"Mel, darling, when were the 'guests' going to arrive?"

He glanced up from the preliminary report, his sixth time reading it today alone, it was still almost too much to believe, something haunting in its implications that gnawed at him, distracting him from what was, superficially, supposed to be a vacation.

"An hour forty-five to two hours." He replied, as the click-click-click of a pair of high-end pumps announced Debbi Burns' approach to the sitting room where he had planted himself since his arrival in Hallstatt.

"Mel..." She chided with her arms akimbo, grinning devilishly at him, looking like some weird amalgamation of the business woman, over-sexed school teacher, and past-the-age-of-common-sense punk rocker, "you're supposed to at least be putting in the appearance of enjoying a debauched week away from work."

Debbi Burns was a study in contrasts, or rather, the sort of deceptions one was forced to undertake to make a go of a career in any form of mass-distribution media. The world knew her as a jet-setting director turned producer coming from an elite east-coast education and a voracious lipstick-lesbian praying mantis in her personal relationships. It was partially true...she was jet-setting, she did have an elite east coast education, and she did date a lot of women, but that's where illusion stopped and reality began. In reality she was a non-practicing heterosexual who had learned all that really mattered in life raised by her father and later step-mother on a Nebraska farm before pursuing higher education and a career in the vid industry. Further under the layer of who she really was, hidden beneath the patina of glitz and the foundation of grounded midwestern practicality was a positively intense and fervent patriotism that even he found humbling.

Debbi had never held anything back from him, initially leaving him uncomfortable with how much she was getting inside his guard off the bat not just because of who he was and what he did but also because he got the sense there was something bordering on the romantic when he assumed, she was a dyke. One night over a bottle of bourbon he'd slipped and brought up the latter point and she'd laughed it off, explaining that she hired young women trying to make a go of it in show-biz to show up places with her, that her "dates" for premiers and awards and other decadent self-congratulatory functions of the celebrity-set were payed in cash and exposure before being sent on their way while she used the perception they created to further insulate and inculcate herself among the media apparatchiks. They had met at a sort of crypto-nationalist function a little more than a decade ago that she always attended incognito lest she be outed for not being one of the off-their-gourd types.

Piotr Walczak had made the introduction, providing an immediate series of bona fides as to why she was present; nine very surreptitious and well-executed defections of high-profile people from former Augment-Enclave nations had been masterminded, funded, and carried out by her and people she hired. It was impressive to say the least; SID had struggled with an approach to those particular problems for years and she had simply done it with such acumen that their original home nations hadn't even been able to acknowledge that they had happened when they did finally discover that they were gone. She was every bit a spy master, in a previous age she would have been numbered among the elite scions of the world of espionage.

She'd stuck to him like glue the rest of the night, discussing various things almost all of them things she should, in all honesty, know nothing about but had a unique and painfully accurate and intuitive perception of. Those who knew the ugly little vagaries of statecraft knew that he was basically the sin-eater for the United Earth Nations and their constituent countries and in this Debbi had found someone who not only shared her secret passion, but someone she could feel sympathy towards as one who undertook the actions she could not. Debbi wasn't afraid of the ethically reprehensible if it meant others didn't have to suffer the burdens of a "free and enlightened" society. There was a strange attraction, one he couldn't quite put a finger on, one he was sure she was equally uncertain about, they were unlikely "partners in crime" if it could be defined as anything, a certain aspect of physical attraction, minute but serviceable, a deep intellectual simpatico, she was also a resource network she'd cultivated over two decades that was impossible to ignore and impossible not to exploit when she made it readily available.

The package before him was a tall, shapely woman in a too-tight skirt that befit a girl half her age but she still somehow managed to wear better than most of them, a white silk blouse buttoned to her throat that followed perfectly into the charcoal district check pattern skirt. Her face was an ageless conglomeration of sharp angles and far too straight everything; nose, teeth, eyes, almost a charicature of what post-30 beauty was supposed to be, darkly made-up eyes behind heavy framed glasses and bouffant hair down to her mid-back shaved almost to the scalp on the sides of her skull.

