Waking up was…different. For the first time he could remember, his mind was completely blank.
It wouldn't last, of course.
Strangely peaceful, though. Lying here. The only sensation was an odd, swooping one in his chest, that wasn't…he frowned. Not pain, exactly. Not his heartbeat either. How ironic, that he still had a heart. Not a physical sensation at all, so far as he could tell. Something…different. More nebulous.
A feeling. No, feelings. Mixed.
But it didn't hurt.
A strange sort of relief, this blankness. Couldn't remember the last time he'd had nothing to analyze. Not even memory. That thought should have alarmed him, but didn't. It was too peaceful, this drifting of his mind.
The room was enclosed and utterly plain. No door, no windows. Light came from somewhere though, probably the pores of the wall itself; it wasn't completely dark, after all. He knew complete darkness. No, this was a resolute steely grey—actual steel, he realized after a long moment, becoming conscious of the press of it against his shoulder blades. Shifted experimentally, recoiling from the abrupt change in temperature through the thin fabric of his uniform.
Steel, yes. Reinforced. Built either to keep danger out or in, and it didn't take any considerable degree of genius to realize which. No one had tried to keep him safe, not in a very long time.
Blast. So much for his fleeting peace.
Was he dangerous? When had that happened?
Thought was familiar though. Old. Well-worn. Couldn't remember how well, but that didn't matter. Nothing really seemed to, in this quiet, oddly peaceful box meant to contain him. They would die for this, of course they would. But for now…
For now there was no thought, no memory. No pain, and the space in which he lay as free of observable features as humanly possible. If only things would stay this way, just for a while…
But it was impossible. A mind such as his did not simply turn off.
The moment memory returned, his limbs were no longer under his control, he felt a searing pang of ice in his chest, and Khan was gasping, screaming with the pain.
No one came.
Waking up should have been a relief.
He'd been warned about this, of course. Warned of the crippling, nauseating sense of disorientation that came from emerging form a long cryosleep. Even nearing the end, there were a few who still thought of them as people. A few who took the time, put forth the effort, broke the laws, to do what human decency dictated be done. Incredible, really, that human decency still existed at this point, even if only among a few. They had explained what needed to be understood. They were the ones John trusted to lead the world out of this mess. Still thought of it as his mess, somehow, even though he would be…a few light-years away, in theory. A lot further in reality.
More to the point, John trusted the one he knew to be behind it, although it had been ages since any contact had been allowed.
It was an absurd thing, trust. Strange how it had twisted on its head, even before the world turned upside down. Before the war—no, not before the war, before all of this, John would have said there was only one man he trusted.
Still quantifiably true, but things changed.
One thing in particular.
Sleep was the only option, in the end. Khan hadn't taken it well, but no one expected anything less. John had made a cautious effort to puzzle out the disjointed steps of that reasoning, but the conclusion he'd come to was anything but logical. He'd known it already.
Imprisonment, to that mind, was never an option. That was what had led to this mess in the first place. Anything that tried to impede the ever-present blaze through his veins, through his mind, was destined to meet with a wall of fire. And the world held the smoldering wreckage to prove it.
John Harrison had been okay, though. There wasn't any choice, he'd known that. He'd only insisted on going last, on being there for the others. Others, he said, but the sympathetic, averted glances made clear that they all knew the truth.
Khan was first.
Watching the healing touch of ice smooth his friend's features was confirmation. Only way. So when his own turn came John had gone under peacefully, calmly, relinquishing the thready cocktail of panic that threatened to take hold because he knew that when he awoke—ten, twenty, a hundred years from now—he'd be needed. As long as Khan Noonien Singh lived, he would always be needed.
Waking would have been a relief, otherwise.
Potential.
The word held such an intrinsic weight. Funny that it weighed more than ever now that it was over.
Truly over this time. And he'd slept through it.
John Harrison stared at the screen. At it. Through it. Then he raised his eyes and said his first words in well over a day—almost his first words following a solid two weeks of questions he couldn't or wouldn't answer. Questions that all made sense now. Not that they'd listened to anything beyond his name.
"Let me see him."
The screen was different every day. But one scene played on repeat.
Wake. Eat. Speak to the men who came, two more often than any other. The broad-shouldered, confident captain with brilliant blue eyes. The cold, dark-haired creature of logic. It hurt to look at them, somehow.
Say the same words over and over again.
"Stop this. Let me go to him. Or kill us both, speed up the inevitable."
