Out of Time

Posted on Wed Dec 27th, 2023 @ 4:20am by Chief Helmsman Kalahaeia t'Leiya & Dr. Izriel "Jaxx" Lonn

Mission: Fractures
Location: Future Fracture
2130 words - 4.3 OF Standard Post Measure

"...try to warn them."

The words were spoken to a darkened, empty room. Though he couldn't adequately explain how he'd known, Jaxx wasn't surprised to find his previous exit point nothing more a brief detour. He was starting to identify a particular sense of disorientation that took hold just before a shift in temporal fixation and, during his entire conversation with Gregnol the last time around, the sensation hadn't abated. He stood in the gloom, taking a moment to concentrate on the rapid thud of his heart against his chest-bone, saturated in the compounding realisation that he had absolutely no control over what was happening to him. Trapped in the swirling eddies of time itself, flung from fate's catapult to land wherever and whenever it pleased, the Betazoid was now facing the very real possibility that he was moving further and further away from an actual solution that would revert him back to a correct time and place.

Where was he this time.

He lacked the energy to formulate it as a proper question.

"Don't move. Whoever the hell you are, your disguise is in incredibly poor taste; and you have thirty seconds to convince me not to follow through on this." A sudden voice from the dark, tight but firm in the sense of someone who is entirely serious in what they're saying. What 'this' was was made clear in the same moment with the cold metal of a blade against Jaxx's neck from behind.

Having just arrived from the experience of having a friend point a phaser at him, Jaxx took only a split second to realise this was far more likely to end badly. His experience with Romulans was limited, and his understanding of this Romulan wasn't quite as developed as he might have liked, but Jeassaho spoke fondly of her shipmates and that gave the Betazoid enough additional information to assess his current predicament as dire.

He lifted both his hands, fingers splayed, to a height where the could be easily seen from behind.

"Temporal issues." There hadn't been a lot of opportunity for him to reflect on a good strategy for explaining his sudden presence and so, just as he had the last time, Izriel cut straight to the point. "Exceedingly out of my control, I'm afraid. No current explanation, I just seem to be on a small vacation through the ship's potential futures." He swallowed, wanting to turn his head to catch a look at the woman but found himself unwilling to risk his jugular. "I would never enter uninvited otherwise," he tried quietly. "I'm not even sure I'd have the skill to get this far without you stopping me."

"Depends on who you actually are." The tone hadn't warmed up much from previous; though there was a few subtle beeps a moment or two after that led to a near-indecipherable string of curse words as the scanner Kali had set on the intruder let her know it detected chroniton particles. So. Probably the truth on the time travel part, at least. The knife at Jaxx's throat let up its pressure ever-so-slightly, but was replaced by the business end of Kali's phaser in the middle of his back. "Hands stay where they are. Step forward till you're against the wall, then turn around, slowly, hands, again, still where they are. Deviate from that and I swear I will shoot you; and I will not hesitate. Move."

He was, Izriel decided to remain optimistic about the fact, still alive. In the short while since he'd met Kali, there still seemed to be enough evidence to suggest that this was no mean feat and he couldn't imagine what circumstances would have lead to this version of her being any less acerbic about sudden infractions on her personal space. He followed her instructions diligently, hesitating only slightly once he reached the wall and wondered if he really wanted to turn around to establish eye contact. He shuffled until his shoulder brushed against the bulkhead and then quickly twisted the far arm around so that his empty hands remained in view first and foremost. Facing her didn't aid much in initial analysis, the room was still pretty dark, but there was enough light cast from the glow of her tricorder to indicate two pinpricks of hells-fire aimed directly at him.

He smiled, a wry tug upwards at one corner of his mouth. Under the circumstances, there didn't seem much else he could do.

"Hi." As far as last words went, his were less than impressive. "I honestly have no idea what's going on."

"That makes two of us." Kali's tone was halfway between a sigh and a snarl. "Because you're dead." The hand that wasn't holding the phaser fished around in one pocket for the remote switch for the lights and toggled them on, bathing the room suddenly in their glow. She scowled when the scanner beeped again with the results of the genetic analysis, which took rather longer than the chroniton scan had, and one eyebrow went significantly up at the confirmation of a genetic match. It was either some seriously advanced disguise work, or the man's time travel story might actually be the truth. Which might really be even more complicated - an undercover agent in disguise she could just shoot, after all; that was often a bad idea with time-travelers, even when they didn't prove to be a version of your child's dead father. "...What year did you come from?"

It didn't feel wise to make any relief obvious though Izriel was sure there was plenty of it littered across his face for the astute to discern. "2397. Truth be told, I've only been on board a couple of months." The slight wriggle of his nose was an attempt to surreptitiously deal with an itch and the Betazoid consciously took a moment to exhale and lose some of the tension across his shoulders, though with his hands still pointed towards the sky, circulation was going to eventually become a problem. "This will be the fourth variant timeline I've unexpectedly visited." After a slight pause, he added, "And the second where I have confirmation that I don't survive to see old age."

