PhaHks wasn't finished, it seemed, when DhraH'Ken was dead. Veexow was very still and stared as a great battle was waged ten feet from her.

Simultaneously she attempted to halt the flow of her own blood and watch as PhaHks caused more to spray the room and those objects in it.

PhaHks, she, the table, the room, all became sticky with it. Blood mixed with tears rained down over them all.

She watched him as he hacked at the lifeless body of DhraH'Ken with all the fury the Klingon had shown but with a face of rage unlike any she had ever seen.

The face of pure hate and total fury. Of punishment, revenge and grief. Of macabre satisfaction. Twisted and wet with tears, it was not quite a sane face she saw.

But it was an very old face. She realised she was seeing thousands of years of violence rewarded for violence. Millennia of humans slaughtering their own kind, murdering and raping of neighbors and even their own children. For reasons political, immoral, demented. Out of religious fervor or selfish gain.

This is what the Romulan High Council, all those decades ago, had feared.

Not the civilized, polite Federation with its policies of non-interference and good will, but the base, animal brain of the species itself. Instincts that shaped the creatures known as Human.

Territorial. Greedy. Mankind bent on war and self- destruction.

Instincts that had survived through eons of adaptive change. Urges still present in the heart of them.

The Federation, springing as it had from these roots, had learned to use words and sugar sticks instead of violence and weapons.

This race had enveloped the galaxy.

The Romulan war with the Federation had been hard fought and slowly won, such had been the "die for life" inner force the humans had practiced throughout their bloodied history.

Until that telling war, the humans had thrived because they'd conquered their baser desires and refocused them on growth and knowledge.

PhaHks had killed DhraH'Ken to protect her.

But a simple death had not been enough for him, she'd seen it plainly, there on his face.

PhaHks had continued his kill, slaughtering the dead enemy to cleanse himself perhaps. Or maybe to send someone else to the underworld and give them a taste of it. To have an other drink of the cup of despair as he had for years.

How many strokes of that sword had been struck with her in mind?

She knew the image of him, mindlessly hacking at the gruesome corpse, would remain vivid in her forever.

But so would the next picture of PhaHks.

Collapsed on the floor in exhaustion, looking sick. Staring at the gory wrath as though it were something unreal and as though he had no idea how it had happened. Sweet innocence.

Whatever force in him that had surged to the surface had expelled itself and was gone. He was PhaHks again, the cloak of ancient fury lifted from him as if it had never been.

Then he came out of it, standing and coming to her.

Checking her wound, he removed his shirt, tore it to strips and carefully wrapped it around her upper arm.

PhaHks shivered in the cool air of the Hall.

"Thank-you, PhaHks. Are *you* all right?"

He said nothing but nodded.

Veexow took PhaHks' hand with her unhurt arm and led him to the Bay where Rhengar and the ship waited.

*

"Have you set our coordinates?"

Rhengar was not only an excellent therapist, but a first rate pilot. "Yes, M'Lady."

Veexow occupied the co-pilots seat in her small but well equipped shuttle craft. Every so often she would stare back at PhaHks who sat in one of the two passenger seats twenty feet to her rear. Slumped down he periodically rubbed his hands together, a sort of catatonic daze having had come over him.

Veexow had led him aboard the craft and he had come without protest or even seeming to notice what was happening.

Now his eyes remained closed and he was non- responsive. Things had folded back. She and PhaHks, it seemed, had returned to their beginnings.

"Rhengar."

"Yes, M'Lady."

"I want you to change our destination." As she said it, she input the new vectors herself.

Rhengar stared. "That planet's a myth."

"It was a well kept Federation secret. One known to only the very highest echelon of the Empire. To those in the elite Royal Council."

"But you are not of them."

"My father was. He told me stories of it when I was a child."

"Just stories."

"No, Rhengar. My father was also a Talshiar Commander. An expert in ferreting out the truth. Father never told me faerie tales."

"But why there, M'Lady?"

