Title: What My Father Wanted
Author: Apocalypse
Fandom: ENT
Disclaimer: Bermaga's.
Pairing: I wrote gen fic! Weird, huh?
Summary: Archer almost killed this pirate guy and now he's going to angst about it.

What My Father Wanted

            Captain Jonathan Archer of the starship Enterprise stared out of the window, brow furrowed and eyes unfocused. He wasn't looking out the window so that he would see anything in particular, but so he wouldn't have to look inward. Everything reminded him of something he didn't want to think about, even to the grey metal colour of the room.

            But the cold space outside the window reminded him of things he didn't want to think about as well. There was no escaping from his own thoughts. They kept coming back to the Osarian pirate, crumpled to the floor and gasping in precious air … given life, at the last moment, on the brink of destruction.

            He would have done it.

            He would have killed the man. For justice. For vengeance.

            Or maybe just for the hell of it.

            And it was more than unsettling to think of the satisfaction it would have given him … no expression of anger more complete than the ending of the other's life, especially in such an undignified way. Jonathan could see the alien in his mind's eye, flopping and gasping on the floor like a landed fish. He looked so silly, so weak, with the rest of his life slipping away from him as the air hissed steadily out of the airlock.

            The deliciousness of it, the strange sense that he was finally accomplishing something out here; the ferocious sense that in fighting back against this pirate, this thief, this murderer, that he was fighting back against the growing frustration and despair as weeks passed in the Expanse and left him and his crew with nothing but some scattered pieces of dirt leftover from the catastrophic destruction of an inhabited planet and the analysis of a severed finger.

            The despair had been creeping in everywhere now. He wasn't eating enough, living mostly on coffee and half-eaten breakfasts in the captain's mess. There was too much on his mind. He was short-tempered, surly, snappish with his crew … men and women who were giving their all for this mission, for this ship.

            His father's ship.

            The thought came unbidden to his mind and it seemed there was nothing he could do to banish it. His father, the scientist. His father, the engineer. His father, the explorer.

            The military had always taken over projects of pure science and turned them into weapons, much to the dismay of their creators. Turning the Enterprise and his father's beloved engine into a warship, a reconnaissance scout for an upcoming invasion force, or whatever it was that they had become … it still felt wrong somehow. He knew it had to be done; millions of deaths hung heavy on Jonathan's shoulders and he had under his command, with this mission, the closest thing the dead would have to justice.

            He, himself, had not joined the Fleet, had not taken command of the Enterprise, to turn it into a weapon of war. But men of resource become what they have to become, and when times are tough, you had to adapt.

            Jonathan wondered, as he stared unseeing out into the coldness of the Expanse, whether he had adapted too well.

            The sneering challenge of the Osarian pirate came back to him. You don't have it in you, Captain Archer. You don't have what it takes to survive out here.

            As it turned out, he did have what it took, because he was ready to kill him. He was more than ready: he wanted to do it. He wanted to watch the bastard's life drain away into the unforgiving vacuum of the airless room. He had wanted to be thwarted in his quest for information because he had wanted the satisfaction of the pirate's death.

            He owed it to Ensign Fuller, an unsung hero of the lower decks; a handyman who floated from department to department doing whatever was requested of him regardless of whether or not it was in his own specialty.

            His death was unnecessary. It felt pointless. It felt like a waste. A useless, stupid casualty, and it was all Jon's fault. They should have been more prepared. A completely unexpected attack, and yet he felt as though he should have been prepared for it, should have been able to prevent it or at least to keep the worst from happening, keep from losing men. But then, it wasn't so very different from the attack Earth had suffered; it was totally unexpected, and yet he felt that there was something he ought to have been able to do about it.

            He felt responsible for all of it. For the Xindi attack on Earth, even; even though he knew that there was nothing he could have done, that he had no way of knowing what was going to happen and that there was no way he could have prevented it, he felt guilty. Because he was the commander of the flagship of Starfleet, and it was Starfleet's self-proclaimed duty to protect Earth from spaceborne threats as well as to explore the galaxy and make peaceful contact with as many civilizations as possible. He, as Starfleet's representative in deep space, had failed in his task … failed in a way that he didn't understand, and it ate away at him, a worry to dog his steps whenever he least expected it to turn up.

            He had failed to protect the millions that had been slain in an apparently random attack that had come out of nowhere and caught him – captain of the Enterprise, the man who had been chosen by the protectors of Earth to represent them out here amidst the unknown – completely unawares. Vengeance was nothing to those that had been incinerated in a swath of white-hot death ... but he owed it to the ones left alive. The ones who had reason for tortured dreams of loved ones with their skin crackling in the flames of inescapable doom.

            He felt helpless out here, more out of place than he ever had. He felt responsible for the seven million dead; he felt responsible also for the crew under his command, with rather more reason, and he felt them suffering out here, from their grief over lost loved ones, the shock that had not faded and would not fade, and from the strangeness of their unforgiving surroundings and the terrifying knowledge that was they would probably never see home, ever again.

            He thought that maybe Ensign Fuller was kind of lucky.

            And there had been the Osarian pirate. Challenging him. Forcing him to show spine that he wished he didn't have. You won't kill me, the alien's eyes had said. You don't have the balls.

            Jon had the balls.

            The Osarian had been in his power and by God, he'd been ready to abuse it. He'd have done whatever was necessary and more.

            But when the moment came, the moment where he could have taken the step from harshness and cruelty to an enemy to the callousness of a tyrant and slain the man merely for being who and what he had become … he had stared over the brink, into the depths of insanity and pain that lay beyond. And he had stepped back from the precipice.

            Although the mercy towards his enemy had been forced, it had taken a good deal of effort for him to keep from sliding into a loss of integrity over his bleak fury over what the Osarians had done to his ship, had done to his crewman …

            He had been merciful.

            Wouldn't Dad have been proud of him.

            Jonathan winced at the scathing edge of his own thought. His father would not have wanted to see this. He would not have wanted his precious ship to be wielded like a weapon, nor would he have been pleased to see what the situation had done to his son: every bit as much his creation … and being warped the same way by events. Their developments were parallel. 

            Jonathan shivered a little and turned away from the window, wondering if he, like the Enterprise, was a weapon now as well.