Disclaimer: Star Trek, Enterprise, and all related characters are owned by Paramount Studios. No copyright infringement intended.
Notes: Friedrich Nietzsche defined Amor Fati as love of one's fate, even when it's a less than lovable one. Rura Penthe, for those who for some odd reason haven't seen 'Judgment' or The Undiscovered Country, is a Klingon prison colony world.
---
The place is Rura Penthe, and the game is on.
Impact was during night, and the early morning is cold and bleak. You haven't been taken yet…at least not inside the perimeter…but you recognize the logic of time and opportunity. You can only run for so long. Home is lodged meters into solid rock. The pride is scattered about you, what remains of it, freezing and frightened.
You hate them, their stupid expectations, and their stupid cowardice. Phlox injected himself with a lethal dose seconds before you reached the shell of sickbay, and asked you to hold him as he died, as he kissed your lips. You wonder if he thought he was the only survivor when he administered the injection, didn't want to be taken. You wonder if the kiss was a Denobulan death throe, or if he had harbored more emotion for you than you thought, if he was just a coward who waited too late to make his move. You wonder where he left the drugs.
Your remaining superior is firm. The ship must be abandoned, destroyed. The jewel of Jonathan Archer's life mustn't become the jewel of the Klingon Empire.
Malcolm sets the charges, with an air of destiny. Tugs on his bloody collar, and gives the order. You press the switch, and in the end, from hundreds of yards and days away, destiny looks like little more than a child's science experiment gone awry.
Such is fate.
The place is death.
Wind…cold like space, colder than hell, it wafted…still wafts…through crevices, whistles across tattered and bloody tent sheets. Before you stopped hearing them, the wind monsters took seventeen away. Some were unable to climb and crawl and were swept away screaming down ravines. Others hacked out last breaths wracked with pneumonia. Discounting the dear doctor, twenty died when your ship first gorged herself on solid rock, Trip amongst…one of his precious consoles exploded. Maybe it was doing him a favor.
But you of all people survived impact, you of all cowards scraped back up a ravine, screamed and cursed your way out of a fever, if without your greatest gift…you emerged. You, or it, what you've become, grew hardened enough to survive, but not whole enough to want to…never whole again.
You no longer listen. Tactile sensory is the game…knuckles scraped bare on rock. Icy water poured into open wounds. Blood mulched across chapped lips and broken teeth.
The wind monsters don't bother you so much anymore.
Amor Fati.
They all wonder, those lucid enough to care.
Crewman Bashier is first to ask, over the evening meal, huddled aft of a cave entrance. It takes him a while, of course, a Frenchman's hemming and hawing and an Englishman's tact.
You watch half crisped meat and juice roll down his elegant, pallid fingers and wonder if the meal of the day is the targ Chef caught or Chef whom the targ turned tables on. You wonder if the hastily requisitioned cook from engineering noticed the difference when turning the makeshift grill and if anyone cares.
"I wonder…" Bashier distorts your lip reading when he bites, veins bulging as weakened muscles strain to ingest the tough meat. "I wonder if the Captain is here."
Cutler sears you with a mocking look and throws him a knife, a thin trail of blood trailing down his neck before he thinks to catch, or cry out. "Of course she is."
You laugh. And let them wonder for you.
---
They don't really consider you Captain after a few more days…not you, Professor Hoshi who carped about stars and the way they should fly, not Ensign Sato who had a clean shot at the raving prison guard gone AWOL holding firm, beautiful Malcolm by the collar and killed the armory officer instead.
You think him better off for it.
Sometimes at night, with his dark skin slick with sweat and dark eyes raging with heat and delirium, Travis
speaks the title as a curse. In the surreal moments between the predatory night and emptily blinding day, he shakes from the sickness and tells you he would take all the pain for you if he could.
You know he lies. Travis Mayweather would rather be useless than be his father's son, be anything but his own fool. He'd rather let you be the one to lead them into certain death.
Cold toes and jagged nails digging into his useless legs, chin resting on his scarred chest, you worship your Ensign while you can.
By morning, you have a Klingon in your camp.
Some of the pride are gung-ho to kill her. Others want to befriend her in the hopes she has connections. You just like watching her, the arcs and swoops, moments of blind rage and fragile weakness.
"I'm human too." She insists the first night she's with you, shoulder length hair flying about in knots as she swings arms in theatrical outrage. "Listen to me, you primitive p'taqs!"
"Is it true that Klingons are more vulnerable to cold?" Cutler inquires, pointing her gaze to the cave entrance and snowdrifts and ice beyond.
Your guest shudders, shoulders compacting under the tattered foreign uniform she wears.
You throw her a blanket.
The next day she falls into exhausted sleep, and Cutler sneaks her supplies away. There's an instrument…looks like a new version of one of Phlox's tools, a scanner. Between the two of you, the readings reveal themselves.
"She's Klingon." Cutler notes with satisfaction.
"She's human as well." You add absently, fascinated and repulsed by the implications.
As always the words roll off your tongue oddly, and you think that those born deaf have no idea how lucky they are, and of the embarrassment you could save yourself if you just had the time to think before you tried to articulate what you can't even hear…but that line of thought is vain disaster. The last time you took the time to think the p'taqs shot your great bird out of the stars.
You don't think much before you react anymore.
"Bring her to me." You demand, shoulder a pulse rifle.
