NEW: VOY "West: Your Possible Pasts" PG-13 J, Q 6/6

[Alara Rogers]

//They dodge around the nebula with a large collection of wormholes
because there are too many Borg, and they don't look back. Life goes
on. They adjust to Neelix's departure, discover that his replacement
Mr. Chell is an even worse cook, broker a peace agreement between two
warring species, and playtest a new Tom Paris holocreation involving
quasi-medieval fantasy in which Janeway, who thought she was to play a
queen and get the action started and then be free to leave, ends up
having to play a wizard with magical powers. Business as usual in the
Delta Quadrant.

Three months later, Seven reveals to Janeway that Chakotay has
proposed marriage to her. Janeway is shocked; she'd thought that
Chakotay's "dates" with Seven were more along the lines of a friend
and mentor, giving Seven some experience and confidence in the dating
arena. She feels as if she has no right to be jealous – Chakotay never
promised to wait for her, and she'd made it clear that as long as they
were stuck in the Delta Quadrant trying to make their way home, she
couldn't get involved with a subordinate -- but it still hurts.

As she stews over the jealousy and hurt she doesn't want to admit to
herself that she feels, Q shows up to once again express interest in
her. He irritates her tremendously by suggesting that she doesn't
really have any good alternatives, especially because it's true -- as
long as they're out in the Delta Quadrant, as long as she strongly
believes she shouldn't have a sexual relationship with someone under
her command, the only long-term relationship she *could* have would be
with a person who can travel interstellar distances to be on Voyager
with her but doesn't live there. She is further irritated by his high-
handedness, and bothered by the disconnect between what he says and
his body language -- he doesn't look as if he's actually attracted to
her. Telling Q any of this doesn't seem like it's going to get her
anywhere with him, so she uses Lady Q as an excuse, saying that she
doesn't want to take the risk of making Q's omnipotent lover jealous.
Q insists that she wouldn't be, and promises to have her come by to
assure Janeway in person, despite the fact that Janeway really would
rather she didn't.

Lady Q shows up to "assure" Janeway that she's not jealous, but is
sarcastic and bitter enough about it that Janeway can tell she and Q
are having problems. At the end of their conversation, Lady Q gives
Janeway a key and says she'll know what it's for. Later, Janeway
returns to her room and finds Q, naked, gagged and shackled spread-
eagled on her bed. She orders him to leave. After she pulls off the
gag, not too gently, he says he can't because his powers are
suppressed . She doesn't believe him. When she starts to walk back out
the door, though, he panics and begs her not to go, and the terror in
his voice gets to her. He's obviously aroused by her presence, and
claims (with great apparent embarrassment) that this is a response to
her, not a response to the situation, that he really doesn't want to
be bound and helpless, and that he can't control his body's physical
responses without his powers. It becomes clear that the reason he
never seemed genuinely attracted to her is that he's been suppressing
the physical reactions of the human form he takes.

If he's genuinely attracted to her, not playing some sort of game, and
he's not going to be an arrogant ass with an overweening sense of
entitlement about it... well, she's not made of stone, and his offer
of friendly mutual fun with no strings attached *would* solve one of
her more vexing personal problems. She talks to him about what he
needs to do if he really wants to win her over, and then lets him go,
with the key.

They explore a few spatial anomalies and a number of strange new
worlds. In between missions, Chakotay and Seven plan a wedding. Seven
is getting advice from Neelix over subspace comms, and Samantha
Wildman, and Tom Paris. Janeway wants to let go of her anger at
Chakotay enough to help Seven too, so she takes Q up on a couple of
dates, one of which is a visit to a physics symposium on an alien
world where the state of the art is just slightly more advanced than
Federation physics, one of which is an exploration of (and picnic on)
a lush alien planet. There are no strings attached. Q doesn't ask for
sex and Janeway doesn't offer. She kisses him after he brings her home
from the physics symposium, and lets him give her a backrub during the
picnic, but she doesn't let it go any further than that, because she
wants to test him and because she still isn't sure this is a good idea
at all. There's no issue with taking too much help from him -- Q says
he's not allowed to give her any material aid or assistance, and may
not warn her or directly advise her about problems she faces, because
the order faction were angry that they were threatened by mortals and
have demanded as a compromise that Q may not do anything to help
Janeway or her subordinates. She's not worried about his power
corrupting her or making her weak or dependent on him, not now that
she knows he's not allowed to help. She just doesn't know if she can
trust him emotionally.

But the physics symposium turns out to give her useful information
that comes in handy a few weeks later, and the alien planet he brought
her to for a picnic is one they end up visiting to take on supplies.
Janeway calls him on it, and he pretends he didn't know the
information would be useful to her. She feels a profound sense of
warmth and gratitude toward him -- he's doing what he can to help her,
within the parameters his people are holding him to and the parameters
she'll accept -- and begins to feel genuine affection for him. So she
attempts to seduce him, but he won't let her go through with it on the
grounds that he doesn't want her accusing him later of bribing her
into bed with his help. As annoyed as she is with being thwarted --
Janeway's not used to being told no, sexually -- she's also pleased,
because it means he *isn't* trying to bribe her into bed.

Eventually Janeway finds that she's able to get over her feelings of
anger and jealousy, and is able to preside over their wedding with
unequivocal happiness for them. Seven and Chakotay, after all, are two
of her best friends. It helps that she sees them together during the
wedding preparations, that she sees enough affection between them that
she stops thinking of this as Seven using Chakotay to experiment with
her newly awakened ability to feel attraction or Chakotay using Seven
because she's young, blonde and sexy. If she'd feared that Chakotay
was looking for a woman who was less stubborn, less strong than
Janeway herself, and thought he'd found it in Seven, she's reassured
by seeing how he dotes on Seven and even defers to her when it's not
ship's business. Seven softens, becomes less harsh and abrupt, though
she's still recognizable as the same person. Janeway knows that Seven
has suffered from loneliness since she was separated from the Borg;
it's good to see her no longer quite so alone.

It also helps that Janeway's got a secret of her own, that someone who
isn't Chakotay finds her desirable and takes her out. Not long after
the wedding, she does end up in bed with Q. She doesn't love him and
he doesn't claim to love her, but he's there to help her relieve
stress on particularly bad days, he takes her places to eat where the
food's a lot better than what Mr. Chell is coming up with, and he
shows her fascinating things, some of which turn out to be directly
useful, some of which don't. She knows he can't aid her in any other
way than he's doing, so she doesn't hold it against him when the ship
is damaged or a crewperson dies and he does nothing about it -- she
knows war in the Continuum would break out if he tried.