"I feel like I need a drink, this report..." He sort of knew he shouldn't be telling her, he wasn't sure why he was. Part of him thought it was because he wanted to get back into her panties, it wouldn't be the first time, but no, it was more because she was the one person that wasn't part of his world he could talk to about this.

She didn't answer, she folded her arms across her chest and cocked a brow, it was a combination of permission for him to continue and a tacit desire to know what had so affected him.

"What if I told you that human history hasn't been interrupted for nearly a half million years."

"I'd tell you that's bullshit since we don't even know what people were actually like two hundred years ago, much less twenty or two hundred thousand."

"We found them." He answered, leaning back into the couch.

"What?" Her arms dropped from where she had them folded.

"Our ancestors...or our ancestors' relatives, our ancestors' ancestors, the early humans and near-humans, they fled earth around the same time Toba went off in northern Sumatra, they've been among the stars all this time."

This was cosmic horror, the sudden understanding that you were the product of the remainder, the left-over, that which was cast off as chaff, that which was left to their own devices or, worse, left to die. They were the evolutionary debtor's colony while the distant overlords of the colony where they had banished hadn't bothered to check in with them for an epoch.

"What's it mean, Mel? Are they coming back?"

He shook his head, "I dunno, I don't think so, hell if they'd wanted to they would have had plenty of opportunity before now."

"So our guests, they're the ones you had on point for this?"

He nodded, "Yeah."

"Mother?"

He shook his head at this, "No, Suvak is working on something unrelated right now."

"Then who?"

"Trip Tucker."

She stepped around the couch and bent part way over the glass coffee-table to adjust an ash-tray and a series of squat vases filed with sand and stones to act as votive holders. She furrowed his brows as she glanced at him, "Trip Tucker?"

"Charles Anthony the third."

Her eyes went wide at this, she had quietly helped bank-roll Igor Yegerev after she saw the original cut of Conqueror's Obligation, Trip had become something of a quiet obsession for both Yegerev and her as they worked to reconcile the idea of the genius engineer and physicist who had spent so much time, relative to his expertise, as an elite war-fighter. In any other setting, in any other time, Trip Tucker would be a tragic and romantic hero, the man who wanted only to work at his craft but was called to the drawing of blood again and again. "The Trip Tucker..."

"The one'n only, him and his wife."

"His..." she paused, furrowing her brows again, "wife...the Vulcan?" He nodded prompting her to continue, "What's her connection?"

"Well...she was a V'Shar spy, he was holding her file when she was aboard Enterprise as the cultural attaché, apparently they had a chance encounter a long time before that neither remembered, they immediately formed a connection that resulted in a Vulcan mate-bond, and now she tries to pretend she doesn't love him as much as I know she does."

The right corner of her mouth lifted slightly, "That'd make a great screenplay."

"Debbi..." His tone was the serious one now, the one he knew she kind of dreaded, "This is going to be a weird few days, very very weird, are you sure you want to be privy to it? You know I can't let you let any of it out."

She cocked her hips to the side, arms akimbo, giving him that knowing, seductive, smirk she was so good at, "You're not getting rid of me that easily, Mel, besides, I'm here to be your distraction, remember?"

He couldn't help but smile back, "Some vacation, huh?"

"Would this be what is referred to as a chalet?" Tupol inquired quietly as they exited the vehicle in front of the architecturally peculiar building facing yet another pair of armed men in what could be confused, at first glance, as normal civilian clothes.

"No, chalets are wood with an overhangin' roof, this'd be a postmodernist villa."

Charlie and T'Pol approached the pair of men at the door, both completing the ritual of showing their weapons to be checked and taken if needs must. In all the things she found strange over the past few weeks, this was still one of the ones that stuck with her the most; the reason they always seemed to be armed, it was odd enough with Charlie but it seemed even more bizarre from T'Pol who struck her as just the most gentle and delicate thing imaginable.

