Chapter Text
“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it." - Leo Tolstoy
Prologue
He was warm and comfortable, the sleep lifting from him slowly and leisurely. Then a tiny body, soft beside him, shifting and moving closer. He could stay here forever, in the heat of smooth sheets. In this unfamiliar familiarity. This pleasant, half-awake world.
“Morning.”
He sat up, the voice jolting him into sudden, startled consciousness.
“Kathryn?”
The room his eyes had opened to was large, and airy, and not his usual quarters. Nor were they hers. The soft morning light, the powdery blue sky framed in the bay window did not belong to either of them. Did not belong to the Delta Quadrant.
He had no idea where he was.
“Good morning,” she came towards him, and set down a cup of coffee on the bedside table – a dark oak surface, he noted, that held a silver-framed picture of both of them, and a bottle of pills, and a pair of glasses - and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. He was too slow to move, far too confused to pull back from her soft lips, the minty smell of toothpaste on her breath, the comfortable familiarity emanating from her. The strange uniform, the different cut of her hair. The warmth of her.
He must still be dreaming. It was the only reasonable explanation.
She leaned over him as he lay still, trying very hard not to panic, and spoke softly to the bundle of sheets he had been curled up beside. He was frozen with panic, unable to react as the body in the bed beside him shifted. The bundle of sheets with thick, black hair which contrasted starkly with the white of the pillows, and grumbled when Kathryn spoke to it.
“Good morning darling, time for school.”
And it was then that panic alighted in his chest, as he looked down at the small face smiling up at them both. She could be no older than six.
“G’morning mummy, morning daddy.”