They have a few close tries at getting home -- one that shaves a
thousand light years, a year of travel, off the journey, a few others
that in the end don't accomplish much at all. They have adventures,
fight pirates and slavers, get involved in some conflicts they'd
really rather not have, save a world dying of a plague. They take on
another trader/guide, an old woman whose persona is closer to a salty
space dog than Neelix's endless cheer, but she knows the area. Miral
walks, and talks, and gets lost in the Jeffries tubes on an average of
once a month. Several other people get pregnant and have kids as
well. And then Seven, of all people, joins them.

Chakotay is deliriously happy. He reveals to Janeway that he'd always
wanted a child, but he hadn't wanted to have one aboard Voyager, so
far from home; even as people pair off and the ship becomes a
generation ship, he had thought it was selfish of him to want a baby
so badly. But now Seven is pregnant with his daughter, whom they name
Kathryn after Janeway. Janeway is delighted for them; she doesn't want
children of her own, but she does very much enjoy the babies that her
crew have. It's a way to enjoy loving a baby without having to suffer
the problems that come with parenting one. When Chakotay is exposed to
mutagenic radiation on an away team mission, and the Doctor is barely
able to reconstruct his genetic code, it ensures that baby Kathryn
Hansen will be the only child Chakotay will ever have. But Chakotay
accepts that, because at least he will have little Kathryn.

Then they encounter L'harei.

The planet L'harei was once the center of an empire. Like the T'Kon
empire, like the Iconians, their technology was so advanced it's hard
to understand how they ever fell. Unlike the T'Kon and the Iconians,
the L'har are still around, leading deceptively simple lives. They've
kept their medical technology, but otherwise eschew anything more
advanced than approximately Earth's 19th century, except where more
advanced technologies are needed to prevent damage to their planet's
environment, and they exile any of their people who are too driven to
learn or understand; something terrible happened in their past,
something related to their technology, and they want to make sure it
never happens again. But they aren't hostile to Voyager's inquiries.
If the Voyager crew want to explore the old ruins and see if the
transilient gateways -- similar to the Iconian gateways, methods of
opening doors between planets across unimaginable distances -- can be
used to get them home, they're willing to let them try.

What seems like a tremendously hopeful opportunity goes horribly wrong
when the Borg's sensors pick up the energy flux of the L'harei
gateways starting to come on line, and they send a small, fast sphere
to assimilate the L'har. Janeway is horrified; the L'har had been safe
from the Borg as long as their tech was shut down in ruins, but
Voyager's attempts to awaken it for their own purposes have drawn the
Borg's attention, and now a peaceful civilization of two hundred
million people may be destroyed by the Borg. And even worse, if it
were possible to get worse -- the Borg would have the L'harei
gateways. Instantaneous transport, anywhere in the universe. It cannot
be allowed. No sacrifice is too great to protect the L'har and keep
the Borg from getting the gateway technology.

But the Borg ignore Voyager's attempts to engage them in combat.
They're single-minded, focusing solely on the goal. Several good
crewpeople die in the attempt to keep the Borg from infesting the tech
with nanites that will study it, map it and report its parameters back
to the Borg. The attempt fails. Even though the drones making the
attempt end up dead, they still succeeded in infesting the L'harei
gateway technology with nanites.

Icheb does not have a cortical node. He can no longer interface on
Borg frequencies. Janeway is forced to send Seven, seven months
pregnant, over Chakotay's protests. Seven volunteers; she knows what
it would mean if the Borg get the L'harei gateways. She consults the
Doctor as to whether her baby can be removed and gestated elsewhere,
in a surrogate mother, but the baby is infused with Seven's nanites...
as is Chakotay, it turns out. Any surrogate mother would end up
infused with the nanites as well, and end up mentally linked to
Chakotay and Seven. Neither Chakotay nor Seven want that. So the
Doctor performs a risky, rarely-done procedure to install a temporary
womb in Chakotay's body and put the baby inside him for the moment.
When Seven returns, the baby can be re-implanted in her, and if Seven
doesn't return, they can perhaps perform a treatment to neutralize the
baby's nanites and implant her in a female surrogate mother, but right
now there's no time and it's easier to make Chakotay pregnant than it
is to safely get rid of the baby's nanites.

Seven interfaces with the technology that the Borg are assimilating,
hacks into the frequency transmitting the information back to the
sphere, and blocks it, sending erase commands to destroy the data that
the sphere's already gotten. The Queen, far distant, senses Seven's
interference and transmits a self-destruct command. Seven cannot fight
off the self-destruct *and* prevent the assimilation of the
technology. She fights a brave fight, but something has to give... and
because she is Seven of Nine and even death cannot stop her from
accomplishing her goals, the thing that gives is her life.

Voyager has meanwhile found a secret group of L'har who haven't
entirely given up on their technology. With their assistance, Voyager
is able to destroy the Borg sphere, but the Queen has by now
established a direct link to Seven, and nothing they do can block the
Queen from telling Seven's nanites to kill her. The self-destruct
sequences has already caused most of her organs to fail by the time
she gets back to the ship. She dies in Sickbay, in Chakotay's arms,
her skin turning black as if she's burning up from inside. The baby
dies as well; as dependent on nanites as Seven was, she cannot survive
the self-destruct command either, and she expires inside Chakotay.
Chakotay survives, physically, since he was never dependent on the
nanites, but he's not well. The L'har destroy the ancient tech to keep
the Borg from coming back, and their current best hope for getting
home goes with it.

Chakotay behaves as if he is half-insane with grief. He accuses
Janeway of having sent Seven to die to get a rival out of the way.
Janeway tells him finally of her relationship with Q, throwing it in
his face to refute him, and she's furious at him for the accusation...
but she knows he's not himself. Seven had formed a mini-Collective
with Chakotay, and he'd felt her die. The loss is deranging him; the
nanites must be purged, but nobody knows how to do that, given that
they were never able to purge Seven's nanites. It's a month and a half
before they find a way to cure Chakotay, and there has been some
permanent brain damage done. He is diagnosed with clinical depression
and needs to use an alpha wave enhancer to help him function on a
daily basis. The combination of his wife's death in his arms, his
baby's death inside him, and the damage done by the nanites when they
were relaying the Queen's self-destruct command has broken him, and
it's anyone's guess whether he'll ever be able to fully heal.

