Jim Kirk had always been fascinated by space, but he had not always loved it. In fact, for most of his childhood, he'd viewed it with suspicion and sullen resentment, that vast, dark abyss that had stolen his father. And his mother, too, truth be told, gone as she often was to some remote outpost on the edge of the galaxy. Back then, long before the last traces of his father had fully emerged from the baby fat of his toddler's face, he'd sat on the back step with Uncle Frank's furious, slurred voice ringing in his ears and the slow, simmering burn of his discipline on his back and gazed up at the stars with a single thought inside his head.
Give me back my Daddy.
It was a child's thought, of course, wish and make-believe. His father was gone, vaporized in the explosion of the U.S.S Kelvin and memorialized in holographs in his mother's bedroom and in the living room, where he gazed blindly down at them with a beatific, cocksure smile that he had passed on to his son. He'd known that it was so, and yet he'd wished for it all the same, had closed his eyes and sent the thought heavenward with all his might because his mother had told him that stars were magical, angel's breath and God's laughter, and in all the stories he had ever read, magic made miracles.
But wish he may and wish he might, his father had never descended from heaven wreathed in the cosmic fire of a falling star. He came no nearer than the handful of holographs that had escaped Uncle Frank's jealous midnight purges of everything George Kirk and the bathroom mirror into which Jim looked every morning as he brushed his teeth, pasty spittle foaming in the corners of his mouth. He had his eyes, or so his mother and the pictures said, and his smile. Sometimes he'd stood on the small stepstool in front of the sink, bare toes hanging off the smooth, wooden edge, and stared into the mirror until his eyes burned and his vision blurred, looking for his father in his own chubby face. Sometimes he'd reached out and touched the mirror with a foam-slick finger and willed its pudgy, pink tip to pass through its bleary silver surface. His father would be on the other side, he was sure, solid as the wood beneath his feet, and when his boy's groping fingers settled on the fabric of his shirt and pulled, he would come tumbling into the bathroom in a tangle of limbs, grinning as he came. He would be strong and broad and grand, a bigger hero than Captain Archer, the first-ever starship captain.
There would be no need for introduction because his father would know, would see the legacy he'd left in his face. He would scoop him into arms strong as steel and warm as a winter hearth, and he would laugh and ruffle his hair the way his mother did when she saw the neat row of As on his report card, and then they would go downstairs hand-in-hand and banish the demon known as Frank from the house. The great George Kirk would seize the bastard by the scruff of the neck and the sagging seat of his pants and toss him out like yesterday's garbage, and then they would all live happily ever after, just one big, happy family in the cozy A-frame house in Iowa, flourishing right along with the corn that grew head-high in the summer.
But miracles, it seemed, were not for him. His father never fell from heaven in a flash of heralding fire, and the mirror remained stubbornly solid beneath his prodding finger, and every morning when he descended the stairs with toothpaste residue clinging to his teeth as tenaciously as the plaque he had just displaced, Frank had been waiting for him, hunkered over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and glowering at him with bloodshot eyes, a troll peering from beneath its bridge. On the good days, his mother was there, pale and strained and filling the silence with the twitter of false, desperate cheer as she dished out frozen pancakes. On the bad days, her chair was empty and the stove was cold, and there was only Frank and the cutting blade of his tongue and a box of stale corn flakes sitting in the middle of the table. On those days, he went hungry, and the tastes of blood and spearmint mingled in his mouth.
By the time he was eleven, the stars were still beautiful, but they had been stripped of their magic by sneering bullies who slapped his padd from his hands, and by the perpetual downturn of his mother's mouth and the streaks of grey at her temples, dusted over her blonde hair like ash. Stars, declared the balding teacher who stood in front of his class every day in a rumpled, white shirt and crooked tie, were so much gas, cosmic flatulence suspended in the dark.
Angel's breath, he'd tried to tell himself as he sat at his desk, idly swinging his legs and kicking the one in front of them, but the angels had been as threadbare and lackluster as the stars, and the thought had brought him no comfort.
By thirteen, the stars had seemed as remote as the sea. Uncle Frank had been deep into his cups, and his temper had grown more vicious, his punishments more arbitrary. His tongue had been a serrated blade, and his work-roughened hands had left welts and bruises wherever they could reach. His mother, tired of Frank's rages, took refuge in her work and left him to fend for himself beneath his father's translucent, three-dimensional gaze.
He'd hated his father then, resented him for saving him from the clutches of a madman only to deliver him into those of a tyrant. Perhaps if he'd died in the blinding flash of a photon array, his existence but a single shrill squall in the heart of a med shuttle, he would have found his father again among the stars and passed the unending eons as stardust and comet's fire. Perhaps his mother, too, would've returned to him, her fire and beauty forever preserved as they danced through the firmament. Instead, he'd grown into a boy too small for his age who carried too many bruises on his skin and too many expectations on his gangly shoulders, and his mother had become a ghost inside her own skin, pallid and silent and hunched against shouts and blows yet to come, and forever grieving a life that should have been.