The questions came. Questions about him, mostly. About the past.
That hurt, too.
"Stop this," John blurted one day, deafened by everything he wasn't saying, the things he couldn't say because it hurt so badly to remember, and anyway didn't they realize that that was then, and this was now, and then belonged to him even if now didn't, and it didn't matter anyway because that was just another aborted prophecy, he hadn't been a good man and wasn't and never would be…
Only he didn't say it like that. He said the name that had pulsed through his slow-beating mind like a tidal wave for the past three hundred years, that hadn't passed his lips in even longer.
Who? they asked, and something in his face must have changed because the next day they came with a clamp-on wrist tracker and a set of civilian clothing and told him he was coming with them.
They took him to an austere grey building that wasn't a dwelling and wasn't a military prison and was somehow both at once. It looked like a bunker from the outside, impossible to break out of and nearly impossible to penetrate (but he could pick out, from long experience, the smallest of blind spots, the probable structural weaknesses, and wondered whether Khan had really, truly shown them the extent of his strength). They took him to the source of the endless agonizing video feeds, and then they took him inside.
And then he was alone with an old friend in the futuristic little flat with a thousand invisible cameras and all the modern conveniences, apart from unnecessary touches like windows and air vents and exit points.
He looked pale and utterly drained of life. He was, John knew now. They came twice a day to take it from him.
He'd had a shouting match with Kirk and Spock only that morning, over that very thing. The first he'd heard of it.
The first lieutenant did the talking.
"There was no other logical choice, Captain." The tone was balanced, dispassionate, Vulcan. "I am certain you are well aware of the difficulties your augmented metabolism poses to any attempts at restraint. Subduing him by drugs or any other usual means was not an option. The extraction is carefully calculated, and even over prolonged periods will lead to nothing worse than exhaustion."
"Four pints a day?" John snarled, grateful for once that a glass wall of mistrust that came between them. If it had not, there would have been more than one bloodletting that day, and the end of hope for him and his crew. "That's barbaric."
Kirk reaffirmed his gift for blind idiocy—once, before, John would have thought courage—by stepping forward, rather than back, until the two inches of glass were all that was between them. "Barbaric? No, 'Captain'," jabbing a finger toward the hateful display on the wall. "Let me introduce you to barbaric!"
And John slammed a fist against the glass, gratified for once to see the arrogant young man jump, if only slightly, glimpse the sudden fear take hold, the realization at just how little effort it would take his centuries-old counterpart to snap him in two.
"No!" he spat, choking on venom held back too long. "No, that's a man altered beyond his control and then dragged again and again through his own personal hell until his mind crumbled under the pressure. What would you do, Mr. Kirk, if the survival of your crew depended on your deference to a madman? And you, Mr. Spock, if someone reached into that perfectly balanced brain of yours and flipped a switch you didn't even know was there? How long would you last once they redirected every scrap of focus and passion into making you care, and then dangled the thing you cared about above your head, jerking it away again, and again, and again…"
Kirk stepped back, blue eyes cloudy, but the Vulcan raised his chin.
"Freeing him will never be an option."
"Yesterday you said killing him wasn't an option. And that's precisely what you're doing."
"Our ship's doctor has calculated carefully the rate at which his cells rejuvenate."
The two men looked at each other, uncertain, as John let out a hollow laugh. "You've calculated, have you? Got us superhumans all figured out? Got him figured out? Why don't you tell me, then, what makes him tick? Heaven knows I've spent long enough wondering."
"The Augmentation experiment…" Spock began, but John had also spent enough time listening.
"We're not immortal, if that's what you think. Tell me, have you factored starvation into your calculations?"
"Surely that is irrelevant. Daily sustenance is provided."
"Better check again with your watchdogs," John hissed. "He hasn't touched food in the past two weeks."
"Without 24/7 video access, you cannot know that."
"I don't need to see him to know it."
The Vulcan paused, and John watched him; eyes flickering, mentally reviewing the feed. "You did not mention this."
"It wouldn't have been relevant for weeks yet, if you weren't draining him every day!" John shouted. He slumped against the wall, exhausted, as though the revelation had torn through his own cells as well and siphoned away his own near-endless reservoirs. When he found strength to speak again, the exhaustion came through in his tone. "Take a sample of Starfleet's convenient new miracle cure, and see. His rate of cell reproduction will have slowed, drastically. He's given up. He. Is. Dying."
"What do you want us to do?"