Q doesn't make an appearance, not for two months. When he finally
shows up. Janeway screams at him because he wasn't there for her. Q
keeps saying that he wasn't allowed to help, as if that was the kind
of help she'd wanted, as if not being able to snap his fingers and
make Seven live again was an excuse for not giving her the kind of
comfort one expects from a friend. Eventually Janeway realizes that Q
actually does believe this; that he has no idea how to give comfort
short of teaching people brutal lessons in getting over it, or else
solving their problem for them, and he does know her well enough to
know the first is inappropriate. She can't handle teaching a clueless
omnipotent being right now, so she sends him away. She tries to be a
friend to Chakotay as much as she can be, although there is no chance
of a romantic relationship now.

Then Tuvok's symptoms become noticeable enough that he has to confess
his illness to her, and she is overwhelmed. Q finally returns, and she
forgives him for not having been there before, since he's there now,
and with both Chakotay and Tuvok being part of her problem and
therefore unable to be her confidants, she has no one else.

Although technically Chakotay and Tuvok remain the first and second
officers, Janeway promotes Kim to Lieutenant and starts grooming him
to take Tuvok's place. She needs backup badly; Chakotay is functional,
but the mutagenic radiation gave him cancer, and he keeps needing to
go in for new treatments, which play holy hell with his depression
treatment. There are days the Doctor simply has to use his mobile
emitter to break into Chakotay's quarters and treat him because
Chakotay won't get out of bed. Tuvok's condition is getting worse.
Icheb takes Kim's place as navigator, Kim takes over Ops from Tuvok,
and Tuvok nominally remains security chief but in practice relies a
lot on his second.

They take on more crew -- a family of Romulans lost in the Delta
Quadrant, an escaped slave, a few more de-assimilated Borg. They fight
the Borg, again and again. Each time they barely escape by the skin of
their teeth; each time they learn something new about the Borg and the
Borg learn more about them. The Borg are actually divided in a sense,
torn between destroying Voyager and studying it the way that a person
might be so torn. The Queen has actually developed a personal
obsession with Janeway, bizarre for an entity that is supposed to not
have a personality at all but to be the executive manifestation, the
"ego", of a collective mind. Q provides Janeway with historical
knowledge about the Borg while continuing to pretend that this
couldn't possibly be of any use to her right now, and hits her up for
babysitting in exchange. By now he's become familiar, almost
comfortable. She still makes sure to tell him that if she met someone
else that she could love, she'd break it off with him, and he still
makes sure to tell her that he doesn't believe in monogamy and in fact
he's got another human lover in the Alpha Quadrant. One time, he even
admits that he loves that mortal, whereas he never admits to loving
her. What surprises her is that she actually feels a pang of jealousy
over this, but she understands that she can't very well admit to being
hurt when he's never agreed to be exclusive and in fact she herself
keeps reminding him that this is merely a friends-with-benefits
relationship.

The last few months are both the best and the worst -- they're so
close to home, they're able to get subspace radio signals through. The
hope is tangible, and sometimes almost heartbreaking. When a member of
her crew dies, just two months away from Federation space, it almost
breaks Janeway. But there's no choice but to keep going. And when they
finally do come home, the joyful celebrations of their homecoming are
marred, for her, by the knowledge of how many did not.

By this time Tuvok is suffering from severe dementia and Chakotay is
very much unwell. Chakotay dies later that year... although he's been
so sick for so long, Janeway almost feels as if he died years ago, and
his actual physical death is a mercy. She is haunted by what happened
to him, and to Tuvok, and the deaths of so many, and particularly
troubled by the number of times she sacrificed her crew's well-being
to save others, or stop the Borg. They promote her to Admiral, and
give her medals, and part of her mind wants them to reject her, to
drum her out of the fleet for her failures. Q tells her she's an
idiot, and she knows he's right -- she did the best she possibly
could. But she can't help how she feels.

With her experience in fighting the Borg, more experience than any
other one person in Starfleet has, they put her in charge of the Borg
task force. The Alpha Quadrant has been successfully fighting off the
Borg for the 23 years Voyager was in the Delta Quadrant, but Janeway
is horrified to discover how far behind the technology the Borg
demonstrated in the Delta Quadrant the attacks in the Alpha Quadrant
have been. She believes that the Borg are aware that the Federation
adapts, just as the Borg do, and that they have been holding back the
technologies they've developed over the course of the 23 years of
fighting Voyager because they want to make a single crushing attack
with tech the Alpha Quad has not adapted to. She knows the Queen
better than anyone else, knows the Borg as a personal enemy rather
than the faceless, soulless malevolence everyone else sees. Starfleet
top brass calls her paranoid, but they leave her in charge of defense
buildup against the Borg anyway.

She meets, befriends, and eventually becomes involved with Picard, the
Alpha Quadrant's expert on the Borg. Though he is an ambassador, no
longer involved with Starfleet's military operations, he agrees with
her that the Borg have been holding back. She sends investigative
sorties back to the Delta Quadrant using slipstream drive, to spy on
Borg activities. They don't come back.

Janeway learns from Q that the Borg want the Federation so badly
precisely because the Federation is so much like the Borg -- that the
Federation assimilate and take the best of new cultures and alien
technologies, that the Federation adapt to whatever is thrown at them
-- and that the Borg have learned that they have to be strategic in
facing the Federation... something they learned from Janeway and
Picard. For a time the Borg were angry enough, as personified by the
Queen, that they could have been drawn into a conflict before they
were actually ready, but the fact that their primary challenger was a
single tiny ship gave them the distance they needed to hold back. They
are taking their time to be sure to deliver a crushing blow, and they
will give no warning when it comes. Janeway sees, from Q, that had she
returned to the Alpha Quadrant earlier, it would have triggered a
massive Borg attack that would have consumed enough of the Borg's
resources that, had the Federation beaten it back -- which they could
possibly have done, because the Borg weren't ready -- the Borg could
have been destroyed, once and for all.

Janeway talks about going back in time to fix it. Q points out that
all this will do is create an alternate timeline. Janeway points out
that if she was gone from this timeline, Q would be free to act -- the
restriction that prevents him from aiding "Janeway or her
subordinates" includes all of Starfleet now that she is an admiral,
but if she were gone, he would be free to assist. He asks why she
thinks he would bother, and she tells him she knows he loves Picard. Q
says she shouldn't make any plans that depend on his assistance,
because he doesn't generally help mortals. She says she trusts him. He
says she shouldn't.