So he'd rebelled the only way he could, determined to leave his mark on a world bent on marking him. He'd ignored the studies that so secretly enthralled him and let the grades of which his mother had been so proud plummet. His mouth had forgotten the sweet music of Yes, ma'am and No, ma'am and Please and Thank you and replaced them with the discordant, snarling hiss of Fuck you and Kiss my ass. There'd been no room for knowledge behind his teeth when his tongue had been swollen with smartass remarks and witty comebacks to the assholes who had once tormented him with sneering impunity. Fingers that had once cradled padds and the spine of the occasional antique book rummaged from the dust and gloom of a thrift store curled and hardened into fists, and timid forebearance gave way to the savage self-preservation of a cornered animal. Uncle Frank hadn't given him much, the worthless, sadistic sot, but he had taught him how to fight, how to endure pain and inflict it in kind, and he'd taken a grim, ugly satisfaction in augmenting the welts Frank gave him with those justly earned in a schoolyard brawl. Commendations and praise had been supplanted by trips to the infirmary and the principal's office.
So disappointing, she would tut, and rub her hands together with the papery hiss of riffled pages. You had such potential, James. Such potential. And then she would enter another black mark on his record with another rueful shake of her head and call his mother to inform him of his latest misdeed.
It was a lamentation echoed by his teachers, who had clustered in the staffroom like ruffled grackles and wondered what happened to their former golden child, who, they were sure, had been destined for greatness.
It just goes to show that you never can tell, they clucked morosely as they thumbed through their padds. If you'd've asked me a year ago, I'd've said he was a sure bet for valedictorian someday. Now, he'll be lucky not to end up on some juvie penal planet by sixteen.
Penal planet? Kid'll be lucky not to end up dead.
Poor Winona. And after she lost George, too. Such a tragedy that was. And then they scrolled to the next page and washed their pronouncements down with slow slurps of thick and bitter coffee.
Poor Winona. It was a refrain echoed often throughout those years by the townsfolk. By the shopkeepers who declined to press charges against him in deference to her yellowing grief, and by the disapproving police officers when they did. Poor Winona Kirk, they'd say as he sat inside a holding cell with a fat lip and scuffed knuckles and a rapidly-swelling eye that afforded him a filmy, red view of the world. Lost a good man up there and got saddled with a good-for-nothing kid like this. And like the principal before them, they shook their heads and entered another black mark on his growing record.
His mother had loved him fiercely, but she hadn't understood. How could she when she was lost in her unfinished world of life with his father and buried in the mind-numbing busywork that kept her out of Frank's intemperate reach?
Oh, Jimmy, she'd sighed as she'd picked him up on the day he'd sent that old T-bird over the cliff. She'd slumped in the driver's seat of her old station wagon, wilted as the corn in the dry, summer heat. Why are you doing this, honey?
He'd shrugged, arms crossed as he'd slouched in the passenger seat, the old vinyl of the seat burning his ass through the worn fabric of his jeans and road dust turning to grime as it mingled with the sweat that beaded on his neck.
Don' know, he'd mumbled, gaze distant and fixed on the glove compartment. It was his standard answer for most such questions in those days. It was also a lie. He had known; he had simply lacked the energy or inclination to explain when he'd known it would make no difference.
His mother had reached out to cup his cheek. This isn't what your dad would've wanted for you.
Yeah, well, he's not here, is he? he'd spat before he could think better of it, and for a moment, the vinyl seat had become a hard, wooden riser beneath his ass.
That particular nugget of wiseass had earned him his one and only slap from his mother, and its lingering sting had hurt more than any of Frank's blows and burned its way into his bones. He'd blinked at her, eyes wide and shocked.
That's enough, James Tiberius, she'd hissed, and her eyes had blazed with a fire he hadn't seen in years, surprise and righteous fury.
It's true, he'd persisted stubbornly.
STOP! his mother had roared, a lioness who had momentarily rediscovered her voice, and she'd slapped the faded steering wheel hard enough to send the vibrations into the steering column. Jesus Christ, Jim, I've-I've had enough. That's enough for one day. She'd covered her trembling mouth with her hand, and tears had welled in her eyes.
An apology had blossomed on the tip of his tongue, but he'd let it wither as quickly as it had come. He had been sorry, ashamed and heartsick at stirring his mother's pain, but he'd also been tired of tiptoeing around the unpleasant truth and being beholden to the memory of a man who'd given him nothing but a name and a fighting chance and a few scraps of DNA. So he'd pressed his lips together to keep his impotent fury to himself and waited for the other shoe to drop.
His mother had straightened and run her fingers through her frazzled hair, and then she'd started the car and thrown it into gear. I don't want to hear any more about this, she'd said dully as the police station had begun to recede in the rearview mirror. When we get home, you're going to apologize to Frank, and then you're going to do whatever he tells you.
But Mom-
Please, Jim, don't make this harder than it has to be, she'd said dully, and hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the drive.
