The sky was never truly blue on Ceti Alpha V. It became an inky shade of ultramarine at night and several variations of leaden when it rained. But on the clearest of days its normal ashen color gleamed silver. But never blue. She was lying in Khan's arms on the thick moss covering the banks of the river by their house. The afterglow of their late afternoon tryst was for rapidly fading into melancholia. The spell of oblivion sensation cast had begun to thin almost instantly chased away by guilt and shame.
She had been sleeping with Khan for almost two months now and nothing in their interaction had otherwise changed. The distance she kept from her in front of others on the starbase, she understood. Though, when there was no chance of anyone seeing, he did occasionally pull her into empty storage compartments silencing her surprise with intimate, carnal kisses. But when they weren't having sex, neither made any attempts to spend any time with each other. At first, she had been relieved, since she thought it spared them both a lot of.
Then it dawned on her that the source of her relief was her not wanting anything to do with him outside the bed. It wasn't the she despised him. In fact, there were quite a few things she like about him: his brilliance, his single-minded determination and his loyalty to his people. She didn't even blame him for her situation. From a pragmatical point of view, his interest in having her as a sort of glorified hostage made sense. She didn't even fault her father and Starfleet Command entirely. After all, despite her resentment at how quick they had been to give her up, she had realized that they desperately needed someone like him in the war against the Klingons and had reluctantly agreed to marry him.
It had become obvious only of late, but she was doing exactly the same thing her former superiors in Starfleet. While they were exploiting Khan's savagery for weapon design, she was using his body to forget. She had tried telling herself that it wasn't as if he weren't getting anything out of it, but the self-loathing would not abate. She had even attempted to rationalize it as Stockholm syndrome. But she had not been abused in any way by him. He hadn't even raised his voice at her. Not even at the starbase, where she had no standing and from where he could kick her out on a whim, considering that she was no longer Starfleet. On the contrary, not counting the slightly mocking tone of their early interactions, which he had discarded long before the start of their physical relationship, he was generally even more polite to her than the Section 31 agents.
"Do you ever miss it?" she found herself asking, not raising her head from where it was pillowed on his chest. "Earth," she added softly.
"Your Earth has long since stopped being the Earth that I knew and nobody, not even me and my people, misses that one," he answered, his voice a low-baritone rumble.
"So you're happy here?"
"Happy?" he snorted, as if the word was poison in his mouth. "I have had everything and lost it all. My crew is my family, my only home. I would do anything to keep them safe."
Carol shuddered and his arms tightened around her, as he was probably thinking she was cold. She did feel chilled. "Are you warning me that you'd sacrifice me for them, should it come down it?" The question was rhetorical, since she had guessed as much, but still the knowledge was oddly saddening. As if she meant nothing to him. Why should she care? After all, he meant nothing to her.
"I had not intended to disrupt your life, Carol. Nor do I want you to come to any harm now." That was in no way a denial. She lifted her head to look at him as he spoke. His face was turned away from her, his eyes staring into the flowing waters of the river. His voice sounded as if coming from far away, even as their bodies were entwined together. "Men like your father believe not only that their cause is absolutely right and just but also that they are the only ones who know how to fight for it. I needed to find out how far he will go for his dream of a militarized Starfleet."
Carol's mouth went dry. "You were testing him," he choked out. "It wasn't all about getting me as a hostage."
He turned his head to look at her. There were spatters of gold around his pupils, which only made his usually inquisitive gaze even more penetrating. "If you don't believe me, you should know that by that time I was aware of enough of contemporary technology to record some of the most compromising conversations with your father."
"I believe you," she said, voice tremolos. She had no reason not, but that didn't dim the hollow feeling in her chest. It seemed there was no ending to how much her father could disappoint her. She slipped out of his embrace and started pulling on her clothes strewn on the moss. She heard a rustling behind her, as he was most likely doing the same.
"I want to listen to those recordings," she said. She wanted to know not just the full extent of her father's betrayal of her, but most of all, the depth of his disregard for the norms and rules that held their world together. She used to believe so strongly in the founding principles of the Federation and thought it worked exactly because people like her and her father shared that conviction not just paid lip service to it. "Please," she added, when he didn't respond.
He was on his feet in an instant, coat draped over an arm, and towering over her. "Alright," he agreed. He held out his hand to her and she allowed him to pull her up. Their eyes met for a few seconds and she saw compassion in his.
It was a new low for her, being pitied by this man. It was fairly obvious that he found mere human pathetic, taking pride in his physical strength and plethora of enhanced abilities, and that he disdained Starfleet, deigning its ideals a fraud and its members hypocrites. Despite everything, it had never occurred to Carol that at least on the last account he was partially correct. Throughout her undeserved exile she had held her head high, secure in the knowledge that this deal Starfleet had made with Khan, albeit downright illegal, remained essentially a fluke brought on by the desperation of war. But above all, she believed that her sacrifice was not an empty one and that her life and career warranted the preservation of the actual version of paradise the Federation represented. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but as she walked to the house at Khan's side, she had a feeling that the content of his recordings would destroy what was left of believes.