She has a final meeting with Picard, as she's getting everything
together to make her trip to the past. She, Picard and Q end up
sleeping together. When Q is gone, she tells Picard that Q is in love
with him. Picard has been involved with Q for several years, but has
never allowed himself to believe Q is all that emotionally involved.
Janeway says that Q will do whatever his own laws and personal moral
code will allow him to do for the mortals he cares about, and that
Picard should keep this in mind.

Two days later her plans come through, she gets what she needs to
travel in time, and she takes off for the past. Her plan is simply to
get Voyager home. Draw the Borg's fire back to the Alpha Quadrant,
betray the Borg, and get them riled up so they attack -- at a point
where she has given her past self the technology needed to defeat
them. She knows that she is simply creating an alternate timeline,
that the odds are that the Borg will overwhelm the people she loves in
the timeline she's from and kill or assimilate them all, but she's
hoping that Q will help Picard to prevent that somehow. And if that
doesn't work, then she's creating a new timeline, where Chakotay and
Seven and Tuvok all survive, where Seven is available to help the
Alpha Quadrant craft a defense against the Borg and Starfleet has the
benefit of her advanced knowledge.

She cannot tell her past self that she's trying to provoke the Borg
into a massive attack, that destroying the transwarp hub might set the
Borg back far enough to let their natural tendency to be ruled by
logic and expediency rather than emotion take ascendancy again. She
tells her past self of the people who will be saved, the loved ones
whose lives will be made better. She doesn't mention Sabrina Wildman,
who may well never exist, or her relationship with Q, which almost
certainly won't happen in this timeline, and she definitely does not
mention that the Borg need to attack the Alpha Quadrant now. Her past
self, knowing none of these things, does the right thing, the moral
thing, and insists on blowing up the transwarp hub. This means that
the Borg need to be livid -- they will hold back to recover from
material damage, and if they hold back they may calm down and take the
long view. She needs to stir up the hornet's nest. She needs to betray
and kill the Queen, because new Queens are created to adapt to the
circumstances that destroyed the old, and a Queen who is born to fight
Queen-killers will be savage with the desire for revenge.

She knows this Queen from 16 years of experience with her that this
Queen doesn't have with Janeway. She knows how to set a trap that the
Queen will not be able to resist. Her last act is to betray the Borg
by poisoning herself, knowing they will assimilate her, and through
that, poison themselves. The Queen dies in rage, and Janeway dies
satisfied.//

*****

Janeway dropped the ball, shaking. It bounced and rolled across the
floor.

Her other self had *planned* this. The Borg invasion that had, in the
long run, killed billions -- killed *her* -- had been the goal the
older Janeway had been *hoping* for. She hadn't decided to break the
Temporal Prime Directive just to save the lives of a few of her crew,
although she had certainly been pleased at the thought of doing so.
She had done so to *trigger* the Borg invasion... admittedly, in hopes
that by triggering it early, it would be possible to decisively defeat
the Borg, whereas in her timeline their only hope whatsoever was
apparently riding on Q deciding to help out, a thin chance at best.
But still. If it had been the only way to defeat the Borg, surely the
older Janeway could have warned her? She had thought the other woman
was completely selfish and obsessive, discarding everything Janeway
herself believed in just to get a few of her crew home alive... and
with the memories she now held, Janeway saw a continuity between what
she had believed of her older self, and what she had actually done, or
what her bio-mimetic self had done. Even when she'd met the older
Janeway, she supposed she must have known, deep down inside, how
obsessive she could be and how dangerous that obsession might become.
Because when she'd met the older Janeway, she had, in fact, assumed
that the woman was destroying time to save a handful of beloved crew
members. And she'd felt, at the time, that it was wrong and yet that
it was something she might become capable of, someday.

It turned out that that wasn't it at all. Older Janeway had been
ruthless, much more ruthless than Janeway herself, but she had done
what she'd done, knowing that it *wouldn't* destroy time, that all it
would do would be to create an alternate timeline, because in her time
the Federation was faced with destruction and it was the only thing
she could think of to do, the only thing that had any hope of working.
And it had, in the long run. Janeway had watched from the Continuum as
the Borg had devastated the Federation, attacked Vulcan, destroyed
Risa... but had in the end been defeated by the Federation and their
own precursors, the Caeliar. Now they had been re-absorbed back into
the Caeliar, effectively ending the threat of the Borg forever. But
the cost! And her older self had *known* such a cost would occur, had
known the Borg well enough to know the devastation they would wreak if
she provoked them... and she'd done it anyway, without telling her
younger self that that was what she'd been up to.

Her anger at her older self, however, was nothing in comparison to her
anger at Q.

Twenty-six years of memory. More than half her lifetime, added to her
life. Q had promised her that she would be able to tell the
difference between her own memories and her older self's, and it was
true, she could... but she couldn't help absorbing some of the
emotional impact. The feelings she'd had for Chakotay, the desire, the
wistfulness and even grief that the life she had expected they might
make together would never happen now... that was overwhelmed by
sixteen years of Chakotay being her good platonic friend who had been
dying by inches for thirteen of them. She had mourned her own loss of
Chakotay, in dying herself, since she came to the Continuum; now when
she thought of him, all she could feel was relief that it was she who
had died and not him. She had mourned her own loss of Seven; now she
felt joy and hope, because Seven was still alive out there in her home
universe, because the horrible death Seven had died would never happen
now that the Borg were gone. She had been pleased that Tuvok had
gotten the medical treatment he needed, and had felt grief that she
would never see him again when she'd been told she could not leave the
Continuum; now she felt profound happiness that he was alive and
healthy, his mind intact. All of her feelings about the people she'd
left behind were irrevocably altered by twenty-six years of a life she
hadn't lived.

Even those who had had good lives in those twenty-six years had been
facing a massive Borg invasion when her older self had left. None of
them had known, not even Harry Kim, who'd made Captain finally. When
the older Janeway had left she'd been sick with fear for them, knowing
that there was no chance of beating back the Borg this time, that all
she could do was free Q to act by removing herself from the situation,
and hope desperately that he'd actually bother to do something to save
them. Given his penchant for giving people the tools to save
themselves rather than committing outright miracles, she wasn't even
sure he would be *able* to save them, not without violating his own
personal moral code. She had died, never knowing if her plan would
work, never knowing if Q was going to take action in her home timeline
or not, never knowing if what she had done to this timeline would save
the Federation here.