As they approached Earth, Enterprise had settled in under the keel of the Indianapolis, allowing the larger ship's sensor profile and IFF transceiver to baffle the presence of their ship as they had entered a lane to the so-called Luna Demilitarization Yards, which she construed to be a place where normal eyes were not permitted to look. Hundreds of ships were within the Earth orbital elliptic, dozens of warships, scores of freighters, transports and merchantmen no fewer than seven different races. These humans, this reality was so martial, she couldn't help but look on in muted horror as she saw the fitting yard at Earth's Lagrange Four point through the thin obscuration of the Kordylewski Cloud, three more identical ships to the Indianapolis undergoing additional construction. Huge accelerator assemblies hanging in space above the ships to be lowered into the dagger-like hull projections across the saucer. T'Pol had explained they were the railguns that served as the primary offensive batteries for the Iowa class battleships with numerous fire-linked smaller caliber railguns and phaser batteries providing lighter offensive punch and point defense.

Her perception of this humanity as thoroughly stratocratic was then immediately challenged as she saw the queues and yards of freighters bearing containers brightly decorated with names like Maersk, CMA CGM, Evergreen, Anglo Pacific Stellar, DFS, K-Line, NYK, and Hanjin. There were Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite, and Rigellian freight haulers, passenger ships, what looked to be pleasure liners, as well as the representative warships of several species present taking on reaction mass, provisions, or just refitting. Here Earth and its people were huge and terrifying in their power, but gently forbearing it seemed if their willingness to allow their space to be shared so close to their cradle world was an indicator while in her reality Earth was barely viewed better than a backwater by most of their neighbor races.

"Ma'am, sir..." She turned to glance at the two plain-clothes commandos, each wearing a thing jacket with a patch consisting of what looked like a P seated at the middle crest of a W and both with fairly heavy accents, they sounded slightly Eastern European but she couldn't distinguish anything else from it. They gestured towards the door of the villa. They had seemed to know Charlie, or at least one of them had, or...maybe...it was safer to say he knew one of them; he'd spoken out in whatever their native language was, it sounded different from the Croatian he'd spoken on the bridge a week prior.

"Zespoł Bojowy Cee?" He had asked from the back seat of the SUV they all climbed into as the two, armed men took the driver's and front passenger's seats.

The one in the passenger seat turned, "How'd you know that?"

"Celes dwa na czterdzieści siedem z naszą zespoł." The driver answered as he started the motor.

Once again, she found herself having fears of a military autocracy as they drove the road winding up the wooded alpine scenery, all shot through with shades of yellow and orange heralding autumn. The area was beautiful, but she couldn't shake her apprehension at their arrival which had been to beam into a skywalk looking down over the beautifully touristy looking town of Hallstatt in what they had told her was Austria but all she could think of was all the historical footage of the Berghoff that had been drilled into her head as she was taught all the evils of nationalism and why the idea of the nation state was responsible for all the ills that befell human society. On the Indianapolis all the uniforms had born tags reading "MCS NAVY" with a variety of secondary flags appearing as hook-and-eye fastener patches on the sleeve of the blouse. Most bore stars and stripes of the old United States, but she spotted others.

They had been met by a different pair of armed men, these were wearing the same combat fatigues she had seen on the Marines and the three men she learned were from 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. These men, however, didn't have a tape reading U.S. ARMY or even MCS NAVY or MARINES, they simply had a patch featuring a parachute canopy, crossed rifles, a dagger and the words "Numquam Retro". When she'd been informed they were "Jagdkommando" her mind was already going back into overdrive with thoughts of Berchtesgaden and all that entailed until Charlie read it on her and told her they were Austrian Army special forces. They were in sovereign Austrian territory, the idea was peculiar to her, the idea of individual sovereign nations, the idea of statehood had been killed in her reality; there was only Earth and other planets, regionalism was just geographical demarcation, there was no such thing as an "American" of "Austrian" as a legal identity, yet here was a world where there was an Austrian and American army, where they were accountable to the local and national laws of the nation of Austria.

The interactions over the next few hours or days would help to answer a lot of questions she had and either ease or compound her concerns about this reality, she just had to get through them.