John raised his head. These weren't the measured tones of the Vulcan, but the genuine force of the hotheaded young captain held a strength he recognized behind it, and for the first time since waking he felt a flicker of hope.
"Take me to him," he repeated for the hundredth time, voice cracking. "Take me to him, and then leave us alone."
John Harrison was…different. They weren't sure what they'd expected upon awaking another Augment, but it wasn't him.
He had all the compassion of a doctor and the strength of a soldier and the furious tenacity of one who has lived through a thousand storms, and fears the steadiness of land more than the heaving sea.
He feared the calm following the storm, Kirk knew. It lived in his nightmares.
What he hadn't betrayed in the slightest—this man, so small and ordinary, and apparently the real John Harrison—was the madness of Khan.
Augments, too, could differ. It was strange to think that. Like…people.
It should not have been strange. Khan, for all his superhuman abilities, was only too human.
"Sherlock, wake up. Please."
He sat there, a steady presence, repeating the phrase for many hours. It was nearly a day before the gray-green eyes fluttered open.
Those eyes were never a window to the soul, (for that was only fragments by now) but on occasion they were a mirror. Reflecting weary rage, and pain, and disbelief, and the barest flash of pure joy.
A cracked, distorted smile. And then a whisper.
John?
Modern was the new word for empty. John had stepped into the future overnight, and he didn't like what he found. Everything was hidden away, automatic, out of sight.
The business of living required very little effort, but it seemed beyond his friend anyway.
John let his voice fill the emptiness.
"Get up, Sherlock. Get up. You're not doing this. Not this time."
"They woke me after three hundred years to come take care of you. How about that? You're not dying on me now."
"They're idiots, Sherlock. All idiots. You told me that, remember? I didn't believe you then…"
"Cameras in the flat, of course. Just like the old days. Only we're in America, they don't call them flats here. I don't know what to call this place, actually. To be honest I don't like to think about it."
A pause.
"Remember America, Sherlock? You tried to take it over once…"
Stop calling me that, he said one day. Don't call me that anymore.
"Why not?"
The names. We agreed. Long ago.
"Three hundred years ago. The Project doesn't matter anymore, Sherlock. You matter."
Stop.
"You never stopped calling me John."
You never changed.
"I miss Sherlock Holmes."
He said it too quietly, and the word reverberated around the empty kitchen. Long minutes of silence, and then there was a sharp 'ping', and the sharper smell of a meal ready to eat. Italian. Something in John was grateful that here, in the future where they didn't have Angelo's, they still had Italian.
Khan had always eaten, always kept himself in fighting trim, while Sherlock rarely had. Sherlock had been a man first of intellect and then of action, while in Khan the enhanced physical body was finally capable of matching the astounding mental feats. Sherlock had leapt routinely to extraordinary heights and fallen to crushing lows; Khan simply began moving and did not stop. John did not realize he was voicing the comparison aloud until it was too late.
STOP!
And then there were things flying past his head, platters and cutlery and a stool wrenched from the ground where it had been bolted, and John could have batted them out of the air with one hand but opted instead for dodging, smoothly, wondering what it meant that his once and future flatmate was worked into a rage again. Khan would not have run out of energy, or fury, but Sherlock did.
SHERLOCK HOLMES IS DEAD!
It was true. But it wasn't, after all, the first time.
"I miss you," John whispered.
I killed people, John.
"I know."
John looked at him. He was curled on the sofa, or the slick piece of leather and chrome that passed for it. Trembling again, like a leaf in a windstorm, but John had been around long enough to know rage from pain.
I'm not sorry.
"I know."
More words, long minutes later, following a silence that spoke of slow, painful recollection. John wondered sometimes whether his own heart was crushed beneath the ruined remains of that mind palace.
We saved people, once.
"Yes."
John looked at him steadily. We did.
"Is that why you hate yourself?" John asked one day. "For changing?"
Khan was silent. He was Khan today, John thought.
"It wasn't you…"
Stop.
"They Augmented us. We knew that. They needed us."
They needed you.
"It wasn't your fault, Sherlock," John whispered.
It had been their job to smooth out the imperfections. To heal injuries and inject cell growth serum and add steel to muscle and sharpen intellect. Make such adjustments as necessary. In certain circumstances, make additions to what was lacking.
They had made him different, and Sherlock would never forgive it.
