As far as he could remember, Strom hadn't ever had his head in an empty metallic container that was being beaten by a sehlat's claws, but if he had, he expected that it would feel just like this. He didn't even dare open his eyes yet, as a wave of nausea and then pain crashed over his whole body. Against logic itself, even his hair hurt, which was scientifically impossible. Then, he felt the cold.

Had he been there, and known he was alone, he doubted he would have opened his eyes, but as the second wave of pain crashed down on him, his eyes snapped open; everything came back to him.

"Osu," he whispered, and pushed himself off the snow-covered ground into a sitting position.

The sun was bright and the snow around him was perfect. There wasn't a foot fall, or anything more than the snow mark he had made.

"Osu," he said a little louder, and then cleared his throat. "Admiral Sopek!" The name echoed through the pristine conifers. The only thing returning to him, other than the echo, was the sound of branches aching under the weight of snow.

Sopek heard his name on the wind, first like a whisper, then like a shout, and his eyes snapped open. He automatically attempted to sit up, but the action caused a wave of nausea to wring his stomach into a knot, and he laid still, carefully touching his head. His fingers came away soaked in green blood.

He took a deep breath and focused on the shouting, and realized someone was indeed calling his name. "Over here!" he replied weakly, then coughed. A coppery taste stained his tongue, and he breathed in deeply through his nose and shouted again. "I'm over here!"

Strom stood, and he did so with great ease, but his mind was too focused on getting to the admira, who may have been in very bad shape. "I am coming!" he yelled back. "Keep speaking!" The shifting snow (which he was not used to) and wind were making it hard to follow the echo.

He heard him call out again, and picked up the pace to a light jog, again heedless that he himself had not been able to jog since he turned two hundred. "Admiral!" he yelled, with a little more excitement than he meant to as he approached Sopek from behind.

Then he paused. "Admiral?" he said, almost in a whisper, and he carefully walked around to face his fellow. Sopek was bleeding, there was that, but nothing that looked worse than a shaving cut here and there. The doctor knelt before him, and saw blood coming from the admiral's mouth, but it looked no more serious than the admiral accidentally biting his tongue. He would be alright, but that wasn't what had Strom breathless.

"Other than your mouth…how do you feel, physically?" Strom didn't know exactly what he was seeing or why. It could be a trick of the light, but that would be an extremely sophisticated trick, because Sopek looked like a man of barely one hundred. The doctor tore off a bit from his cloak to dab away the blood from his friend's face, and in doing so he saw his own hands were full and strong, like when he was a surgeon back in the time before the Kir'Shara.

Shoving his confusion down, he cleaned the admiral's face. "Something unexplainable is happening," he whispered.

Sopek, with the doctor's help, sat up and looked at their surroundings, taking in the snowy tundra with deep, measured breaths. He shook his head, wondering at how clear his vision and hearing seemed to be, and then he set his gaze on his friend and suppressed a gasp.

"Doctor...your hair..." What was once a neat bob of cloud-white hair was now grey-black shod with silver at the temples. And the doctor's face looked younger, healthier, with the same pronounced jawline, but no sallow cheeks or deeply set wrinkles. "I find this...most illogical, and any explanation is not forthcoming," the admiral replied, and he noted even his voice had lost its gravelly texture and was as smooth and clear as it was in his younger days.

Strom considered the admiral for a moment. "Indulge me, Osu, but I think you will find you can stand."

Staying at hand in case his hypothesis was incorrect, he watched the man who was nearly unable to walk stand with ease. "It is as I suspected, we are…for reasons I cannot know, no longer…" Strom couldn't finish the sentence, but he knew Sopek would understand. The cause for his almost emotion was sufficient so he did not have shame. Then he looked around. "The senator…" He swallowed thickly. "He transported us to the back of the ship to give us a chance to live, but I do not see any scraps of the ship, and I do not think he is here."