"This is the really long 'n short of it." Charlie began, he was seated on an ottoman, his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward, the man they referred to as General Tyner had asked for a debrief while they waited for dinner to be served. He seemed nice enough, personable, pleasant, his rough edges were the sort that were artfully frayed, save for the part where he was in charge of secret operations and spent his weekends in secluded alpine villas he didn't come off as anything remotely threatening or like some terrifying overlord of a junta. Of course, Charlie had told her and T'Pol had affirmed with a nod that he was, possibly, the most dangerous man in the known galaxy.

"There's basically close t'half a million years of hominid history that we've completely lost. There was a series of major disasters between seven'y four and 'bout fiddy thousand years ago that more'r'less undid 'bout two hun'erd thousand years'a advancement. Now, they were an advanced civilization even way back then; interstellar travel capability, FTL, population 'bout in th'range'a seven'r'eight billion, 'n they predicted there was gonna be a series'a disasters from hyper-volcanism, when it happened they packed up's'much as they could and went t'beat feet until things normalized, pro'lem was some'a'em didn' wanna leave Earth back then, they were gonna stick it out, this was their home. Of the ones that survived some of 'em became our ancestors. 'Bout forty-eight thousand years ago, the ones that left came back t'see if anything was left n' to start rebuildin', then they discovered that not everyone that stayed behind died, we kept movin' forward, now they were technically inna iron age at that point, but there were only 'bout a few hun'erd thousand left on th'planet so it was pretty respectable maintainin' at least that level'a technology."

"What happened?" Debbi, as she had introduced herself, spoke up seemingly in spite of herself. She couldn't peg what the importance of this woman was, her presentation was...odd, to say the least. She didn't come off like a state functionary in any way, shape, or form. It was pretty clear she wasn't a diplomat; she wasn't typical of the sort who were mistresses to powerful men, and even if she were, she wouldn't have been cut into the loop on this sort of thing. Something about her read to her like the widow of an eccentric billionaire who'd married a woman far too young for him but had managed to land the actual mastermind sort of woman who ran his empire with an iron fist in his enfeebled years and carved her own legacy from the foundation of the wealth.

"Another major volcanic event, a few bolides, n' by that point the cultures were too divergent so they, the ones that left, decided t'just let us evolve on our own, accordin' t'them we were almost ready fer intersteller travel again as of 'bout twelve thousand eight hun'erd seventeen years ago."

"The Hiawatha impact..." Tyner muttered.

"Yep, most'a civilization was coastal, so upon impact...well...you can figure it out; two-mile thick glacial sheet over 'bout half the northern hemisphere, seven hun'erd plus megaton equivellent impact on the ice-sheet with immediate oceanic effect run-off." He let that hang in the air for a moment, she could grasp it even if the others couldn't, approximately a ton per cubic meter of ice, a billion cubic meters per cubic kilometers, an impact that flash melted what was probably a few million cubic kilometers of glacial pack, approximately two trillion tons of water all coming pouring down around the world, it suddenly made flood myths make so much more sense, they weren't myths, they were the result of generations of word-of-mouth recounting finally committed to record. "Within a week water levels had risen between sixty n' five hun'erd feet from the impact-melt around the globe and if the tidal wave effect hadn' destroyed it, it was pretty much swamped afterwards. Then, if that weren' bad enough, pretty much everything caught fire while the rest was bein' flooded. 'Bout sixty 'r seventy million people were dead within twelve hours'a the impact, the number ballooned t'in the neighborhood of four hun'erd million within a week. There had been no clue that the object was inbound, wasn' part'a normal orbital track cause they'd'a spotted it based on where th'technology level was. Only 'bout ten percent a'the population on the planet survived. In the final tally we were back down t'only a few thousand breedin' pairs from millions before." He paused, letting it sink in, "It wasn' a disaster...it was an attack."

"Were they responsible?" Tyner inquired; his eyes set harshly as he looked back at Tucker.

"I really doubt it, at least not directly." Tucker laced his fingers, "They seem t'view us and our ancestors that stayed behind as the long-term evolutionary strategy, they saw us survive extinction even after extinction event and spring back, while we're not really them anymore, we are human, n' they seem t'view that as enough reason t'let us keep on keepin' on as part'a the macro strategy of human survival."