Apologizing to Frank had been a moot point, as it turned out. The destruction of his favorite pet project had been the last straw, and after a final knockdown-dragout affair in a living room illuminated only by a single, yellow bulb and the cold, blue glow of his father's eternally-smiling holograph, Uncle Frank had hit the bricks as hard as he'd once hit him. His mother had spent the night slumped over photo albums of her life Before. Before Jim and before Frank and before the tedious grind of an existence with her feet tethered firmly to the earth. He'd spent the night in his room, guiltily glad that he'd seen the last of roaring, clubbing, venomous Uncle Frank.
Not that it had made much difference in the end. He'd simply been replaced with another, and another, none as cruel as Frank but most indifferent to the child of a ghost, and he'd been left to fend for himself, a child of none despite the quiet, drawn mother who absently ruffled his hair in the mornings as he'd left the house on his way to nowhere in particular.
And then had come that ill-advised bar brawl in that no-name dive, when his attitude had promised more than his skills could deliver. Sometimes when he beamed down to some barren asteroid in the vast, cold reaches of the galaxy with nothing but a phaser clapped to his hip and Bones' doomsday voice in his ear, he still remembered the dusty, pencil-shaving stink of the sawdust on the floor and the coppery tang of blood in his mouth as he'd sat in a chair with toilet paper jammed into his nostrils and a grimly-paternal Captain Pike breathing down his neck.
I dare you to do better, he'd challenged quietly. There'd been no mockery in it, no subtle sneer, no malignant twinkle in his eye that spoke of failure preordained. It had been the truth, hard but fair, and in it, he'd thought he heard a distant echo of his father, pride and cautious hope.
It wasn't until the Academy that the stars had regained their magic for him. He hadn't looked at them in years, focused as he'd been on the blood in his eyes and the dirt in his mouth, but as the lights had dimmed in the planetarium on his first day of Exogalactic astronomy, and the artificial darkness had spontaneously birthed a hundred constellations above his head, the breath had caught in his throat. For a moment, he'd been sure he could taste the stardust on his tongue, cornstarch and leaded silver.
Wish I may, wish I might, he'd thought nonsensically as his heart had pounded inside his chest and the professor had launched into his inaugural lecture, and he'd quashed the absurd impulse to reach up and plunge awestruck fingers into that flawless, glacial beauty.
They're wrong, he'd thought with dreamy certitude as he'd gaped at the glittering tapestry above him. They're not just gas and dust. They're angels' breath, just like my mother said.
Nebulae and quasars and the absent light of black holes that devoured like voracious mouths. Comets and planetoids and meteorites so vast they could blot out the Terran sun. Red dwarfs and white giants, birth and death and power so so incalculable that it threatened to warp the mind if contemplated too deeply. One look, and he'd been lost, enthralled by the splendor and immortal fragility of space. A place for everything, and everything in its place, or so the old saying went, and he supposed that was so even in space, and yet, the cosmos had a way of reshaping itself when the old places and orders no longer suited. It was eternal but not immutable, and as he'd gazed up at a constellation his eyes had never seen, he'd understood why his parents had chosen to ride the stars. From that first glorious glimpse, he'd been determined to explore its infinite possibilities and revel in its limitless hopes.
The promise of the stars had done what all the teacherly tutting and clucking and maternal despair could not and spurred him to excel. He'd reclaimed the discipline he'd cast aside to make room for his seething fury and studied in his dorm and in the library until his eyes had watered and his back had cramped so often and so fiercely that Bones had huffed and blustered and issued dire, grumbling predictions of developing scoliosis or a permanent hump.
Dammit, Jim, he'd grouse as he stumped into his dorm room with bags under his eyes and three padds tucked under his arm. Human beings weren't meant to sit so damn long. Get off your ass and take a damn walk before you get a clot. Good luck getting on a starship if you've had a damn stroke. He'd hover and hector until he surrendered and staggered to his feet to shake the pins and needles from his legs, and then he'd force him to stretch his spine and take a few laps in the corridor.
You'll thank me when you're not in a back brace by thirty, Bones would grunt dispassionately as he'd hobbled up and down the hall, wincing and grimacing as he went.
Bones and his future posture might not have approved, but that relentless drive and application had paid dividends. Four years? I'll do it in three, he'd told Pike so brashly the day he'd boarded the shuttle bound for the Academy with nothing but a grimy duffel bag and his bomber jacket(a vow whose power he'd promptly undermined by banging his head on an interior bulkhead), and damned if he hadn't done it. Three years later, he'd gone from disgraced cadet to Starfleet captain when he'd relieved a beaming, wheelchair-bound Pike and assumed command of the Enterprise, his grand silver lady.
And she was grand. Scotty would have him believe that she was made of aluminum and Jeffries tubes and dilithium crystals, but he knew better, just as he knew the stars were born of angels' breath. Her bones might've been aluminum and crystal, but her soul was the stuff of stardust and comet's fire, brilliant and divine, and to stare at her for too long was to be forever blinded to anything else . She had embarked on her maiden voyage with gentle grace and had proven herself a warrior beneath her elegant exterior. She'd shuddered and cracked but never broken beneath Nero's furious assault, and she'd carried them home even though her heart had been torn from her chest, and when Admiral Marcus had tried to obliterate her with the concussive, crushing thunder of his monstrous cannons, she had emerged battered but victorious, a reflection of the crew who lived and thrived within her sheltering bosom.
