A/N: if you read it, please tell me what you think, whether good or bad.

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Kati was huddled towards the end of her bed, curled in a fetal position, her skin almost translucent as it stretched pitifully over prominent bones and thinned muscles. She was shivering slightly and her bruised-looking lips opened, but no words came out. A single drop of blood leached from the left corner of her mouth. Khan approached her carefully, his steps heavy and measured. Ling hovered at his side. He didn't need to look at her to know she was terribly worried. They were testing something on Kati, perhaps a new improvement to their already remarkable mental and physical acuities or a new virus or bacteria that pushed against the barriers of their iron health. The tests were not going very well and each time they returned her to the bedrooms, she seemed worse and worse.

Khan crouched on the floor, before the bed, letting Ling sit down on the edge of it, within a safe distance from Kati. Ling slowly reached over, trying to touch the shuddering form of their sister, but Kati shook her head no, her eyes now brimming with tears. They were all his brothers and sisters, perhaps not in blood, but most definitely, in spirit. They were also different or at least, that was what Doctor Heisen and their tutors kept telling them, genetically-engineered to lead humanity to peace in a world ravaged by wars. Only that they weren't human. They were better, stronger, more intelligent... .They heard better, could see in the dark and moved faster.

Superior ability bred superior ambition, he had once overheard Dr. Heisen tell one of his colleagues. Khan had then begun to suspect that there was an additional purpose to the experiments performed on them safe for the obvious, practical one. They were means of control, a yoke of pain placed on their necks that had become too resilient for their creators' liking.

The door opened with a hiss. Khan turned his head to see Doctor Heisen on the threshold, flanked by two guards and surrounded by a the hallo of bright, white light spilling from the corridor. Khan was twelve, but in that moment he saw with perfect clarity that one day the tests would stop, his siblings' suffering brought to an end, the hold the humans had on them shattered. On that day they would be free and he would kill Heisen and his associates with his own hands. And before he did, he would look them all in the eye and show them what kind of ambition true superiority spurned.

There was a touch, a light one, strange yet familiar, breaking through the haze of memory. A woman's voice called to him gently in English... . He startled awake. Carol's face swam into view, a crease of worry marring the pristine skin between her eyebrows. She drew back and straightened herself.

"Your door was open," she said haltingly, looking slightly embarrassed. "I heard you... I heard a noise. You seemed to be having a nightmare."

He sat up, a few errand strands of hair falling into his eyes. "I was having a nightmare," he said distractedly, the memory as acute, as though he had just knelt by Kati's bed. He even recalled the sterile scent of the room. Kati and Ling were asleep in her cryotube, still in the hands of the enemy, but he was coming for them, for what remained of his family, and they were finally to be reunited.

"I thought you might want to know we are on the edge of the Talosian system. I hid us in a nearby asteroid field." She was looking at him from the corners of her eyes. "Are you alright?"

He blinked to adjust his focus and bring it closer to the present. "Yes, I am," he said, combing his fingers through his hair, brushing it out of his eyes.

Carol didn't look convinced. "Do you want a moment?"

He shook his head no and got off his bed, which was more of a narrow, hard slip of metal in a small, concave chamber carved in the bulkhead. Even if the door had been functional, he wouldn't have bothered sealing it. He had slept under less surveillance than without a door on a large ship with only one other inhabitant. Carol was still staring at him, her frown growing disapproving. She said something about him taking bed clothes from the Denobulan vessel, her gaze roving around the empty walls, taking in the empty bench he had lain upon covered only by his coat. Khan shrugged one shoulder. He had never cared much for comfort and had definitely slept on worse so it had been only natural that he had chosen a resting place based on its proximity to the bridge.

Comfort was the farthest thing from him, anyway, as he stood there, looking her over, the desire singing his veins so intense he barely saw straight. It wasn't just her body he yearned for. He wanted the companionship and to have someone look at him the same way Ling had looked at Joaquin on the day of their wedding. He wanted to have someone. He wanted her. There had been a time when he had dared take what he wanted either ruthlessly or by cajoling and seducing. If he wanted her on those terms, he knew just the words for it: he could play on her guilt and confusion over her father's deeds, manipulate her emotional vulnerability and sense of isolation and appeal to her badly-concealed physical attraction to him. But he didn't want her under false pretense. He wanted the woman who had rescued her father's assassin from what she though was unfair treatment, the woman who had stood up to him with nothing and no one to back her up, the one before him now looking at him with her eyes warm with concern.

She was asking him about his nightmare again and if he was really alright, the words sweet on her tongue, like a honey he longed to taste.

"I was dreaming of my family," he told her truthfully. "Of an experiment performed on one of my sisters under Heisen's purview."

There was not an ounce of insincerity in the compassion coloring her expression. Her lips parted to say something, but he pressed his right index finger on her mouth. "You asked," he said, his gaze stroking over the dark curve of her eye-brow, the tanzanite blue of her right eye and the hazel of her left, down the soft fullness of her cheeks and all the way to her pale pink lips. Her proximity was intoxicating. "It's enough," he added.

