Meet Lt. Zariel Sindile, temporarily assigned to Voyager for its rescue mission in the Badlands. Now she's stuck in the Delta Quadrant, her children are at home without her, she has no one to depend on, and her darkest secret is about to be laid ba...
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Stardate 54982.7
The transporter beam dissolved away from the five of them, and they all gave each other one final encouraging glance before they moved away to their assigned tables. There was no one at Zariel's table when she arrived. She turned and looked into the crowd, growing more apprehensive by the second. Then she turned back, and found herself face to face with two tall, handsome young men, both with her same cobalt blue eyes. No one seemed sure what to do. She couldn't read their faces, and she didn't dare open her mind to them. Were they still her boys, her best buddies? Were the three of them strangers now?
Too afraid of the silence to let it continue, and not sure what in the universe she was about to say, she held out her hands full of things and blurted out, "I brought y'all some stuff."
They shouted as one, "Mom!!" and all but tackled her into a three-way hug that lifted her feet off the floor and squeezed the breath out of her. She dropped her shield and dove into their emotions. Joy, disbelief, admiration, love, but none of the anger or resentment she had so dreaded. They set her down, so she could fling everything down on the table, then swallowed her in a hug again. They were all talking at the same time: "Mom, you gotta come and..."
"Just wait'll you see this..."
"You'll never believe what..."
They all seemed to take a breath at the same time and stepped apart to look at each other, arming tears off their faces and laughing breathlessly. Zariel cried with relief as much as anything else. They were still the three essential points that defined their plane.
They sat down at the table, Zariel in the middle, and dug into the food that had been set there while they weren't paying attention. As they ate, Zariel reached into the pile of stuff she'd brought from the ship. She handed the boys each a data stick. "For your reading pleasure, the ship's log and my log as well. What I've been doin' for the past seven years."
She lifted a sleek electric guitar from the table. It shaded from a natural finish to black in a sunburst pattern, and was inlaid with a gold logo that was a stylized combination of the letters V and X, with a scrawly signature underneath. She handed it to Michael, and said, "Here you go, a signed guitar played onstage by the lead guitarist of VX." She set a data cube on the table in front of him. "And VX live in concert, all ten shows." She added a framed photo of herself playing that same guitar.
Next she picked up a baseball bat and a glove, both bearing the same scrawly signature, and laid them in front of Patrick. "Bat and glove used on the field by the Voyagers' shortstop." Another data cube. "Replays of all three seasons, including post season play." Another photo, a group of people in baseball uniforms, herself in the middle of the front row.