In answer, she looked back at PHaHks who remained unaware of his surroundings or their conversation.

"I see." Rhengar nodded. "But why, M'Lady, after all you've gone through to acquire..."

She glanced sharply at the doctor.

He finished carefully "...to save him?"

"What is salvation to one can be torture to another and..." her gaze rested sadly on PhaHks.

"...I have grown weary of causing pain."

"It is a long journey M'Lady, parts of three days."

When one elegant hand came to rest on his shoulder, he looked at it sharply. "Please, let him sleep through it." Veexow asked.

If it were possible, his heart softened even more towards her. *I will have this woman.* he thought but only brushed her cheek with his fingers. She had said please to him a great deal the last few months, and thank-you.

"For you, Dear Lady, anything. Always."

Rhengar fetched his medical supplies and the drugs he'd designed for PhaHks.

After PhaHks was drugged to deep slumber, Rhengar piloted the small ship to a new goal.

**

"PhaHks..."

"...PhaHks!" Veexow spoke louder.

She helped him sit forward. Crouched before him.

"Come." she said to him.

"Where?"

He was still very low.

"To a nice place. A familiar place. For you, the best place."

Rhengar had watched the exchange and administered a mild stimulant to hasten the humans progress towards consciousness.

"PhaHks?"

He had slept for thirty-eight hours.

Veexow took his hands in each of hers. "We should go now."

"Trrd. Why d'we haf d'go'gin?"

He was still in a half-asleep state.

Perhaps a good thing, she thought.

Veexow took his haggard face in her hands and kissed him very tenderly. "PhaHks, please, just this once, trust me."

She helped him to rise and he didn't resist.

"Trust me."

**

--------------------------------------------------------------------- Never.

PhaHks had never lived in her world.

He had only waited in it.

Waited and held onto hope like a breath suspended.

Veexow tried to pull him in, wanted a last close touch but instead he stepped away, leaving only a few fingers entwined in her outstretched hand.

It came to her then.

It came to her as they stood before The Guardian of Forever. The Portal that lived and saw all the living while situated upon a forsaken and lifeless planetoid.

It came to her that it was not hurting him to leave. Not like it was hurting her.

His brown eyes, flecked as they were with green and gold - the colors of Earth - did not moisten at this leaving.

He wanted to go.

She wondered if she might stop breathing. She wondered if she would have the strength to finally release his hand and as she wondered it, he pulled it free.

He took two steps back, allowing her no opportunity to clasp it again. No room to change her mind.

He knew her well.

And he was going to leave without saying another word to her.

She was wrong.

"Thank you." They'd been spoken out of gratitude. Relief. She couldn't tell.

He looked away to his right, to distant cliff faces and electric sky, eyes closing once, shutting out so many things now, then looked back at her.

"I want, I hope..."

Whatever it was he was trying to say, she wanted to hear it desperately. But mostly, she wanted to smell and feel him again. She wanted him to stay.

By stepping away and widening the gap of rocky soil between them, he had been right. Had he given her another minute, she might have convinced herself to make him stay. Convinced herself that she could somehow make him want to.

"I hope..." He didn't finish. Shaking his head sadly, a bone-deep sigh was the last thing she heard from his lips before he was turning away - suddenly - facing away.

Veexow gasped softly. Seeing his body turn, he was taking nothing of her with him.

The pain.

PhaHks had rejected her touch, left her space, and now was severing his physical self along with his mind and heart.

The pain of it.

He was removing everything he was from her and doing so willingly. Happily.

Veexow wondered now if she had ever dwelled in him.

He gathered up the physical part of himself that he *had* allowed into her world and was set to again offer it and all he was up to his own time where his spirit dwelled. The life he had never really left.

Somewhere deep in unexplored regions of her passions, something previously undiscovered and alive burst and died. When he stepped through the portal, all that was left was the shriveled skin of that new death, already brittling inside her.

Veexow grieved as a Romulan: whole bodied, whole minded, but no outward sign. If she had known how to weep, she wondered if it would have helped.