His first glimpse of space, that venerated promised land, hadn't come on her decks; that had come through the window of a transport shuttle as Bones smuggled him into a Federation space dock. But it was where he felt most alive, where space was most vivid, so full of wonder and possibility. Sometimes the view from the observation deck stole his breath, and he could only watch the scintillating, silver pulse of a quasar as its light washed over the window and breathe a prayer of thanksgiving to his tireless, elegant lady for bearing him up where only angels trod. She was mother and father, home and blessed escape, and he was never safer than when he and his were nestled within her hull and dreaming and drifting among the stars.
Except it isn't so safe anymore, is it, Jimmy boy? Uncle Frank sneered, and he heard the truculent slosh of bourbon in the bottom of the bottle. It's been invaded by the bogeyman, sullied by the memory of Khan, that terrible monster in a cryotube. Logic and Starfleet brass tell you that he's gone, exiled to a distant planet, a dangerous relic from a bygone era safely put away. Nothing to be afraid of, they whisper as you make your morning rounds, greeting yeomen and young ensigns and popping into the galley to steal a doughnut or into sickbay to filch a cup of the good coffee from your pet doctor, but it's not much comfort when you know he's been there before. The dearly-departed Admiral Marcus told you so when he sent you on your blind fool's errand.
A weapon, he called him, a superhuman designed and bred long before the bombs began to fly and turn Earth into a toxic cinder. His first breath was taken in a lab, and everything he knew of the world was learned within its blank walls. He was a product of his time, a child of pipettes and petri dishes, molded by pointed heads and gloved hands. There was no love in him, no warmth, just cold analytical intelligence that your green-blooded sidekick could only envy and a ruthless, grasping intelligence that would stop at nothing to sustain itself. When they realized what they had created, the same hands that had made him tried to destroy him, and when that didn't work, they tried to contain him, to bury him beneath miles of concrete and steel and let him languish in an eternal sleep.
And sleep he did, until good old Admiral Marcus went looking for a war and found him instead. Starfleet is sure they've collared the beast, marooned him and his on a planet far from respectable civilization and thereby ensured that he will never darken humanity's door again, never remind them of their ancient sin, and on good days, when Scotty is singing in his jaunty brogue and Chekov is rewriting the history of the world in Mother Russia's cherished image and Carol Marcus is striding briskly through the corridors in her science blues, bright-eyed and focused and young as her years, you can believe it. Khan is long ago and faraway, a fever-dream easily banished by the light from an alien sun.
But then there are the bad days, the days Carol Marcus comes down the corridor with a hitch in her step, plagued by an ache not even McCoy's legendary hands can fix and haunted by the crunch of her old man's skull between Khan's pale, cold hands. Or the thud of his corpse as it hit the deck of his precious Dreadnaught. You don't ask, and she never tells. She just offers a listless smile that doesn't reach her eyes and plods on by, and you nod in wordless acknowledgment and wash down your guilt with a cup of gritty replicator coffee.
On the bad days, your pet doctor mutters under his breath and kneads at his temples and watches you over his padd and from the corners of his eyes. He just so happens to pop up wherever you happen to be more often than not, and if he has to, he dogs your steps and follows you into the turbolift and onto the bridge, where he hovers like a distempered grackle, brow furrowed and arms folded across his chest. He knows, you see, senses what lies behind the bluster and bravado. He knows you as well as you know yourself, knows you better, truth be told, and he knows just how full of shit you are when you insist that everything is fine, Bones, just fine. You'd flee from him if you could, turn from the penetrating scrutiny that makes you feel naked and exposed, an emperor stripped of his clothes, but that would just make him tighten his jaws and set his back, so you sit in the captain's chair that suddenly feels like so much sword and steel beneath your ass and grip the armrests as tightly as you dare and wonder just how much he sees. Too much, you suspect, and selfish prick that you are, you pray for a medical emergency to call him away and afford you a moment's respite from that terrible, knowing compassion.
Gone, the brass assure you so confidently, and swan about with padds in their hands and insignias on their chests and agendas and meeting times in their heads, but these same people also swear up, down, and sideways that they never knew what the esteemed Admiral Marcus was up to on that dark and lonely moon. They never saw the massive expenditures hidden in dozens of pork-barrel grants, never saw the huge price inflations for mundane objects or questioned the random, sudden reassignment of valued personnel to humdrum postings in the middle of nowhere. They never saw the perversion of their most cherished ethos or bothered to investigate the bustling hub of activity on a desolate Jovian space dock. Gone, they promise you, one eye on their padds and preoccupied minds already turned to thoughts of warm, happy children and willing wives and husbands. You say, Yes, sir, and salute because your leash is too short to do anything else, but in your mind's eye, you see gloved hands and bare walls and the crumbling bones of ancient scientists who had once thought the same thing.