With her memories, her emotions alive inside Janeway now, Janeway felt
a profound sense of relief for all of her crew, all of her loved ones.
By her own death, and all the sacrifices that had been made by far too
many in that final conflict, the Borg had been defeated at last. If
Harry was going to become captain and Tom was going to become a holo-
novelist and B'Elanna was going to make ties with her mother's people
and the Doctor was going to find love and a first name, they could do
all those things now without the spectre of the Borg looming over
them. Sabrina Wildman might never be born, but if she was, or if Naomi
had different children, they would not face assimilation before they
were older than Seven had been when she was assimilated. Since she'd
come to the Continuum, she'd spent her time resenting her own death
and trying to find a way to come back from it; this was the first time
she'd truly *felt*, all the way down to her bones, that her own death
had been an acceptable sacrifice for what had been gained.

And she could have felt closure. She could have enjoyed the contrast
between the world old Admiral Janeway had fled from and the world
she'd made for Janeway herself, accepted her own death finally and
even felt joy at what her and others' sacrifice had saved those she
loved from... if it hadn't come from Q, and if his motives hadn't been
so obviously ulterior. Because her feelings about *him* had changed,
too, and she was enraged at him about it.

Q had never been her friend. At his best, he'd been an acquaintance
she wished well, so long as he stayed well away from her. At his
worst, he'd been unbelievably irritating, inflicting his presence on
her without thought to her wishes, making crude sexual innuendos she
couldn't help but find belittling and upsetting, or demanding that she
give him child-rearing advice and then forcing her to babysit his son.
Her opinion of him hadn't changed much since coming to the Continuum,
because she had only seen him once; she'd come to see *the* Q, as a
race, as much more similar to the ordinary people she knew than she
ever would have expected, but she'd always seen Q himself as a person,
not an ineffable godlike entity, so her opinion hadn't changed any
from seeing his home in more detail. He'd irritated her when his ex-
lover had dragged her to the Continuum, presumably on his behalf, and
he'd refused to see her or even answer his messages for what had felt
like months; he'd irritated her when he'd finally made an appearance,
and made demands for her to come visit him. The gift had been the
first genuinely thoughtful thing he'd ever given her, she'd thought...
except that she could see through him now.

Because Admiral Janeway hadn't seen Q that way at all. She'd started
that way, of course, and when he'd tried to seduce her after Chakotay
proposed to Seven, it had mostly just irritated and angered her. But
she had come to see him differently over time. She'd never fallen in
love with him, but she had come to genuinely like and trust him, had
come to consider him a friend. After Tuvok and Chakotay had been
consumed by their respective mental illnesses, he'd been the only
confidante she had, and the fact that he turned up at most once a
month and more usually once every three months or so had actually
helped. He hadn't been there with her on a regular basis; Admiral
Janeway had still managed most of those twenty-three years after
Seven's death and the beginning of Chakotay's illness by herself. But
he'd been there for her sometimes, which was better than she got with
anyone else; she couldn't consider young Harry Kim a confidante even
after he became her first officer. The age difference was too great,
and she had a hard time not seeing the fresh young ensign whose mother
had beseeched her to take care of him when she looked at him. And no
one else had even been in the running. Command was a horrifically
lonely place, all the more so with her first and second officers
declining in front of her; Q had been all she'd had.

In Janeway's own memories, she cared for Chakotay, felt their
relationship had been painfully truncated, and considered Q a
nuisance, and not particularly physically desirable. In Admiral
Janeway's memories, her feelings for Chakotay were long behind her,
put to bed and resolved, and Q was a close friend she had sex with and
found attractive. And even though she knew they weren't her memories,
even though she *could* feel a difference, still twenty-six years was
too long not to seep into every part of her mind and color the things
she felt now. It couldn't be more obvious, in retrospect, what Q's
motives had been in giving her the memories.

She concentrated, visualizing Q's "home" in the Continuum, the place
where he'd given her the memories. Feeling out the connections between
every point and every other point in the Continuum, singling out that
particular connection. And then she opened a door and stepped through
into Q's living room.

Q was lounging on the floor, which was covered with a colorful, spongy
surface, against a pile of large furry beanbags that purred like
tribbles. In the center of the room, there was a holotank, displaying
a battle between Federation starships from Admiral Janeway's memories
and a Borg cube. The starships outnumbered the Borg by twenty to one.
It wasn't helping.

"Kathy!" Q jumped to his feet, his motions startled and almost guilty,
as if he were hiding something. He waved a hand at the holotank and it
turned off. "This is an unexpected pleasure. What made you decide to
drop in?"

"You son of a bitch," Janeway snarled, and threw the ball of memories
at him. Q dodged, and the ball shattered on the floor as if it were
made of glass. "I never imagined you'd stoop this low."

Q blinked at her. "Stoop to what? What did I do?"

"You know damn well what you did." She didn't raise her voice, but her
tone was harsh and angry. "Tell me, after I'd absorbed your lover's
memories, was I supposed to fall gratefully into your arms again? You
did all this -- gave me memories that granted me abilities that humans
don't have, abilities that everyone tells me are one of the reasons I
can't be released from the Continuum – and you lied when you said you
could take them away if I didn't want them, to trick me into becoming
the woman you were sleeping with, now that she's dead? All this so I'd
go to *bed* with you?"

Q's expression grew very hard, and very cold. She had never seen him
like this. The other Janeway had, on rare occasions when he was angry
and offended, and had recognized his expression from visual logs from
Picard's Enterprise. "Oh, but there's a fundamental fallacy in your
premise, Janeway," he said, and if it were possible for a purr to
sound cold, he was doing it. "You're assuming that I *want* you."

"You had sex with my counterpart an average of once a month for twenty-
six years. I'd think that would be fairly definitive."

"Except that you're not her." Q walked around her, circling her like a
tiger with prey. She turned to face him, and had to keep turning
because he kept circling. "She was a human woman, the captain of a
ship and then an admiral of a fleet, a human at the height of her
power. She knew who and what she was, what she was made of and what
she could tolerate. She was fully realized potential in motion, the
ultimate in what an ordinary living human could be, confident in
herself and her abilities. But you?" He sneered. "You're a poor broken
thing, a revenant crawling between heaven and earth. Neither fish nor
fowl, neither dead nor alive. You don't even know what you are. When
you're shown evidence that you have powers you never had before, you
run away screaming. You command nothing, you fit in nowhere, you're a
bundle of insecurities and nerves, and sex with you would be child
molestation. Worse. q-ling is more confident, more knowledgeable about
her own abilities and limitations, than you are. I'd sooner have sex
with a Q toddler than with you as you are now, Janeway." He shook his
head. "You aren't her. And it would take far more than a bundle of her
memories to make you her, because she was human until the moment she
ceased to exist, and you're a dead human who still exists. A ghost.
You are not *my* Janeway, and you will never be."