Veexow was alone now before The Guardian.

Nothing had changed in her universe. The Empire remained.

There were no human beings.

She was who she had been. Perhaps.

On the planet, PhaHks had stepped through and back.

Now, he was there. Already. In his time and life. His human filled earth.

The space-time, the exact moment in the continuum, had been relatively easy to calculate.

Eight years to the day that he had been taken she had returned him.

She wanted him to remember her. Could not have bourn his having no memory of her and what they had shared, all of it.

However small a portion of him she had gleaned, in the end, it had been worth it.

Simple to do the sending of him back.

The loss she felt was the loss of every wonderful thing she had ever known.

Imagining him still alive and fighting and beautiful... was some comfort.

Now, in her time no humans breathed but for the tiny body suspended within her womb. Her secret.

She could have told him. Maybe it would have kept him back. Perhaps he might have stayed, then, willingly.

Perhaps not.

But bribery? Coercion?

No. Her Romulan pride had kept her silent.

She could hurt him no longer.

But she had kept something alive.

Half PhaHks.

Her heart panged even now, his name though unspoken.

It had been so easy to take him from the Ferengi. So simple to confine and study him, lock him away and observe.

Not so simple when she began to love him. His kind of love; human. Illogical and impassioned. An unquantifiable joining that had made her near mad with desire, spurring her with a drive to protect him no matter what the price.

Impossible, then, to see chains, however figurative, ever again encircle his wrists.

The sadness of his abduction, the uncontrollable events that had led to the dissolving of her comfortable existence, this terrible fate that had caused two voyagers over an eternity of time and distance to by chance cross each other had, in the end, twisted them together.

Adversity has caused a mating of enemies, each blind in their own way. Each having learned dependance upon the other so to survive the darkness.

Now this same destiny had sheared them apart and she, in all those years of battles and lovemaking, had never heard him utter her name. It had fallen from his lips to greet her, not once.

Veexow would never hear him speak it now.

Too much pain caused for her to have even apologized for it, and so she would never know its peace.

She had lied to him for a long time. Lied for herself, wanting him to stay. Could not - would not lose him! Impossible to bear!

Until his own anguish at living in her world, the hopelessness on his face that terrible day.

His Hay-zahl eyes drained of animation, she could no longer look upon and live herself.

The ecstasy of love had bound her to him with such exquisite torture that she could not breath comfortably unless she'd known how he was hour to hour; that he still lived; that he was all right.

How much worse the agony in letting him go.

At the Guardian, she'd been calm, cool and logical as her ancient Vulcan ancestry allowed her to be when needed.

She'd watched him walk through the portal without looking back and had not flinched. Had not done what her heart begged of her, to run after him, to hold him back, to keep him with her forever. Or go with him.

But she could no more easily have existed in his world than he had in hers.

Yet he had been simply a man.

When he had stepped through and was gone, as it swallowed him from her reach forever, grief enclosed her heart in its frozen fist. She thought her Romulan soul might go mad.

Empty wind spoke to her of him and his absence.

And when it whistled down through the rocks as that pale yellow sun dipped behind jagged hills, only then did she come to understand what she had lost.

She ceased to feel as a Romulan Commander. Knew it had happened long before.

Wealth.

Power.

Position.

Less than nothing.

Meaningless.

Her small understanding of human love had made her send him back against all more powerful desires that said bind him.

Surprised at how strong her ancient Vulcan heritage really was. The urge to seize him had almost been beyond her control. An insane urge to possess, outside all reason.

But his grieving face and eyes that begged had defeated those ancient instincts to impotence.

All that mattered had been him. All that remained was him. A small part of him inside her.

A tiny, frail, precious piece that was already growing stronger. Hidden but alive. A beating half-human heart.

She lay her hand upon her already swelling belly, and signaled Rhengar to beam her up.

**

Veexow returned to her small vessel and to her small room. There she let the grief have full sway for a while until exhaustion demanded she rest.