"Sometimes, when you look at me this way, I think you're trying to hypnotize me," she murmured, her inner conflict seeping into her voice, the second his finger fell off from her mouth.

"It's the heterochromia," he replied. "Something you should be intimately familiar with." He leaned to whisper in her ear, letting her scent invade his nostrils and wash over him. "Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent."

She leaned closer as well, her warm cheek touching his, but her whispered words were measured and cold, cutting through him like a blade of ice. "And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body?"

He drew back and took in the sudden stern expression plastered on her face.

"I've done some reading, since you so kindly informed us that no ship should go down without its captain," she grumbled, her frown relaxed, her features smoothed by frosty aloofness. "Whatever you do... don't try to romance me. No fancy quotes from Moby Dick, no tentative gestures... ." She stepped back. Her fingers were trembling slightly, as they undid the clasps on her blouse. "Just come as you really are!"

He didn't allow his gaze to stray from her lovely face and to the patch of skin revealed by the parting folds of material. Unseeing he reached and grasped her wrists, stalling her hands. "This is me. The same book, the same person." He released her. "If you want this, then do it because you wish to, not as means to inflict further punishment onto yourself."

"What I want?" she cried out, grabbing onto the top folds of her blouse one-handed and holding them tightly together. "What I want is for my leg to stop hurting, when there is nothing wrong with it anymore. What I want is to go to bed without the fear of nightmares every night. What I want is for none of this to have happened. What I want is not have felt satisfaction, when I saw you in the hands of the butchers Section 31 calls doctors... . What I want is to have never understood why you did what you did."

"Come, sit down," he said gesturing towards the bench he used as a bed.

She shakily did her buttons back up before nodding. She sat on the metal surface, staring uncertainly at her hands stapled on her lap. He took a seat next to her and pulled his coat to cover her quivering shoulders then wrapped an arm around them, his fingers pressing gently into her right one.

"What you want is for the world to be black and white instead of gray," he stated after a few moments of silence.

She rested her heard on his shoulder. "Your world is black and white. All you want is your family."

"And the one thing I can never have."

Carol lifted her head to look at him with hooded eyes. "How would it have been then... when you were a prince with power over millions?"

He rested his free hand on her cheek. "With you... the same."

"How was it... with the others?"

His hand drifted lower, caressing the side of her neck, his thumb carefully pressing against her jugular. Her pulse, the living beat of her blood, vibrated against his skin, the sensation made all the more decadent by her willingness to allow his hand on her throat in that manner. The symbolism, whether intended on her part or not, was not lost on him.

"I don't know what you've read, but I didn't have a harem. Those four years I was in power only seemed peaceful. Beneath the surface tension was brewing, if not within my borders then outside them. There was an assassin or a spy on every corner. When they weren't spies or assassins, they wanted something from me, even if that something was a night with an augment. The only people I could truly trust, the only ones I could confide in was my family. It was thanks to them that I didn't become a paranoid, genocidal maniac like my neighbors."

Her arms came to furl themselves timidly around his torso. "You asked me what I want? I want to feel something besides pain, anger and doubt if only for a while." His eyes slid closed and she pressed her forehead to his chest. "I don't know if this is the answer you were searching for, but it is the truth."

His hand moved to her nape, grabbing a fistful of her hair and using his grip to lift her head. A tiny gasps fell off her parting lips. He covered her mouth with his in hard, demanding kiss. She kissed him back with equal fervor, her teeth digging into his lower lip along the way. He leaned back on the metal bench, taking her with him. She broke the kiss a second later to gaze at him with blown pupils.

"Close your eyes," she whispered thickly.

He did only to feel her lips on his forehead, his temples, his eyelids... . He shivered, distantly recalling an old Slavic superstition that a kiss on the eyelids predicted a separation. He became keenly aware that this first time might as well be their last. He squeezed her harder to his body, wishing he could have the memory forever imprinted into his skin. It was as though she was seeping into his very pores, her warmth coiling inside of him, taking root into portions of his soul that he had always thought to be dry, infertile land. Her hands slipped under his shirt, slow and gentle as they explored. He smiled, as her mouth found his again. She had come into his arms to forget her suffering and he was discovering that his was washed away in hers.

The proximity alert blared, impossibly loud in his sensitive ears. His eyes snapped open and instead of letting her go, he hugged her tighter, the urge to defend and protect overwhelming.

# # #

Carol had placed the ship in a well-chosen strategical spot: nestled among asteroids, with a gas cloud obscuring the most visible side. No Starfleet ship had the sensors to read through that, but those of the ancient Xindi vessel had been built to scan through the spacial distortions of an expanse created by inter-dimensional beings so their accuracy was not affected. Khan stared at the little view-screen on the make-shift bridge. The configuration of the two ships hovering on the edge of the Talosian system was unmistakable: one Constitution-class that was all too familiar and another one, a Miranda-class vessel.

TBC