The words chilled her, not so much for what he was saying as for the
utterly cold and certain tone he was saying them in. "None of that is
my fault," she snapped, angry. "I didn't choose to continue to exist
after my death."

"Actually, you did. Q gave you a choice, and you took it."

"What, was I supposed to say no?"

"Why do you think fault has anything to do with this? Was it Kim's
fault that even after she made him her second in command, she still
saw him as so much younger than she was that she couldn't confide her
problems in him the way she'd done with Chakotay and Tuvok? It isn't
anyone's *fault* that they're too young or too weak or too unrealized
in their potential to be attractive to some specific person, it just
is." By now he was in her personal space, speaking into her ear. "In
ten thousand years, if you choose to become a Q, maybe I'll find you
beautiful again. But right now you're as attractive to me as a snot-
nosed baby boy with spit-up on his bib would be to you. *My* Kathy is
dead. Do not insult me, or her, by insinuating that you could possibly
become her with any amount of memory surgery, now that you have died
to the human world."

"Then why am I here?" she asked harshly. "Lady Q said in so many words
that she was saving my life for your sake. If you didn't want me here,
why would she have done that?"

Q laughed unpleasantly. "You persist in the belief that Q genuinely
has my interests at heart. Until the moment of your death, I was under
the same restrictions regarding you that I was under regarding my
Kathy. I was no more allowed to interfere to save your life than I was
to save hers. But Q isn't under the same restrictions, and even if she
were, it's likely that no one would take her to task for it -- other Q
are *afraid* of her. She could have saved my Kathy as easily as she
saved you. Why do you think it was *you* that she saved?" He turned
away. "Let's say for the sake of argument that she loves me and wants
to give me something to make me happy, as a way of begging my
forgiveness for her unconscionable treatment of our son. So why would
she save *you*, the Janeway who can barely tolerate me, instead of the
one who was my dear friend?"

There was actually pain in his voice. When he'd been looking at her
he'd sounded malevolent, controlled but vicious. When he turned away,
though, she heard a crack in his voice, and the memories of the other
Janeway (Q's Kathy?) told her that he had turned away because he
didn't want her to see him react emotionally. The older Janeway had
known Q could feel pain, but it was a knowledge she herself hadn't
fully integrated -- she'd seen him show fear, hope, triumph, unease,
but she had never seen him show grief. It hadn't really occurred to
her until this moment that he *could*.

"Because you loved her?" she said softly. "And no matter what you
told... the other Janeway... about Lady Q not being jealous of me...
the truth is, she is. Or she was. Jealous, of the other one, because
you loved her, and you don't love Lady Q anymore."

"I'd be a fool to love a mortal," Q said. "They always die in the end,
you know. Always. Everyone says I should stick with my own kind. Just
get over the fact that she told Junior I'd ruined him, called him
worthless, ran out on the both of us and then *replaced* him with a
new baby, with a different other parent because obviously I was too
much of a failure as a father to produce the perfection *she* expects
in *her* child. Or get over everything the others have all done to me
at some point or another and involve myself with one of them. Only an
idiot would fall in love with a *mortal*."

Except that he'd admitted to the other Janeway that he was in love
with a mortal. He'd just never admitted to her that he was in love
with her, too. Any more than he'd ever admitted to the Picard of that
timeline that he loved him; he'd told Janeway he loved Picard, but
never told Picard himself. In the light of that fact, his
protestations to the other Janeway that he didn't love her -- when
she'd gone out of her way to remind him that she didn't love him --
took on a different meaning.

The other Janeway had known, she realized. She had known Q loved her,
and that she didn't love him, and that she would use his feelings for
her as a weapon against the Borg, her last-ditch effort to save her
own timeline while she fled back through time to create a new one.
Because for Q, *that* was the "real" timeline, the place where the
mortals he loved lived. In this timeline, Picard was involved with his
chief medical officer and Janeway would have been with Chakotay if
they'd ever had time. There were no mortals in this timeline who were
romantically involved with Q. But this was the timeline where the
Federation had defeated the Borg on their own; the timeline where the
mortals Q loved lived was about to be overrun. And the older Janeway
had known that if she created a new timeline, the new timeline's
Janeway wouldn't be Q's lover, and most likely the new Picard wouldn't
either.

"Why did you let me stay, then?" she asked softly. "If I'm not the one
you wanted... Lady Q only brought me to the Continuum because you
wanted me here. Or so she said. Why didn't you refuse?"

He sighed and turned back to her. "I don't hate you, Kathy," he said.
"Just because you're not *my* Kathy doesn't mean I wanted you dead. I
wasn't allowed to give you any kind of warning, and I convinced myself
I didn't want to anyway, because it didn't really matter what I told
her... everything I told her that I intended to help her, she used as
her reason why she had to go back in time and kill herself. So you
know, I said, I'm done. Not helping any more Janeways. But it's a
crock, because if I could have, I would have. You may not be her, but
you're you, and the you who originally caught my interest is a part of
both of you. You're both branches of the same tree. So, you know, if Q
thinks she's winning any points with me by bringing you here... let
her. I don't mind. It's not like I ever *expected* her to bring the
other one; she was mortal, she died, I got over it. Mortals die, it's
what they do. It's... nice, I suppose, having you alive and here. I
just expected you were going to die too and then there wouldn't be a
Janeway in either timeline." He shrugged. "Besides, my son wanted you
here. He didn't handle the death of the other Janeway all that well...
it's why we went back in time, when he started acting out, to before
you split off from her, because before the split you were both you and
her, and it was the only way he could have any part of his Aunt Kathy
back. Of course, you didn't actually *know* him the way she did, so it
didn't help as much as I thought it would, but I suppose it all worked
out in the end."

"I'm sorry," Janeway said. "I didn't... I don't think of myself as
different from how I was, when I was human. It never occurred to me
that that would make a difference to you."

"Oh, it's not the only difference." He threw himself backward into the
beanbag, flopping his head back to look at the ceiling. "Twenty-six
years makes a difference. You may *have* her memories, they may
influence you in ways you didn't expect, but they aren't your memories
and you know it. And I knew you'd know it. Even if you were still
human, giving you her memories couldn't make you into my Kathy,
because my Kathy considered me her friend and you don't."