When Rhengar entered unannounced, it awakened her from a dream that might have been pleasant but it slipped away and lost form like a breaking wave on a distant shore.

"Dear Veexow. You should eat."

He'd brought food and set it on her desk.

She sat up. "Rhengar. Always practical."

He sat beside her. "Your health is paramount. Especially now."

Veexow sat up, saying nothing and making no move toward the meal he had brought.

Interpreting her silence as a need to be alone, he rose to leave.

When he reached the door, she called him back.

"Rhengar. Do you love me?"

He turned, looking at her beauty and the open sorrow on her features. She was showing her self to him for perhaps the first time in his memory. "I think you know the answer to that."

She bowed her head. "Yes." Acknowledging what she'd known for seven decades, that he was passionately in love with her. "What would you do for me?"

He spoke without hesitation. "I would do anything for M'Lady."

"NO! Not "M'Lady"! For ME, the one you say you love! Do you love me with all your soul and life?!"

He knew she was saying: *As I loved him?* He answered, "I would die for you."

"I do not need you to die for me, I need you to make him live again."

Rhengar peered at her unblinking. "What are you saying?"

"You know what I'm saying. I'm pregnant with Phahks' child and I intend this baby to be born and grow up and live as freely and as beautifully as he lives."

She stood, the passion in her voice becoming tempered with reason, plans being laid out, set in motion. "I'm saying I want you to factor out my DNA in this fetus, I want all Romulan element removed from his child. I wish it to be fully human."

"The technology is available, M'Lady, but the risk to the child is high, I do not know if it is possible."

"It is possible, we will do it. We must."

She grasped his arm, to *make* him understand.

"We, - we took on a role that did not belong to us, that of gods. We judged another sentient race as unfit - "

*PhaHks. PhaHks unfit?! Passionate. Driven. Spiritual, sorrowful, sexual, beautiful PhaHks!....so beautiful...*

" - we decided their fate, their right to exist in this universe and we were wrong! We were arrogant. Stupid! I have learned that they had as much right, maybe more to be here."

"I want this child to be human. I want it to be unstained with the guilt of his mother whose own people would have murdered his father and his own kind. That is a guilt I will have to carry until the day I die."

"Do you know what it is you ask of me? Do you understand the step you are taking? You are speaking of the reintroduction of the human species in the galaxy, in our time."

"I understand what I am saying. Will you do it? Will you do it for me if not for him?"

"I love you, Veexow. You know yourself that I will do it."

She had been standing before him, every muscle tense with the depth of her passion, of what she wanted. Now she visibly relaxed, released his arm and turned away. Walked to the food he had brought, looking at it, making no move to eat.

Suddenly, Rhengar was beside her, laying a hand upon her shoulder, turning her away from the tray of vegetables and from whatever memories might be found there.

"This grieving will end, Veexow, someday. Eventually you will be yourself again. You will feel again."

"Who I was, Rhengar, is dead. But as long as he lives in this child, I will continue. For him, I must."

"You always have. You have always survived, anything."

"But to feel again? What does that mean? Feel what? What should I feel?"

"Something besides grief."

She sighed, irritated at the thought. "Maybe that is what I want to feel. What else is there?" Her tone mocked the impossible.

"If not those, perhaps love."

"No. It costs too much. I will never forget what it has cost me, what it is costing me. I've lost everything including that for which the sacrifices were made. But I would still love him again. I would do everything all over again. Don't you understand? I will never forget him. I CAN never forget."

Rhengar took her hand and held it tightly, bringing it up to his strong, young chest, his other hand touched her face with such compassion, she almost couldn't meet his eyes for fear of seeing her pain in them.

"Never?"

He leaned in and kissed her, his lips saying for him what his words could not. She let him, wondering if her heart could possibly break anymore than it already had.

She loved PhaHks. She did not have him.

She had Rhengar. Did not deserve him.

"Perhaps, one day, Veexow, you'll let me help you forget."

**