Sopek raised an eyebrow. "As long as I have lived, and as old as I am, I never thought I would see the day when a Romulan would give his life for Vulcans. As much as I would wish to investigate the wreckage, I believe our priority is to find shelter. We will not endure the cold of a night here if we do not have shelter and fire."

Strom nodded. "In the distance, there is a stone structure. I believe we can walk there within the hour."

Sopek looked. "It seems as if there may be a humanoid near that structure."

Strom squinted. "It does, though it is hard to make out from this distance. I did not see him there before."

Sopek smoothed down his hair. "Let us depart, before we lose the light." He stepped forward, at first a small tentative step, one he would have taken an hour ago with his dying legs, and then as he moved he could feel the full strength of his legs returning; he began to step with confidence.

"Could this be some chronotron radiation?" he asked, looking to the doctor. Perhaps together they could start building a hypothesis.

"I am no physicist, admiral, my specialties were psychiatry and neurology, but I would hazard a guess that chronotron radiation would continue to reverse our aging until we are infants. Since we both seem to be staying at approximately one hundred years, I would think there is something else at work here."

"Logical," Sopek agreed with a nod. "Doctor, is that structure up ahead natural or fabricated?"

Strom frowned at the formation jutting out of the snow. "These pillars bear the signs of being carved from stone. Do you believe we are in the ruins of some ancient civilization?"

"Not some ancient civilization," a man said, and they turned to see a human-looking male in a long seal skin trench coat and bowler hat. The stranger put his cigar in the side of his mouth and gave a curious smile. "The ancient civilization…though…" He continued walking toward a wooden rocking chair that wasn't there a moment ago. "Since time is so relative it is likely the newest of civilizations to exist, or the last." He pulled a newspaper from his inside pocket of his jacket. "It truly is all a matter of perspective."

He winked at Strom, and then nodded at Sopek. "Ya know…I don't get too many of your kind here, which I always found curious." He took in a deep draw of his cigar, blowing it out into a Milky Way galaxy shape. "But it doesn't matter, because you are here now, and I think you have places you need to go."

He forcefully waved his hand before the stone porthole and a blue energy began swirling around the inside, visions and pictures of ages long past and ages so far flung in the future that time had no more meaning, and every kind of scene in between.

"Am I being rude?" he asked, and then answered himself. "Allow me to introduce myself, Mr. Strom and Mr. Sopek…." He cleared his throat and then spoke with such a reverberating voice it was like the planet itself spoke.

"I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER."

The ground shook considerably, giving his statement immense weight, and then everything returned back to normal and he was sitting between the two Vulcans blowing smoke galaxies in the freezing air. "I never like to assume people know me…it's vain, ya know. But in the interest of not standing on too much ceremony, you can call me Carl."

"It is obvious you are a being of great power," Strom remarked, raising an eyebrow at another smoke galaxy that drifted past him. He glanced at Sopek, who was staring at the man with an intensity rarely expressed by their people. "Admiral?"

Sopek tore his eyes from the figure and looked to the doctor. "If what he says is true, then it would be reasonable to assume he is the cause of our new-found youth."

He turned back to the man. "What is it that you want from us? You mentioned we had places to go. Could you elaborate on your meaning?"

"He means dead," came a melodic but very angry voice from behind them. His pure white hair was gone, along with the milky blue eyes age had given him. His eyes were bright and sharp, as were his ears and the points of his jet-black hair. He pointed at the Guardian, shaking a finger at him; he was so flustered he couldn't really speak.

"I…oblivion…cheated…" Letant turned back around and kicked snow into an arc.

The Guardian chuckled. "Your excitable friend isn't wrong." He stood up and put his cigar into his pocket. "You boys died up there." He pointed to the sky. "But not everyone who dies really dies, and so it was with you. Some people are given unimaginable gifts and second chances."

"I…." Letant said thinly, "want…I want the death I earned! Don't make me have to do that all over again."