# # #
Carol had psyched herself to hear her father talk of her as if she were asset he was willing to barter, but nothing could have ever prepared her for the full devastating truth. As it turned out, Kirk had instantly notified Starfleet of Enterprise's discovery of the Botany Bay, inadvertently giving her father the opportunity to intercept their initial transport to this planet and kidnap the Augments, who, despite their strength, could not match the forces Admiral Marcus had at his disposal. After that, it had been easy to separate them and use the devotion these people had to each other to control them. And most importantly, to blackmail Khan into cooperation, even when that involved medical experiments bordering on torture being performed on him.
Knowing Kirk's reputation, she wondered if he had not begun to suspect something on his own and leaked his final report on the Botany Bay himself, forcing her father to cover up his wrong doings by negotiating with Khan. There was also the equally disturbing issue that it was virtually impossible for Starfleet Command not to either have had some idea of what was going on or even if they didn't know, they had been willing to sweep the horrendous infringement of every rule they had been sworn to uphold under the rug in their haste to get a deal on new and better weaponry.
Worst of all was the thought that the mistreatment of Khan and his crew could have continued indefinitely. Bile rose into her throat, but she forced down the nausea, as her eyes sought Khan, who was staring outside his home study window, a frown marring his profile. His back was ramrod straight and his fists at his sides clenched so hard, his knuckles had become chalky. Her revulsion switched gears and turned onto herself, as she realized she was making him listen to a play-by-play of a traumatic experience.
"Computer," she called out, her voice wavering. She still felt like throwing up. "Pause the recording."
Silence returned, but he didn't budge from his position at the window. She leaned back in the chair at his desk, her mind whirling. It all felt surreal, more so than the events of the past year. "I am sorry," she finally said. "I didn't know... I am truly sorry."
He slowly turned to face her, his expression mildly contemptuous. "If you didn't know, then why are you apologizing?"
"Because what my father did is monstrous and I'm ashamed to be his daughter."
"No," he said, shaking his head, voice barely above a purr but still precise in its cutting impact. "What you feel is not shame. It's disillusionment." He sneered and took a few steps into the room. "In both your families. Starfleet and the father, for whom you were never good enough for. You tried so hard to earn their approval. You gave them your undying loyalty. You worked tirelessly to graduate early from the Academy and then you got a doctorate in applied physics with a specialty seemingly guaranteed to endear you forever to their hearts. Yet it was not enough. They still discarded you without a second thought."
A lone tear streamed down her left cheek. "Listen, I know you hate my father and Starfleet and I can certainly understand why, but can't you see how hard this is for me too? How can you be so cruel?"
"Cruel?" he spat, his voice saturated with venom. "You accuse me of being cruel, Carol Marcus." He pronounced her name like an insult, as he quickly covered the last few paces to the desk where she sat and drew her up by her left wrist.
"I told you, I didn't know," she defended herself but did not resist his touch.
He smirked and pulled her against his body. "But you knew what you were doing when you crawled into my bed for a few hours of pleasure to make you forget of your loved ones' abandonment, didn't you?"
Carol felt as if he had slapped her and tried to pull away, only to have his grip turn into a vice. He leaned so close that their breaths mingled. "No," she said harshly.
He let go of her instantly, but the malicious smirk didn't leave his lips, making his eyes twinkle with an unnamed emotion that only unsettled her further. She had no way of physically resisting him. She doubted armed Klingons did.
"No, no not unless it's on your terms," he said in a deceptively casual tone. "You will come back, though. You have nowhere else to go."
Her stomach sank, as she began to piece together the other horrible truth about to be revealed to her. "You planned this," she whispered, terror making her hands clammy, as the words spilled seemingly out of their own volition. "From the beginning... you made sure the Augments shunned me, you isolated me, until I became lonely enough to come to you on my own."
He reached to stroke her cheek but she flinched away. His expression was almost thoughtful yet still carried hints of a viciousness she had yet to see in him. "To be frank, isolating you was not hard. My friends would have stayed away from you simply because of what your father did to us. I also did no incur the starbase personnel's prejudice against you. As for the rest, all I had to do was wait." His eyes, blue as the Earthen sky in this light, bore into her. "I could break every bone in your body on your first day here, but I needed you alive so I would eventually have to reset them before infection set in. But the break in your spirit is permanent."
Carol felt as if the floor had been violently pulled from under her feet. She stepped back, desperately gulping on air that did not quite seemed to reach her starved lungs. "Stay away from me," she rasped. She needed to leave and get into a shower to scrub at her skin until it bled. Maybe this way she would erase his touch from her body.
He gestured to the door with an arched brow, as if to indicate that he was in no way holding her. Finding her feet and not caring if it looked cowardly, she fled.
TBC
