was some final trick of the Nexus, and her baby—the baby she'd just started to allow herself to care for—wasn't real.
"Yes, sir, but…we were told that only you and Doctor Crusher remained."
Jean-Luc smiled at Beverly and touched her face. She smiled at him, breathing out a sigh with the relief she felt at the confirmation of their secret little life sign.
"We'll explain when we're aboard," Jean-Luc said. "Just lock onto all three, please."
"Aye. Stand-by for energizing."
Jean-Luc hugged the album to his chest and locked eyes with Beverly. She felt an overwhelming amount of tenderness flow through her in that moment. It was, she imagined, much like the warmth he'd explained from his vision in the Nexus.
"Where would you like to spend our R and R, Beverly?" Jean-Luc asked.
"I wouldn't mind seeing your family home, again," Beverly offered. "We've got news for Marie."
"I'd like that," Jean-Luc said. "Just out of curiosity, what do you think about the name James?"
Beverly laughed to herself. She shrugged, waiting for the tingle of the transporter that would come, she knew, very soon.
"It's a fine name," she said. "But—you're so sure this is a boy?"
Jean-Luc's smile only grew.
"Perhaps not, but…with six chances, Beverly, the odds are in our favor to have at least one boy."
Before Beverly could respond, she felt the start of the transporter moving their atoms toward the USS Farrangut—and she knew that there would be time to discuss this later.
Plenty of time.