It wasn't your fault, Sherlock. It was theirs. They couldn't see what you hid. They didn't know you cared already. They didn't know what adding to that would do, couldn't hear it like a violin's bow scraping across a raw nerve…
Sometimes John left. John left and the silence was worse than it had been before.
How he hated the silence.
And then John came back and he made that better too.
One day John came back holding the impossible in his hands. Khan was Sherlock that day, lethargic on the sofa. They had ceased to take blood from him shortly after John's arrival, but the memories John had brought with him were every bit as good a soporific. Or paralytic.
Love was the most vicious of motivators, it was true, but John was here now. There was still the rest of the crew. But they were in the hands of people the world called good, in no immediate danger, and to wake them would be to inflict pain on them as well. Make them aware of their shameful imprisonment.
That was what Khan told himself.
In truth, allowing the crew to worm their way into his mind would initiate another holocaust, and John would be tugged along as inexorably as he always was, by Sherlock. That was the one massive character flaw that after all these centuries he had not shed: John would still kill for Sherlock Holmes.
No. Not him.
The name had, with John's help, slithered its way past his evasions, even raised the suggestion of being part of him. Which was not true. Not remotely.
So when Khan saw the impossible object in John Harrison's hands he merely snarled and turned away.
John hadn't been there the first time Khan had killed. In his more deluded moments, when he dreamed that things could be the same, he wondered if that meant something.
Until then, the Project had been a complete success. The Augments were the superheroes the world had always dreamed of, the unqualified saviors of humanity, and Sherlock, the first and best of them. That desperate times called for desperate measures was an axiom so well believed by the government of the then-United-Kingdom that when they—he—was forced to send a single man into war against an undercover army spread across the continent, he sent him prepared well beyond the limits of the law.
After it was all over—after ring after ring of underground crime had fallen to the new god of justice, code-named Khan, after the need for secrecy had been dropped and the name spread like wildfire across the planet and its owner lionized beyond the point of mere mortality and John Watson disabused of his grief—after all that, John had followed him. Even then, he'd had misgivings. But it took years to realize that the man he had once believed dead was closer to that state than anyone had supposed.
In the end, three hundred years were no better than two in convincing John that his best friend wasn't coming back. Such things take moments, not centuries.
It was just too easy to believe in something else. To pretend that the broad, muscular shoulders were once again slim and boyish, that the dark hair still curled and fell about the ears, that the emotion in the piercing silver eyes was muddled and uncertain.
In reality, it burned John just to look into them.
He had encouraged that fire, once, in a time beyond memory. He had been as dull and brainless as Sherlock Holmes had accused, to insist on seeing what lay beneath that exterior (as though man were something other than what he chooses for himself). He had been as selfish, callous and uncaring as he had in turn accused Sherlock of being. John had gotten his wish in the way that the Project doctors had gotten theirs. Backward. The shell had been a defense; now, shattered, it was a weapon.
A man without a shield on his arm has no choice but to take up the offensive. Khan Noonien Singh was the raw nerve the world played upon.
This thought came to John so clearly one day that he knew, beyond a doubt, that it was not his own. That it was seeping into his mind through some other medium. That Khan, within the grey space they shared, was sharing something else for the first and last time.
All it took was stopping to listen.
Sherlock the sociopath, in morphing into Khan the empath, had left a single bridge unburned between them. The one John had been desperately scrabbling for all this time, without really knowing what form it might take. But when he heard it, he knew.
Five miles away in a rebuilt Starfleet office, the others heard it too.
It was the kiss of bow against strings, the voice of an ancient Stradivarius preserved for the past three centuries in a bank vault already brim-full of brother's guilt. That had not soured the pitch, but sweetened it, for the song was pain, and the man playing it had forgotten every other language; they had run like water out of his mind. The brain from which the notes flowed had been frozen and thawed so many times that the effort to redeem it left any who tried trapped in its endless mire. John listened as the wavering notes formed a language he had never understood until now, and felt his head sink beneath the water table.
The bow drew untrembling across the last note, and whatever had been left inside of John evaporated as his best friend's body crumpled to the carpet.
Miles away, the captain and the Vulcan were witnesses to it: the last breath of John Harrison, marbled and embedded in the Dirge of Khan.
A/N: I was hunting through old fanfictions and found this half-finished piece I had written after watching Star Trek: Into Darkness. I finished it and this is the result. Please note that I am no true Trekkie; I did not watch television growing up and don't know the first thing about Star Trek, which is probably evident in this piece. BC's acting was as masterful as ever and this is first and foremost a tribute to that.