Disclaimer: Star Trek © Gene Roddenberry
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Shell Child
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Now it's your time to look after us
'Cause we kept you clothed
We kept in business
When everyone else was having good luck
So now it's your time
Time to pay
To pay me and the one I love
With the worldly goods you've stashed away
With all the things you
Took from us
—Dear Darkness; PJ Harvey
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(This is what is important: He hates—not only Section 31, not Starfleet—humanity as a whole. Repulsive, oblivious, limbed worms. His vengeance was a quest to destroy them all.
He is Khan, who is war, and fire, and hate embodied.)
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Cryosleep—frost sleep—is more eternal than sleep and less eternal than death. Dreams in stasis are a comforting lie told to protect children, for not everybody survive stasis. Some die by technical malfunction, or rather, human malfunction. Stasis is dreamless, and windless. One is nothing and nowhere.
Limbo. Existence, simple and still. A foetus in a turbine womb. No thoughts, no emotions.
Then they wake Khan. Again.
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Khan knows what they want.
"Blood," he rasps, and thinks of the delicious crunch! Admiral Marcus' skull made as it broke in his hands, pomegranate red dripping down his fingers, drooling down his chin. "You want... my bl—blood."
"It's only fair," the new admiral says. There will always be a new admiral, a new ant, to take the place of his predecessor. Insects are like that. Death, life, destroy, rebuild.
Khan's laugh is sharp and bitter. "When was war fair?" he raises his arm and duranium shackles dig into his bruised flesh. "One cannot tame war." One cannot tame a fire, or it will wither and die.
"War?" The admiral leans forward. "You are many things, but you're not war. Not anymore."
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Gloved, gauze masked scientists above him. Bright pale light. Beeping monitors. The smell of disinfectant. Those damned, damned white walls. And... containers, on each side of him, currently being pumped full of blood. His naked body is chained to a hospital table, arms and legs full of needles. A horrible cold consumes him. Clothes are not wasted on him, mot anymore.
You had your chance, the scientists' eyes say, and you blew it.
He cannot speak (or choke or cry or scream—) because there is a mechanical device inside his mouth. 'I have been rendered inhuman in their eyes,' he realizes. Once, he described the cold emptiness as a hole inside him; inside his chest. Now, he is emptiness embodied.
"Get him ready," the admiral says, "for round two."
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He remembers sitting around fire (fire is wild and ancient and untameable, like a city, dead when it's still), telling them to cremate his remains. "I will die in battle," he'd predicted then. "Do not let the maggots have me." Humans or worms; same thing. "Instead, give me a Viking funeral and burn my bones." They'd danced then, like flames, and screamed and laughed, alive. Every hour could be their last in an endless war—they knew they couldn't win—with their creators.
He was war then, bloodthirsty war, who never bothered to wash out the stains, just wanting to shout and scream and kill, dammit
but he cannot because
He is Khan, who is death, and cold, and hate embodied.
He is Khan, who dies alone at a metal table in a cold, white room, just like the one he was made in.
The last thing he hears?
"Let's bring in the next one."