"I... It's not that I dislike you, Q..."

He lifted his head and looked directly at her with a smirk. "Oh, don't
try to spare my feelings, Janeway. I'm a Q, and I'm telepathic, and I
thrive on being an abrasive bastard. You really can't say anything
about how you feel about me that would hurt my feelings." The smirk
got bigger. "I irritate the hell out of you. Admit it."

"Yes, fine, you're incredibly irritating and you obviously know it.
But it's still not as if I dislike you, Q. I always wished you well,
just... to be well somewhere else."

He laughed. "Well, now you're stuck in the same Continuum with me for
the foreseeable future. But I won't exactly be camping out on your
doorstep, so I'm sure you have nothing to be afraid of."

She sighed, and found a chair to sit in. "So are you going to do it?"

"Do what?"

"Save her timeline. Do what she wanted you to do."

Q's expression went cold again. "She ran off and killed herself,
despite my best advice, to change the timeline even though she *knew*
it would do her own timeline no good whatsoever, and her only plan for
how to solve her own people's impending doom was to trust that I would
fix it for her despite my telling her repeatedly that I cannot be
relied on to fix anything for anyone. I'm a whimsical creature. I help
if I feel like it. And when someone who supposedly has *some* feeling
for you deliberately abandons you by killing herself, I don't know why
I would be supposed to feel like helping her out."

"But she knew all that and she trusted you anyway."

"I warned her that her trust was most likely misplaced."

"You also told her that you didn't love her."

"I would be an unparalleled idiot to love a mortal."

"You told her that you loved Picard."

"I told her lots of things."

Janeway sighed. "Yes, you did, and about half of them contradict the
other half. But I saw you watching a battle against the Borg in her
timeline. And if you couldn't bring yourself to watch me die, and I'm
not even the Janeway you cared about, I doubt very much you could
bring yourself to watch that timeline's Jean-Luc Picard be assimilated
by the Borg. So I think you're doing something about it."

"You're really annoying, did you know that?"

Janeway laughed. "Now that's the pot calling the kettle black."

"Why do you care, anyway? It's not your timeline."

"I have her memories." She leaned forward in her chair. "She would
have wanted to know if you were going to do it, and since she's dead,
I'm the only one left to find out."

Q sighed. "I suppose that makes sense."

"If giving me her memories can't turn me into her, and if I'm so
repulsive to you now that I'm dead, why did you *give* me the
memories?" Janeway stood up. "At first I thought you were working with
Lady Q's agenda, that this is part of that destiny she claims I have.
But your... I don't know what to call him, the Q who claims to be your
brother?"

"They're all my brothers. And sisters. But you mean the guy who got me
thrown out of the Continuum."

"Yes. He claims that you would never do anything to cooperate with
Lady Q's agenda because you hate her, and it certainly sounds that way
from what you've said."

"Hate is such a strong word," Q said. "I don't hate her. I'm just
still enraged with her. There's a difference."

"Now that I think about it, I think that was actually what he said.
That you're furious with her, so you wouldn't go along with what she
wanted." Janeway shook her head. "Then I got that last set of
memories, and it seemed self evident what you'd been after all along.
Except you say you have no interest in me that way anymore. And I
don't really understand that, either -- why would you find me
repulsive for being more like what you are?"

"I don't find you repulsive. Do you find babies repulsive?"

"Well, no, of course not--"

"Do you want to have sex with them?"

"No, of course I don't."

"Well, then." Q leaned back. "You've come up from the cave, and you're
stumbling around blind making a fool of yourself. When your eyes
adjust to the light, maybe you'll be attractive again, but right now
you just look like an idiot."

"The cave?"

"You must be the only starship captain in Starfleet who never read
Plato."

"My philosophy classes at the Academy were a long time ago, Q."

Q came forward off his beanbag to sit on the floor, looking up at her.
"Plato said that all of human existence was merely being in a cave,
watching the flickering shadows of the outside world cast on the cave
wall. And he said that there are two kinds of blindness -- the
blindness of coming from the light into darkness, and the blindness of
coming from the dark into the light. Either one makes people look like
fools, but only one's appropriate to laugh at. Going from the light
down into the cave is a tragedy; coming up from the cave into the
light is a joyous occasion, but the one who has come up from the cave
is still stumbling around blind."

"And you see me as that."

"The person who has come up from the cave, and is now blinded by the
light. Yes. That's exactly what you are. And until your eyes adjust,
until you become a person who understands what she is and what she can
do again, I can't find you attractive any more than I could find q-
ling attractive. That doesn't make you repulsive, it makes you
childlike. And I can rejoice for you that you now have vastly more
potential than you did when you were limited to a mortal body, but you
haven't realized that potential, and until you do, you're more like a
child than an adult to me. And the thing one does with children is
teach them."

"So the memories were your attempt to teach me something?"

"I wouldn't say 'attempt', Kathy." He leaned back against the beanbag
behind him slightly, grinning. "My understanding is that you've
learned quite a bit."

"And that's all it is. You think I'm a child and I need you to teach
me things."

"You plainly need *someone* to teach you things. You're staggeringly
ignorant about your own condition, and Q seems to have done as little
to resolve that problem as she can get away with. I've noted that
you've made good use of the Continuum to do a bit of armchair
exploration of the universe, and that's all well and good, but no
knowledge is particularly valuable without self-knowledge. Having been
*in* a position where I knew most of the secrets of the universe but
hadn't the faintest idea how my own biology worked or what the
boundaries of my reduced capabilities were, exactly, I understand this
from personal experience. All the knowledge of the Continuum will do
you no good unless you know who you are. And to learn who you are now,
after you've transformed into something new, you need to know as much
as you can about who you were and what you've been capable of doing in
your time."

Janeway took a deep breath. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said, shrugging. "Still so eager to get rid of
them now, or are you finally getting used to the idea that no one's
trying to turn you into anything that you aren't already?"

"Lady Q said that the memories couldn't be removed; that doing so
would declare that humans are an inferior species, or something like
that."

"I gave them to you. I have the right to take them from you, with your
permission. No other Q would have that right, it's true. But if you
really, really wanted to get rid of them and go back to the level of
self-ignorance you had before you took the memories..."

