Ayden Blake, "New Years Day, 2492."

[Deliera Jay]

((Day 30))

::The quiet waves of the beach did not draw the attention of the vulcanoid. Instead, his mind was many decades away, brown eyes staring up at stars that didn't seem to tinkle.

::This place was perfect. A hellscape, to be sure.::

::He came back to 2395 to save his family, to save *himself*, when his livelihood was threatened by the very people who insisted they could make a better life with minor changes to the timeline - minor, calculated changes, only to give up when the going got tough and take a sledge hammer to it, allowing the loss of two hundred people to the timeline, himself included.

::Now, as he attempted to use a tricorder and make temporal calculations with the CRI brace, he'd come across a small problem.::

::Ayden wiped his eyes as Makepeace mozied on up next to him, taking a seat on the rock beside him. She'd brought with her two bottles, and he handled him ::

Makepeace: You look like you've got a thousand thoughts in your head, kid.

::If he had the capacity to sigh, he would have.::

Blake: I wish people would stop calling me that. I'm nearly four times your age.

Makepeace: Yeah well, you could have fooled me. ::She glanced at him.:: You act young.

::He had no response to that. "Act your age" hadn't been a concept he'd ever heard of during his later years - not from anyone but Merce, his fiance, but that was more in relation to his health rather than anything about his personality.::

Makepeace: So what's on your mind?

Blake . . . my daughter turned 22 the week after I left. My native time, I mean.

Makepeace: You have a daughter?

Blake: Adopted. She was an infant when her homeworld was annexed by the Tholians. My fiance - Merce - he . . . wanted kids. I was really hesitant at first, but the second I laid eyes on her . . . ::He smiled to himself.:: Mazarites don't celebrate birthdays, just birth years, so we made hers 247001.01. New Years Day. Was a good call, really - she grew up to love fireworks.

::She stared at him fully now, eyes confused as she tried to make sense of his words.::

Makepeace: What's changed?

::Ayden held the CRI brace, which had been taken off of his wrist, up a little higher to see in the moonlight. It was on idle mode, in the middle of trying to connect (unsuccessfully) to the temporal beacons from his home time period.::

Blake: I always knew going home would be unlikely. Only half of the Veritas crew was meant to survive the attack - my being here changes that. But I didn't think about the extent of the changes, not until I managed to calculate them.

Makepeace: You're saying that some of the crew have totally changed your future?

Blake: The CRI brace uses temporal beacons to create transport coordinates through time, but the beacons were retrofitted from an old Starfleet project that was shelved. A project led by Tristam Core - the MST. In my time, Commander Core remained behind on the Veritas with Captain Rahman - some like to think it was a deliberate romantic action, but since the entire point was to buy the crew more time to evacuate and keep the Veritas together, I'm not convinced they'd have even been in the same room, let alone have time to start romantic interludes while the ship was coming down around their ears.

Makepeace: You've clearly never seen them in the same room.

Blake: The point is, he was supposed to pass. No one would have picked up the MST project - the beacons, the equipment already designed; with him still alive, he probably won't allow some random civilian group to come in and start retrofitting his designs for temporal travel. ::He switched off the CRI.:: The beacons no longer exist in 2491. Ergo, even if I wanted to go home, which would be fruitless since the Ay- Jhalib Ekal of this year would already have taken my place since *my* native time has been made redundant anyway, I can't.

Makepeace: You're stuck here?

Blake: For now, I can still access periods *before* this year, but I don't even know for how long. Time needs to catch up to me - it moves forward, but flows backwards; all changes to the timeline started at the end of time before reaching the beginning. My timeline has changed, therefore I . . . no longer exist. I might just disappear, for all I know.

::Ash looked down, placing her bottle next to her.::

Makepeace: And to top it all off, you're stuck on Limbo, with the crew you studied for years.

::And his mother, whom was in surprisingly high spirits - far frome how he remembered her, which was also unfair in its own way. He felt jealous, really, of his younger self.

::But it wasn't that he was stuck here on this moon. It wasn't even the notion that he couldn't go back.

::It was that Merce, and Nairen - both of their lives would be totally different from how they once were. If they even still existed. Merce was much younger than Ayden, and with Mazar presumably safe from Tholian forces, chances would be that her biological Mazarite parents would keep her, assuming she is even born.

::This was the problem he was facing. Ayden was born in the century before both his partner and his daughter. He had no capability to find out what happened to his family. He would be forever left with the image of his daughter, fear striking across her face as he told her to run to Duronis. And his last moment with Merce was Ayden outright lying to his face - that he'd come home, meet him on Duronis II.

::How long would Merce have waited? At what point would his heart have sunk, the realisation that Ayden wasn't coming home setting in? What about Nairen?::

::He was going to die here, in this horrible, horrible year. His questions would remain forever unanswered, and he would never see his family again.::

::Ayden sniffed, rubbing tears away from his eyes again.::

Blake: I keep telling myself that I did the right thing. But . . . I've lost everything. And I can't tell anyone exactly how much I've lost, because I have to preserve a timeline that probably doesn't even exist anymore.

Makepeace: Jhalib . . .

Blake: No, it's . . . it's okay.

::He deserved this, he told himself. He chose to travel through time, to change history for their benefit. They *abused* time, which is probably why the Guardian of Forever fell dormant.::

::And if he was to disappear here in the next day or so, he'd be okay with that.::

::But he wouldn't disappear tomorrow. Because time demanded he serve his due penance. A cruel punishment, fitting to his exploits.::

::He just wanted to hug his daughter one last time.::


Ayden Blake
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