Besides, you know better. Khan isn't gone. He's out there, fashioning a kingdom for himself on Ceti Alpha V, learning and building and thriving. And he's still here, on your beloved lady. He's in the turbolift, sandwiched by two security offers who would be so much brittle fodder for him if he truly chose to fight. He's in the decontamination shower, spitting water as he stands beneath the powerful spray. He's in the brig, sitting on the cot or standing at the Lexan partition with his arm thrust through the porthole. He's in the airlock, suited up and waiting to thread a needle through the chaos of a debris field. He's in sickbay, his blood collected in plastic vials and labeled in McCoy's cramped, painstaking hand and his body strapped into a cryotube for forcible sedation and transport. He's in the copy of Scotty's resignation that you keep in your padd and in the archived transmissions from the doctor to your bloodthirsty sidekick as he did his best to shatter superhuman bone beneath his pummeling fists.
And he's inside you, seething in your veins like some latent, malignant disease, put there by the man who calls himself your best friend.
He grimaced and chafed his wrist through the cuff of his uniform tunic. The flesh beneath prickled and burned as though the tainted blood had risen to the surface, one painful demon answering the call of another, and he resisted the urge to bend his head and suck the flesh between his teeth and gnaw until it tore. Instead, he shook his hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his uniform pants and stared out the observation window without seeing what lay beyond.
Intrusive thoughts? That could be a sign of psychiatric stress, Jim, his portable Bones said fretfully. You'd better come into sickbay, let me have a look at you.
But the only movement he made was to curl his hand into a fist, thin fabric of his pocket bunched in his fingers.
That's what kills you, isn't it? Uncle Frank jeered inside his head, and took another sloshing sip from his beloved bottle. That no matter how thoroughly you scrub and decontaminate your ship from stem to stern, it will never be truly clean again. You carry Khan with you wherever you go, waft him into the recycled air with every breath and leave a trace of him on everything you touch. He's a part of you now, embedded in the very marrow of your bones and steeped into every tissue. Khan is the stepfather you never wanted, and unlike your sainted old man, whose face you can't quite remember unless you see it for yourself in some old holograph, you'll never be able to scrub him from your mind.
Not that he hadn't tried. After the rehab and the official inquiries, he'd done his best to drive Khan out, consign him to the past as he had done with Nero and the dim specters of previous failures. He'd crammed his schedule with workouts and supplemental education courses and run until his legs had gone to rubber and he'd dry-heaved on the side of the road and Bones had come haring after him in his old Toyota, hands curled around the wheel in a white-knuckled grip and knitted brow heavy and dark with the promise of a lecture on pushing himself too hard too soon. He'd read until his eyes burned and the words lost shape upon the page and puddled like so much spattered ink upon the pages, and then he'd downed a pot of coffee and punched the body bag until his knuckles had blackened and swollen. The proof of his frailty had soothed him, slowed the painful pounding of his heart inside his chest. If he could bruise from a simple workout, then he was still him, still just Jim Kirk, corn-fed Iowa fuckup and accidental hero. If he could still bruise and bleed and hurt, then he was not Khan, was not the unintended seventy-fourth member of his warped little family.
You worry about that a great deal, don't you, Jimmy, my boy? It keeps you up at night, makes you wring the pillow with hands that seem a hair stronger than they were before, a hair stronger than they have any right to be, and walk the floor in the wee hours when the only sound is the subtle, lulling hum of the ship's engine in your ears and beneath your socked feet. Your pet doctor made light of it when you came to two weeks after your unexpected dirtnap in a San Francisco hospital with him looming over you like a delivering angel.
Tell me, are you feeling homicidal, power-mad, despotic? he grunted with a deadpan wit more biting than the teeth inside his mouth. Ha ha ha and so funny to a man so recently spat from the stingy gullet of eternity and surrounded by members of his own tattered family.
But it wasn't so funny later, when McCoy and his warm familiarity were gone and there was no stodgy Vulcan to distract you with his pained solicitousness. You were alone with the cheap sheets and the beep of the monitors and the click of the I.V. that delivered pain meds and mild sedatives at regular, numbing intervals, and those words echoed in your head. Not a joke now, but the sinister import of casual prophecy.
Tell me, are you feeling homicidal, power-mad, despotic? the good doctor asked in the seething stillness of the night, while nurses roamed the halls in crepe-soled shoes. No sly humor now, just a stony expression and a voice tinged with uneasy grief, as though he suspected an answer he didn't want to hear.
You wanted to tell him that you were fine as fine could be for someone who'd been lethally irradiated in a warp core, but you weren't sure just where the truth lay on that particular score, and for once, you were too afraid to lie. Lies had almost gotten your precious crew blown to Kingdom Come and given that lunatic Khan a reason for his contemptuous hatred of the Federation and all it stood for. Lies were dangerous, and you were terrified that this one could be the most dangerous of all.
You weren't lying when you told your pet doctor that you sensed no fury in your blood, no anger burning alongside the radiation beneath your skin, but when your drawling guardian angel was gone to his well-deserved rest, you lay there and wondered if it was only biding its time, quelled by the pain meds and sedatives. What would happen when they were gone and you had nothing but time in front of you? What would happen when McCoy wasn't there to harangue you through your paces and distract you from the incessant itch of alien blood within your veins? Maybe the sleeping dragon McCoy slipped into you would awaken, and you'd crush a hapless longshoreman's skull in your hands in the next bar fight or snap a fumbling ensign's neck the next time he botched an assignment. Maybe you were a monster just waiting to shed its respectable skin and taste blood and terror on its tongue.
It hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that it won't. You watch and wait, and every time anger burns in your gut, you wonder if this is it, if this is the moment the monster will rise from the ashes of the cocky kid you used to be. You keep an encrypted log of every odd thought, every flicker of unwarranted irritation or inexplicable anger, and you keep close tabs on the little girl snatched from death's door by a vial of Khan's blood and a father's sacrificed honor. She's only too happy to be penpals with Starfleet's greatest captain; not many people clamor to be friends with the child of a man who blew up his workplace and killed dozens of his coworkers and robbed children of mothers and fathers and idolized older brothers. She writes faithfully every week, glad for a friendly voice even if it comes from light years away, and she doesn't need to know that her friendly neighborhood starship captain analyzes every whorl and slant and line for signs of disturbance, for a glimmer of things to come. She doesn't need to know that you read her happy letters about school and horses and her favorite holovids by people you have never heard of and wonder if she's dismembering her dolls in the dark or contemplating ways to crush the dog's windpipe during the next bout of roughhousing in the yard. She just has to keep writing so you can keep watching.
It got a little better when you went back to work. There's no cure for what ails you like your silver lady, and the instant your boots touched the deck, your stomach settled and your breath came more easily. Home and heart were reunited, and when the machinery of duty clicked into life and your patchwork family moved in routines as deep as muscle memory, you thought Khan was dead and buried, and you whistled as you strode the decks with the confidence of a king in his castle. It was of scant consequence if you sometimes dreamed of wrapping your hands around my neck and squeezing until my face purpled and my flesh bulged through your fingers or of swinging a length of lumber at my skull as I tinkered under the hood of some old junker and shattering my skull like cheap crockery. You'd been doing that since you were a runt, and if they were more vivid and infinitely more gratifying, well, surely that was to be expected after what you'd been through. Maybe being raised from the dead had simply brought along a handful of ghosts.
Then came that first order to conduct a remote observation of Ceti Alpha V, that brave new world of Khan and his kin. The officer in you could see the cold, hard logic of it, the wary prudence, but the man in you recoiled. You were a snot-nosed kid again, creeping up the porch steps and bracing to see the bogeyman when you peered around the corner. You considered defying the order as you'd defied so many others, but miracle man and two-time hero or not, Starfleet's patience was thin and you were gunshy about leading your crew into another thicket of shit because of your recklessness, so you swallowed your fear and muttered, Aye, aye, with a pluck you did not feel.
Your dreams changed on your first journey to the edge of heaven. Oh, I still popped up now and again, but so did your mother and your sainted old man. The former looked at you with bruised, sad eyes and asked why you didn't bring your father back with you when your pet doctor raised you from the dead, why you couldn't perform the same miracle and make her heart whole again. The latter fell from heaven in a ball of fire that burned white-hot and seared your dreaming eyes and demanded to know why you thought you were too good to die, why you thought yourself better than the captains who had gone before you, why you should get a second chance while Pike rotted in the ground and he floated through the cosmos, stardust and bone and angel's breath. It was a question you could never answer, and you woke in the night with the breath stale and thick in your throat and sweat prickling in your armpits and itching in the crack of your ass.
You dreamed of Delta Vega, cold and dead, a frozen wasteland meant to be your prison until it became your tomb. You dreamed of clomping through the snow until your skin chapped and cracked and bled, and of the fire that scourged your lungs with every breath. You dreamed of your feet crunching over the snow and of the breath of the hengra on the back of your neck, hot and avid. But in your dreams, you turned on your pursuer and wrapped your hands around its forelimbs and squeezed until bones crackled and ground together and tendon tore like gristle and the triumphant roar of pursuit became a piercing howl of agony. You squeezed until hide and flesh yielded beneath fingers gone to iron and blood spurted in high, ejaculatory arcs across the snow. You squeezed far beyond the capacity of man or Vulcan, squeezed until the forelimbs tumbled to the ground and twitched in the snow, and you threw back your head and bellowed into the frozen wastes, exultant and indomitable. You were no man, but a god, and there was nothing you could not conquer. You woke from these dreams bathed in sweat and with your hands balled into aching fists and your cock standing at hard attention between your thighs.
You dreamed of returning to the Enterprise with Scotty in tow, dripping and armed with righteous purpose. You confronted your resident green-blooded alien and sank your teeth into his festering, smothered grief for a mother who had disappeared into the abyss of a collapsing planet, but instead of being choked to within an inch of your life while your illustrious crew watched in stunned fascination, you bested him. You were the one to rain down hammering blows and drive him back, drive him to his knees and make him kneel before you like a groveling penitent. You battered him until his lips split and his face swelled and he swayed before you, exhausted and beaten. And why shouldn't he? He had deserted you, left you to die without a flicker of hesitation, deemed you as worthless and expendable, and now he would reap his just desserts. He would acknowledge your superiority or he would die. You woke with your chest heaving and the throb of combat in your knuckles, bewildered by an inexplicable surge of atavistic pride.