"And about the previous enounter...?" Tyner prompted.

"We got a track on 'em when you had us on Idle Wind, we caught their scent, had no idea who they were, we assumed extant at th'time, when they showed up on th'En'erprise I thought I finally had 'em. Turns out, they had an agent trackin' the same people we were, the ones I suspect might'a been responsible for Younger Dryas event n' possibly Toba."

"The Neanderthal..." T'Pol blurted out, eyes widened with the realization.

"Wait...wait...hold on, Neanderthal? There was a space Neanderthal?" Burns interrupted, holding up a hand as if the gesture would stop a world that no longer made any sense to her.

"They didn' interbreed back then, the separate hominid races interacted, cooperated, but they didn' intermarry, didn' reproduce with each other, but yeah, Neanderthals still exist. That's th'thing, we're not them anymore, they're not us, there're an evolutionary antecedent, but they're not us, we're not them, they're humans...Hominidae...but they're not earthlings anymore, n' they're startin' t'die off. Thing is, they know they're dyin', it's a slow drain, but it's still a drain, a few fewer born each generation, a few more genetic inconsistencies each time, a few more cases'a infertility or incompatibility." Tucker let his eyes drift around the room, "They figured out too late what geneticists have been sayin' fer decades...conflict, struggle, is what drives humans, without it, we stagnate n' we die. See, that's what confused 'em more'n anything, each time they came back t'look at what had changed, we were a bit stronger, a bit more robust, n' each time they were a bit weaker."

"How'd all this lead to their Enterprise coming to exist in our timeline?" Tyner steepled his fingers, this would provide some insight as to why they were present.

"Refer t'the appendix titled 'Cenotaph zero four one nine', it was a moon they'd settled on 'bout twenty two thousand years ago, started as a nature preserve fer various Pleistocene species they'd brought along, they began t'urbanize several processin' sites around th'planet till 'bout eight hun'erd years ago when a faction began t'think it was time fer 'em to come back home t'earth. There was a civil war, the two sides killed each other off, the 'watchers' let it happen then blockaded th'world, but not to keep anything from gettin' out but t'keep anything else from gettin' in. That's what happened t'their Ener'prize; mines capable to takin' whatever triggered 'em outta the normal behavior of space time, problem was there was a quasi-entanglement level between matter in their reality and ours, enough t'where there interaction along the Bose-Einstein Condensate was suffecient t'trigger the mine'n consequently put that area'a their space 'n ours int' entanglement n' it spat 'em out at the origination point. In short, it was an accident, but one they couldn' reconcile."

"The Neanderthals and other late hominids with them..." Melvin stated, his brows arching as he looked up from the PADD, "what were they like?"

Tucker grinned slightly, "Pretty damn amazin', durin' the idle Wind operations we ended up runnin' int'one'a their agents a few times, he was the Neanderthal I referenced from my report, Bwaethe, Clade Arch-Executor, he was tryin' t'cover tracks they'd made thousands a years ago, some other faction, the one I speculate might'a caused the Younger Dryas Bolide were on the trail, Bwaethe was sent t'sanitize the locations, the archaeological teams were collateral damage."

"Did he kill them?"

Tucker shook his head, "I never asked him, I didn' feel like I had to, their methodology is t'incapacitate n'confound, they prefer t'remove evidence of their existence than t'leave bodies that'll make questions. So, I'm inclined t'say 'no', I think it was one'a the other factions n' he was jus' in the wrong place at th'wrong time when we showed up."

"Doesn't it strike you as odd that they're so secretive?" Tyner cut eyes over to Debbi, wanting to see if she picked up on that particular element of the presented behavior.

"They're paranoid." T'Pol interjected, "there have been enough conveniently placed disasters in their history that threatened to wipe them out as three distinct species. When the Haiwatha impact occurred, they believed that the remaining humans on the planet had been wipe out entirely for nearly two centuries until they sent an expedition to Earth to assess what had occurred. This might seem to indicate that someone or something has had a vested interest in stifling their, and later your, progression if not wiping out advanced life on Earth whole-sale, and they have had cause for this concern for nearly a hundred thousand years now."

