A/N: I suspect there will be a *lot* to write about after Season 3, so I don't know yet whether this will be a one-shot or I'll have other missing scenes or additions to the story later. For now, just the one, from the beginning…

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/The Next Generation/

"Come on, Mother—a few more steps—"

"Mmm." She gritted her teeth against the white-hot bolts of pain radiating from the gashes in her shoulder and abdomen, leaning heavily against her son, inching step by agonizing step around the debris strewn everywhere on the Eleos bridge. Finally reaching the console table, she braced against it as he threw open an emergency medkit, ransacking it for supplies. "Hypospray," she managed, catching sight of it before he did.

"Right." He grabbed the correct instrument—of course he did, she'd trained him well—and pressed it surely to the side of her neck, before finding fresh bandages to apply to her abdominal wound. She couldn't suppress a groan at the pressure, but tried to help him as best she could with the stopgap measures—well-trained or no, he had nowhere close to her five decades of practice experience, and his hands were shaking. "Damn it, you shouldn't have kept me away!"

She didn't flinch at the outburst. She knew she'd done what she had to do, what she'd always done: protect him. Keep him safe. There had already been too many of these attempts on their lives, on his life; this latest attack had only been the most brazen. And while she didn't know if her own luck had finally run out, well—at least by locking him safely away from those hideous, masked assailants, she'd ensured that it hadn't run out for him.

As the medicine worked through her system, the pain eased just enough for her to catch her breath and focus. She met his distraught gaze. "We don't have much time, Jack. I can't repair the damage myself. You'll have to put me in stasis." She moved, unsteadily but under her own power, to the nearby medpod, checking the settings with her good hand, forcing herself to ignore the continued throbbing in her side. The control panel readouts blurred and she blinked hard to clear her vision. Losing too much blood.

"Mother." He was beside her again and even as she knew he accepted the truth of her words, she could hear the frustration in his voice. The fear. "You know they're still after us, we won't be able to leave the nebula. With the power drain—how long can this thing hold?"

"Long enough. Just stay hidden." She gripped his hand hard, conveying reassurance, seeking it herself in the stars streaking by at warp behind him out the forward viewscreen as they fled to safety. She swayed again and he reluctantly helped her maneuver into the pod. "The message did go through..."

Jack pressed his lips together in an expression that reminded her all too much of his father. "Picard. You really think he'll come?"

Her eyes burned now from more than the phaser wounds, and she looked away. After all these years…after everything? Jean-Luc, she thought, the name that lived as an ever-present whisper at the edges of her mind. That lived, too, in the mementos on the spare shelves in her modest ship's quarters, in the songs he had gifted her that she often played at night…and in the eyes, the expressions, the very being of the son who was her whole life.

But also: Jean-Luc, the name she so rarely spoke aloud that it had felt almost foreign to her lips as she'd recorded their desperate plea for help. Because for so long she'd kept away, kept them hidden, shouldering her burdens alone until there was nothing more that she could do and nowhere else for them to run.

She didn't know if he'd ever understand why she'd done what she had done. If he'd ever forgive her.

But in the end, Jean-Luc was the only one aside from her sons that she knew that she could trust, and so somehow she did believe, with fierce conviction: he would decipher her message, and he would come. "Yes."

Jack shrugged a wordless we'll see but gave her a crooked smile, and her heart ached.

"Go on. I'll see you soon," she promised.

He stepped back. The pod door closed over her and sealed shut with a hiss of air. She could see his brave, intense gaze through the transparisteel cover. Love you, he mouthed, and touched the control pad again.

Beverly Crusher closed her eyes.