A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.
# # #
There was no other sound besides Carol's stuttering heartbeat in the tomb-like silence of the abandoned alien ship. It reverberated against empty walls and dilapidated equipment rolling in his ears like the forgotten sound of the ocean. If felt as though they were both buried alive in the dead vessel. She was so pale, her skin looked livid. Her lips were white and her eyes widened in stark terror. Tears still glistened on her emaciated cheeks. It dawned on him that, while he had recovered and thrived in the past few weeks, she had lost weight, tress and worry taking their toll on her. Right now there was nothing of the vibrant, courageous woman who had earlier teased him about his ego left in this pain-ridden shell.
She didn't seem to be physically injured. There were a few cuts on her clothes but no blood anywhere and she wasn't favoring any part of her body other than her left leg. The same he had stepped on in his hurry to get to her father on the bridge of the Vengeance. He had broken more than her bones that day. He had caused a splinter into her spirit that was still bleeding and still hurting. He wondered if she would ever be whole again. She had to be. The alternative stung and chafed against portions of himself that so far had only housed thoughts of his family, so removed from him now, always in danger, slipping though his fingers the second he had felt confident they were safe.
The realization of how deeply embedded within him Alexander Marcus' daughter had become angered him, but the fury had none of the violent fire he was used to. Instead it stoked another feeling he was experiencing: one much less familiar, but no less vicious. This one was not an all-consuming blaze, but a slow-burning flame that singed rather than scorched. Guilt, which he was feeling for the second time in the space of a week, a frequency without precedent in his entire life. It fed into the stab of regret of he had felt at first glimpse of a destroyed downtown San Francisco after the crash of the Vengeance.
Guilt dwindled along the ever-present concern for his family, his center, his link to a mad, senseless universe dead-set against him. His only constant in the game of marked cards that had been his life. Since crushing Heisen's skull with is bare hands, he had killed repeatedly to protect himself and his family, sent people to their deaths in his quest to bring order and unity to a confused humanity ravaged by wars and cruelty and killed again directly during their escape from a burning city in the aftermath of a lost fight. He had killed to avenge his family in Carol's century and sought to kill himself, unable to stand the idea of being alone without his loved ones, the last of family and the last of his kind.
He refused to feel sorry for any of those times, yet the guilt would not be subdued, festering like the seed of rot corrupting a fresh apple. Carol's pain and fear accused him, even as her angry words resounded in his memory: murderer, monster... . It was true. He was a monster, an exiled prince three hundred years out of his time, his very existence an abhorrence to the laws of nature in every conceivable way. And he was a murderer, perhaps not quite a genocidal madman, but a murderer, nevertheless. A bottomless chasm opened between them at that very moment and he saw with absolute clarity what they were: victim and perpetrator. In that instant he was absurdly grateful that they had not spent the night together back on the Cardassian colony, because it would have been yet another transgression against her, laying his blood-stained hands on someone he had wronged so egregiously.
The Starfleet-issued phaser seemed to materialize out of thin air in front of his eyes. The lapse in concentration was one of the worst he had ever had. But Carol was holding the weapon out to him by its muzzle.
"Take it," she wheezed. "It's not safe for me to have it with you around. The setting... it's on kill. I always have my phaser on stun and I don't know when I changed it."
He took the phaser from her automatically, switched the setting back to stun and shoved in the back of his pants. He unfurled himself and stood stretching a hand out to her. "Can you walk?"
She didn't answer just staggered to her feet on her own, shaking as she did, and wavered immediately. Her breathing accelerated with the effort. He wrapped an arm around her waist to support her and she did lean on him, her head all but resting on his shoulder. She seemed so slight against him and he felt a fresh burst of admiration for this woman who was so physically
unassuming yet so morally and emotionally strong, he could swear he felt the titanium spine in that petite, delicate body.
They moved together through the oppressive bowls of the extraterrestrial ship, his hearing strained to hear the slightest noise alerting to the presence of another predator, but the silence reigned supreme. He returned her to the familiar Denobulan vessel in the cargo bay. She refused to go the infirmary, insisting she wasn't really hurt, so he helped her into the bed in the living quarters then dashed to the medbay to grab the medical tricorder and a dermal regenerator. He knew how to use both as part of 23rd century version of first aid, yet his can revealed that she no more seriously physical injuries than several ecchymoses on her chest and right arm.
He left her with the regenerator and a cup of hot tea and went to attend to another pressing matter. The Xindi ship's entire system converged onto a chamber designed as a hatchery for the offspring of the Insectoid species. The original equipment had been stripped away, but he had managed to transfer all the processes not conducted automatically throughout the ship to a central command core he had established there to employ instead of a bridge. He was utilizing it now to scan the vessel for a third time and for a third time the sensors only found two life signs aboard: himself and Carol. The animal had to have slipped in, when they had maneuvered the Denobulan shuttle in the cargo bay.