The eyes in the room shifted to her, "They were reticent to initially share much information with me, but the appeal to the scientific forced them to open up a bit and there seems to be indications that there were several other extinction events throughout the progression of Earth's hominids that would suggest a deliberate attempt at wiping them out."

"In regards to your interactions with them." Tyner commented, giving T'Pol his undivided attention, "the report said they were cautious if not slightly hostile, can you elaborate on that?"

"I have reason to believe they may have had contact with pre-historic Vulcan cultures, they seemed to know what I was and were cautious towards me. However, when they came to understand that I was the spouse of Captain Tucker, some of them became less reticent about engaging with me."

"Why was that?"

"The Neanderthal agent, Bwaethe, is distantly related to Trip."

It wasn't as if the room hadn't been quiet, but now there was a weightiness to the quiet, a stunned silence.

"It is a very distant, very tenuous linkage in his haplotype that indicates far enough back in the Tucker family line there was a Neanderthal that was related to the Neanderthal we knew as Bwaethe. The fact I am Trip's mate, and the fact that there is a distant familial relation is why they revealed much of what they did to me. They had little reservation about expressing their belief I constituted a pollutant in human genetics and Trip constituted a pollutant in that of Vulcan's depending on if and with whom our children elect to produce offspring with."

Debbi Burns brought her hand up to cover her mouth, "That's awful, why would they say that?"

T'Pol cocked a brow at the woman, "From a purely biological standpoint their concerns are valid and warranted as were some facets of Terra Prime's critiques of our son's birth when it was widely publicized. I will note, that there are Vulcans that feel the same way about Captain Tucker."

Lizzie wasn't certain why she and Tupol had been privy to all this, short of the fact they had seen it too, she'd been silent through the already hour long quasi-debriefing, but now she was starting to feel a bit like a piece of furniture, "I'm sorry, general, sir, but what gonna be done with us?"

Tyner rested his hands on his knees and gave a sheepish smile, "Well, miss Tucker, I was sort of hoping you'd maybe devised something with Captain Tucker to possibly get your folks sent back home."

"I understand there is a need for secrecy," Tupol spoke next to her, "among a populace if there is concrete evidence of concurrent parallel realities it would serve as an existential threat to cultures and societies."

She turned to look at Tupol cryptically, she noted that Debbi Burns was doing the same thing, "How do ya figure?"

"The idea of impermanence is fundamental among most sapient species, the idea that eventually one will die creates societal and cultural motivation for the majority to work towards general improvement. If individuals were to learn that their existence was a gestalt concept where they existed as many iterations across many timelines their focus on immediate temporal concerns of their experienced reality may diminish." T'Pol replied with steel-trap quickness prompting assenting nods from both Tyner and Charlie.

"So...what happens to us if we can't figure out a way t'get us back?"

"We're going to do everything in our power to make sure we do get you back." Tyner replied.

"But what if ya can't? What if it can't be done? What happens t'us then? If y'all are just gonna take us out back, put one in our heads, then toss us in a shallow lime pit, I'd rather know it's comin'."

She could feel the looks going around the room, all except for Tyner whose eyes didn't shift a second, when he spoke his tone was even, almost flat, like someone who never had to be reassuring doing their best attempt at it. "I promise you that we won't operate like that, miss Tucker. In the event we can't send you all home, you'll have to spend the remainder of your natural lives here, but we're not in the business of summarily executing loose ends. The chips will just have to fall as they may."

Charlie lifted his head a bit, "I'm thinkin' we might have a possible avenue fer gettin' 'em home."

All eyes in the room were on him now, "The Tethys R four four one IFF antenna. It's technically the largest quantum entanglement communication array in existence, it'd prob'ly be able t'resync them to their Bose-Einstein Condensate default which should kick'em back t'their reality."

Tyner gave a half nod, "What's our worst-case scenario?"

"I end existence as we know it." Tucker answered flatly.

"Oh, is that all then?" Tyner chuckled back at the all-too-honest response.

