Chapter 10: Bonding

Molly watched Khan on a vid screen, safe in a cloud of starfleet admirals and officials. He stood perfectly still, spine straight, legs apart, fingers curled. She was sitting in a dreary, overly air-conditioned conference room on the mars starbase. Authoritative voices filled the air around her, like so many bees. One voice carried above the rest.

"Don't be barbaric, Commander Th'Sheena, Khan is too valuable to execute. Admiral Marcus didn't handle him properly."

Molly burst out laughing, seeing for a moment the way Khan must have seen them. "He's manipulating you. You know that right. That is exactly what he wants. There isn't a prison or planet that could contain him, not without me. He will rip the galaxy to shreds to find me. He know's that I am not weak, so he is counting on you to fail." Every eye was on her, admirals and princes still as they all realized that she is the most powerful person in the room. "You think that he seems calm and civilized? It is because he knows I am here, my scent is reaching him on the currents of re-circulated air. If you cannot kill him, then put him back in his cryotube to sleep until someone stronger can."

"What ever Khan may deserve," Captain Kirk's voice rose above the din, his eyes meeting hers with unbearable sympathy. "He's entitled to a fair trial."

Molly leaves the conference room then, sick to her stomach- the life inside her restless.

Leonard must have told him. Molly stalked down the hall aimlessly, furious at the breach in privacy. She'd been subjected to medical tests after her rescue, the med bay crew prepared for the worst and surprised to find her in perfect glowing health. The first tricorder exam had revealed the pregnancy, as Molly knew it would.

"No one can know, Leonard." She'd said grabbing his forearm.

"They'll think it's his." She'd wanted to say, the prepared words straining to get out. She couldn't, not to Leonard. McCoy looked at her, his face wiped clean of his usual irritated impatience. "Molly, do you want to be pregnant?"

"I wasn't-it wasn't-" She stopped turning away and closing her eyes against the truth, her tears dripping past her jaw and sliding down her neck. "Yes." The word escaped on an exhale, McCoy's hand warm on the skin of her shoulder over the thin straps of her white night gown.

She did love Khan, in whatever way a captive can love a captor - an omega love an alpha. She wanted this child

She remembered one night, wakened by the cold beginning to permeate their bedroom, when she'd found him on the balcony over looking Kabul, soft rain just beginning to dampen his dark hair. Seated on one of the stone benches, he'd been whispering something she couldn't make out at first. As she approached the soft murmurs sharpened into paused in the doorway, sheltered from the cold drops.

"...Phoolan Dasall, Joaquin Weiss, Suzette Ling, Armando Rodriguez, Otto Kelly, Liam MacPherson, Geir Jonsson, Vishwa Patil, Harulf Ericsson, Zuleika Walker, Gideon Hawkins, Dmitri Blasko, Parvati Rao, Daniel Katzel, Amy Katzel, Nadia Gorinksy, Eric Lutjen, Paul Austin, Karyn Bradley, Keith Talbot, Saraj Panjabi, Ali Rahman, Kamala Devi, Hans Steiber, Marcel Dumas, Juliette Savine, Debra VonLinder, Shirin Azar, Vijay Nikore, Yolanda Aponte-"

He paused in his litany, his breathe caught in his throat, unable to move on. She'd felt his sorrow like a bone in her throat- she couldn't draw breath around the weight of his anguish. She drifted forward, not aware of what she'd done until a cold drop hit her face. In that moment she knew, whether it was because of whatever chemicals had drawn them together, or just that when she laid his goodness next to his savagery it created a wild landscape she couldn't wait to explore. She loved him. It was an immutable fact. Molly laid her hand on Khan's should, sliding along the slope until her hand rested on the opposite corner of his jaw. He leaned his head into her soft, still flat stomach, releasing the last names on his list with a sigh.

"Eleana Noonien Singh, Tomas Noonien Singh, Malik Noonien Singh."

The plan had begun as a remembered dream, a thousand fleas swarming her skin. The solution occurred to her as Khan traced his fingers over the shiny oval where his teeth had broken her skin. It had taken two hours after he'd administered his blood for the jagged bite to close. Even with dermal-plasts it would take atleast a day for such a deep wound to heal.

There was still a full sample vial of Khan's blood in Leonard's desk on the Enterprise.

Every time Khan left to replenish supplies, Molly would spend hours bombarding any StarFleet comm should could access. A five second message that would play automatically and then delete itself from both systems. "Cure for Niburian parasites is on the Enterprise in the chief medical officer's desk." It was days before she got a reply. A news story about the remarkable recovery of a StarFleet Medical Officer and new powerful cure for some off the deadliest off-planet diseases, "This new treatment could save thousands of StarFleet Officers." The news anchor chirped. And so it went, Molly sending messages and StarFleet trying to find and decode them.