"Ah, but you don't get a say in that. In your case, some of my second cousins twice removed said to me, Carl…that Letant, he seems bad but he saved a lot of my people. Could ya do me a favor?" He chuckled. "Well, how do you say no to family?"

Sopek's eyes widened, "If we are…"

"Dead."

"Then, why…?"

"You haven't been paying attention! Time doesn't mean anything! You are here because time is a punk! That said, you do need to go somewhere and soon. Your stories have ended in this plane of existence, you all did very good. Now it's time for you all to write new stories. Live new lives, and this time, you don't ever have to feel the burden of pain or disease."

He looked between the Vulcans, ignoring Letant for a moment. "I can't force ya, but I can tell ya…" He pointed to the portal. "It's going to be a lot of fun. Not that I suppose you Vulcans are into that kind of thing, but I think deep down you'd like a fresh adventure."

He tipped his hat. "Waddya say? Time for a little rest and relaxation?"

"Only a fool would believe there is anything good for us beyond that gate," Letant growled. "And I may be...well, I was old, but I'm no fool. What proof do you have that we won't be scattered into a million pieces or transported back to a war zone when we go through?"

"Senator, his very existence is proof," Sopek replied calmly. "Our de-aging is proof. Information about the Guardian is very tightly controlled by Federation intelligence, but surely you have seen the reports. This being has power to send us to any point on time, to other worlds, to any other dimension, of which there are an infinite number."

The being smiled, but then his tone became far more grave. "Now, you should understand, just because I promise no pain or disease does not mean you won't face some challenges in your new life." His tone lightened and he smiled again. "But then, what's life without a little rain now and again, am I right?"

Sopek raised an eyebrow. "How long do we have to decide?"

The Guardian smiled. "Time in this universe is already trying to creep up on you. Nature doesn't like a vacuum and right now you three are sucking up all the air." He pulled out two business cards. "When you are done where you are going in a few hundred years, look me up. There are lots of adventures out there, and you can have them all. You've earned it."

Letant looked more defeated than he had ever been in his life, and he thought that was rich to think since he had been a senator his whole life.

"You my good man, turned the tide and saved the Bajorans and the whole Alpha Quadrant," Carl told the Romulan. "Then there is the matter of trying to save these two young men as you crashed. Given your good deeds, the Prophets have granted you something no Romulan has ever been granted."

He didn't wait for Letant to respond, he simply kicked him into the middle of the vortex behind them.

"I've always wanted to do that," he muttered with a chuckle, then calmed and faced the two Vulcans.

"Alright, gentlemen, I'll leave you to your decisions. The portal won't remain open forever, so don't take too long. It's been a pleasure for you to see me," he said with a sly wink, and when he turned around, he was gone.

Strom frowned slightly at Sopek. "It is a large and daunting choice, but I think of the service we might be able to render wherever we go. I confess not having to give that up is….appealing." He looked at the card and placed it in his robes pocket. "I will go, if you go." There was nothing left for him here anymore anyway. Retirement? Death? They were the same thing.

Sopek straightened, adjusting himself to this new reality and the weight of the future now laid out for him, but he paused. "Senator Letant will be graced with some adventure courtesy of the Prophets, but for us...he did not mention if we would be separated or not."

Strom frowned at him, clearly displeased with the notion. "If he is what you say he is, and there are infinite universes beyond this gate, is there not a high probability we would meet on the other side regardless?"

A tiny, almost imperceptible smile touched the admiral's lips. "I should like to think that no matter the universe, we would be friends."

Strom returned the smile. "As would I. Live long and prosper, Sopek of Shi'Kahr."

"Peace, and long life," he replied, and they raised the ta'al to each other.

"If we find each other on the other side, should we establish a sign of sorts to prove that we are from this timeline?" Strom said quickly, forcing himself to suppress his apprehension.

Sopek knew an answer, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Carl sends his fondest greetings," he offered, and Strom nodded.

With one final nod to each other, they stepped through the portal, and naught was left but the howling of the wind.