"No, it's all right. I don't..." Janeway walked away from the chair,
looking at the walls of Q's metaphorical living room. Constant,
chaotic frenzies of color and light raced across the walls, with brief
recurring patterns popping up again and again, only to disappear into
the chaos once more. "I still want to get a message home. To return to
my world, if I can. But I've seen that my obsession with home is more
dangerous than I thought it was, and I've seen that I left my family
and friends in a much better position with this death than I did with
any of the others, and... I can't choose not to know who I am and what
I've done, if I'm given the options. I can't choose not to remember.
It would be like... deliberately putting blinders on, wouldn't it?"
She turned back to him.

"Now you're seeing things our way," Q said approvingly, which unnerved
her slightly because she wasn't sure she *should* be seeing things the
way the Q did. At the same time, though... what was she now, but her
thoughts and memories? Wouldn't cutting off part of her memories be
like self-amputation? Perhaps that was *why* the Q thought of it that
way, she thought. What were *they*, after all, but their thoughts and
memories?

"So what happens now?" She came back to the chair, but didn't sit
down. "After I attacked the other Q's lab, the one who transformed Tom
and me, and knocked myself out doing it, Lady Q seemed to feel the
need to train me in using these powers I never expected to acquire...
and she threatened my mother to do it. That was the main reason I
wanted to get rid of these memories. I don't want to be in a position
where my loved ones are threatened by what I do or don't do here,
where I have to jump through hoops I may or may not be capable of
jumping or those I care about back home will suffer."

"I can promise you that that won't happen again," Q said soberly. "Q
was trying to emulate a technique I use, but you're too advanced
already to *need* such a technique, and it's not at all the right
technique to use on a mortal who's living among us as a friend. You'd
be better off going to Amanda's Auntie, or to Queria, or to me, for
that matter -- you need a Q with experience training young Q and other
entities. I heard q invited you to join Q University."

"She did. She said that if I did that, she could invite me to a party,
and invite Tom and Harry as well."

"She could invite you whether you go to the university or not; she
just doesn't want to get in trouble with Q, since Q's your sponsor and
you may have gathered that many of the Q in the Continuum are afraid
of her."

"You're not."

Q shrugged. "I had a Q lover who tried to kill me once. That's not who
Q is. For someone who enjoys violence in her games so much, she really
is a very staid and respectable Q. Or she was, anyway. Before the
war." He sighed. "If I let her, I'm sure she'd rip my heart out of my
chest and dance on it, but she'd never do me any physical harm. So no,
I'm not remotely concerned with her opinion one way or another."

"*Should* I go to the university?"

"If you want to, but I don't think you're quite ready. You need more
time to acclimate to the fact that you're not entirely human any more.
And I'm not sure they'd know what to do with you. "

"What would you recommend I do?"

"What, you're actually asking my advice?"

She smiled wryly. "You may be irritating, but you're probably the
closest thing I have to a genuine friend here. I don't trust Lady Q's
motives, Junior's just a kid, and I'm not sure any of the others
really care what happens to me except in the abstract."

Q's face broke into a pleased smile. "Well, that's progress." He stood
up. "My entirely biased personal recommendation is that you let me
teach you. Queria's got q-ling to deal with, Amanda's Auntie was on
the wrong side of the war and might be a trifle miffed at your role in
it, Quinn's dead, and no one else has any experience whatsoever in
teaching *humans*, or former humans."

"And you won't threaten my loved ones?"

"Dearest Kathy, I *know* better. Doing that sort of thing only makes
you mad, and you hold grudges. I'm quite sure that someday when she
least expects it you're going to get back at Q for that stunt."

"I wouldn't threaten anyone in her family."

"No, but you *would* convince q-ling to do something in direct
violation of her mother's orders because you think it's the right
thing to do, and the only thing that would hold you back from doing
such a thing would be consideration for Q's feelings and reactions,
and if you're angry at Q for threatening your mom, you'd weight her
feelings a *lot* less heavily in the equation." He grinned at her.

"I suppose." She didn't want to mention to him that she'd actually
thought of the possibility of convincing q-ling to send her home, at
least temporarily... which would be doing exactly what he just said
she might do. Perhaps his years with the other Janeway had led him to
a better understanding of who *she* was, in the end. "As long as no
one ends up at risk from you teaching me except myself, then I
accept."

"Great." He put an arm around her shoulder. She would have been much
more unnerved by the maneuver if she still thought he had a sexual
interest in her, but his offense at the concept had seemed genuine,
almost hurtfully so. She didn't want *him*, but being told she was a
snot-nosed baby with spit-up on her bib wasn't the way she'd have
preferred to learn that he didn't want her anymore, either. "So here's
what we're gonna do. You're going to go back home, and rest, and spend
some time integrating those memories. If q invites you to a party, or
your kids decide they're willing to see you, or Junior drags you off
on some adventure, so much the better. Go on with your life... or your
un-life, if you'd rather look at it that way. Play around with the
abilities you understand how to use, explore the Continuum, have fun.
And when I'm done with this one project I'm involved with that's
taking rather a lot of my attention, I'll come show you some new
tricks, and we can see if we can expand your self-concept of what you
can imagine yourself able to do."

"Would this project that's taking a lot of your attention involve the
Borg and the other Janeway's timeline?"

He made a sour lemon face at her. "You really think you know
everything, Kathy. Gotta work on that. If you're gonna act like a know-
it-all, you'd better get working on actually knowing everything."

Janeway laughed. "Well, I'll let you get back to it. Let me know when
you're ready."

"Oh, absolutely."

She concentrated, opened the door and walked through into her own
home.

For several moments after the door closed behind her and she was alone
again, she stood in the center of her living room, staring at the
viewscreen, wondering if there was something she could pull up to
watch or read or learn about. She thought about looking in on Chakotay
or Seven or her mother and sister... but no. They didn't have the
perspective she had now. They didn't know how much better it was that
she was here than that they were dead, or facing the Borg. She
couldn't send them a message, she couldn't let them know she still
existed... so she'd have to let them go, to find their own way to the
peace with her death that she'd finally achieved.

Which didn't mean she wouldn't still keep trying to find a way to let
them know, or get back home. But she wasn't going to let it consume
her anymore.

Instead, she took a deep breath, envisioned the park she'd seen twice
on excursions with Junior and q, and concentrated. Time to do some
exploration on her own, now that she could.

She opened her front door and walked out into the park.

...i cease to be a slave
i am finished with my own death
wrapped tight around my little lamb
i think it's funny
--Pet, "calmate!"