Molly had been in the market when she'd heard the last broadcast, rifling through a basket of greens. "And residents of Mars Starbase can look forward to the Perseid meteor shower tonight at 01:15. It promises to be quite a show. Now back to Tom with the headlines."

When the officers crept into the apartment using the security codes she'd sent in her last message, Molly fought a sudden and intense desire to rouse Khan, freezing in his arms, terrified of betraying herself.

The remembered minutes swam past in a blur, Khan shouting her name a knife on her skin. She arrived at her quarters drained, the strain of bad memories and early pregnancy pulling at her joints. She hadn't been able to sleep since those few hours before Kirk and his team had arrived to rescue her. I may never sleep again. She flopped on the bed only to fall into fitful dream-filled sleep. She woke a few hours later still exhausted, but full of restless energy. Pulling a robe over the loose grey tank top and blue wide leg pants she'd worn to bed, Molly walked laps around her tiny quarters. Frustrated, she moved into the corridor, lights dimmed for gamma shift.

Molly's pacing brought her to the hallway outside Khan's cell, the hum of the force field ringing in her ears. She stopped in the corridor for a long moment before deciding to go in, quickly flashing her StarFleet credentials at the guard and dismissing the ensign assigned to Khan's cell.

"You do not look well, Little one." Khan said from the cot in his cell, looking Molly in the eye.

"It seems I can no longer sleep without you." Khan's icey blank face shifted briefly before settling back into hardness.

"Why, Molly." He whispered, the buzz of the force field between them almost drowning out his words.

Anger overwhelmed her, all of the frustration and futile resistance building into a tidal wave of rage, "Because you are a monster! You have killed hundreds of innocent people, Khan! You deserve this cell. You deserve-" Molly's voice cracked, the tide of her emotions turning.

"Why did you have to be like this?" She asked Khan, falling to her knees, too exhausted to stay upright, tears clotting her eye lashes. "I didn't do anything Khan, why do I deserve this."

Molly looked up, the silence settling over them like snow. Khan's face was completely covered by his hands, as if unable to face everything his selfish ambition had cost him.

"There is going to be a trial, Khan." Molly said her voice calm again.

Khan laughed lightly, his hands sliding to his thighs, "Of course."

"They want to imprison you again." Khan freezes, but waits for her to continue. Molly struggled to find words to explain what she needed from him. Finally she walked over to control station accessing the port used to pass food through the force field. She opened the portal, allowing her unmuted scent to carry into the cell-the wave of methylene chloride moving over her in a rush.

Khan's eyes widen, registering the nascent threads of cardamon beneath talc and wet pavement. Khan surged out of the cot, powerful legs bringing him to the portal in two strides. He reached through and gently clasped her wrist. Khan's teary smile, matched her own.

"Did anyone tell you about -" Molly asked, the names of his seventy-two crew members lilting through her mind.

"Yes." Khan interrupts clasping her wrist tighter. "You will never see me again, Molly." He stated the fact like an entreaty, asking her one more time to change her mind.

"That shall be my punishment then-to live everyday without you." Molly replied, slipping her wrist from his grasp.

She made her way back to her quarters, feeling calm. She fell asleep immediately, settling her wrist next to her face. She doesn't wake until after noon the day, the chime of the automatic door swishing open pulling her out of sleep.

"Molly? What are you-" McCoy asked, holding a plastic package in his hand.

"Leonard?" Molly replied blurrily from her bed.

"I brought something to help you sleep. I'll just leave it here." McCoy said, clearly embarrassed about waking her.

"Thank you." She said getting out bed to take the package from him. McCoy left as she opened the clear plastic bag. Inside was a black standard issue StarFleet turtle neck, the weave rough against her skin. The scents of sand, soap and methylene chloride rose to meet her nose.

There's a board inquiry and a formal trial, Molly is charged with aiding and abetting. Kirk testifies in her defense, telling how Khan hadn't even known her name before being abducted. It's her own testimony that seems to convince them, as she lets her own anger chime through.

They leave her the combination-four numbers: 8164-believing for some reason that it would be safe with her. She knows one day she will use it, the pressure of the empty bond finally driving her mad.

The child comes early, lending credence to her claim that she'd become pregnant weeks before she'd even met Khan-She didn't know at the time, a flu had been going around campus and she'd chalked her symptoms up to that-ship logs confirming Lieutenant Vlahovic's scan.

Molly welcomed Edmund John Hooper into the world on a rainy Tuesday. On his birth certificate she entered the name of a name no one had ever met, Erik Kelly.

She didn't tell, and nobody asked.