---
There was a virus, she tells you, eyes darting with fear but shoulders firm with arrogant Klingon resentment. Far into the future, it broke…will break, you correct mentally…at Rura Penthe, assimilated the entire prison population. Containment attempts failed. The Klingon Empire fell, or transformed. They aren't much safer an enemy than before, but they're a whole lot more no nonsense. The Alpha Quadrant followed. The planetary list is extraordinary and strange. Trill…she cracks a senseless joke about a lot of split personality disorders disappearing. Betazed, Romulus, Vulcan. Kessick, Bajor, Risa…Earth. Everything remade a hive.
"Yet you survived, came back in time to change it?" Travis ventures the question no one wanted to ask.
Her eyes are dead, voice caught between a growl and tears. "Nearly three centuries into the future, I'm the engineer who cracks open your little treasure trove of debris here at Rura Penthe and destroys the universe. You forgot to destroy the Borg tech you picked up. It was time-delayed."
You know. You encoded the timer, before Malcolm buried it with his explosions.
She's full of plans, the Klingon who is also human. A ship, she has, orbiting the penal colony, cloaked…an assistant who knows her way around Borg technology better than anybody else. They came back by using that very technology, before something…she has a long-winded engineer's explanation…broke. Now they need the very thing that started it all to travel back in time again, to another critical point…she mentions Zephrame Cochrane and Vulcans, and you think of Jon and T'Pol, who could be anywhere in the universe right now, who haven't tried to save you.
You hope them dead. But there's no time for grief. Your guests need you to show them around the debris field.
"Will we be heroes?" Travis asks, eyes sparkling for the first time in weeks, emancipated elbows pressing down as he struggles to sit up. His voice is flyboy and eager Ensign both, and your guest touches his cheek, tears misting her dark eyes.
"You'll be my hero." She promises, and you work beside her in silence for hours, envious and uncertain what she has that's worth envying.
"I think we're ready." Eventually her eyes glow now, fire and destiny. She holds an instrument…Trip's favorite spanner…in one hand, bits of Daniels' technology in the other. You pretend not to notice the dried tear stains on her tanned face or the fondly handled picture hanging around her neck, carefully protected by her dog tags. You can't afford to see her as a wife and mother. She's half-Klingon.
You stoke the hate, touching the pulse rifle you wear as a second skin now.
Her smile is growing more uncertain as she hands back over your complimentary supply kit. Thanks for stopping by the 22nd century, and all that jazz. "You keep the food for yourself. You'll be here for a while…" Her voice falters, nearly three centuries of knowledge finally brokering caution.
You don't need the words, the platitudes. A hand flies out, touching Travis' cold forehead. He succumbed screaming. "All he wanted was to fly. To be remembered for something." The anger is burning now. So tired of it all, God, how tired you are of it all. "What the hell are you going to be remembered for, hero? Saving the universe?"
She is half-Klingon. Her glare is savage. "I'll die completing this mission. So will Seven." Her head jerks towards her companion, tall ornamented Nordic elegance wearing her own picture. "But no one but you will ever know. And if things go the way we want, we'll be put in the history books for being lost. Just for being lost."
Just like you.
You turn and lead your pride back into death.
---
The time travelers are long gone now, and so is the pride. You've been on Rura Penthe for most of your life. It hasn't exactly been a life, but you've existed. You somehow think it a small miracle, after the hybrid and the drone and their crazy ideas of righting the universe.
Decades ago, there was a child, a half-Klingon. You think you named her Destiny, but you never put much effort into remembering back then and it's too late now. At any rate, it's moot. Destiny died.
The Klingons don't bother you. It was two years into planetary wandering before you succumbed to the skeletal crew's pleas and stopped playing the game, surrendered and let them herd you within the perimeter. Most of the men died in the dilithium mines that first year, the women who had too high moral standards to do what was necessary for their captors were exposed and followed in short order.
You don't quite remember when you lost your moral standards, but you've always had your jailors respect. You wallow in your age and experience and deafness and laugh at the new prisoners who trickle in, never expecting to stay. There are humans. You don't talk to them, you've forgotten their language.
Today, one of the guards handed you a picture…out-dated by a few decades, filched off some ship caught in Klingon space. The owner never made it to Rura Penthe. He was human, and you think the guard said he was an archer. You never liked the sport yourself.
The picture is your treasure. The landscape interests you…desert. The heat is tangible at times when you touch the thing, briefly more tangible than the cold that settled into your bones so long ago you remember nothing else.
There is a strangely familiar woman in it, a Vulcan, wearing her long robes like a mantle, face firm and eyes haunted. A Vulcan man…Ambassador Skon, the Klingon guard roars in derisive laughter…stands at her side aptly robed and aptly distanced. Between them rests a child, a boy you would guess. His expression baffles you, hunted and proud and full of fatalism…and the even more strangely familiar human kneeling beside him matches the expression brow for frown.
You wonder just why a human archer would be in a Vulcan family portrait.
You don't wonder for long. There is an arbitrator from the House of Mogh coming to the colony today, a unique event, and rumor says that this honorable Klingon would free chosen prisoners to the universe again.
Destiny died long ago. Clutching the picture and the leather strip that holds it about your neck, you struggle to see upwards through the clouds, wondering if you might return the picture to the boy who inked his name in human form on it's back. Just one more trip, that's all you ask for. You're too old to hurt the Empire now.
The game is almost over.
Amor Fati.
FIN