"On the up-tick, it'd be over real fast."

One of the hardest things was being close to him, being around him, his body and mind addled by the dual confusions of being so physically young again while retaining the same mind and how they would go about sending their counter-parts back to their own reality. Worse still was his physical aloofness, they hadn't shared a bed since his irradiation, there were still lingering traces of ionization in his tissue and he didn't want her near it. It was difficult to isolate why he was illogically insistent on remaining quasi-quarantined from her; his present levels of ionizing radiation traces were admittedly still above the norm for a living being, but still far, far lower than for those who had even cursory contact with say a warp power-plant or even radiological diagnostic medical equipment.

He was seated in a chair next to a desk in their guest room, clad only in the athletic shorts he had donned upon finishing his shower, his legs were folded across the seat in the lotus position with his arms folded across his chest, eyes closed, chin resting on his chest. She continued toweling her hair as she watched his chest slowly rise and fall, he wasn't asleep but he was in a near-sleep state, his mind all but shut-down to steal moments of rest before sleep came and his already overtaxed mind found itself engaged in the rigor of dreams.

"What did you and the general speak of?" She asked softly, standing naked in the doorway between the bathroom and their room.

He didn't lift his head or open his eyes, "My disposition fer the next fourteen months."

"And that is?"

"Up'n the air, needless t'say they're gonna wanna control who gets t'see me so they don' gotta explain why I went from lookin' forty t'barely over twen'y."

She folded her own arms across her chest, he wanted him to look at her, she wanted to feel that feeling from him, that touch of nervous ardor that stole over him when she was direct regarding intimate intentions. But he didn't budge, he was too submerged in his own exhaustion, beyond just in the flesh, he was mentally worn out as well.

"Do you intend to sleep with me tonight?" She asked it just loud enough for him to hear.

"I shouldn'-"

"Trip, you are no longer exhibiting the risk of contact contamination, there are five devices in this room that place me at higher risk of radiation contamination than you."

"And what if..." He paused, his mental process chewing at his next words in a way that wasn't immediately evident to her, his inability to put the words into the crass factuality was somehow endearing, "What if we...n' I don'...if yer ovulatin'."

"We do not have to engage in any sexual behavior." She answered; indeed she hadn't considered it as a primary course of action, an option certainly, but mostly she just wanted to be close to her mate.

"N' what if I want to?"

That had surprised her; it suddenly struck her that she was the primary initiator of sexual contact between them, perhaps the exclusive initiator, as hard as she thought about it, she never could recall a time when he'd initiated without significant cues from her. What seemed strange was she didn't sense any desire from him, and now she was left to wonder if he constantly suppressed it.

"Trip..."

"Th'brain may be pushin' forty, but the body's still in its twen'ies, n' if my sperm is all genetically screwed up n' yer ovulatin'..."

This is what he must have been like when he was young, that insecurity and constant worry that he hid from the world, she found it strangely endearing. "Is this just about impregnating me or is this about the fact that you are...horny?"

"I still can't get it outta my head...our...lil butter bean..." He didn't need to supply anymore; she could sense the well of grief still in him, a grief he had fought so hard to suppress.

"You knew." She let the words out just above a whisper, "before even I did, when it happened, you knew, didn't you?"

She caught a hint of reflection, something shining at the lower edge of his eyes, running down his cheeks, he had known, and it was what had driven the fury, the rage that came over him, the rage that had almost seen him killed. He held out a hand in her direction, a tacit summons, something he felt that was a terrible truth, a horrific revelation, but he needed her to know and feel it wasn't him, it was just a part of him. She crossed over to him, straddling his lap and put her arms around him as he pulled her against him.

"When you got hit..." he began, his voice quiet, his head leaned forward to rest in the crook of the right side of her neck, "I already knew where it was, how deep the wound penetration was, yer body was already tellin' me where it hit, it just took a bit'a mental tabulation t'figure out the rest. I knew...we'd lost it, that it'd been killed."

She closed her eyes as the breath of his words danced over her skin, she wasn't sure why he hadn't wanted to reveal this, she could sense it was something he'd held back for a long time.