You dreamed of Khan, pale as alabaster and cold as death. His flesh unmoving beneath your vengeful, pounding fist. The sneering, contemptuous curve of his mouth. The malicious intelligence in those eyes. You hated him, but damned if you didn't feel an unmistakable kinship, an instinctive tug behind your breastbone.
Blood calls to blood, Khan purred in his rich baritone, and the words washed over your skin like silk, black and cool, and oh, so delicious. You woke with a gasp, momentarily blinded in the darkness, and longing lodged behind your breastbone like a hot stone.
You dreamed of the Defiant, standing on its deck with your silver lady crippled and failing in its viewscreen. Only there wasn't a phaser in your hands, but Admiral Marcus' buckling skull. It was so much putty in your grasp, fragmented and frangible, and the sharp pop as you disarticulated his head from his spine was queerly gratifying, almost erotic, and as the body slumped to the deck, you closed your eyes and shuddered, and pleasure filled your mouth like the richest wine. Carol Marcus' anguished cry made it all the sweeter. You woke with your head thrown back and your tongue coated with a wine you had never tasted.
You dreamed of your pet doctor looming over you as you emerged from your long and dreamless sleep. He was still solicitous, still resplendent in his whites, but when he asked you if you were feeling, homicidal, power-mad, despotic, you did not answer him with a logy, fond smile and an idiotic laugh; your hand shot up and seized his throat in a crushing grip. He struggled, your doctor, dropped his padd and clawed at your hand and wheezed unintelligibly at you while his face purpled and mottled and his eyes bulged.
You felt his trachea give, crumple like a flimsy paper cup in your hand, and just before your delivering angel took your place in the eternal void, those eyes filled with tears.
I love you, Jim, those eyes said, wide and imploring. Doe eyes, as your sentimental, milksop mother would've called them. But it didn't matter. He must be punished for his hubris, for the sin of violating his oath and playing God. So you squeezed until your encircling fingers felt the hard notch of bone, and then you let go and let him join his padd on the floor, an angel fallen from grace and staring heavenward with blind, disbelieving eyes.
You woke from that dream with tears streaming down your face, hiccoughing and snorting like a frightened toddler. Whereas the other dreams had left you with a dim sense of euphoria, of power beyond your wildest dreams, but this one shamed and revolted you. The others had insulted you, had demeaned and wounded, doubted and deserted, but McCoy had only ever loved you, had been your friend and stood by you even when you made a ripe jackass of yourself for the world to see. He had dragged you out of bars and patched you up in his dorm room with his well-stocked medkit, and if it weren't for him, you would be commanding a broom in Starfleet Janitorial and your silver lady and her crew would be so much space dust in a cosmos without an Earth. He was innocent, and you had killed him anyway, a petty spiteful god. And God help you, you enjoyed it.
They come every time, the dreams, a dark tide called forth by what you know waits for you on Ceti Alpha V. They start two days before the planet rises on your view screen like a malignant sun and stay until you're out of the sector and cruising into safer space, a fever mercifully broken.
You should say something to your pet doctor, but you don't. You tell yourself it's because you don't want to worry him, that he has suffered enough on your behalf, and it's certainly true as far as it goes. He nearly lost everything because of you, was nearly stripped of his profession and his pride and the threadbare skin he'd managed to stretch over his bitter bones. Contrary to popular belief, a doctor who conquers death isn't greeted with fanfare and endless plaudits. They're interrogated and suspended pending further inquiry and hauled before ethics committees, and every medical decision they've made in the last ten years is analyzed and questioned ad infinitum. The price of his continued profession was his exhaustive notes on the miraculous serum and every vial of Khan's blood and a promise not to pursue independent research of the subject. The blood and his research disappeared into the bowels of Section 31, and your fiercely-independent doctor submitted to random, periodic reviews of his performance and diagnoses, a galling humiliation to a man so proud and so undeniably gifted.
The hell of it is, he thinks you worth the price.
It was worth it, he slurred one night in his mouse-fart studio apartment in San Francisco. Every goddamn second, and I'd do it again, Jim-boy. Owlish and mutinous and drunk as a Georgia hayseed.
He's the truest friend you've ever had, and you'll be damned if you cost him one more ounce of tender-hearted flesh, burden him with one more minute of worry. So you keep your mouth shut and close your eyes to the image of his bulging, disbelieving eyes and ignore the doughy warmth of his skin between your fingers and tell yourself it's the right thing to do.
It is, he insisted, and wiped his palm on his uniform pants.
Maybe it is, Uncle Frank conceded. But you've never been selfless, boy, no matter what your adoring crew and the starry-eyed media think. You've always had an ulterior motive, a selfish streak a mile wide, and you know damn well that if you admit to your little nocturnal fantasies of bashing my head in or breaking your resident hobgoblin or crushing your sainted doctor's windpipe like a paper cup, you'll be yanked off duty faster than you can blink. Your faithful sawbones would hide it for a while, might even sacrifice his career to save yours, but sooner or later, the truth would out. The crew would wonder why their golden boy was no longer on his throne, and it wouldn't be long before the rumors started, rising from the lips of the mess-hall magpies like wisps of smoke, whispers of madness and cover-up and command conspiracy.