Whatever Kali might have said was interrupted by a small face peeking around the corner on a room off to the opposite side of where she had herded Jaxx to, then freezing in the doorway to the main room.

"...Daddy??!?" The perplexed cry came from a little girl who looked like she might have been somewhere around six to eight, clad in blue satin pajamas, with pert little pointed ears and upswept brows above unusual dark hazel-green eyes.

Kali fought the urge to whirl around at the unexpected complication, but kept her eyes focused clearly on Jaxx still and didn't waiver her aim - if anything, her grip tightened and steadied in preparation in case she suddenly needed to fire. "Ariah!!! Get back in the bedroom, now!"

"I don't think you belong here. Do you?" If the first words were eerily perceptive, the next ones were spoken nearly in tears glistening in her eyes as she locked them with Jaxx from a distance. "....You don't know me." The girl seemed to be completely ignoring her mother's commands, and instead stepped further out into the main room, forcing Kali to shift her own position to try to block any line of attack towards her.

He had, to the best of his understanding of the signs, stood in the wreckage of a Borg attack and felt arguably less shellshocked. To Izriel's credit, he didn't flinch, having already had at least a little time in between negotiating for his life to process the future's rampant obsession with him fathering more children. Finding himself with Jeassaho had not been such a stretch, certainly not in a future absent of Rueben and several degrees of comfort if the state of that version of the ship was anything to go by. That was a known connection, one that could easily have been a reality in his own version of events but for several key decisions that were probably, at least he hoped, for the best. This... There just hadn't been time enough to gauge any sort of dynamic with Rosie's pilot, other than several conversations that he would have admitted to thoroughly enjoying. If that was all it took for this phenomenon to start pairing him up, he loathed to think what would happen if he professed to a similar enjoyment in his interactions with Beya, Evelyn and, most perplexingly, Oliver.

If he found a future where he was married to the young medic, he might officially quit.

Worried eyes sought Kali's over the top of her daughter's head. If he took himself out of the situation for a moment, the potential for damage here seemed too great for him to indulge in the questions suddenly preoccupying him. Instead, acutely aware of the faint psionic tendrils reaching out to examine him, the telepath willed his features to relax into gentle resignation and simply confirmed the young girl's suspicion. "This is not my place to be, no, though I haven't arrived by choice." Suddenly stricken by a wave of misplaced sadness, Jaxx added, "I probably won't be here for too long though." Again, he made eye contact with Kali. With no opportunity to speak, no understanding of what had transpired, no way of gleaning whether he was missed or resented, he landed on the only words he could muster, though they were woefully inadequate. "I am sorry."

Kali shook her own head sadly, human style, the hand not holding the weapon reaching out to snag her wayward offspring as she came close enough and pull her against her side; and despite not being an active telepath herself she could practically sense at least some of the likely questions in play. The ones that would make her forever grateful to her fallen mate; but also forever guilty that it was the drama and target of having joined her family that had killed him. "...No. The fault was mine. It was me and her they came for, not you. We lost track of one of them in the fight, they fired at her and...you blocked it." The flat tone of this last part implied exactly how and with what he had done so; and she seemed to not have the same hesitation - or at least to the same degree - about speaking such things in front of the child. For the little girl's part herself, she seemed to be paying minimal attention to the spoken words, just silently focusing in, like she was trying to absorb as much of the essence of this doppelganger of the missing presence in her life as she could before he vanished.

An act of sacrifice. Preservation of life. The good of the many. In this case, it was a rather singular multitude, which possibly didn't count in the strictest of sense and yet as a measure of all priorities distilled into the most significant, Izriel could think of nothing more apt. If the cosmos was determined to riddle itself with his offspring then it was wise that it had come to grips already with his devotion to the role of Father, having had plenty of time to recover from the shock of how easily he had taken to it. It was inevitable, if a little unfair, that his thoughts turned to his son briefly, a verified presence in the life he was entitled to claim as his own and yet as far away as one soul could be from another under current conditions. The empathy was not a distraction, rather it enhanced his understanding of what this child was experiencing, and burdened him with the responsibility of forever being a ghost in the night, no more tangible than the missing link she would forever feel responsible for. He nodded slowly, an understanding of the recount, and with it a vague sense of familiarity that didn't feel unwelcome. Of all the ways he could envisage his final acts, this didn't seem to be the worst.

"Hardly your fault," he risked contradicting her, driven by a sudden urge to leave her with something. "All stories end. The sequel," his eyes dropped to their daughter, his smile rueful, "Seems worth it."

The smallest ghost of a smile pulled at the lips of mother and child alike at that, but within moments, there were only two people in the room again, and Kali was left pointing her phaser at an empty space.

 

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