His analysis of the Xindi ship had revealed another unexpected surprise: it had an operational water reclamation system that powered in a bath of some sort with a heated basin that also worked. Carol missed washing with actual water. He hesitated, considerations of wasted time and a narrow window of escape weighing heavily on his mind, before the imagine of Carol shuddering under the duvet on the bed, in exile, far away from friends and any safe haven she could count on. Khan sanitized the chamber and and filled the small pool.
# # #
The water felt heavenly against her skin. Yet, despite its temperature, she still felt chilled, as though the cold had seeped deep into her bones, turning the living marrow to ice. Her left leg still hurt and the tension in her back made her muscles cramp painfully. Still the bath felt like a balm on her wrecked the nerves. The room was as eerily quiet as the rest of the ship. Vapors traveled up, licking at the glistening ecru walls. The arched ceiling was covered in a vividly-colored mozaik depicting Insectoids fighting against a winged version of their species.
War. Everywhere she looked nowadays. War was supposed to be over, the Federation peaceful, Starfleet focused on exploring. But she had spent the past two years at odds... even with her own father. The world around her seemed to have turned sharp, hostile, almost biting. She sighed and slid to the edge of the pool, where she had her communicator. She used it to tap into the Xindi vessel's communications system.
"How is the ship?" she asked, once she got through.
"Prepped and ready to fly," came Khan's crisp and clipped reply.
"I'd be right over then."
"There is no need. I can maneuver it by myself." There was a pause. "Carol... I will not pretend I regret killing your father. As far as I'm concerned, he more than deserved it. That will never change, but I am sorry I hurt you... both in body and soul."
A frosty tremor sliced through her and her hand curled harder around the communicator. "I don't want to talk about it."
"I can understand that, but I believe you should."
"You and three different therapists," she snapped. "Nowadays we can grow organs back with just one pill and repair broken bones within minutes, but the mind... the mind is still touch-and-go. Maybe I'll get better, maybe I won't. That's just the reality of it." She closed her eyes. It was strange talking to him like this, strange and vaguely impersonal, but at the same time, easier. Safer somehow. "For a while, after what happened on the Vengeance, I blamed you for everything. If only he hadn't found the Botany Bay, I used to think, he would have never done what he did."
"Necessary evil," he said gruffly, his voice thicker than usual in the tubular room around her. "You never know what you would do for the ones you hold dear, for the things you believe in, until they are threatened. People believe dying for your loved ones is difficult. It's not; it's the easiest, most hopeful thing in the universe. What is difficult is lying, cheating, killing, starting a war or ending one to protect them."
"Necessary?" She smiled bitterly. "And where does necessary end? With a thousand deaths? A million? One destroyed civilization or a hundred?"
"Are you asking how long that particular slippery slope is for myself? For Starfleet? For your father? Or for yourself?"
"Even I'm not that much of an idealist to ask that question right now for anyone else but yourself."
Her statement was initially met with silence and for a while she thought he wouldn't answer, but then he spoke. "You once told me that life without a conscience had to be so much easier. I wouldn't know." He paused and she tensed, bringing the device closer to ear to hear. She had thought she had heard a sob filtered through the static of the ship's rusty communications system. "But there is nothing I would not do for my family," he continued haltingly, his voice sounding strangled. "No matter how hard it would be to live with it in the aftermath. Carol... if you cannot accept anything else, at least, understand that the man who raised you and the man I knew were two entirely different persons."
Carol winced, finally opening her eyes. The water around her had gone lukewarm. "I thought you hated him."
"I do, but I also comprehend him. This is how I knew where to hit him."
Realization dawned. "The attack on the Daystrom Conference Room... it was him you were trying to kill, wasn't it? The others were just collateral damage."
"Him and his eventual accomplices."
She knew what he meant. Lance Cartwright had been there that evening and had been seriously injured in the assault.
"Khan... what you said before about my Dad being two different people. That was... kind of you, but we both know it's not true. His choices, all of them, whether they involved killing eleven people in their sleep or provoking a war with the Klingons, are... were a part of him, of the man who was my father. And this, rather than on what happened on the Vengeance, is what I have to live with."
# # #
Khan set the communicator down by his side. He was sitting on the floor, in the corridor, on the other side of the wall of the bath. He couldn't hear her inside, as the ship's chambers were soundproof, safe for what came through the communicator. Yet he felt her acutely close, their conversation unbearably intimate. He wiped at his eyes, his fingers coming back wet. He had committed a grave miscalculation. He had thought himself immune, just because it had never happened to him in all his years, both awake and in cryosleep. The only love he had ever felt had been familiar devotion and in time he had come to believe that was the true extent of what he could feel.
It wasn't that he had read Carol Marcus wrong. He hadn't. He had seen all the way to her core and now he wished he hadn't. The irony was not lost on him. Alexander Marcus could have had power over him like no other, if only he had introduced him to the daughter he had been so keen on keeping away from his most secret projects.
TBC