"They'd taken our kids, 'n that made me furious. They'd hurt you, 'n that made me furious. But when I realized they'd killed our baby..." He looked up, at this proximity she could see the tear tracks on his cheeks, a father's despair and sorrow allowed to slip out, "I've never felt that kinda rage."

She reached up and clutched his head, pulling it back to her shoulder, "What else."

"There was a part'a me..."

"That thought I had gotten what I had wanted." She said it softly, a codification as devoid of any judgement as possible

She felt him nod.

"K'diwa..." She cooed to him, here again was the vulnerability she had longed for, the vulnerability she had seen in him so few times, the vulnerability she had come to understand she adored about him on a day that felt like a life-time ago near the Apalachicola River where a wound had been opened in the planet.

"I'm sorry, baby, I'm so sorry."

"Trip..." She sighed to him, "I have felt such guilt over the loss of the child for the same reason, that perhaps I somehow willed it into happening."

She felt the wetness of more tears against her skin, "But it was not the case, it was happenstance, brutal, brutal happenstance. Something was taken from us, we made those that took it pay, now we have nowhere to go, but forward."

His arms tightened around her a little more, pulling her tighter against him, a sobbing sigh leaving him as he received the absolution she'd just provided. She could almost feel the weightiness on his soul shift, alleviating some of an agony he was experiencing she hadn't even been aware of.

"Do we try again?" He asked.

"Yes and no." She stated as she shifted her head to plant kisses against the short hair on his scalp. She could as much feel his eyebrows lift against her skin as she could in the touch-connection into his body-consciousness. But he said nothing, she could sense doubts roiling deep in him, considerations of what this meant, his mind so used to reading the spoken and unspoken cues was moving faster than his, admittedly, superb understanding of the bond for one without latent telepathy. But as usual, his mind was outrunning everything else, even his heart which lurched at the doubt around the same time he began to understand her meaning. "We will let spontaneity dictate the course of action. We will not plan our family as if via a committee. When the time is correct, you will impregnate me, and I will bear our child, just like with Solan and Elizabeth."

"I love you."

She stroked the back of his neck, "I know you do. Now come to bed with me, we need to enjoy this illogically big, illogically comfortable bed while the opportunity presents and we both think better when we are well rested and well disposed towards each other."

She could feel that his hands wanted to roam over her body, to touch and caress, to fondle and grope, but he was fighting it. "I want you really bad right now, though." He muttered against her skin.

"I will provide you with relief."

She'd always wondered what it would be like to force him to climax as he had her many times through the administration of oral and manual stimuli. It was one of her cloistered and compartmentalized fantasies to undo him in a way similar to how he undid her.

"It's not 'bout that." He muttered into her skin, "I'm not jus' turned on like'a horny kid...I really want you."

"Then have me." She whispered as she kissed his ear.

"But...someone might hear..."

She shook with a silent laugh, smiling where he couldn't see it, he was being so silly, so childish, "Are you attempting to elicit an argument against it from me?"

"I'd kinda hoped you'd have some pearl'a wisdom that'd change my mind."

"I cannot provide any modicum of logical or anecdotal rationality to abstain from what seems to be an inevitable course of action."

He huffed, his breath hot against the skin of her neck and clavicle. "Well, guess we'd better head t'bed 'n just hope I suddenly get real tired then."

[Author's Note]

This is a clumsy, sloppy, transition chapter but it had to be done, what started out as an interesting idea turned into an unwieldy mess that I've spent close to two months trying to unravel enough to make it usable. Thus I give you this mess by way of avoid four more chapters of dense, uninteresting, and really esoteric exposition about two extinction events we survived as a species when we shouldn't have and how it influences the human experience. In short, I started pontificating and it bit me in the ass because this is fan fiction and it'd take me another 50,000 words minimum to begin extrapolating the theoretical history of humans that lived for 200,000+ years before the Younger Dryas extinction event and why we have no evidence of tools or culture from them despite the fact we're almost certain they existed.

Prepare yourself for more intrigue, drama, and a war about to go hot.