After that, there would be no magic left to spare you. Starfleet command would boot you from their precious flagship like bouncers hurling you from some flea-bitten dive while the night sank low and the shadows pooled around your bloody cheek while you sprawled on the pavement and spat blood onto the hubcap of a parked car. It had learned hard and well what happened when madness sat the command chair, and it would have no desire to repeat that little performance. Your pet doctor would be bounced out, too, victim of his thrice-damned loyalty to your arrogant, thoughtless ass. If you didn't wind up in the brig or on some penal colony for dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the tenets and directives of Starfleet, you could pilot a cargo ship, running medical supplies and staple foods to the colonies and outposts in the Alpha Quadrant. You might even end up on the Jovian run and get to see the cradle of the ship that nearly ended you, would've ended you if McCoy hadn't loved you more than the oath that burned in his blood and rooted in his DNA as tenaciously as kudzu. You could sling bandages and cheap cotton, and if your faithful old dog didn't hate your guts for ruining his life, he could eke out a living patching up cuts and bruises carried home from the spacedock bar by chippy crewmen and delivering the occasional baby for some young yeoman with more lust than sense. All under the table, of course. His medical license would be as gone as his pride and his promising future, and all he'd have left would be his bunk and his broken dreams. And his bones, of course. Always those.
From acclaimed savior of Starfleet twice over to a has-been who peaked at thirty, a career trajectory as steep as the plunge of that old Thunderbird over the cliff when you were a kid. You'd be just another fallen star, the only genius-level offender running junkers and garbage scows from San Francisco to Io, and wouldn't that just make old Pike so proud, to know that his last passion project spent his days doing scut runs to nowhere and drinking himself into a pleasant delirium?
And that's if you were lucky. God help you if Section 31 got wind of your nasty little mind movies. You'd end up in a bunker three miles below the earth, eating off plastic trays with plastic forks and spending most of your time in your underwear while needles drained you dry and hypos filled what little blood you had left with drugs and sedatives. You'd be a human guinea pig, a freak in a Lexan cage, and when they could plumb no more information from your mind and pry no more truths from your bones, they'd let you die, and there'd be no one to know it but the drone who dumped your neatly-bagged body into the incinerator. There'd be no one to miss you, either, except maybe a disgraced Southern doctor gone to seed in some pisspot hospice where they valued warm bodies more than the credentials that had been stripped from them.
And heaven knows what they might find squirming beneath your skin before they zipped you up and returned you to the stars.
And there it was, the hard, pithy crux of it, the uneasy thought that kept him up at night and made his head pound with unexpressed fears. Bones had worked a miracle, but it had come at a terrible cost, been pulled from the veins of a sociopath. He had been forever altered, tainted by the blood of his enemies, and when it was quiet and there was nothing to distract him from himself, he wondered just how much of himself he had left.
Would he recognize me? he wondered as he skimmed duty rosters and requisition reports, stylus scant millimeters from his idly-worrying teeth. If he died tomorrow and his soul flew into the black embrace of the cosmos, would he find his father there, drifting among the stars like an angel on the wing? And if he did, would his father recognize him and welcome him joyously home, or would he fly from him, appalled by what he had become, what he had let himself be in exchange for survival?
Wish I may, wish I might have this wish I wish tonight, he thought as he gazed at his reflection in the observation window, but his father never materialized from the ether with a smile on his lips and pride in his eyes, and he was still acutely aware of the blood in his veins, hot and sluggish and foreign beneath his skin.
It gets stronger every time we get close to Ceti Alpha V, pulls and tugs and turns like a restless hook, dredges up old memories like rotten, moldering bones and fills my mouth with the taste of smoke and blood, not all of it my own.
And in his mind's eye, he saw Bones, sprawled on the floor beside his hospital bed, eyes wide and sightless and stiffening hand stretched toward his padd.
Still worth it, Bones? asked a cold, mocking voice inside his head, and his skin crawled at the terrible familiarity of it.
"Bridge to Captain Kirk." Chekov's voice resounded through the shipwide com system.
He hurried to the com station set in a small alcove and toggled the switch. "Kirk to bridge."
"Yes, Captain," Chekov chirped. "We are within sensor range of Ceti Alpha VI."
"Thank you. I'll be there shortly. Kirk out."
He snapped off the com and stood for a moment, rocking from heel to toe and back again. He knew he should go, assume his place on the bridge, but still he lingered. He had no desire to see that planet again, hovering on his viewscreen like a great, unblinking eye, jaundiced and malignant and knowing.
You're afraid of what it might see in those reanimated guts of yours, aren't you, boy? Uncle Frank leered, and he heard the truculent slosh of bourbon in the bottom of a bottle.
You don't respect the chair, Pike said, all dignified authority and paternal disappointment, and his throat clenched.
A captain keeps his secrets, he thought. A captain does his duty.
With that in mind, he spun on his heel and headed for the bridge.